Please join the American Studies Consortium for two events with

David Alworth (Harvard)

Public Lecture: "Henry James: Media Archaeologist"
Thursday, April 14 at 4pm, 3154 Angell Hall

Grad Seminar: Discussion of pre-circulated excerpt from
Alworth's Site Reading
Friday, April 15 at 3pm, 3184 Angell Hall 

Thursday's talk is adapted from Alworth's Art Novels book project. Prevailing accounts of the "art novel," the genre of literary fiction after James, define it as a repository of "cultural capital" and a bid for "distinction" in what Pierre Bourdieu calls "the game of culture." But this definition, however important and useful, actually sidesteps art––or more precisely, media relations: the technical and historical interplay between the visual arts (variously construed) and literature (particularly the novel). Focusing precisely on such relations, by contrast, Alworth seeks to reconceptualize the art novel as a feat of "media archaeology." An emerging subfield of media studies, media archaeology examines the interactions among different media, both new and old, as well as the material, technical, formal, historical, and social conditions of any given medium: from painting, sculpture, and photography to performance, installation, and digital design. Understanding the art novel in this sense not only allows us to see U.S. fiction as a vibrant component of modern art history; it also provides an apt critical language for analyzing the turn toward the arts in very recent novels by Tom McCarthy, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, and Ben Lerner, among others.

Friday's workshop will explore an excerpt from Alworth's first book, Site Reading.  Through an engagement with the sociologies of Bruno Latour and Erving Goffman, Site Reading offers a new method for interpreting narrative setting. Examining five sites (supermarkets, dumps, roads, ruins, and asylums) that have been crucial to American literature and visual art since the mid-twentieth century, Alworth demonstrates that setting is not merely a static background for narrative action and characterization. Instead, he argues, sites figure in novels as determinants of sociality that raise complex questions about the experience of collective life.

The American Studies Consortium invites you to two events with:

Florence Dore (UNC-Chapel Hill)

Public Lecture: 

"Novel Sounds: The Ballad Novel in the Age of Rock and Roll"

Thursday, March 24th at 4pm, 3154 Angell Hall

Lunch Workshop:

Discussion of Dore's "The Rock Novel and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude"

http://nonsite.org/article/the-rock-novel-and-jonathan-lethems-the-fortress-of-solitude

Friday, March 25th at 1pm, 3154 Angell Hall 

RSVP kindly requested

Florence Dore is associate professor of American Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she has been on the faculty for five years. She has been a member of the Steering Committee of Post45 since 2007 and was one of the founding co-editors of the "Post 45" Book Series at Stanford University Press. She is the author of The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism (2005), and she is currently planning a public conference and concert series called "Novel Sounds" for the National Humanities Center and Carolina Performing Arts. She is at this very moment completing the first in a two-monograph series with the same title as her talk: ""Novel Sounds: The American Novel in the Age of Rock and Roll"  The talk is taken from the first book in the series, Ballad Novels: Reverberations of Rock in 1950s Southern Fiction; the article you'll read for Friday is taken from the second, The Rock Novel in Contemporary American Fiction.

The American Studies Consortium invites you to workshop a dissertation chapter by:

Kathryne Bevilacqua

“A Reading Army as No Army Ever Was Before”: The American Library Association’s Campaign for Books and Reading in World War I

Friday, March 11th at 1pm, Angell 3241

Lunch from Jerusalem Garden will be provided.

Please RSVP to request a copy of the pre-circulated draft. 

Over the course of the United States’ involvement in World War I, the Library War Service of the American Library Association (ALA) collected and distributed over ten million books and magazines to U.S. soldiers and sailors at home and overseas. To organize the library profession, the military brass, and the general public behind these efforts, the ALA ran what is arguably the first ever mass-mediated, institutionally-backed publicity campaign for books and reading. This chapter examines the materials that attempted to convince the nation to support its new “reading army”: special bulletins and internal memoranda meant to mobilize local libraries, press releases and human interest stories aimed to win over the general public, and posters and pamphlets designed to lure soldiers into special ALA-operated camp libraries. In these varied textual and material spaces, the ALA circulated images of the “soldier-reader,” an idiosyncratic figure, notably distinct from other wartime depictions of U.S. troops, whose reading serves as an index of emerging ideals of American masculinity, modernity, and, surprisingly, tolerance. By recovering this forgotten campaign, I show how the ALA not only publicized its services to a specific set of readers, but also publicized a broader vision of how reading—and being a nation of readers—might help mediate the physical, psychological, and rhetorical ruptures of modern war.

