Robyn Marasco, a candidate for the Ph.D. in Political Science, describes her dissertation, Politics on the Heights of Despair: Critical Theory and the Persistence of Hope, as an exploration of the ”fragile place of the critic in a postfoundational world.” She looks especially to those German intellectuals who ”fused the insights and aspirations of Marxist critical theory with the tragic vision of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Weber.” In a study that draws from interdisciplinary exchange with history, philosophy, comparative literature, religious studies, and rhetoric, Marasco asks what the gestures toward the arts, literature, and theology carried out by these intellectuals reveal about the limitations of and frustrations with the political; and what do they tell us about both the promises and the limitations of critique?