The unit is one of several dozen centers around the world devoted to critical theory, and was one of the first to be formally established (circa 1981).
[1][2] In The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies, literary scholar Michael Berube writes that "[b]y formally bringing together, through zero-time appointments, faculty members from disciplines engaged in some degree by theorized recursivity," the Unit for Criticism "has helped produce dialogue spoken in a kind of esperanto based in shared hermeneutic practices," performing an important interdisciplinary function within the university.
It has thus played a small but significant part in the transformation of the humanities and qualitative social sciences in the past several decades in the USA.
Over the years, guests of the unit have included Linda Martín Alcoff, Perry Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Étienne Balibar, Tony Bennett, Lauren Berlant, Michael Bérubé, Homi Bhabha, Timothy Brennan, Wendy Brown, Pheng Cheah, James Clifford, William E. Connolly, Tim Dean, Lisa Duggan, Terry Eagleton, Roberto Esposito, Grant Farred, Didier Fassin, James Ferguson, Nancy Fraser, Simon Frith, Jane Gallop, Paul Gilroy, Gerald Graff, John Guillory, Judith Halberstam, Catherine Hall, Stuart Hall (cultural theorist), Donna Haraway, Dick Hebdige, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, Martin Jay, Lynne Joyrich, Paul W. Kahn, Ernesto Laclau, Christopher Lane, Henri Lefebvre, David Lloyd, Saba Mahmood, Toril Moi, Franco Moretti, Chantal Mouffe, Jeff Nunokawa, Paul Rabinow, Bruce Robbins, Andrew Ross, Joan Scott, Ella Shohat, Kaja Silverman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Michael Szalay, James Vernon, Gauri Viswanathan, Priscilla Wald, Michael Warner, Cornel West, and Patricia J.
From 2003 to 2009, the unit was directed by Michael Rothberg, professor of English [2] and current director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative [3] also at the University of Illinois.