american

Deadline for abstract submissions: September 30th 2015

In worlds full of superhuman heroes, mythological imaginary creatures and battle narratives of epic scope, what is the role of the domestic? In the recently released film _Avengers: Age of Ultron_, the titular superheroes hide away not in a high-tech secured stronghold but in a farmhouse belonging to the archer Hawkeye, his wife, and their young children. Barton's presence as the film's only parent with a seemingly stable domestic lifestyle provides a temporary shelter for our heroes, illustrating how the domestic can function as a stable ground for the superhero narrative to withstand its otherwise fantastic, explosive elements.

Foundational texts, events, and people influence our cultural and national personas. In the United States, for example, people may look to the Constitution and patriotic songs or even the bible as foundational texts--texts that define (and limit?) national identity. We often see events such as the Salem Witch Trials, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement as critical moments of national formation, while people such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr. represent quintessential "Americans.". These foundational texts, events, and people work their way into literature and pop culture in myriad ways as authors, writers, poets, filmmakers and playwrights incorporate, reify, or challenge them through their works.

From sympathetic contagion to animal magnetism, nervous physiology to cell theory and germ theory, nineteenth-century medical theory and practice imagined human embodiment in open relation to the environmental, economic, religious, and political forces that shape historical experience. Often represented in both cultural and physiological terms, disease functioned as both sign and symptom of the irrevocable togetherness of mind and body, something to be combatted morally and technologically by prudence and enlightened reason.

This panel investigates the contemporary meaning of gender and class in film and literature in the United States. While authors such as Sheryl Sandberg and Hannah Rosin focus on women in the professional ranks to argue for women's prominence in U.S. culture and stories of professional women dominate the media, few stories of working-class women have emerged to challenge the symbolic dominance of the white male worker and breadwinner. As work, families, and genders have changed, how has this symbolism been reinforced or challenged in literature and film?

If one measure of the term catastrophe lies in its power to subvert existing systems, we ask how this concept impacts certain memory-narratives produced by contemporary women writers and artists in the wake of human-made catastrophes in the 20th and 21st centuries.