In mid-December of ‘08 I had the pleasure of attending the Birmingham conference on Jack Kerouac’s break-through novel On the Road: “Kerouac’s On the Road: The Beats and the Post-Beats,” organized by Dick Ellis of Birmingham U. who wanted to mark the 50th anniversary of the UK publication of OtR, tying the conference in with [...]
Lately, I have been preoccupied with a new research project that I am trying to work up into a paper for the next Nordic Association of American Studies conference in May 2009.
These days I spend about 10 hours a week commuting, which means that I get to listen to a lot of CDs. One of [...]
Ben Shahn’s “Register to Vote” poster from the 1940s
Photography by Ben Shahn for the FSA: Fiddlin’ Bill Henseley, North Carolina, 1937
I just received a pre-notification on a cfp for an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
The organisers are Burroughs and Beat Gen. scholar Oliver Harris, in partnership with fellow-Burroughsian – see for instance Reality Studio – Ian MacFadyen (they are also co-editing the book, Naked Lunch@50), and with [...]
Every year the International Literature and Psychology Conference offers scholars an opportunity to discuss literature and the other arts, using insights from psychoanalysis and other psychological approaches. We have psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, Freudians, Lacanians, a few Jungians and myth theorists, Zizek’ers, post-Zizek’ers, plus an assortment of literature and culture scholars who like to dabble in the [...]
Tagged 9/11, DeLillo, Safran Foer, trauma, Yves KleinAn increasingly hot topic in literary studies and in the area studies fields, such as American Studies is the relationship between writing, place, identity and belonging. Evidence of this agenda getting more and more important can, for instance, be found in the proposed topics for conferences and seminars worldwide. In Denmark the next big Am. [...]
Following up on our spring sequence of posts on The Beats (conveniently collected here), we’d like to help announce a two day conference to be held at the University of Birmingham in December. Scholars will meet and give papers on aspects of the Beat Generation with a particular focus on Kerouac’s novel On the Road. [...]
I was surprised recently in my relentless pursuit of Beat scholarship to learn of a connection between Brion Gyson, who invented and later taught William Burroughs the cut-up technique, and Alice B. Toklas, who was Gertrude Stein’s long-time companion and muse.
Even more surprisingly the connection turns out to revolve around a recipe for ‘Haschisch Brownies’ [...]
Recently we at The Atlantic Community have been honored by a bit of attention from the excellent photo journalism and public culture blog No Caption Needed. NCN is run by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites who authored one of the only sustained books charting the emergent field of cultural iconology, No Caption Needed: Iconic [...]
Iconotopoi/Bildkulturen (Cultures of the Image)
Current Academic Practices in the Study of Images
Joint Eikones-McGill Graduate Conference
Department of Art History and Communication Studies
McGill University, Montreal
December 3 to 5, 2008
The joint McGill-Eikones Graduate Conference Iconotopoi/Bildkulturen (Cultures of the Image) aims to identify and challenge cultural and linguistic barriers within the academy, so that the study of images may [...]