Melissa Free, Unit for Criticism SCT Fellow, Summer 2007
On her experience at S.C.T.

"There’s a reason that the SCT is fondly referred to as “Theory Camp.” Though of necessity requiring its participants to do a lot of reading, the SCT is primarily a place of intensive interaction with other scholars. Students in my course—led by Ann Stoler—hailed from seven or eight different countries, nearly as many disciplines, and twenty or so universities (both public and private); most of us were graduate students, though there were at least three assistant professors. We were driven not only by the material at hand—history, anthropology, fiction, film, journalism, political theory, and lots of postcolonial theory—but by what we could learn from one another. Dutch East India and Abu Ghraib thus engaged us as much as the liminal space between, for instance, architectural and literary scholarship. Intensive critical thinking with and around people trained so differently than I encouraged my appreciation not only for interdisciplinarity but also for the ways in which my own discipline had shaped and was continuing to shape my theories, methodologies, and objects of study. In addition to the “regular seminar” that each of us took (four different seminars ran for the duration of the program), we attended two other lectures, at least one other seminar, and a catered dinner each week. The six-week and shorter-term faculty attended the weekly events, too, so between these events and less formal ones—a dissertation workshop, student talks, impromtu get-togethers, like meals or studying and/or hiking in the gorges—there was plenty of time to talk to fellow participants about anything and everything."