Americanist Colloquium and Nineteenth-Century Group Reading (4/25/13)

The Americanist Colloquium and the Nineteenth-Century Group will be co-sponsoring a discussion of John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America: With References to Ghosts, Protestant Subcultures, Machines and their Metaphors; Featuring Discussions of Mass Media, Moby-Dick, Spirituality, Phrenology, Anthropology, Sing Sing State Penitentiary, and Sex with the New Motive Power.

Readings from Modern’s book (Introduction, Chapter 1, and a brief Epilogue) are available on the Americanist and the 19th C. group Sakai sites.

We will convene tomorrow in MU 107 between 2:00-4:15. All are welcome to what should be a wide-ranging and engaging discussion. Snacks will be provided!

For more information, please contact William Ryan (wjryan@eden.rutgers.edu) or Mimi Winick (mimi.winick@gmail.com).

Discussion of John Lardas Modern’s book
Thursday, April 25, 2013
2:00-4:15 PM
Murray Hall, Room 107
510 George St. (New Brunswick, NJ)

Kathleen Howard Article Workshop (3/12/13)

The Americanist Colloquium will be holding an article workshop on Tuesday, March 12th.

Kathleen Howard, a doctoral candidate here at Rutgers and currently the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Fellow in Early American Religious Studies at the McNeil Center, will be joining
us to discuss her draft article,  ”Form, Function, Epistemology: Literary Creativity in the Protestant Tradition.”

In addition to Americanists, Howard’s work would also be of interest to scholars working on the nineteenth century more generally, the novel, and secularization studies. A copy of the article will be available for download later this week.

Kathleen Howard
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
4:30 – 6:30 PM
The Center for Cultural Analysis
8 Bishop Place (New Brunswick, NJ)

Jennifer Fleissner (3/4/13)

Please join us for the final Americanist seminar event of the semester on Monday, March 4th.

Jennifer Fleissner (Indiana University) will be here to discuss new work. Fleissner is the author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity:  The Moment of American Naturalism (2004), a study that–through dazzling readings of James, Wharton, Dreiser, Crane, and Norris–puts questions of gender back at the center of our thinking about naturalist texts’ exploration of individual agency.  

Two of Fleissner’s recent articles, which we will discuss on Monday, are on the seminar’s SAKAI website:  ”Maladies of the Will:  A New Reading of the American Novel,” and “Obsessional Modernity:  The ‘Institutionalization of Doubt.’”

 

Jennifer Fleissner
Monday, March 4, 2013
2:30 – 4:30 PM
The Center for Cultural Analysis
8 Bishop Place (New Brunswick, NJ)

Vincent Brown (2/11/13) & Elizabeth Dillon (2/14/13)

This coming week there will be two talks that extend research on the history and literature of the Black Atlantic into the digital realm.

On Monday, February 11th, Vincent Brown will be giving a talk entitled “Tacky’s Revolt and the Coromantee Archipelago: A New Cartography of Slave Revolt.” 
Brown offers a major reconsideration of the early modern African diaspora by conceiving it in terms of its military history. By examining the Jamaican slave revolt of 1760 in the context of a series of insurrections between 1675 and 1775, Brown will show how events in Africa reverberated through the Atlantic, thereby joining African, European, and American history within a critical study of popular revolt and imperial counterinsurgency. Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History and Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University.

And on Thursday, February 14th, Elizabeth Dillon will be offering a presentation on her use of geospatial mapping to think in new ways about the literature of the early Black Atlantic. Dillon is Professor of English at Northeastern University.

 

Vincent Brown
Monday, February 11, 2013
6:15 PM
Plangere Annex, Murray Hall, Room 302
510 George Street (New Brunswick, NJ)

 

Elizabeth Dillon
Thursday, February 14, 2013
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
Murray Hall, Room 107
510 George Street (New Brunswick, NJ)

Ben Schmidt 2/1/13

Please join us for the first event of the semester this Friday. Ben Schmidt will discuss new methods of digital reading emerging under the rubric of digital humanities, from ‘culturomics’ to deformance, and offer a case study in reading millions of books at scale by describing and situating dramatic changes in what it meant to ‘pay attention’ over the last 200 years.

Schmidt is a doctoral student in the History Department at Princeton University and a graduate fellow at The Harvard Cultural Observatory.

Event Date: Friday, February 1, 2013
11:30 AM – 1:00 PM
The Center for Cultural Analysis
8 Bishop Place (New Brunswick, NJ)

Stephen Robertson, Tues. 12/11/12

Join us for the final event of the semester tomorrow. Stephen Robertson (University of Sydney) will talk about his involvement in the construction of the Digitial Harlem archive.

 

Event Date: Tuesday, December 11, 2012
11:30 – 1:00 p.m.
The Center for Cultural Analysis
8 Bishop Place (New Brunswick, NJ)

Americanist Seminar: Sandra Young

Event Date: Wednesday, December 5, 2012
3:00 – 5:00 p.m.

The Center for Cultural Analysis

8 Bishop Place (New Brunswick, NJ)

• Sandra Young (University of Cape Town) will discuss a work-in-progress on Thomas Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588 & 1590).