Final meeting: April 29, 2013

The Publics and Politics Mellon Graduate Workshop held its final meeting of the 2012-2013 school year this evening.  Over the past year, the workshop generated an intellectually stimulating environment to share work and exchange ideas: we have benefited greatly from the conversation, fellowship, and support of our peers over the last academic year, as well as the tremendous opportunity to bring in visiting scholars to meet with the workshop.  Many thanks to Professors Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Jodi Dean, Sean McCann, and Gene Jarrett for their kind involvement.  We would also like to thank the Mellon Foundation for their generous financial support, the Cogut Center at Brown University for their invaluable support and assistance, and our faculty advisor Phil Gould for his guidance--all of whom made this workshop possible.

We also would like to thank all of our participants for their insights, responses, and company.  It has been a pleasure to think through the issues of this Mellon in such a generative and generous community.

Meeting: April 15, 2013

Our next meeting will be held on Monday, April 15, 2013 at 6pm, Salomon Hall, Room 004.  Dinner will be provided by Kabob and Curry.  Brandy Monk-Payton and Maggie Hennefield will be workshopping with us.  Readings will be circulated over email and uploaded on the site.  More details to follow soon!

Visiting Scholar: Gene Jarrett, April 1, 2013

Please join us on Monday, April 1 at 11:30am for our next Mellon workshop!  We will meet in the English Department's Barker Room (70 Brown Street, Room 315).  We are delighted to welcome (back!) Professor Gene Jarrett, Professor of English and African American Studies at Boston University, as our final visiting scholar to join us at the Mellon.  Professor Jarrett specializes in African American literature and culture from the 18th century to the present; intellectual and literary history of the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries; race, ethnic, and cultural studies; and theories of literature, aesthetics, and intellectual historiography.  He is the author of Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature (NYU, 2011) and Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Penn, 2007).  Jarrett has also edited and co-edited six volumes on African American literature and criticism, including most recently A Companion to African American Literature (Blackwell, 2010), The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Ohio UP, 2009), and The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938 (Princeton UP, 2007).  Jarrett's current project is a monograph on the life, literature, and times of African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar.

We will be reading selections from Professor Jarrett's recent book, Representing the Race, along with a 2012 article on "The Harlem Renaissance and its Indignant Aftermath: Rethinking Literary History and Political Action After Black Studies."  All readings, and additional readings from Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature? (2011), are available on the google site (log-in required).  With generous co-sponsorship from the Graduate Student Council, Professor Jarrett will deliver a paper entitled "Beyond Literacy and Literature: Rethinking Political Histories of Slavery, Agency, and Freedom" as part of his visit to the workshop.  Please join us for Professor Jarrett's paper, lunch, and the workshop!

Visiting Scholar: Sean McCann, March 4, 2013

Please join us on Monday, March 4, 2013 at 12pm for our next Mellon workshop!  We will be meeting at 12pm in the English department's Barker Room (70 Brown Street, Room 315).  We are excited to host Professor Sean McCann, professor of English at Wesleyan University. He specializes in post-Civil War American Literature, specifically in relation to contemporaneous political developments and discourses. He is the author of A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government (Princeton UP, 2008) and Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Duke UP, 2000), which received honorable mention for the America Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Prize for the best book in American Studies. His essays have appeared in American Quarterly, The Common Review, ELH, Radical History Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, Studies in American Fiction, the Yale Journal of Criticism, as well as several edited volumes including Poetics/Politics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (St. Martin's Press, 1999). 

Professor McCann will be workshopping two pieces with the group, both of which are available on the google site, along with selections from his previous work (log-in required).  Lunch will be provided.  Please join us for our conversation!

Event: "The Inevitability of Liberalism?"

On Friday, February 22, 2013, the Brown University Department of English will be sponsoring a symposium, "The Inevitability of Liberalism?" featuring Professors Amanda Anderson (Brown University), Catherine Gallagher (University of California Berkeley), Philip Gould (Brown University), and Deak Nabers (Brown University).  The description and schedule is as follows.

The Department of English presents "The Inevitability of Liberalism?"  Over the past half-century the fortunes of liberalism in critical thought have fluctuated wildly.  As the central ideological element of philosophical modernity, liberalism is the basis of political and aesthetic judgment, of investment in technological and scientific progress, and of all politics driven by hope, equality and belief in community.  This symposium will celebrate the recent arrival of Amanda Anderson on the Brown faculty by considering liberal thought as a darker concept, one alive to a negativity that runs through its brightest convictions.  What have been the effects of the dominance of liberal thinking in British and American studies?  How central to liberal thinking is the dialectic of hope and defeat?  How do theories of narrative, or the history of the novel more broadly, expand or complicate liberalism as a political form?  Is a non-complacent liberalism possible?  And is there any future for critical thinking beyond liberalism?

Friday, February 22, 2013
2:00-5:00 pm
Alumnae Hall, Crystal Room (194 Meeting Street)

2:00 pm: Welcome and Opening Remarks - Philip Gould (Department of English, Brown University)
2:15 pm: "Cold War Aesthetics: The Case of Trilling and Adorno" - Amanda Anderson (Department of English, Brown University)
2:45 pm: "When 'Liberal Democracy' Was an Oxymoron" - Catherine Gallagher (Department of English, University of California Berkeley)
3:15 to 3:30 pm: Break
3:30 pm: Response - Philip Gould (Department of English, Brown University)
3:50 pm: Response - Deak Nabers (Department of English, Brown University)
4:10 pm: Audience Q & A
5:00 pm: Reception

This event is organized by Professors Timothy Bewes and Jacques Khalip and is made possible by the Department of English and the Wetmore Fund for Literature.

Meeting: February 18, 2013

Our next meeting will be held on February 18, 2013 at 6pm (location forthcoming over email).  Dinner will be provided from Kabob and Curry.  Tim Syme will be workshopping two pieces, "Individuals, Social Justice and Political Action" and "How is X political?"  Sara Pfaff will be workshopping a dissertation chapter entitled "'After the After': Timeless Bodies of Pluralism in John Henry Days and Aloft."

We will also, if time permits, look at several pieces on geography, public space, and democratic politics, including selections from Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja.  All readings will be available on the google site (log-in required).

Visiting Scholar: Jodi Dean, February 8, 2013

Please join us on Friday, February 8, 2013 for our next Mellon meeting!  We will be meeting at 12pm in the English Department (70 Brown Street), Room 315.  We will be hosting Professor Jodi Dodi, professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY.  She teaches broadly within modern and contemporary political theory, ranging from feminism to fascism, consumption, and citizenship. Her research interests include digital media; poststructuralism and psychoanalysis; neoliberalism and consumerism; cultural studies; and feminism theory. Dean's impressive list of publications boasts numerous journal articles, contributions to collected volumes, and seven monographs including Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Duke UP, 2009),  Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Cornell UP, 2002), and her forthcoming work, The Communist Horizon (Verso, October 2012). Dean has edited and co-edited several collected volumes addressing questions of feminism, empire, and information networks. Dean also serves as co-editor of Theory and Event, an electronic academic journal published quarterly by John Hopkins University Press.   

Professor Dean will come and talk with the workshop about some of her previous work, as well as a forthcoming project that she will be workshopping with the group.  All readings will be available on the google site (log-in required).  Lunch will be provided.

We are also delighted to sponsor a public talk that evening.  Professor Dean will give a lecture entitled "Communicative capitalism: this is what democracy looks like" on Friday, February 8, 2013 at 4pm in Pembroke Hall, Room 305.  This lecture is also co-sponsored through the generous support of the Department of Political Science, the Department of Sociology, and the Graduate Student Council at Brown University.