Writing and Society Research Centre

A.Karina Kordela is Professor of German Studies and founding Director of the Critical Theory Program, at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.  She received her Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1998.

Professor Kordela’s research interests include philosophy and intellectual history, with an emphasis on the formation of modernity; critical theory; Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis; German Baroque and Modernist literature; comparative literature and literary theory; political theory, theories of ideology and cultural analysis; visual and film theory; and biopolitics. One distinguishing aspect of both her research and teaching is her focus on the relation between economic structures and metaphysics in secular capitalist modernity.

Kordela’s publications include $urplus (Spinoza, Lacan), in the series Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature (Ed. Charles Shepherdson), SUNY Press, 2007 and  Freedom and Confinement in Modernity: Kafka’s Cages, ed. A. Kiarina Kordela and Dimitris Vardoulakis, in the series European Culture and History, ed. by Eric Weitz and Jack Zipes, New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011.

http://www.macalester.edu/german/people/kordela.html