On the Front Burner:
Center for Cultural Analysis seminar, 2011-12: Public Knowledge
2011-12 CCA Seminar: Public Knowledge
Henry Turner and I will be co-directing this year’s CCA seminar on Public Knowledge. What, today, is public knowledge? What forms have shared, openly accessible bodies of knowledge taken historically, and what are the prospects for collective inquiry in the 21st century? Faculty, graduate student, and post-doctoral fellows drawn from a variety of fields, including architecture, art history, geography, history, literary studies, political science, and sociology, will investigate the creation and transmission of knowledge by and for a variety of publics, semi-publics, and counter-publics. We are particularly interested in institutions such as universities, museums, and libraries that are explicitly dedicated to the transmission of knowledge across generations. But we will also take up other social practices and cultural forms that serve the public good or the public interest, such as journalism, government reports, learned societies, watchdog agencies, non-governmental organizations, and free and open source software projects. Are there problems that can only be addressed through a collaborative, collective mode of inquiry? How does knowledge become institutionalized, and how do institutions account for themselves? What are the historical precedents for the informal knowledge networks made possible by new media? We hope to address the history and prospects of the university and other learned societies; public knowledge and social media; the institutional landscape of the public sphere, including corporations and laboratories; the public domain; intellectual property and the privatization of public goods; limits to or restrictions on public knowledge.
Rutgers Seminar in the History of the Book:
Rutgers Seminar in the History of the Book, Fall 2011
I’ll be giving a talk on Tuesday, Sept. 20 as part of this fall’s Rutgers Seminar in the History of the Book lecture series.
Harper, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects
“Form after Format: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the Circuits of Abolitionist Poetry” uses the career and writing of the well-known poet and anti-slavery orator to explore how attention to the format of printed works can change how we think about the history of literary genres, in particular, the history of poetic genres. The talk will be held at 5 pm. at Alexander Library’s Teleconference Lecture Hall.
Simmering:
Rutgers Americanist Seminar Fall 201
The Rutgers Americanist Seminar announces our fall lineup: Our first speaker will be Bryan Waterman (NYU) on Weds. Sept. 28. Please contact Curtis Dunn at curtis.dunn@rutgers.edu for copies of the essays we will be discussing. The Americanist Seminar meets on Wednesday afternoons at 8 Bishop Place from 2:30-4:30 pm.
On the Back Burner:
Rutgers English Diversity Institute:
Are you currently working with an undergraduate who shows great promise in literary study and is considering graduate school in English but doesn’t know much about it? REDI is designed to encourage current students and recent graduates from diverse cultural, economic, and ethnic backgrounds to consider graduate study. Students participate in a week of intensive seminars, including a visit to the Schomburg Library and attending a play in New York city. Students receive a $500 stipend for participating in the program. REDI is held in the first week of June; applications are due in March, 2012.
New Tools, Hard Times:
Click here for the Speaker bios (and hotlinks) for this MLA roundtable exploring the use of blogs and social networking to organize in response to the economic crisis in higher education.
