With the Post45 Board of Directors, I am organizing the organization’s first large-scale gathering since 2010. I drafted a proposal for sponsorship by the Huntington Library Research Division’s sponsorship and will assemble a conference committee to continue planning this major conference.
Excerpt from the Draft Proposal
Post45 proposes a landmark conference in contemporary American literary and cultural studies in partnership with the Huntington Library and Caltech. This conference would be the second large-scale conference organized by Post45 in its twenty-year history (and its first since 2011 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland). Post45, a scholarly organization established in 2006, promotes research, collaboration, and community in the field of contemporary American literary studies through annual works-in-progress research symposia, a book series at Stanford University Press, and two online publications: Post45 Journal, a diamond open-access peer-reviewed journal and Post45: Contemporaries, a popular forum for topical clusters of essays, conversations, interviews, and creative works. While these activities have positioned Post45 as an influential institution in Americanist literary studies, the organization remains a small scholar-run endeavor that collects no membership dues, conference registration fees, or publication royalties. Participants in our symposia report finding the gatherings exceptionally generative and productive, but the workshop format is necessarily intimate and thereby “exclusive,” accommodating only about 15 presenters per year. This conference will mark an expansion of Post45’s field-shaping and -sustaining activities, including more frequent large-scale conferences and extended community, outreach, and diversity efforts.
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Day 1 (Thursday): Symposia
The first day of the conference would take the form of a modified Post45 symposium, held at Caltech, with five parallel works-in-progress meetings, each with eight presenters (including at least three graduate students and contingent scholars) and seven respondents, including at least one Post45 board member as moderator. All participants would stay in the same stream throughout the day. Presenters would pre-circulate papers at least two weeks in advance, allowing all participants to arrive at the symposium prepared for engaged and lively discussion. This format would offer the benefits of Post45’s annual symposia but nearly triple our usual limit of 14-15 presenters per year. Three of the workshops would be led by editors of Post45 publications and focus on different genres of academic writing: first books (led by the book series editors); journal articles (led by the journal editors); and public humanities (led by the Contemporaries editors). The other two workshops would be open genre.