Catherine Liu is a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. She’s the author of several books, most recently Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class and the forthcoming Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering. In the last few years, she’s emerged as a razor-sharp and compelling critic of identity politics and middle-class liberalism, and a champion of a renewed materialist left politics. Her conversation last year with podcaster Joshua Citarella on “trauma, virtue, and liberal elites” has been viewed more than half a million times on YouTube.

This weekend in Frankfurt, Liu and several colleagues are launching a new initiative called the Palm Springs School for Social Research (PSSSR). I sat down with her for a wide-ranging conversation on the PSSSR, the state of academia, the pathologies of contemporary liberalism, and the gangsterism of the Trumpist right.