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Below is a list of past ARC events. Members can access archived emails here. This quarter's schedule can be viewed at our Events page. If you are a former ARC presenter and would like to include a link to your paper's abstract and/or your website next to your name, please e-mail the abstract text and/or link to melanieh at ucla.edu
FALL 2007
Oct. 25, SAM OTTER (Associate Professor of English, UC Berkeley), "Frank Webb’s Still Life: Rethinking Literature and Politics through The Garies and Their Friends (1857)." [abstract]
Nov. 1, ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON TRANSCENDENTALISM: STATE OF THE FIELD, featuring: Ronald A. Bosco (Distinguished Professor of English and American Literature, State Univ. of New York at Albany),
Joel Myerson (Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor, Univ. of South Carolina),
Barbara L. Packer (Professor of English, UCLA), and
Thomas R. Wortham (Professor of English, UCLA) [description of event]
Nov. 15, MARY ESTEVE (Associate Professor of English, Concordia University), "Shadow Economies: Realism, Race, and the Distribution of Wealth in Pudd'nhead Wilson." [abstract]
Nov. 29, 1:00 pm, JOSEPH REZEK (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA), “Washington Irving and the ‘Eternal Playtime’ of the Literary Sphere.”
WINTER 2008
Jan. 17, KATE MARSHALL (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA), "Infrastructure." [abstract]
Jan. 31, NATHAN BROWN (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA), "DESIGN-SCIENCE." [abstract]
Feb. 28, MICHAEL SZALAY (Associate Professor of English, UC Irvine), "Robert Penn Warren, the New Criticism, and the Birth of the Hip."
Friday, Mar. 14, DAVID VAN LEER (Professor of English, UC-Davis), "'Call Me Straight': Resisting Sexuality in Melville." (lecture)
FALL 2006
Oct. 26, CECELIA TICHI (William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, Vanderbilt University), “Wealth Whiteout in the New Gilded Age.” [abstract]
Nov. 16, MARK McGURL (Assoc. Prof. of English, UCLA), "Transportopia: Programming a Transnational Turn." [website]
Nov. 30, JOHN ALBA CUTLER (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA), "Assimilation and Its Discontents: Richard Rodriguez, Danny Santiago, and Arturo Islas." [abstract]
WINTER 2007
Jan. 18, AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES: The State of the Field. A roundtable
discussion featuring Professors Katherine Hayles (UCLA), Rafael Pérez-Torres (UCLA), Cindy Weinstein (Cal Tech), and a fishbowl.
Feb. 22, PROF. CURTIS MAREZ (USC School of Cinematic Arts; editor, American Quarterly), "Seeing Skeletons: Whiteness in the Visual Field of Farm Workers." [abstract]
Mar. 8, ALISON HILLS (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA), "The Art of Not Knowing: Elizabeth Peabody and New England’s Antebellum Aesthetic Culture" [abstract]
SPRING 2007
Apr. 3, KATE BALDWIN (Associate Professor of American Studies, Department of English, Northwestern University), "Alice Childress, Natalia Baranskaya, and the Speakin' Place of Cold War Womanhood" [abstract].
Apr. 26, ERIC HAYOT (Assoc. Professor, Dept. of English, Univ. of Arizona; Global Fellow, International Institute, UCLA), "Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures" [abstract].
May 17, ROBERT VON HALLBERG (Helen A. Regenstein Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago), "Sob-Ballads" [abstract].
May 31, SAM SEE (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA), "'Spectacles in Color': The Primitive Drag of Langston Hughes" [abstract].
FALL 2005
Oct. 13, GENEVA GANO (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA), "'Outland, Outandish!': Willa Cather's Cosmopolitan West." [abstract]
Oct. 27, JESSICA PRESSMAN (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA), "The Revolution of the Word: Textual Montage in Ezra Pound's Cantos, Bob Brown's 'Readies', and Young-Hae Chang's Dakota." [abstract] [website]
Nov. 17, CHRISTOPHER CASTIGLIA (Professor of English, Loyola University-Chicago), "Maria Monk's Bad Associations: Institutionalism, Anti-Catholicism, and Reform in Antebellum America." [abstract]
Dec. 1, CATHERINE JURCA (Associate Professor of English, Cal Tech), "Hollywood’s Democratic Art, 1938-1942." [abstract]
WINTER 2006
Jan. 19, PAUL GILMORE (Associate Professor of English, California State University, Long Beach), "Aesthetic Materialism: Electric Language, Bodies, and Technology in American Romanticism." [abstract]
Feb. 9*, KAREN ROWE (Professor of English, UCLA), "Imag(in)ing the Female Reader: The Lady's Magazine in the New Republic."
Feb. 16, MARTHA BANTA (Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English, UCLA), "An American Aesthetic and Its Travails" - Part I of One True Theory & the Quest for an American Aesthetic. [abstract]
Mar. 2, MELANIE HO (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA), "Our Wilder: Progressive Education and Literary History." [abstract] [website]
SPRING 2006
Apr. 20, BONNIE FOOTE (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA), "Eco-Tales: Finding, Telling, and Living the Stories for the Future" - Introduction [abstract]
May 4, MARK GOBLE (Asst. Prof. of English, UC-Irvine), "Wired Love: Pleasure at a Distance in Henry James and Others" [abstract]
May 18, KATHLEEN WASHBURN (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA), “Dying Prophecy”: Ghost Dance Texts and the Paradox of Terminal Modernity [abstract]
Jun. 1, ANTHONY GALLUZZO (Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA), "Dangerous Transformations: Charles Brockden Brown’s Subversive Aesthetics." [abstract]
FALL 2004
Oct. 14, LARS ERIK LARSON (Visiting Lecturer, Dept. of English, UCLA), "Emily Post on the Road: Minding the Manners of a National Space."