Kathryne Bevilacqua is a graduate student in the department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. 

Please join the American Studies Consortium and the Nineteenth-Century Forum for a lecture by Hester Blum!

What happens to messages left in bottles? Or in cairns, or in copper cylinders, or with passing ships? Hester Blum's paper "Polar Ecomedia" discusses the history of Anglo-American polar exploration -- as well as the literature produced by expedition members -- by considering how letters and other forms of knowledge circulate in the ecological spaces of the polar regions. What forms of writing and recording practices are sustainable in the Arctic or Antarctica? We might say that polar expeditions functioned as a mechanism for generating narratives, but in the anthropocene, writing on ice may be scarcely more legible than writing on water.
Thursday, November 12
3154 Angell | 4:00pm

Hester Blum is Associate Professor of English at Penn State University and co-founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. She is the author of The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination andAntebellum American Sea Narratives (2008), which received the John Gardner Maritime Research Award. Her edited volumes include Horrors of Slavery (2008), William Ray's 1808 Barbary captivity narrative, and the forthcoming essay collection Turns of Event: American Literary Studies in Motion (2016). She is completing a book entitled The News at the Ends of the Earth: Oceanic Studies and the Ecomedia of Polar Exploration.

March 19 & 20: Two events with Bruce Burgett

You are warmly invited to attend two events with

Bruce Burgett

Professor and Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Washington, Bothell

Co-director, Graduate Program in Public Scholarship, Simpson Center for the Humanities

“Keywords for American Cultural Studies:

What Do (Print-Digital) Keywords Do?”

Thursday, March 19

3222 Angell Hall

4 PM

Drawing on his experience co-editing Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press 2007/2014), Burgett will discuss what makes keyword projects different from other forms of academic presentation and other means of approaching questions of interdisciplinary field formation.  In contrast to encyclopedias and reference works, Keywords aims not to codify the state of scholarship in discrete fields called American studies and cultural studies, but to catalyze interdisciplinary conversations across those fields and others.  In both print and digital formats, keyword projects encourage authors and users to think critically and creatively about the genealogies and futurologies of terms and concepts.

UM faculty members June Howard (Chair of the Department of American Culture and Professor of English, American Culture, and Women’s Studies) and Kevin Gaines (Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies), will join Professor Burgett to discuss questions of methodology, pedagogy, and technology.

&

“Why Public Scholarship Matters in Graduate Education”

Friday, March 20

3184 Angell Hall

11 AM

Please join Professor Burgett for a discussion of his recent Pedagogy article on public scholarship, co-authored with Miriam Bartha. Coffee and bagels will be provided.

Abstract:

Drawing on nearly a decade of experience at the University of Washington, the authors argue for a reorientation of graduate curricula and pedagogy through publicly engaged forms of scholarship. Recognizing that the claims mobilized around public scholarship are necessarily local and situational, they suggest that public scholarship is best understood as organizing language that can align and articulate convergent interests rather than standardize or normalize them. This approach to public scholarship cuts against the disciplinary-professional mandates of most graduate curriculum since it requires both diversified forms of professionalization and pragmatic commitments to institutional change.

The article is available for download here.

Bruce Burgett is Professor and Dean in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, graduate faculty in the Department of English at the University of Washington, Seattle, and co-director of the Graduate Certificate in Public Scholarship program at University of Washington’s Simpson Center for the Humanities.  He is the author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (1998), and co-editor, with Glenn Hendler, of Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Professor Burgett has published multiple scholarly articles on sex and nation in early America, as well as essays on interdisciplinary education, cultural studies, and public scholarship. A past President of the Cultural Studies Association, Professor Burgett currently serves as Chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life.

