9/20: Jonathan Flatley on Langston Hughes and Black Leninism

Join us for a great event with 

Jonathan Flatley (Wayne)

September 20

Thursday, April 2: Trish Loughran, "The Grave at the End of the Poem: Whitman Printed, Photographed, and Waxed"

The American Studies Consortium,

with support from the Nineteenth Century Forum

and the Poetry and Poetics Workshop

presents a lecture by

Trish Loughran

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“The Grave at the End of the Poem:

Whitman Printed, Photographed, and Waxed”

Thursday, April 2

3222 Angell Hall

4 PM

Reception to follow. Everyone is welcome!

ABSTRACT: Recent shifts in communications technologies have made pre-digital print culture come into view as a discrete object of historical study—a five hundred-year-old fossil that, because its time has largely passed, is now subject to the monumentalizing archival impulse to define, to classify, to contain—to name and know fully.  In this talk, I will think about what it means to look back on 19C print culture from the other side of the great digital divide.  In particular, I consider a range of Walt Whitman’s work in the context of the nineteenth century’s ceaseless technological innovations across a number of materials forms, printed and otherwise—from handpress printing to photography and (early) voice recording—all forms Whitman explored and experimented with between around 1840 and 1892. Using the example of Whitman to produce both a “reading” of his corpus and a meditation on historicist method, I want to think about both the “ontology” of print—its irreducible ‘printedness’—and how that squares with a more materialist approach that takes the micro-fissures of historical detail into account.

Trish Loughran is Associate Professor of English & History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the connections between art, history, politics, and communications technology from the early Enlightenment to the present. She is the author of The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (Columbia UP, 2007), which was awarded the Oscar Kenshur Book Prize in Eighteenth-Century Studies.

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

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.

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

------

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.

USists Presents a Talk by Caroline Levander: "Designing American Literature"

Please join the US Literatures & Cultures Consortium for

Designing American Literature

A talk by Caroline Levander, Rice University

Thursday, February 13, 2014

3222 Angell Hall

4:00 PM

Professor Levander is the Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives, Carlson Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of English at Rice University. She is author of Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child, and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois and Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in 19th Century American Literature and Culture; she is also co-editor of several collections, including Hemispheric American Studies and A Companion to American Literary Studies. Professor Levander teaches a wide range of courses in American literature and culture, including US literature in the Americas, Civil War literature, and the long 19th century.

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

Tues. 2/18-Wed. 2/19, 8 pm-8 am, Shapiro Library
- 1,000 Speak Out for Racial Justice (hosted by the United Coalition for Racial Justice, or UCRJ)

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), and many other sponsoring/supporting organizations to co-sponsor this student-centered demonstration and dialogue. The UCRJ is a coalition of students, student organizations faculty, and staff building on the momentum of racial justice activism around #BBUM and the Diag Freeze Out & Follow Up.

For more information on how to participate in and support this dialogue, please see our most recent posts, and for the social media savvy, https://www.facebook.com/UnitedCoalitionForRacialJustice

Mon. 2/24, 4 pm, Angell 3241
- Dissertation Chapter Workshop and Discussion with Konstantina Karageorgos

Mon. 3/24, 4 pm, Angell 3222
- Talk 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"

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: Robert Viscusi

March 20, 2013 - 3pm, Room 100, Hatcher Library Gallery

Robert Viscusi (Brooklyn College, English)

"Her Hands Were Rough and Smelled of Dead Things: Louisa Ermelino's The Black Madonna"

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

Visiting Speaker: Amy Hungerford

January 20, 2012

Amy Hungerford (English, Yale): "The Making of McSweeney's"