Futures of American Studies

Last updated

The Futures of American Studies is a weeklong academic summer institute dedicated to presenting new work and critiquing the field of American Studies held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The first Futures of American Studies Institute was held in the summer of 1997. [1] Donald E. Pease, Professor of English at Dartmouth College, founded, organizes, and directs the annual Institute. [2]

Contents

Founding of the Institute

After the School of Criticism and Theory left Dartmouth for Cornell University in 1995, Dartmouth faculty member Donald E. Pease started the Futures Institute as an alternative summer program for faculty and graduate students. [3] In 2017 the Futures Institute celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its founding.

Institute Description

The Institute is divided into two daily plenary sessions, which feature current work from Institute faculty, and multiple three-hour research seminars in which all participants present and discuss their own work-in-progress. Speakers in the plenary sessions typically examine the relation between emergent and residual practices in the field of American Studies from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. Participants come from a variety of programs and schools and represent fields as diverse as American history, social geography, American literature, gender studies, and the digital humanities. The Institute welcomes participants who are involved in a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields and who are interested in current critical debates in American Studies. [4]

Past Institutes

2017 institute

The 2017 Institute was the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Futures of American Studies Institute. Faculty included Lisa Lowe, Dana Nelson, Cindi Katz, Branka Arsic, Christian Haines, Alan Nadel, Susan Strehle, Patricia Stuelke, Russ Castronovo, David Golumbia, James E. Dobson, Eng-Beng Lim, David Eng, Rachel Lee, Karen Shimakawa, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Ronald Judy, Donatella Izzo, Heike Paul, Liam Kennedy, Winfried Fluck, Hortense Spillers, John Carlos Rowe, Tim Melley, Heike Paul, Liam Kennedy, Eric Lott, Hamilton Carroll, Annie McClanahan, Colleen Boggs, and Dana Luciano.

2016 institute

Along with Institute Director Donald E. Pease, the institute co-directors were 2016 are:

2014 institute

Along with Institute Director Donald E. Pease, the institute co-directors were 2014 are:

2012 institute

Along with Institute Director Donald E. Pease, the institute co-directors were 2012 are:

Notable Plenary Lecturers

Each year the Futures Institute brings practicing Americanists and well-known critics and theorists working outside American studies. Notable plenary speakers from the Institute's history include:

Recent books written by Institute plenary faculty or students

Related Research Articles

Trent Lott Former United States Senator from Mississippi

Chester Trent Lott Sr. is an American lawyer, author, and politician. A former United States Senator from Mississippi, Lott served in numerous leadership positions in both the United States House of Representatives and the Senate. He entered Congress as one of the first of a wave of Republicans winning seats in Southern states that had been solidly Democratic. Later in his career, he became Senate Majority Leader, and, alternately, Senate Minority Leader. He also joined with three other Republican Senators in the Singing Senators barbershop-like quartet. In 2003, he stepped down from the position after controversy due to his praising of senator Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist Dixiecrat presidential bid.

American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that examines American literature, history, society, and culture. It traditionally incorporates literary criticism, historiography and critical theory.

Thomas H. Cormen is the co-author of Introduction to Algorithms, along with Charles Leiserson, Ron Rivest, and Cliff Stein. In 2013, he published a new book titled Algorithms Unlocked. He is a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College and former Chairman of the Dartmouth College Department of Computer Science. Between 2004 and 2008 he directed the Dartmouth College Writing Program. His research interests are algorithm engineering, parallel computing, speeding up computations with high latency.

Eric Lott

Eric Lott is an American cultural historian and Distinguished Professor of English at The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York City. Previously, he was a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Virginia.

Hans Joas

Hans Joas is a German sociologist and social theorist.

Hollis Micheal Tarver Denova is an author, historian, and university professor, with a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Bowling Green State University. Tarver is the son of Rosemary Tarver and Cecil Donald Tarver, Sr..

Sacvan Bercovitch

Sacvan Bercovitch was a Canadian literary and cultural critic who spent most of his life teaching and writing in the United States. During an academic career spanning five decades, he was considered to be one of the most influential and controversial figures of his generation in the emerging field of American studies.

