Each summer, scholars from around the world gather on the Cornell campus for the School of Criticism and Theory (SCT), a six-week program of dynamic intellectual inquiry and interaction with leading critical thinkers and theorists.

The school, founded in 1976 and based at Cornell since 1997, ran from June 13 to July 22 this year and offered seminars, public lectures and "an ongoing conversation among the faculty and participants that touched on some of the most important and controversial issues in contemporary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences," SCT Director Amanda Anderson, M.A. '88, Ph.D. '89, said.

"The 2010 session was an especially vibrant one," said Anderson, a professor of English literature at Johns Hopkins University. "SCT continues to be an open forum for the exploration of emerging trends and debates; and this year we took on challenging questions having to do with secularism and religion, political theory, academic freedom and the developing interest in the digital humanities."

"Digital Discourse: Theory, Art, Archive" was one of eight seminars offered. Led by Society for the Humanities Director Timothy Murray, the seminar "sits at the intersection of so many fields and reflects the interdisciplinary nature of critical work nowadays," said participant Patrick Keilty.

"It was great to hear from so many different perspectives, [with] participants from performance studies, film studies, African-American studies, musicology and architecture, to name a few," said Keilty, an information studies Ph.D. student at the University of California-Los Angeles. "I think this kind of intellectual diversity attests to SCT's growing importance across the humanities and social sciences, and hopefully one day science as well."

Stanley Fish, a professor of law and humanities at Florida International University, led a mini-seminar and lectured on "Academic Freedom: How Odd is That?" He asserted that "academic freedom has no legal force whatsoever," and also has no relation to free speech. Instead, he defined it as "the desire of workers in a guild to police their own shop and be responsive only to their own practices and conditions."

"Academic freedom is freedom to do that particular and limited job assigned to academics and not to turn it into a staging ground for other activity," such as political activism, he said.

Dominick LaCapra, a Cornell professor of history and the Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies, lectured on "Historical and Literary Approaches to the 'Final Solution." He examined what he called "two recent prize-winning works of epic proportion" -- Holocaust survivor Saul Friedländer's two-volume historical study, "Nazi Germany and the Jews," and Jonathan Littell's novel, "Les Bienveillantes" ("The Kindly Ones"), whose narrator-protagonist is a high-ranking SS officer and a homosexual. Both works seek to shock the reader in very different ways, he said.

The accessibility of high-level scholarship at SCT can have a transformative effect, said LaCapra, a former director of the program.

"The quality of participants is very high, and they often comment that they learn as much from each other as from SCT faculty," he said.

This year, 92 scholars took part -- including 19 from outside the United States and 21 others with international degrees.

Participants noted that the diversity of viewpoints and disciplines in the program benefited their own scholarship.

"I can see things in different perspectives and get new inspiration, even if the seminars are very different from my own research. They show how to use interdisciplinary theories and not just talk about them," said Melody Li of the University of Hong Kong,

"SCT offered me the opportunity to rethink major cultural questions across disciplinary boundaries," said Toni Jaudon, Ph.D. '09, who teaches English at Ithaca College. "Our seminar ['Politics of Religious Difference' with Saba Mahmood of the University of California-Berkeley] included scholars trained in anthropology, political theory, religious studies, history and literature. We brought different methods and presuppositions to the table, and these differences opened up new ways to think about the topic. [Mahmood] pushed us to ask hard questions about secularism and the goods that it promises. I will be responding to this summer's conversations in my own work for months to come."

Linda Glaser, a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences, contributed to this article.