Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic Public Sphere(s), 1890-1940
September 9 and 10, 2011
http://www.udel.edu/mediamorphosis/
This two–day symposium will provide a forum for literary scholars, historians, media historians, and art historians to share works–in–progress on the transformations of print media and transatlantic public spheres at the turn of the twentieth century. The symposium will feature work that probes artificial literary and art historical boundaries, challenges national divisions and the divide between nineteenth– and twentieth–century print culture studies, and links texts and writers across different genres or sectors of the print media of the period. There will be ample time for open discussion; there will be no concurrent panels. Presentations will engage substantially with the following areas of common interest:
• advancing our understanding of print culture’s role in the period’s movements for racial, class, and gender equality;
• identifying and theorizing the relationship between print culture, empire, and cross-cultural (transatlantic, transnational) writing, reading, and publishing;
• bringing the theories and methods of material culture studies to bear on the analysis of print artifacts as “objects” or “things”;
• grasping the increasing textual hybridity of the period’s print artifacts, by examining such phenomena as the interactions between illustration and text and the complex collage effects created by advances and experiments in typography and image reproduction;
• developing our knowledge of Anglo-American links, interactions, and networks among writers, publishers, editors, agents, and other participants in the period’s print culture;
• analyzing and theorizing the relationship between transformations in print culture and evolving notions of authorship and the literary, including the role of the nascent academic field of English, in Britain, the United States, and/or the colonies/commonwealth.
This symposium is hosted by the College of Arts and Sciences’ Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center and supported by: the Center for Material Culture Studies, the Departments of Black American Studies, English, and Women’s Studies, the University of Delaware Library, the Institute for Global Studies, the University Faculty Senate Committee on Cultural Activities and Public Events (CAPE), and the Delaware Humanities Forum.
ACRAH 