Donald Pease may refer to:

The Berlin Graduate School of North American Studies (GSNAS) is affiliated with the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University Berlin. It was distinguished by the German Universities Excellence Initiative in 2006, a nationwide competition carried out by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, together with the German Research Foundation. The GSNAS was officially opened by the former German minister for foreign affairs, Joschka Fischer, in November 2007. Speakers of the Graduate School of North American Studies are Prof. Dr. Ulla Haselstein and Prof. Dr. Winfried Fluck.

Eric J. Lott is a religious scholar who taught in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Of the Indian languages, he knew Sanskrit, Telugu and Kannada.

Winfried Fluck studied German, English and American literature at Freie Universität Berlin, Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1972, he got his doctoral degree from Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation on aesthetic premises in the literary criticism of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For his Habilitation, the European qualification for a professorship, he wrote a study on American realism as a form of “staged reality” (Inszenierte Wirklichkeit). After visiting scholarships at Harvard and Yale University, he got his first appointment as a professor at the University of Constance in Germany before he became Professor and Chair of North American Culture at the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Winfried Fluck taught as a guest professor at Princeton University and the Universidad Autonoma Barcelona, and he was a research fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, the Advanced Studies Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, and the Internationales Kulturwissenschaftliches Zentrum in Vienna. From 2005-2008, he was chair of the Research Reviewing Committee of the German Research Council on the humanities. He is a founding member of the Graduate School of North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, funded by the German Universities Excellence Initiative, and is directing it together with Ulla Haselstein. He is also co-director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College established and directed by Donald E. Pease.

Alan Lelchuk American writer

Alan Lelchuk is an American novelist, professor, and editor from Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.A. in World Literature from Brooklyn College in 1960 and received his M.A. in 1962 and Ph.D. in 1965, both in English and from Stanford University. He completed a Stanford dissertation fellowship at University College London in 1962–63.

Werner Max Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and of African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also Global Professor of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi.

Donald E. Pease is the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Chair of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He is an Americanist, literary and cultural critic, and academic. He has been a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective since 1977 or 1978. He was the founding editor of the New Americanist Series at Duke University Press and editor of the Re-Encountering Colonialism Series and Re-Mapping the Transnational Turn: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies for the University Press of New England (UPNE). Pease directs the annual Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth.

Peter-André Alt German literary scholar (born 1960)

Peter-André Alt is a German literary scholar, former president of the Freie Universitaet of Berlin and, since August 2018, president of the German Rectors' Conference (HRK). Alt is married to the writer Sabine Alt and has two adult sons

Danuta Fjellestad is a professor of American Literary studies at The English Department of Uppsala University, Sweden. She was appointed the professor's chair in 2007 and has since then been teaching and conducting research on postmodern and post-postmodern literature, with an interest in visuality studies as-well-as technologies in, and as a part of, literature. As an author, she is widely held in libraries worldwide.

Burghardt Wittig is the chairman of MolBio2Math and a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Freie Universitaet Berlin in Berlin (FUB), Germany. His research focuses on the areas of gene regulation, DNA structures induced by torsional strain, chromatin structure, G-protein-mediated signal transduction, as well as therapeutic applications of genetic research and DNA-based vaccines. His research has been published in numerous leading scientific journals, including Cell, Nature, PNAS, and Science.

Research in transnational American studies, a field of American studies, foregrounds the complex relationships amongst nations, cultures and histories that intersect with the United States of America. A significant impulse driving the development of transnationalist American studies is the pursuit of analytical methods that are less likely to reinforce the ideology of American exceptionalism by removing the nation state as the "natural" frame for analysis. This re-examination of American studies can be seen as a critical response to the significant role the U.S. State Department historically played in promoting American studies outside of the United States. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, in her 2004 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, argued that a transnational focus for American studies would foster studies that frame the United States as a "participant in a global flow of people, ideas, texts, and products."

Aimee Bahng is an American academic. She is a professor of gender and women's studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Her previous denial of tenure at Dartmouth College sparked widespread protests about discrimination against racial minorities in academia.

References

  1. The Futures of American Studies. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~futures
  2. Futures of American Studies, Edited by Donald E. Pease, Robyn Wiegman, Duke University Press, 2002, ISBN   978-0-8223-2957-2.
  3. "About the Institute".
  4. "About the Institute".