Futures Of American Studies
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The Futures of American Studies is a weeklong academic summer institute dedicated to presenting new work and critiquing the field of
American Studies 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. Schol ...
held at
Dartmouth College Dartmouth College (; ) is a private research university in Hanover, New Hampshire. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, it is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Although founded to educate Native ...
in
Hanover, New Hampshire Hanover is a town located along the Connecticut River in Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States. As of the 2020 census, its population was 11,870. The town is home to the Ivy League university Dartmouth College, the U.S. Army Corps of En ...
. The first Futures of American Studies Institute was held in the summer of 1997. Donald E. Pease, Professor of English at Dartmouth College, founded, organizes, and directs the annual Institute.


Founding of the Institute

After the School of Criticism and Theory left Dartmouth for
Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...
in 1995, Dartmouth faculty member Donald E. Pease started the Futures Institute as an alternative summer program for faculty and graduate students. 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.


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:
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
Northeastern University
Soyica Diggs Colbert
Georgetown University * Eric Lott, City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center * Winfried Fluck, Freie Universitaet, Berlin
Colleen Boggs
Dartmouth College * Donatella Izzo (Università degli studi di Napoli "L'Orientale"


2014 institute

Along with Institute Director Donald E. Pease, the institute co-directors were 2014 are:
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
Northeastern University
Soyica Diggs Colbert
Georgetown University * Eric Lott, University of Virginia * Winfried Fluck, Freie Universitaet, Berlin
J. Martin Favor
Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College


2012 institute

Along with Institute Director Donald E. Pease, the institute co-directors were 2012 are:
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon
Northeastern University * Eric Lott, University of Virginia * Winfried Fluck, Freie Universitaet, Berlin
J. Martin Favor
Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College


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: *
Hortense Spillers Hortense J. Spillers (born 1942) is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-America ...
*
Rita Felski Rita Felski (born 1956) is an academic and critic, who holds the John Stewart Bryan Professorship of English at the University of Virginia and is a former editor of '' New Literary History''. She is also Niels Bohr Professor at the University of So ...
* Walter Benn Michaels *
Lauren Berlant Lauren Gail Berlant (October 31, 1957 – June 28, 2021) was an American scholar, cultural theorist, and author who is regarded as "one of the most esteemed and influential literary and cultural critics in the United States." Berlant was the Geo ...
* Tim Dean * Bill Brown * Mark Bauerlein *
Janice Radway Janice Radway (born January 29, 1949) is an American literary and cultural studies scholar. Education Radway holds a BA from Michigan State University, 1971, and an MA from State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1972. She earned her PhD fr ...


Recent books written by Institute plenary faculty or students

* Eric Lott, ''Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism,'' Harvard University Press, 2017 * James E. Dobson, ''Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America,'' Palgrave, 2017 * Soyica Diggs Colbert, ''Black Movements: Performance and Cultural Politics,'' Rutgers University Press, 2017 * Giorgio Mariani, ''Waging War on War: Peacefighting in American Literature,'' University of Illinois Press, 2015 * Eng-Beng Lim, ''Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias.'' New York University Press, 2013 * Hamilton Carroll, ''Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity,'' New Americanist Series, Duke University Press, 2011 * Johannes Voelz, ''Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson's Challenge,'' Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies, Dartmouth College Press, 2010, * Donald E. Pease, ''The New American Exceptionalism,'' University of Minnesota Press, 2009, * Jonathan Beecher Field, ''Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London,'' Dartmouth College Press, 2009, * Jonathan Elmer, ''On Lingering and Being Last: Fictions of Race and Sovereignty in the New World,'' Fordham University Press, 2008, * Christopher Castiglia, ''Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum U.S.'' New Americanist Series, Duke University Press, 2008, * Hester Blum, ''The View from the Mast-Head: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives,'' University of North Carolina Press, 2008, * Colleen Glenney Boggs, ''Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation 1773-1892,'' Routledge Press, 2007, * Randall Fuller, ''Emerson's Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists,'' Oxford University Press US, 2007,


References


External links


Institute FacultyInstitute Facebook Page
{{Dartmouth College American studies Humanities education Dartmouth College