Thursday, November 15 at 5:00, LC 319. The Theory & Media Studies Colloquium presents a Panel Discussion, “Historicizing the Recent Past,” featuring:
JD Connor is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Film Studies at Yale. His principal focus is the interplay of art and industry in the Hollywood system, particularly its contemporary version. As part of that, he is currently completing The Studios after the Studios: Hollywood in the Neoclassical Era, 1970–2005. Offshoots include studies of DreamWorks, production design, and Robert Altman. Other interests include the consequences of sound technologies for the voice and subjecthood (especially tape recording) and the theory of cinematic fidelity. In all of these, his overriding concern lies in detailing modes of collaborative aesthetic production in highly structured situations, be those studios, transcriptions, or adaptations.
Amy Hungerford is Professor of English and American Studies and Master of Morse College at Yale. Her research and teaching focuses on American literature, especially the period since 1945. I study how literature helps form the cultural imagination around subjects such as genocide, religion, social networking, and the status of the book in the internet age. In various editorial roles (for Yale Studies in English, the new Post•45 series at Stanford University Press, and Contemporary Literature), and as a founder of Post•45 (a professional association for scholars working in post-45 literary and cultural studies) I help bring the work of other scholars to larger audiences. I have reached out beyond the academy with recent work on American Public Media’s radio digest “Weekend America,” ongoing blog posts for The Huffington Post, a free online course, “The American Novel Since 1945” (available on Open Yale Courses and Academic Universe), and book reviewing for The Yale Review and DoubleX.com. Books in progress: The Cambridge Introduction to the American Novel Since 1945 and This Is McSweeney’s, a book about the social justice and literary projects of Dave Eggers and his McSweeney’s publishing house.
Sam See is Assistant Professor of English at Yale. His research and teaching focus primarily on British and American modernist literature and sexuality studies. I’m currently interested in the questions that aesthetic and sexual feeling present for literary historiography. My first book project explores how British and American modernist writers co-opt the evolutionary precepts of degeneration theory to depict queer feeling as natural: material but nonetheless subject to change. My next book project will examine how British and American writers throughout the twentieth century use aesthetics like the mythical method and magic realism to create queer mythologies that depict the construction of transhistorical and transnational queer communities.