American Literary History Now

Join us for a conference on American literary history to discuss origins, paradigms, and future directions of the field. The conference explores how the study of American literature has evolved in relation to its Cold War origins, its reinvention in response to the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and its reinvigoration through cultural studies. Leading figures present research on American literature from its inception to the present, staging a lively discussion about current critical challenges, approaches, and methods.

Generously supported by the Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership in the College

Organizer:

Yogita Goyal, Professor of English and African American Studies, UCLA

Schedule

October 3

10-10.30

Welcome and Introductions

Dean Alexandra Minna Stern

Russ Castronovo and Yogita Goyal

Session 1

10.30-12.30

Chair: Nancy Martinez

10.30: Sean Teuton, “Primal Returns: Tribal Storytelling, Deep Reading, and the Rise of Native American Literature”

11.30: Sakiru Adebayo, “The Americanization of African Literature: A History”

Session 2

2-4

Chair: Uri McMillan

2: Sampada Aranke, “The Hammons Effect”

3: Lee Edelman, “The Hole in the Everything Bagel: Queerness, Blackness, and Other Catachreses of Multiversal Non-Singularity”

Reception

4-5.30

Faculty Lounge, 2^nd floor, Kaplan Hall

October 4

Session 3

10.30-12.30

Chair: Aditya Bahl

10.30: Patricia Stuelke, “Dark Academia and the New Cultural Front”

11.30 : Francisco Robles, “Poetic Forms, Desert Time, and Desert Movements”

Session 4:

2-4

Chair: Jonathan Grossman

2: Sri Basu McCall, “Revolution’s Racial Masques”

3: Travis Foster, “Too Good to Live: Trans Feminine Children and the Sentimental Death Trap”

4-5.30

Closing Roundtable, led by ALH co-editors Russ Castronovo and Yogita Goyal; Assistant Editor Noah Terrell and Managing Editor Elijah Levine

Speaker Bios:

Sakiru Adebayo, “The Americanization of African Literature: A History” 

Sakiru Adebayo is an Assistant Professor and the James and Eva Good Chair of African and Postcolonial Literature at Western University. He is the author of Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa (shortlisted for the African Literature Association First Book Award and finalist for the Memory Studies Association First Book Award). Dr. Adebayo is also the winner of the 2022 Nigerian Prize for Literary Criticism and the 2023 Amilcar Cabral Prize. He is the host of “The New African Diaspora Podcast”. His papers have been published in such journals as Parallax, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Postcolonial Text, Research in African Literatures, Journal of African Literature Association, Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, Museum International, Journal of African Cinemas, and Memory Studies.

Sampada Aranke, “The Hammons Effect”

Sampada Aranke is an Associate Professor of Art History and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in e-flux, Artforum, Art Journal, ASAP/J, and October. She has written catalogue essays for Sadie Barnette, Betye Saar, Rashid Johnson, Faith Ringgold, Kambui Olujimi, Sable Elyse Smith, and Zachary Fabri. She has curated and co-curated exhibitions at galleries and museums, including the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis and The Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the recipient of the 2021 Art Journal award for her article “Blackouts and Other Visual Escapes.” Her book, Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power (Duke University Press, 2023) examines the ways artists and activists reconceptualized death as a generative visual and political force in the Black Power era. Death’s Futurity was awarded the Modern Language Association’s 2023 William Sanders Scarborough Prize.

Sri Basu McCall, “Revolution’s Racial Masques” 

Sri Basu McCall is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. Her first book, Rogue Genres of the Revolutionary Atlantic (under contract with Cornell UP), presents a triangulated narrative of crime, class warfare and racialization in the eighteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic in which colonial slaves and the metropolitan laboring poor are connected parts of a larger and underexplored story of colonial dispossession. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Nineteenth Century Studies, MELUS and American Literary Realism.

Lee Edelman “The Hole in the Everything Bagel: Queerness, Blackness, and Other Catachreses of Multiversal Non-Singularity” 

Lee Edelman is the Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. He has published widely in the areas of theory, sexuality studies, literature, and film and is the author of Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire (1987), Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), L’impossible homosexuel: Huit essais de théorie queer (2013), and, with Lauren Berlant, Sex, or the Unbearable (2014). His most recent book, Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing (2022) was awarded Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize by the MLA.

Travis Foster, “Too Good to Live: Trans Feminine Children and the Sentimental Death Trap” 

Travis Foster is Associate Professor of English and Academic Director Gender and Women’s studies at Villanova University. He is the author of Genre and White Supremacy in the Postemancipation United States (Oxford University Press, 2019); the editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body (2022); and the co-editor of “American Women’s Writing and the Genealogy of Queer Thought,” a special issue of Legacy (2020). He has published articles in, among other places, American Literature, American Literary History, ESQ, The History of the Present, and The Edith Wharton Review. His most recent publication, in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, received the 1921 Prize honorable mention for the year’s best essay in American literature, tenured category. His new book project, a cultural history of trans feminine childhood in the nineteenth century U.S., is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Francisco Robles, “Poetic Forms, Desert Time, and Desert Movements” 

Francisco E. Robles is Associate Professor of English, Latino Studies, and Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame, as well as the co-editor of Post45: Contemporaries. He is the author of Coalition Literature (Stanford University Press, 2025). Articles, reviews, and chapters can be found in MELUS, Post45: Peer Reviewed, Latino Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, Chiricú, A Contracorriente, Post45: Contemporaries, and Killing the Buddha, as well as the collections Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities, the Routledge Handbook of Latinx Life Writing, Deserts Are Not Empty, and Latinx Literature in Transition, 1992-2020.

Patricia Stuelke, “Dark Academia and the New Cultural Front”

Patricia Stuelke is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique, was published by Duke University Press in 2021. Her other writing has appeared in venues such as American Quarterly, American Literary History, Genre, differences, and Post45 Contemporaries. She is currently at work on a second book project on twenty-first century transnational cultural front politics and aesthetics, for which she was awarded a 2022-2023 Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship.

Sean Teuton, “Primal Returns: Tribal Storytelling, Deep Reading, and the Rise of Native American Literature” 

Sean Teuton is Professor of English, Director of Indigenous Studies, and Fulbright College Master Researcher at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel (Duke 2008), Native American Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2018), and What Was the Trail of Tears? (Penguin forthcoming). He is at work on a monograph entitled Many Trails: Cherokee Writers at the Crossroads, and has completed his first novel, The Wolf Trail. Teuton was born in Compton, California and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Sampada Aranke photo credit: Kristie Kahns