Events

Join us for a conference on American literary history to discuss origins, paradigms, and future directions. In an era of seeming never-ending crisis, how may we conceive of the project of American Studies today, both in terms of its Cold War origins and its reinvention in response to the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s? A certain mood of urgency and crisis attends discussion of US democracy in the present, while a sense of buoyancy often accompanies discussions of American literature, reinvigorated by dialogues with African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Indigenous Studies. This conference will assess the state of the field, by way of leading figures who have contributed foundational research in race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.

Organized by Yogita Goyal, Professor of English and African American Studies at UCLA.

Conference Schedule:

October 24

10-10.30

Welcome and Introductions

Russ Castronovo and Yogita Goyal

Session 1

10.30-12.30

Chair: Michael Cohen

10.30: Timothy Bewes, “The Freedom to be Wrong”

11.30: Autumn Womack, “The Beginning of Things and the End”: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Speculative Imaginary”

Session 2

2-4

Chair: Summer Kim Lee

2: Ren Heintz, “Trans History and Antebellum Obscenity”

3: Christina A. León, “Poetics of Omission: Incommensurate Negatives, Puerto Rican Poetics, and Fascist Frames”

October 25

Session 3

9.30-11.30

Chair: Richard Yarborough

9.30: Sarah Quesada, “What was African Decolonization for Afrolatinidad?”

10.30: Jordan Stein, “The Queer History of Anti-Slavery Media”

Closing Roundtable

11.30-12.30

Questions about the event?
Email: englishevents@ucla.edu

Speaker Bios

Timothy Bewes is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 2004. His books include Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022), The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011), and Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (2002). He is Associate Editor of Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and convenes the Film-Thinking series at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown.

Ren Heintz is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities at Cal State Los Angeles. Heintz received their Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, and their MA from the University of Pennsylvania. Their working manuscript is titled The Obscenity of White Supremacy: The Antebellum History of Gender and Sexuality. Heintz’s scholarship has appeared in American Quarterly, GLQ, and Feminist Media Histories, among others. They were awarded the Richard H. Brown/William Lloyd Barber Long-Term Fellowship at the Newberry Library and the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Tulane University. Through their public humanities work, they are the inaugural creative writing instructor for the nonprofit initiative, Transchool. Heintz is the editor of the anthology Transchool: Vol. 1 (Co-Conspirator Press, 2024).

Christina A. León is Assistant Professor of Literature at Duke University. She specializes in literary, anticolonial, critical race, feminist, and queer theories, with a concentration on Latinx and Caribbean literature, art, and thought. Her scholarly writing focuses on the interplay of materiality and semiosis to better theorize and attend to works by authors and artists who often become known only through their identificatory markers, overdetermined by grammars of race and gender. She is the author of Matters of Inscription: Reading Figures of Latinidad (NYU Press 2024). Her articles and essays have been published in Women and Performance, ASAP/Journal, Diacritics, GLQ, Sargasso, Small Axe, Representations, and Post-45. She serves as the co-editor of the Gender Theory book series at SUNY Press.

Sarah M. Quesada is an Associate Professor of Romance Studies and by courtesy, of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge UP, December 2022), which received an Honorable Mention for First Book in 2023 from the Modern Languages Association (MLA). Her second book project investigates different internationalist attachments among Chicana, Mexican, and African writers, and unburies the influences of lesser-known feminists in this south-south engagement. Her work has been supported by the National Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies and she currently serves on the Executive Committee for the MLA’s Anthropology and Literature Forum, and the advisory board of the journal Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism (Duke UP).

Jordan Alexander Stein is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University, where he is also Affiliated Faculty in African and African American Studies. He is the author most recently of Fantasies of Nina Simone (Duke 2024).

Autumn Womack is Associate Professor of African American Studies and English at Princeton University. She is the author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930 (Chicago, 2022) which received the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize and was a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize. Most recently, she edited the Norton Library’s edition of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (2023). Womack has published numerous essays on nineteenth-century African American literary culture, visual studies, and Black aesthetic practice in journals such as American Literary History, J19, Women and Performance, Black Camera, and several edited volumes. She is currently at work on two book length projects. The first, The Wanderer (Knopf) is an archival biography of Toni Morrison. The second project explores the relationship between financialization and aesthetics in turn of the century African American literary aesthetics.