Conference Q & A for graduate students

Conference Opportunities in American Studies:

a graduate student advising session

Tuesday, January 20

3222 Angell Hall

4 PM

When should you start thinking about conferences? Which should you apply to? Where do you find CFPs and funding? How do you write an engaging abstract and paper? What makes a memorable presentation? Is “networking” worth your while?

The American Studies Consortium warmly invites fellow graduate students working on the history, literature, and culture of the Americas to a peer advising session on navigating academic conferences. Advanced graduate students from the departments of American Culture, English, and History will briefly speak about their experiences attending and presenting at major conferences in their fields, and invite your questions at an informal Q & A session on all aspects of the conference process.

While this session will be geared in particular to conferences relevant to American Studies, it is also intended to provide a friendly forum on finding, applying to, and presenting at academic conferences more generally. Everyone is welcome!

Light refreshments will be provided. 

Thursday, September 25: interest meeting/mixer

Please join us for the Fall 2014 American Studies Consortium interest meeting/mixer

Thursday, September 25

3222 Angell Hall

4 PM

Do your academic interests relate to the literature, history, and/or culture of the Americas? Are you looking for ways to expand the disciplinary, methodological, or historical horizons of your research? Are you interested in American public scholarship? Come meet fellow graduate students for food and conversation as we re-launch our interdisciplinary interest group for the 2014-2015 academic year. Swap knowledge about all things Americanist, from course offerings to conference opportunities, reading lists to research methods. Find out about and weigh in on this year’s events, including dissertation chapter workshops, reading groups, professionalization roundtables, and visiting speakers (and mark your calendars for a talk by American literary scholar and public intellectual Joanna Brooks, Monday October 20 at 4 PM).

Pre-candidates (including first-year students) are especially welcome!

Refreshments will be provided.

Dissertation Chapter Workshop and Discussion with Alistair Chetwynd

Please join the United States Literatures & Cultures Consortium for our final dissertation chapter workshop and discussion of the year with

Alistair Chetwynd

PhD Candidate, English Language and Literature

Monday, April 21

3241 Angell Hall

4:10-5:30pm

Daniel's Travesty, Doctorow's Satire: A Reconsideration of the Politics of Postmodern Parody

Abstract:

E L Doctorow's The Book of Daniel is one of the foundational texts for our dominant account of the politics of postmodern fiction's form: Linda Hutcheon's claim that postmodern fiction privileges parody as a way of drawing power away from the hegemonic discourses that constitute official history.  In this paper I treat the novel instead as a pre-emptive critique of the idea that mere language-games or mere discursification have any value for the recuperation of historical possibility.  I then examine how this critique yet offers grounds for optimism about non-mimetic fiction's ability to help us do that recuperation.

Snacks provided!

Drafts are available for download at the USists website:

https://sitemaker.umich.edu/usists/the_workshop_files

or from Google Drive here:

https://drive.google.com/a/umich.edu/file/d/0B3FAAv0dKLHXU081blFFNWoyWm8/edit?usp=sharing

Dissertation Chapter Workshop and Discussion with Sony Coráñez Bolton

Please join the United States Literatures & Cultures Consortium for a chapter workshop and discussion with

Sony Coráñez Bolton

Doctoral Student in American Culture,

Asia/Pacific Islander American Studies,

Southeast Asian Studies

Monday, March 17

3241 Angell Hall

4:10-5:30pm

Queer Entanglements and Homotransnationalisms: Reading Queer Enlightenments and Queer Diasporas in Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado and the “Philippine Gay Situation”

Snacks provided!

