IU Cultural Studies: 25 Years and Beyond
22nd Annual Cultural Studies Conference
October 6-7 2017
In 1990-1991, former IU faculty members Barbara Klinger adnd Christopher Anderson convened a year-long multi-disciplinary faculty seminar on “The Cultural Studies Movement in the Humanities and Social Sciences,” funded by the then Office of Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculties. From that auspicious workshop, Patrick Brantlinger and Jim Naremore drafted a proposal to establish a Cultural Studies Program at IU that would promote interdisciplinary dialogue and debate for both faculty and graduate students.
The 22nd Annual Cultural studies Conference on October 6-7, 2017 will celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of our program. The two-day event will reflect on institutional histories and the futures of the field, as well as celebrate the work that we all do here. It will also be an occasion to chart a path forward for Cultural Studies at IU in the face of the perpetual institutional reorganizations, ongoing reductions in resources for the study of the humanities and social sciences, and the increasing legitimation of xenophobia, ethnonationalism, and strains of illiberalism in the United States and Europe.
Friday, October 6 (CAHI 1211 E. Atwater)
5:30 Keynote I
Roderick Ferguson, University of Illinois at Chicago
“The Bookshop of the Black Queer Diaspora”
Saturday, October 7 (CAHI 1211 E. Atwater)
9:30-10:00 Breakfast
10:00-11:30 New Directions in Cultural Studies I
Pallavi Rao (The Media School), “Mani Ratnam’s Oeuvre and the Filmic Landscape of Caste in Tamil Cinema”
Dan Hassoun (Communication and Culture), “Attentional Work: Managing the Instability of Everyday Film Viewing”
Laura Partain (The Media School), “(Not) Enough Said: Lebanese Women’s Rights NGO KAFA and Its Media Use for Audience Mobilization”
Moderated by Raiford Guins (The Media School)
11:45-1:15 New Directions in Cultural Studies II
Ryan Powell (The Media School), “Symbolic Indianness, New Masculinity and Song of the Loon (Andrew Herbert, 1970)”
- Andrés Guzman (Spanish and Portuguese), “Immigration, Sanctuary, and Generic Sovereignty”
Ishan Ashutosh (Geography), “Diaspora’s Migrations in the Social Sciences: Trajectories of Departure, Maneuver, and Arrival”
Moderated by Marissa Moorman (History)
1:15-2:30 Lunch (provided)
2:30-4:00 Roundtable: Institutional Pasts and the Futures of the Field
Purnima Bose (IU)
Patrick Brantlinger (IU emeritus)
Tom Foster (University of Washington),
Barbara Klinger (IU emerita)
Moderated by Shane Vogel (IU)
4:15 Keynote II
Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Rutgers University
“A Study in Distant Reading”
6:30 Reception/Dinner — All welcome!
Roderick Ferguson is Professor of African American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is also the co-director of the Racialized Body research cluster. He is the President-elect of the American Studies Association and has written widely on the institutional formation of interdisciplinary studies, especially in his two books: The Re-Order of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minnesota, 2012) and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minnesota, 2004). He is also the co-editor of Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Racialized Difference.
Lauren M. E. Goodlad is Professor of English at Rutgers University. From 2009–2014 she was Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in the literature and culture of the long nineteenth century, especially Victorian, and her research interests include gothic genres; serialized media and culture; critical, feminist, postcolonial, and political theory; cultural studies; new media; and literature in relation to contemporary understandings of liberalism, globalization, internationalism, and financialization. She is the author of The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty and Transnational Experience (Oxford, 2017) and Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Johns Hopkins, 2003), and co-editor of the cultural studies anthologies Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s (Duke, 2013) and Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke, 2007), among others.