From June 18 to June 24, I will be attending the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. The “Futures Institute,” as it is shorthanded, will give me the opportunity to see and hear the work of current scholars in the field(s) of American Studies, as well as work on my own scholarship with other graduate students and peers. The week-long, intensive summer institute is describe as:
The sixteenth year of the Institute is the third of a four-year focus on “State(s) of American Studies.” The term “state(s)” in the title is intended to refer at once to the “state” as an object of analysis, to the state as an imagined addressee and interlocutor for Americanist scholarship, as well as to the reconfigured state(s) of the fields and areas of inquiry in American Studies both inside and outside the United States. As such, we are inviting both scholars well known as “Americanists” internationally and those whose theoretical frameworks, objects of study, and disciplinary inclinations promise to transform the field’s self-understanding.
The Institute is divided into plenary sessions that feature current work from Institute faculty (listed above) and research seminars in which all participants present and discuss their own work-in-progress. Speakers in the plenary sessions will examine the relation between emergent and residual practices in the field of American Studies from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. 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.
The Institute was designed to provide a shared space of critical inquiry that brings the participants’ work-in-progress to the attention of a network of influential scholars. Over the past ten years, plenary speakers have recommended participants’ work to the leading journals and university presses within the field of American Studies, and have provided participants with recommendations and support in an increasingly competitive job market.
I am able to attend the institute (along with three other English Department graduate students) through the support of the Hilen endowment and Eva Cherniavsky, who is the Hilen Professor of American Literature and Culture at UW.