Fourth Annual Post45 Graduate Symposium

May 10-11

Michigan State University / University of Michigan

Keynotes by Professors Sara Blair and Justus Nieland

Additional Faculty Participation by Zarena Aslami, Sarah Ensor, Yomaira Figueroa, Aida Levy-Hussen, and others to be announced

Post45 seeks graduate-level works-in-progress related to post45 literature and culture.

Works-in-progress may range from conference papers to articles or dissertation chapter drafts. Following the Post45 faculty symposium model, all works-in-progress will be pre-circulated; this will allow participants to consider papers carefully and to generate thoughtful critical feedback—a benefit often absent in traditional conference formats. Papers for the sixteen participants will be shared securely, three weeks in advance of the symposium, giving each participant ample time to read. During the symposium, each paper will receive 35–45 minutes of discussion.

Submissions: Those interested should submit 250- to 300-word abstracts through the following Google Form by Wednesday, November 21st: https://goo.gl/forms/f638PbOrCf7CVQ983

Note: the form will collect your name, academic affiliation, a brief academic biography, paper title, and an arbitrary four-digit code of your choosing (e.g., 6459). To facilitate the blind submission process, it will also require you to upload your abstract, titled only with same four-digit code. This abstract should not include your name or your institution’s name.

Some limited funding for accommodation and/or travel may be available to participants.

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Sara Blair is Patricia S. Yaeger Collegiate Professor of English and faculty associate of American Culture and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Her publications include Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press), Trauma and Documentary Photography of the FSA, co-authored with Eric Rosenberg (University of California Press), and Remaking Reality: U.S. Documentary Culture after 1945, co-edited with Joseph Entin and Franny Nudelman (University of North Carolina Press). Her most recent book, How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlives of Images (Princeton University Press, 2018), focuses on photographic practices on the Lower East Side and their power in shaping literary and cultural narratives of American modernity.  

Justus Nieland is Professor of English, Associate Chair of Graduate Studies at Michigan State University, and teaches in the Film Studies Program. He is the author of Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (2008), David Lynch (2012), and co-author of Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization (2010). With Jennifer Fay, he co-edits the Contemporary Film Directors book series at the University of Illinois Press. His most recent book, Happiness by Design: Modernism, Film, and Media in the Eames Era, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2019. The book explores the transformations of modernism at midcentury through the film and media experiments of designers, whose work became part of a sweeping technical agenda of well-being in the Cold War period, when communication was in vogue.

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Post45 is a collective of scholars working on American literature and culture since 1945. The group was founded in 2006 and has met annually since to discuss diverse new work in the field.

The Post45 Graduate Symposium meets annually to discuss works in progress. Now in its fourth year, it has convened in the past at UNC-Chapel Hill, UC-Berkeley, and Yale University.