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!

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.

Meeting: January 28, 2013

Welcome back!  We are looking forward to starting our Spring Semester with a brief meeting on Monday, January 28th at 7pm.  Our meeting will be held off-campus, location to be sent over email.  Readings will include several essays from an edited collection responding to Jurgen Habermas, Habermas's 1964 "Public Sphere" encyclopedia entry, and some optional readings from Hannah Arendt.  Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is on reserve at the Rockefeller Library.  Readings are all available via the google site (log-in required).

We have a tentative Spring schedule posted on the syllabus.

Visiting scholar: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, November 26

Please note that the location has changed to Room 315 from the originally scheduled October meeting.

Please join us for our next Mellon Workshop meeting on Monday, November 26 at 12pm, at 70 Brown Street (The English Department), Room 315.  We will be hosting Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, professor of English at Northeastern University, whose research interests include Early American literature and drama; feminist, political and aesthetic theory; transatlantic print culture; Atlantic colonialism; and the early novel. In her first book, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford UP, 2004), Dillon argues that narratives of citizenship and subjectivity within liberalism include - and, indeed, rely upon - depictions of women that encourage affective identification as an unspoken political act and thereby complicate the distinction between private and public spheres. Currently, Dillon is working on her manuscript for New World Drama: Theatre of the Atlantic, 1660-1850, as well as co-editing a volume of essays on early American culture and the Haitian Revolution.

For Monday's meeting, we will be reading selections from Dillon's The Gender of Freedom, a recent essay entitled "John Marrant Blows the French Horn," as well as a forthcoming essay from Professor Dillon.  All readings are available here (log-in required).  There are also additional, optional readings available for this week's discussion.

Meeting: November 5, 2012

Our next Mellon meeting will be held Monday, November 5, 2012 at 12pm in Partridge Hall (Third World Center), Room 104.  We will be reading selections from David Eng's The Feeling of Kinship (2010), Corey Brettschneider's "The Politics of the Personal: A Liberal Approach" (2007), Sharon Krause's "Lady Liberty's Allure: Political Agency, Citizenship and The Second Sex" (2000), and a chapter from Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia (2001).  All readings are available for download here.

Our readings this week deal with questions about race, gender, sexuality, and the public/private sphere.  We will think through how various identities are represented publicly while nevertheless facing political privitization.

Join us for lunch and discussion!  We will also discuss the recent schedule changes and plan for the rest of the semester.

Visiting Scholar: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, October 29, 2012

RESCHEDULED!  Due to Hurricane Sandy, we will be rescheduling Professor Dillon's visit for later in the semester.  Please check the syllabus for the schedule changes.

Please join us for our next Mellon Workshop meeting on Monday, October 29 at 12pm, at 70 Brown Street (The English Department), Room 218.  We will be hosting Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, professor of English at Northeastern University, whose research interests include Early American literature and drama; feminist, political and aesthetic theory; transatlantic print culture; Atlantic colonialism; and the early novel. In her first book, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford UP, 2004), Dillon argues that narratives of citizenship and subjectivity within liberalism include - and, indeed, rely upon - depictions of women that encourage affective identification as an unspoken political act and thereby complicate the distinction between private and public spheres. Currently, Dillon is working on her manuscript for New World Drama: Theatre of the Atlantic, 1660-1850, as well as co-editing a volume of essays on early American culture and the Haitian Revolution.

For Monday's meeting, we will be reading selections from Dillon's The Gender of Freedom, a recent essay entitled "John Marrant Blows the French Horn," as well as a forthcoming essay from Professor Dillon.  All readings are available here (log-in required).  There are also additional, optional readings available for this week's discussion.

Meeting: October 15, 2012

Our third Mellon meeting will be held Monday, October 15, 2012 at 12pm in Partridge Hall (Third World Center), Room 104.  Join us for lunch and conversation as we discuss John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927) and Isaiah Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" (1958).  Copies of the Dewey were distributed at our previous meeting--if you need a copy, please email Devon to arrange a pickup.  "Two Concepts of Liberty" is available on the accompanying documents site (available here, log in required).  You may also want to bring copies of Lippmann, as the Dewey piece responds directly to The Phantom Public.

Professor Philip Gould, the Nicholas Brown Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres (Department of English), will be joining our discussion of Dewey and Berlin.  Professor Gould has recently taught a graduate seminar on American liberalism and is the faculty advisor for our Mellon workshop.

Our previous meeting, in which we discussed Rawls and Lippmann raised a number of stimulating questions about the potency of liberalism as a political philosophy, as well as its more aesthetic use of the imagination. 

Second Meeting: September 24, 2012

The second meeting for "Publics and Politics" will be held next Monday, September 24th, 2012 in J. Walter Wilson 302 at 7pm. Dinner will be provided. We will be discussing selections from John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (original edition, 1971) and Walter Lippmann's The Phantom Public (1925). Readings are available over email and online here (log-in required).

  

Copies of John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927), our reading for October 8th, will be distributed. We also hope to secure some dissertation presenters for upcoming weeks and finalize our meeting schedule. 

Last week's discussion of Locke and de Tocqueville raised some interesting questions about the origin of "feeling" or "desire" and the parameters of culture. We look forward, for next week, to a lively discussion of public opinion, intellect, and expectations of the individual for democratic political participation.

First meeting: September 10, 2012

The first meeting for "Publics and Politics" will be held next Monday, September 10, 2012 at 12 pm--lunch will be provided.  We will be discussing selections from John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835-40).  Reading selections are available over email and online here (log in required).

  

Copies of the reading for the October 8 meeting, John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927), will also be distributed.  Readings for the September 24 meeting will be uploaded online.  We also hope to finalize the schedule with the workshop during Monday's meeting, including participant presentations of dissertation work, as well as our visiting scholars to the workshop, so expect more information to be uploaded onto the site in the coming weeks.