Sponsored by the American Studies Consortium, Reorientations, and the Department of American Culture

Thursday 2/19: Chapter workshop with Prof. Julian Levinson

Please join the American Studies Consortium for a book chapter workshop and lunch with Prof. Julian Levinson:

"'The Seventh Angel Woke Me': 

Adah Isaacs Menken 

and the Return of Israelite Prophecy"

Thursday, February 19

3241 Angell Hall

12 PM

Lunch will be provided. RSVP to logansch@umich.edu by Tuesday, February 17.

----

This chapter is part of my current book project, tentatively titled New World Israelites: Reshaping Jewish Identity in Protestant America. The book considers emblematic instances where Jewish and Christian cultural works have engaged with prevailing religious discourses, establishing specifically American ways of reading Jewishness. In particular, the book traces the lines of influence connecting Protestant biblio-centrism to ideas about modern Jews. From this perspective, modern Jewishness comes to be modeled on the image of the “Old Testament prophet” – a figure imbued with a divine mission to correct the world’s moral failings and to strengthen the bonds uniting the “chosen people,” however defined.

The chapter under discussion, “’The Seventh Angel Woke Me’: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Return of Israelite Prophecy,” explores an emblematic case of these cultural and religious dynamics. Here I explore the prophetic-Jewish self-invention of a Baptist-born woman who became the nation’s most celebrated and notorious stage performer of the 1860s. Drawing on discourses ranging from Reform Judaism, sentimental Protestant poetics, and Whitmanian poetic forms, Menken wrote a series of free-verse poems from the perspective of a “prophet of Israel.” These works establish a model of modern Jewish identity that will be picked up in numerous subsequent works by Jews in America.

Friday, February 6: William J. Maxwell, "F.B. Eyes"

William J. Maxwell

Washington University in St. Louis

“F.B. Eyes”

[How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature]

Friday, February 6

3222 Angell Hall

4 PM

----

Interested graduate students and faculty are also warmly welcomed to join Professor Maxwell earlier that day for a discussion of his accompanying project, the F.B. Eyes Digital Archive, an online collection of FBI files on African American authors and literary institutions obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Professor Maxwell will answer questions related to the creation and curation of digital archives, and on working with archival material more broadly.

3154 Angell Hall

12.30 PM

A light lunch will be provided. RSVP to emiwap@umich.edu.

----

From Princeton University Press:

Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover’s white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI’s hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the Bureau’s intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem’s renaissance and Hoover’s career at the Bureau, secretive FBI “ghostreaders” monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover’s death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau’s close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as William J. Maxwell reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century.

Taking his title from Richard Wright’s poem “The FB Eye Blues,” Maxwell details how the FBI threatened the international travels of African American writers and prepared to jail dozens of them in times of national emergency. All the same, he shows that the Bureau’s paranoid style could prompt insightful criticism from Hoover’s ghostreaders and creative replies from their literary targets. For authors such as Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Sonia Sanchez, the suspicion that government spy-critics tracked their every word inspired rewarding stylistic experiments as well as disabling self-censorship.

Illuminating both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it, F.B. Eyes is a groundbreaking account of a long-hidden dimension of African American literature.

A PDF of Introduction to F.B. Eyes is available here.

F.B. Eyes will be available for sale and signing at the 4 PM talk.

William J. Maxwell is associate professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars and the editor of Claude McKay’s Complete Poems.

Sponsored by the American Studies Consortium and the Department of American Culture.

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. 

October 20: Workshop and Lecture with Prof. Joanna Brooks

The American Studies Consortium welcomes

Joanna Brooks

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University

author of The Book of Mormon Girl

"When Storytelling is Movement Building:

Putting American Studies to Work in the World of Mormonism."

Monday, October 20

3222 Angell Hall

4 PM

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Interested graduate students and faculty are also warmly invited to attend a workshop of Professor Brooks’s draft introduction to Mormon Feminist Thought: Classic Writings from Forty Years of the Movement (Oxford UP, forthcoming 2015).

Monday, October 20

3241 Angell Hall

12:30 PM

The workshop file is available on the American Studies Consortium website.

A light lunch will be served. RSVP to Emily Waples (emiwap@umich.edu).

