By interrogating the terms and concepts most central to cultural change, Future Theory interrogates how theory can play a central role in dynamic transition. It demonstrates how entangled the highly politicized spheres of cultural production, scientific invention, and intellectual discourse are in the contemporary world and how new concepts and forms of thinking are crucial to embarking upon change.

Future Theory is built around five key concepts – change, boundaries, ruptures, assemblages, horizons – examined by leading international thinkers to build a vision of how theory can be applied to a constantly shifting world.

Future Theory is not just a handbook explaining current critical concepts but a series of wide-ranging explorations, by an impressive international group of thinkers, of concepts that are likely to be critical for the future of theory, such as risk, catastrophe, climate, threshold, and, fortunately, hope. * Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University, USA *

Marc Botha is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Theory in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK. He is the author of Persistence and Transfiguration: A Theory of Minimalism (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Patricia Waugh is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Durham University, UK.