Deadline for Submissions: September 30, 2017
Call For Papers
Reclaiming the Swamp (Thing): Popular Culture and the Public Academy
The 14th Annual
Graduate Conference in Comparative Literature
In Association with the “Barbara Harlow, The Sequel” Conference
27th-28th October 2017
The University of Texas at Austin
Keynote Speaker:
Richard T. Rodriguez
Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and English
at the University of California, Riverside
on “Latino/U.K.: Postpunk’s Transatlantic Touches”
When the DC comic Swamp Thing debuted in 1971, the border between human and vegetal was crossed. This conference hopes to bridge the gap between the comic and the novel, the art film and the vine, Occupy and Gramsci, the poetry slam and the classical stage, that is to say, between the popular and the academic, so as to allow the academy to occupy a public space. The Graduate Association of Comparative Literature Students presents the 2017 Graduate Student Conference, “Reclaiming the Swamp (Thing): Popular Culture and the Public Academy.” Focusing on the role of Popular Culture in the Humanities today, and remembering the contributions of Dr. Barbara Harlow to education and to the world as a public intellectual, this conference considers how academic scholarship has evolved in its relationship to popular forms of human expression, in whatever medium in a world that has always been filled with cultural objects and discourses. It also imagines what future directions in such work might take.
Often dismissed as an insignificant, transient form, popular culture plays a persistent and powerful role with political and social consequences. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary named “post-truth” as the international word of the year, insisting that the affective had supplanted the analytical and that popular culture and media had erupted into the political sphere. Reality-TV, comedy skits, social media posts, and memes became the vehicle for public discourse in a historical moment that demands an understanding of how and why popular culture and media operate so effectively across borders and across spheres. Continue reading “CFP: Reclaiming the Swamp (Thing): Popular Culture and the Public Academy (UT-Austin)”