The rise of theory in literary studies in the 1970s and 1980s is usually understood to be mainly a matter of the importation of French ideas into the U.S. The papers in this session do not discount the influence of poststructuralism, but they focus on understanding the American institutions that enabled theory’s ascent and the broader intellectual currents, including Marxism, feminism, and anti-racism, that it entailed. By theory, we mean what Cusset called “a strange new transdisciplinary object,” no longer concerned primarily with the conditions of possibility for the study of literature. Rather, theory claimed a broad purview, in principle taking all of human knowledge as its object. By the 1980s, theory had become the most visible discourse within U.S. literary studies, its influence crossing most subdisciplinary boundaries. This session will explore three institutions that contributed to this change, something that would have been hard to predict in 1970. It expands on previously published work by two of the panelists, Jones-Katz’s Deconstruction: An American Institution, and Shumway’s “The Star System in Literary Studies.” Jones-Katz’s paper Uses fresh archival sources and interview material to explore the impact of The University of Minnesota Press’ Theory and History of Literature series. It is “widely regarded as the most influential publishing venture of the last half-century in the Humanities.” This paper concentrates on the ways the labor of THL editors—Jochen Schulte-Sasse (1940–2012), Wlad Godzich (1945- ), and Lindsay Waters (1947- )—invented theory. By procuring, editing, framing, and marketing theory, THL editors helped invent, develop, and disseminate theory as an extra-disciplinary mode of analyzing language, culture, and society. Bendzsa’s paper examines the Marxist Literary Group and its Institute on Culture and Society. It draws on interviews with longtime participants of the MLG and ICS, as well as the archival issues of PMLA, to reveal how the organizations have been central to the rise of Marxist theory. The MLG grew out of the Radical Caucus of the MLA and dates to 1969-70, when it was conceived by Fredric Jameson and some of his graduate students at UC San Diego, its first = MLA sessions were in 1975. By 1978, it was the largest organizer of sessions at the Convention, with 14 in total. Around the same time, in 1977, the MLG began holding a summer institute—the first meetings of the ICS—in St. Cloud, Minnesota. These proved highly influential for a number of young scholars, who attended to hear pioneers of Marxist theory, like Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Stanley Aronowitz, and Gayatri Spivak. Shumway’s paper focuses on how the growth of conferences in literary studies was integral to theory’s rapid rise. Theory’s debut in the United States is widely asserted to have been “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” a conference held at Johns Hopkins University in 1966. But while this conference brought to the U.S. for the first time several leading European intellectuals who would later be identified with theory, its reach was limited. What enabled theory to expand its reach were the increasing number of conferences and the increased attendance at them. While there had been conferences in literary studies since the MLA began meeting in 1883, the difficulty and cost of travel had long limited the number of scholars who attended such meetings, and the frequency with which they did so. But as air travel expanded, so did the number of conferences in language and literature and the number of people who attended them. During the 1970s and 1980s, theory played an outsized role in these meetings. Drawing on programs from the MLA, the MMLA, and various stand-alone conferences, such as the “Theories of” series at Indiana University in the early 1980s, this paper will show how theory became much more broadly familiar. Theory’s impact was enhanced through personal appearance and participation of leading theorists in these events. Each paper will take 15 minutes, with 10 minutes for the respondent, allowing at least 15 minutes for questions. The panelists reflect professional and regional diversity. They represent institutions located in three different countries, and they are at different career stages and conditions: a Ph.D. student, a contingent faculty member, and a tenured professor.