Chesapeake American Studies Association

CRITICAL JUNCTURES: America and its Crises
April 2nd, 2011
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia

The 2011 meeting of the Chesapeake area chapter of the American Studies Association (CHASA) will be hosted by the Cultural Studies doctoral program at George Mason University, Fairfax VA, Saturday April 2nd, 2011.

Keynote speakers:
DANA LUCIANO (Georgetown University)
PETER HITCHCOCK (CUNY)

Special Plenary Panel:
“Sinking Arizona”, with Paul Smith and friends

CRITICAL JUNCTURES: America and Its Crises
America is currently suffering through a severe economic recession, accompanied by political and cultural turmoil of all kinds. But pandemic crises of this sort are not rare in the history of the republic. CHASA is now inviting proposals for papers and panels from any disciplinary perspective that will address any of the cultural, social or political-economic aspects of such critical moments in America, contemporary or historical.

Please send 150 word individual paper proposals and a brief bio as MS Word attachments to chasa@gmu.edu

Proposals for panels will be accepted and should be 1 page maximum. We welcome a range of panel formats, but all panels should fit within a 75-minute time frame with at least 15 minutes dedicated to audience discussion.

Graduate students are especially encouraged to attend and present papers and a prize will be given to the best student paper given at the conference.
The deadline for proposals is February 14th, 2011.

George Mason University is located in Fairfax Virginia, approximately 15 miles from downtown Washington DC. For details, please visit www.gmu.edu

Peter Hitchcock is a Professor at Baruch College and CUNY Graduate School. He studies literary and cultural theory, twentieth century film, literature and culture, globalism and transnationalism. He is the author of several books: Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice; Dialogics of the Oppressed; Oscillate Wildly: Space, Body, and Spirit of Millennial Materialism; Imaginary States: Studies in Cultural Transnationalism; and the recent The Long Space: Transnationalism and Postcolonial Form


Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. She received her PhD from Cornell University’s English Department in 1999. Her research and teaching interests include American literary and cultural studies; feminist and queer theory; time, historiography and temporality, especially queer and post-colonial theories of temporality; affect and critical embodiment studies; photography, film and video; and digital humanities. She is the author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU, 2007), which won the Modern Language Association’s First Book Prize in 2008. She is currently working on a monograph titled Materializations: Ghosts, Affect and Embodiment in America, 1850-1910; a collection, co-edited with Ivy Wilson, of new scholarship in American literary studies on the long 19th century, entitled Unauthorized States; and a cultural edition of Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” She is a founder of the interdisciplinary, cross-institutional DC Queer Studies Consortium and serves on the Program Committee for C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.


Paul Smith is Professor of Cultural Studies at George Mason University works on political economy, globalization, media, new media, critical theory, and American Studies. He is the author of five monographs: Primitive America: The Ideology of Capitalist Democracy; Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North; Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production; Discerning the Subject; and Pound Revised. He has edited or co-edited Boys: Masculinities in Contemporary Culture; The Enigmatic Body: Selected Writings of Jean Louis Schefer; Madonnarama: On "Sex" and Popular Culture; and Men in Feminism. He is currently completing an edited volume for Temple University Press: The Renewal of Cultural Studies. He is the author of numerous essays and book chapters, and is an elected member of the Executive Committee of the national Cultural Studies Association.