Joanna Brooks is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, and a national voice on religion in American public life.  Author of The Book of Mormon Girl: A Memoir of An American Faith (Simon & Schuster, 2012) and the blog “Ask Mormon Girl” (www.askmormongirl.com), her work been featured in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Tablet, Salon, and the Michigan Quarterly Review; she has also appeared as a guest on MSNBC, NPR, & The Daily Show.  A senior correspondent for ReligionDispatches.org, she has been named one of “50 Politicos to Watch” by Politico.org, and one of “13 Religious Women to Watch” by Center for American Progress.

Professor Brooks is also the author or editor of five scholarly books, including American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (Oxford, 2003), Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (Oxford 2012), and Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America's First Immigrants (University of Minnesota, 2013). Her scholarship on race, gender, and religion in early American literature has received support and commendation by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Association, and the Modern Language Association.

Tuesday, October 7: faculty and graduate student roundtable on public scholarship

“The American [Public] Scholar”: a faculty and graduate student roundtable 

Tuesday, October 7 

 3222 Angell Hall 

4.30 PM 

“There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handiwork or public labor, as a penknife for an axe.” --Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” (1837) 

Please join the American Studies Consortium for a roundtable discussion on the contemporary meanings and manifestations of American public scholarship. A hundred and eighty years after Emerson’s call to (scholarly) action, what possibilities and pitfalls exist for American citizen-scholars? How are institutions of higher education creating opportunities to re-envision or re-invigorate the relationship of the humanities to public life? University of Michigan faculty and graduate students will discuss the ways in which they are conceptualizing and mobilizing public scholarship, transcending institutional forms, and encouraging civic engagement.

With:
Julie Ellison, Professor of English and American Culture
Petra Kuppers, Professor of English, Theatre and Dance, and Women's Studies
Jacqueline Antonovich, PhD Candidate, History
Jina Kim, PhD Candidate, English & Women's Studies
Amanda Hendrix-Komoto, PhD Candidate, History

Please refer to the Workshop Files section of this site to download an essay by Julie Ellison for this event.

Light refreshments will be served.

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 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.

1,000 Speak Out for Racial Justice (hosted by the United Coalition for Racial Justice, or UCRJ)

Who: The UCRJ is a coalition of undergraduate and graduate students, student organizations, faculty, administrators, and employees building on the current momentum and long history of racial justice activism at UM.

USists is proud to join with Black Humanities Collective (BHC); DAAS Racial Task Force; Arts of Citizenship; Graduate Employees Organization (UM GEO); The Black Student Union; Residential College; American Culture Discretionary Funds Grant; Integrating Diversity and Equality in the Academy (IDEA); American Indian Studies Interdisciplinary Group (AISIG); Doing Queer Studies Now (DQSN), and many other sponsoring/supporting organizations to co-sponsor this student-centered demonstration and dialogue.

Where: Shapiro Undergraduate Library (note that a space will be reserved in the library for quiet study only.)

What/When: UCRJ’s event begins at 8 PM, Tuesday, February 18th with a student-led open mic and a keynote address by Barbara Ransby. Dr. Ransby is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, History, and African American Studies at University of Illinois, Chicago and was a founding member of the United Coalition Against Racism (UCAR) as a graduate student at UM.

Sessions that follow include: teach-in discussions of specific topics like affirmative action, the history of student organizing, and the language of "diversity" (10 PM-1:30 AM, schedule below); student performances; documentary film screenings; spaces for collaboration among student organizations to develop policy strategies and to draft and workshop addresses to the Board of Regents. These sessions run to 8 AM, Wednesday the 19th. Free pizza and coffee will be provided.

How you can participate/support:
- Attend any portion of the event you can, especially the Tuesday 8 PM open mic/keynote by Barbara Ransby.
- Share the event with your students and colleagues and direct them to the teach-in session topics listed below.
- For the social media savvy, connect via Facebook, and sign up for UCRJ's "Thunderclap" (Thunderclap works by asking you to authorize an automatic posting about UCRJ to the social media platform of your choice--e.g. Facebook, Twitter--that will appear at the same time as everyone else who signs up to create a social media blitz on the 17th.)

