Unprecedented: Isolation/Communication
The Center for American Literary Studies “Unprecedented” webinar series grew out of the online-only days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to “Unprecedented,” Americans during that period heard a lot about “Isolation,” in one of two ways. First, physical isolation, so as to stop the spread of the virus. Second, social isolation, or the feeling
Expecting the Unprecedented: Speculative Fiction and the Climate Events of the Future
Speculative fiction has recently marked a turn in American literature to imagine not just the past of “unprecedented” climate crises, but also their future. It has been well established that speculative fiction can assist societies in imagining the future of climate crises. However, it remains to be discussed what the limits of these imaginative possibilities
Sewing the Seeds of Activism in an Age of COVID-19: The Auntie Sewing Squad
In March 2020, performance artist and comedian Kristina Wong initiated an effort with friends to sew masks for essential workers in response to the federal government’s failure to provide adequate supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE). The Auntie Sewing Squad rapidly grew into a national team of mask makers—mostly women of color—who sew masks for
Politics, Performance, and Pseudoscience
For the first time in its publication history, The New England Journal of Medicine endorsed a candidate during the recent U.S. presidential election. While the journal’s editorial was heralded as an unprecedented move, the politicization of science has always been a concerted point of inquiry in American health and medicine, not least of all during
“Getting Personal: American Women Poets and the Autobiographical Lyric”
“Getting Personal: American Women Poets and the Autobiographical Lyric,” A CALS “Unprecedented” Webinar When it was announced that Jewish-American poet Louise Gluck had been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature, Gluck became the first woman poet from the United States to win the prestigious honor. Using this “unprecedented” announcement as a launch point, this
“Sizing Up The Chair”
In the opening episode of Netflix’s recently launched series The Chair, Ji-Yoon Kim, played by Sandra Oh, delivers her first speech to her colleagues as the first woman, and first woman of color, to serve as chair of the Department of English at Pembroke University: “I’m not gonna sugarcoat this. We are in a dire crisis.
Penn State’s Center for American Literary Studies presents Serial, True Crime, and Podcasting’s “Golden Age”
When Adnan Syed was freed from prison recently, it sparked renewed interest in Serial, the first podcast to win a Peabody Award and the series that spawned arguably the most addictive podcast genre, true crime. Indeed, media critics have argued we’re living in a “golden age of true crime” in which a proliferation of true-crime podcasts are
Twitter and the #Humanities: Online Research, Community, and Praxis
Over the past decade, Twitter has offered an integral community space and online knowledge commons to humanities researchers. The relationships emerging from Twitter hashtags like #AcademicTwitter, #AltAc, and #PhDChat have produced new scholarly collaborations, crowdsourced bibliographies, collective syllabi, and more. Tweets have become a valuable source of humanities data, prompting exciting new work on the
CALS “Unprecedented” Webinar: Can Sports Save the English Department?
Labor disputes, body politics, racial injustice: professional and collegiate athletics are no mere fun and games, but microcosms of American sociopolitical life—rich texts well-suited for the kinds of literary and cultural analysis fostered by English departments. With the humanities under constant threat of defunding (if not total elimination), might English departments turn to the sports
Healing Community: Black Women on The Arts and Liberation Pedagogy
In her timeless Black feminist novel The Salt Eaters (1980), author, educator, and organizer Toni Cade Bambara wrote, “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” For Bambara and other activist-writers, the ideas of wellness and freedom are taken up as dynamic issues for both are interrelated—individual health and the health of one’s
American Working-Class Art and Literature Now
Ever-widening income gaps, a proliferation of workers’ strikes, the expansion of the gig economy—these are just some of the causes, and symptoms, of working-class struggles transforming in the wake of the pandemic. If the pandemic exposed the vulnerability of the global population to climate catastrophe, so too recent workers’ rights movements in the United States
CALS Unprecedented Webinar: “AI and the Labor(s) of Writing”
In recent months, the Writers Guild of America held a strike that, in part, protested the use of AI to replace or otherwise harmfully alter the work that screenwriters perform. Congress, too, held hearings to consider possible regulations of AI tools, including ChatGPT, in order to minimize their threat to jobs, national security, and intellectual