Oct. 28, JENNIFER FLEISSNER (Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, UCLA), "Henry James's Art of Eating."
Nov. 18, AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES: The State of the Field. A panel
discussion featuring Professors Jennifer Fleissner, Christopher Looby, and Mark McGurl.
Dec. 2, JULIA LEE (Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA), "Strangers on a Train."
WINTER 2005
Jan. 13, SHARON CAMERON (William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, Johns Hopkins University), "'The Sea is the Sea': The Unpersonified Impersonal in Melville's Billy Budd." (lecture)
Jan. 27, GREGORY JACKSON (UCLA Ph.D., Assistant Professor of English, University of Arizona), "'What Would Jesus Do?': Practical Christianity, the Social Gospel, and the Homiletic Novel." (lecture)
Feb. 24, SIANNE NGAI (Assistant Professor of English, Stanford University), "The Cuteness of the Avant-garde."
Mar. 10, CINDY A. WEINSTEIN (Associate Professor of Literature, California Institute of Technology), Excerpts from Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2004)
SPRING 2005
April 21, MEREDITH NEUMAN (Postdoctoral Fellow, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library),"Telling Time in Puritan Conversion Narratives" [abstract]
May 5, SHARON OSTER (Visiting Lecturer, Dept. of English, UCLA), "Immigrant Nostalgia and the Dialectic of Value in Abraham Cahan's The Imported Bridegroom" [abstract]
May 19, ERIN TEMPLETON (Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA), "'The eternal bride and father-quid pro quo': William Carlos Williams, Marcia Nardi and Paterson." [abstract]
June 2, MAX CAVITCH (Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Univ. of Pennsylvania), "Richard Nisbett's Privacy and Yours" [abstract]
FALL 2003
Oct. 30, BRIAN WALKER (Assoc. Prof. of Political Science, UCLA) "Toward a More Sufficient Secular Humanism:
Thoreau's Encounter with Learning of the Way Confucianism"
Nov. 13 LYNN ITAGAKI (Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA) "Intersectionalities: Race, Righting, and Representation in Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight" [abstract] [website]
Dec. 4 MARY HOLLAND (Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA) "‘The Art’s Heart’s Purpose’: Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest"
WINTER 2004
Jan. 15, DAVID S. REYNOLDS (Distinguished Professor, Baruch College, CUNY) "Transcendentalism, Abolitionism, and the Civil War."
Jan. 22, The Job Market Meeting
Feb. 19, ERIN TEMPLETON (Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA) "'Who is the third who walks always beside you?': The Waste Land (1922)"
Feb. 26, THOMAS AUGST (Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota) Excerpts from The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (2003)
SPRING 2004
Apr. 22, CHRISTOPHER LOOBY (Professor of English, UCLA), "Southworth and Seriality: The Hidden Hand in the New York Ledger."
May 6, MARK McGURL (Associate Professor of English, UCLA), " Autobardolatry: Modernist Fiction, Progressive Education, 'Creative Writing." [website]
May 20, JOANNA BROOKS (UCLA Ph.D., Asst. Prof. Univ. of Texas--Austin), "Trickster Tracks in the Colonial Archive: Theorizing Early American Indian Literature."
June 3, HELEN CHOI (Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA), "A Great People's Audience."
[back to top]FALL 2002
Oct. 10, JUNE CHUNG (Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA), "Getting the Picture: Corporate Advertising and Cosmopolitan Modernism in The Ambassadors."
Oct. 24, MEREDITH NEUMAN (Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, UCLA), "Occasional Genres: Reconsidering the American Jeremiad in Light of 1660s Election Sermons."
Nov. 7, MARTIN GRIFFIN (Ph.D., Dept. of English, UCLA), "Cambridge Interiors: Nation and
Irony in Lowell's Harvard Commemoration Ode." [abstract]
Dec. 5, LARS ERIK LARSON, (Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA), "Home From the Road:
Highway Habitat in The Grapes of Wrath."
WINTER 2003
Jan. 30, PROF. ELISA TAMARKIN (UC-Irvine), "Loyal Americans; or, How the Prince of Wales Saved the Union."Feb. 13, MICHAL LEMBERGER (Ph.D., UCLA), "From Prophet to Poet: Spinoza's Enduring Cult of Personality."
Mar. 6, PROF. JANICE KNIGHT (Univ. of Chicago), "Reading Women and the Bible."
SPRING 2003
Apr. 17, DAVID WITZLING (Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA), "'Incompatibilities have come to bed:' Jazz, Language, and Cultural Alienation in Pynchon's V. and its 'Beat' Influences."
May 1, ANDREW ROSENBLUM ((Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA), "The Alpine Flower: Hawthorne, Accidental Friendship, and Slavery."
May 15, MOLLY HIRO (Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA), "The 'Race Problem' and the Problems of Sympathy in Stephen Crane's 'The Monster."
May 29, ANDREW SARGENT(Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA), "Interracial Male Bond(age) and the Limits of the 'Buddy Cop' Formula."
WINTER 2002
Mar. 7, JENNIFER FLEISSNER (Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, UCLA) "The 'Feminization' of American Naturalism"
SPRING 2002
Apr. 18, SHARON B. OSTER (Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of English, UCLA) "The Noble 'Shopkeeper of the Mind': Henry James, Cosmopolitanism, and 'The Jew'" [abstract]
May 9, NAOMI E. SILVER (Faculty Fellow, UCLA) "Sacrificial Rhythms: Myth, Ritual, and History in Cullen's 'Heritage'"
Jun. 6, MARK J. McGURL (Assistant Professor of English, UCLA) "Arts and Sciences: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction" [website]
Americanist Research Colloquium (ARC),
UCLA Department of English