Schedule of Teach-In Sessions

Session A (10-11:15 PM):

Affirmative Action at the Supreme Court 

Organized by: Robin Zheng
With: Matthew Countryman and Shanta Driver

Shanta Driver, national director of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (BAMN), and Matthew Countryman, Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies, are plaintiffs in the Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action case that is currently up for review by the Supreme Court.

Race in the Classroom
Organized by: Lisa Jong
With: Mejdulene Shomali, Wendy Cortes, and Megan Sweeney

This session invites students and instructors to think together to generate strategies and share resources for responding to uncomfortable interactions concerning race and racism in classroom contexts and for fostering an ethic of dialogue in our classrooms from day one. 

“Leaders and Best”: Exploring Michigan’s Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion 

Organized by: Becky Christensen
With: Kimberly Reyes, Kyle Southern, Aurora Kamimura, and Laura Sanchez-Parkinson

In this session, participants will consider both ways in which the University of Michigan has positioned itself among “the leaders and best” in promoting diversity and inclusion and the approaches student activists have taken to more closely align real conditions with the institution’s professed values. We will also discuss potential approaches the University could take to promote a more diverse and supportive community and share stories of student activism in promoting positive change.

Campus and Community Organizing 101: Detroit and Ann Arbor,
Tensions and Contradictions

Organized by: Lumas Helaire
With: Shari Robinson-Lynk, Stephen Ward, and Craig Regester

During our time together, Shari Robinson-Lynk (African American woman born & raised in Detroit who now resides in Ann Arbor; not a UM alum); Stephen Ward (African American man born & raised outside of Michigan; not a UM alum) & Craig Regester (White man; former resident of the city of Detroit & UM alum) will share their varied personal and professional narratives around living, working and organizing in Detroit. Please come prepared to engage in critical dialogue with these three UM scholars and activists. 

Session B (12-1:15 AM):

Political Organizing
Organized by: Sumana Paelle
With: Isaac Epstein and Dominic Barbato

This session will focus on important tactics and strategies to organize effective campaigns and protests, why some tactics and strategies have worked in UM's past and nationwide, and why others have failed. 

Student Organizing
Organized by: Chloe Brown
With: Mayra Orozco and Mimi Fadlallah

What does it mean to lead by example? Being an activist starts with being active in your community. Learn how to cultivate your personal leadership style. 

What is “Diversity” Anyway? A Conversation about Michigan’s Institutional Rhetoric

Organized by: Frank Kelderman
With: Valentina Montero-Roman, Kyle Grady, and Cass Adair

In this session we will collaboratively examine Michigan’s statements on “diversity” in websites, qualitative studies, and handbooks. We hope to start a critical conversation on the way the University has employed the rhetoric of inclusiveness, and how that rhetoric has shaped action or inaction in terms of dealing with campus climate issues and the enrollment of underrepresented minorities. Looking ahead to the ongoing project of pressuring the administration—including at the upcoming Regent’s Meeting of February 2014—this session will also offer a space to think in practical terms about how and when the rhetoric of diversity might become more than institutional self-promotion, and can instead serve a more critical reflection on its own policies and accomplishments. 

History of Student Organizing
Organized by: Rachel Webb
With: Elizabeth Hinton

In this session, we will walk through the history of student activism on the University of Michigan’s campus. In light of the current movement Being Black at the University of Michigan (#BBUM) and the case for reopening Affirmative Action, it is important to examine past movements and their outcomes, both short and long term.

We look forward to seeing you at this and other upcoming events:

Thurs. 2/13, 4 pm, Angell 3222
- A talk by Caroline Levander (Rice University): "Designing American Literature"
 
Mon. 2/24, 4 pm, Angell 3241
- Dissertation Chapter Workshop and Discussion with Konstantina Karageorgos

Mon. 3/17, 4 pm, Angell 3241
- Dissertation Chapter Workshop and Discussion with Sony Coranez Bolton

Mon. 3/24, 4 pm, Angell 3222
- Lecture by Hsuan Hsu (UC Davis): "Twain, Chinese Immigration, and Comparative Racialization"

Tues. 3/25, 4 pm, Angell 3241
- Discussion of Prof. Hsu's work-in-progress, "Literary Cartographies and the Scales of Environmental Justice"