Rita Felski is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the editor of New Literary History. Her current research interests are centered on questions of method: namely, what does it mean to engage in “critique” and what might a “postcritical” methodology look like? She has recently completed The Limits of Critique (Chicago 2015), a detailed examination of the hermeneutics of suspicion as it has shaped the recent history of literary and cultural studies. Her new project is tentatively called Art’s Work: Forms of Attachment and combines actor-network theory with neo-phenomenology to think about the affective and social aspects of attachments to art. Her other books include Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, The Gender of Modernity, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, Literature After Feminism, and the Blackwell Manifesto Uses of Literature, and she also the editor of Rethinking Tragedy and co-editor of Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the William Riley Parker Prize for best essay in PMLA, an Australian Research Council Major Grant, and a fellowship at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Her work has been translated in twelve languages.

In November 2014 she will be a visiting fellow at John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she will be discussing research projects in workshops with members of the Popular Seriality Research Unit, as well as give a talk at the Conference "Looking Forward, 2014: Current Projects in American Studies."