Prof. Catherine Liu, “The Political Gets Personal”
On February 20, 2025, the student-run Lecture Fund partnered with the Georgetown Humanities Initiative for the talk “The Political Gets Personal: Professorial Managerial Class Feminism and the Rise of Trauma Culture,” by UC Irvine professor and cultural theorist Catherine Liu. The event was hosted in the Georgetown Humanities Initiative conference room and was moderated by Prof. Roger Lancaster (Cultural Studies Director, George Mason U).
The Georgetown University Lecture Fund is a non-partisan student-run organization committed to enriching the academic experience of the Georgetown community by bringing speakers to Georgetown’s campus. Through forums and individual talks in various disciplines, the Lecture Fund addresses a wide range of topics.
The event with Professor Catherine Liu focused on an incisive critique of liberal institutions. Professor Liu is the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class and specializes in Critical Theory, Class, and Identity Politics. In her talk, she argued that modern “woke” culture has been leveraged as a tool of the professional managerial class to obfuscate discourse away from class conflict and orient politics towards the personal/cultural rather than the collective/material. Professor Roger Lancaster, the event moderator, is Director of Cultural Studies at George Mason University, as well as the author of The Struggle to be Gay and Sex Panic and the Punitive State.