cfp.english.upenn.edu

American Collaborations

A joint Canadian Association for American Studies/Northeast MLA panel for the 41st NeMLA convention
April 7-11, 2010
Montreal, Quebec - Hilton Bonaventure

The process and results of collaboration have increasingly become objects of research and study over the past decade, with several books and articles published that touch on various aspects of the topic, including studies of literary collaborations, innovations in pedagogy, revised notions of academic criticism and research, and theorizations of the relationship between authorship and culture, per se. As such, studies of collaboration lie at the heart of many concerns of contemporary criticism and academic study, as shown most recently by the 40th anniversary issue of NeMLA’s journal, Modern Language Studies.

Arising from this ever-increasing interest in the topic collaboration, this proposed panel (to be sponsored collaboratively by NeMLA and the CAAS) aims to analyze the role of collaboration in American culture and society, both national and continental. The latter approach will prove especially fruitful given that NeMLA is returning across the border to Canada for the first time in many years, opening up a geographic and cultural space for the very work the panel aims to do.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

Studies of specific literary or other cultural collaborations
Criticism and/as collaboration
Theories of collaboration
Globalization as/against collaboration
National and continental American Studies: Collaboration or Cultural Colonialism?
Border crossings and collaborations
Collaboration and conflict

Please send 500-word proposals to Jason.Haslam@dal.ca. Deadline: 30 Sept. 2009