Rita Felski is an academic and critic, who holds the William R. Kenan Jr. Professorship of English at the University of Virginia and is a former editor of New Literary History. She is also Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. Felski is a prominent scholar in the fields of aesthetics and literary theory, feminist theory, modernity and postmodernity, and cultural studies. She is closely associated with the field of postcritique, a school of thought that tries to find new forms of reading and interpretation that go beyond the methods of critique, critical theory, and ideological criticism. Felski is the author of Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change, The Gender of Modernity, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, Literature After Feminism, and Uses of Literature. The Limits of Critique, an assessment of the role of the hermeneutics of suspicion as a mood and method in literary studies, has been widely reviewed. Felski is the editor of Rethinking Tragedy and co-editor of Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, Critique and Postcritique, and Latour and the Humanities. She has also published articles in numerous essay collections and in such scholarly journals as PMLA, Signs, New Literary History, Modernism/Modernity, Cultural Critique, Theory, Culture and Society, and New Formations. Her most recent book, Hooked: Art and Attachment, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020.
Education
Felski received an honors degree in French and German literature from Cambridge University and her PhD from the Department of German at Monash University in Australia.
Career
Before coming to the University of Virginia in 1994, she taught in the Program for English and Comparative Literature at Murdoch University in Perth. She served as Chair of the Comparative Literature Program at Virginia from 2004 to 2008. From 2003–2007 Felski served as U.S. editor of Feminist Theory. She has also served on the editorial boards of Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Criticism, and Echo: A Music-Centered Journal. Her work has been translated into Korean, Chinese, Russian, Polish, Swedish, Hungarian, Italian, Croatian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish. She has held fellowships at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change at the University of Virginia, and the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, and was the recipient of an Australian Research Council Major Grant. In 2000, she was awarded the William Parker Riley Prize for the best essay in PMLA. In 2010, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2016 she was awarded a by the and will spend fall semesters at the University of Southern Denmark over the next five years. Rita Felski received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark in 2016 and will receive an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Turku in 2020.