Drafts are available for download at the USists website:
https://sitemaker.umich.edu/usists/the_workshop_files

Dissertation Chapter Workshop and Discussion with Konstantina Karageorgos

Please join the United States Literatures & Cultures Consortium for a chapter workshop and discussion with

Konstantina Karageorgos

PhD Candidate in English

Monday, February 24

3241 Angell Hall

4:10-5:30pm

"Richard Wright's Marxism: The Outsider and the Making of a Postwar Aesthetic"

“Richard Wright’s Marxism: The Outsider and the Making of a Postwar Aesthetic” is the second consecutive chapter on Richard Wright in my dissertation, Beyond the Blueprint: Episodes of African-American Literary Marxism in the Period of the Cold War. Mobilized by a provocative claim—that Wright became a Marxist only after leaving the Communist Party—this chapter revisits the thirteen year interim between Native Son (1940) and The Outsider (1953), during which time Wright shifted his focus away from political and cultural Marxism to the principle texts of Marx’s thought. By recovering this lost period in Wright’s Marxist evolution, I restore a pivotal context to The Outsider, Wright’s most misunderstood novel, which reopens his postwar work to fresh political, theoretical, and formal readings.

Snacks provided!

Drafts are available for download at the USist website:

https://sitemaker.umich.edu/usists/the_workshop_files

Please email Kathryne Bevilacqua (bevilacq@umich.edu) with any questions about this event.

Dissertation Chapter Workshop and Discussion with Kya Mangrum and Liz Rodrigues

Please join the United States Literatures & Cultures Consortium for a chapter workshop and discussion with Kya Mangrum and Liz Rodrigues. 

 

Monday, October 21

3154 Angell Hall

4:10-5:30pm

 

Snacks provided!

 

Drafts are available for download at the USist website:

https://sitemaker.umich.edu/usists/the_workshop_files

 

Please email Kathryne Bevilacqua (bevilacq@umich.edu) with any questions about this event.

 

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Chapter synopses:

 

Kya Mangrum, "Fictions of Progress: The Visual Slave Narratives of the Civil War"

In "Fictions" I argue that mechanically reproducible photographs of former slaves inspired a new sub-genre of the slave narrative.  This new genre was comprised of two contradictory impulses---a need to affirm the freedman's fitness for battle contrasted against a desire to disqualify his full claims for citizenship.

 

Liz Rodrigues, "W.E.B. Du Bois, Data, and the Re-assemblage Race and Self"

This chapter demonstrates how data collection—as a conceptual framework for empirical reality, as a method of sociological inquiry, and as a representational form—enables Du Bois to tell new stories about African American life and selfhood. I locate Du Bois's methodological interventions in sociology as engagements with the concept of data and trace how those engagements continue to surface in a series of his later, multi-formal collective works of autobiographical, literary, and sociological-historical writings. 

Doing Archive Research

April 17, 2013 - Room 3222 Angell Hall, 4pm
Panel presentation and Q&A on doing archive work towards and around your dissertation

Presenters:
Cat Cassel on: Philip K Dick and hassle with archive copyright owners

Dina Karageorgos on: Richard Wright, Sarah Wright, doing interviews, and losing your images

Jesse Carr on: The Arts of Citizenship project, and working with microfilm

Daphna Atias on: Emily Dickinson and finding what you didn't necessarily come to find

Ali Chetwynd on: William Gaddis and hunting down fiction's non-fictional sources

Chelsea Del Rio on: Karate Lesbians and lesbian feminism

Kya Mangrum on: Literary archive work with visual/photographic material

Visiting Speaker: Robert Chodat

March 25-26, 2013

Robert Chodat (Boston University, English)

4pm Mar 25th, 3222 Angell Hall - "Jigsaw Puzzles, Salesmen, and Cavell's Improvisations"
"I address Stanley Cavell’s recent memoir Little Did I Know against the backdrop of some of his philosophical writing. I'll consider Cavell’s challenges to certain entrenched conceptions of language, art, and action, and will focus particular attention on the idea of “improvisation,” which Cavell’s writing often thematizes and enacts"

2pm Mar 26th, 3184 Angell Hall - graduate student event on doing interdisciplinary research in analytic philosophy and literary study, and other occasionally antagonistic combinations.

Visiting Speaker: Marion Smiley

Jan 31-Feb 1

Marion Smiley (Brandeis University, Philosophy/ Politics/ Women's and Gender Studies)

January 31st, 4pm, Angell Hall 3222 - Lecture: "From Science to Symbolic Interpretation: Rethinking American Pragmatism"

February 1st, 1.30-3pm, Angell Hall 1164 - Graduate Student Professionalisation discussion