With the Post45 Board of Directors, I am organizing the organization’s first large-scale gathering since 2011. I drafted a proposal for sponsorship by the Huntington Library Research Division and assembled a conference committee to plan this major conference in collaboration with Caltech’s Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Proposal Excerpt
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 but the workshop format has been necessarily intimate, accommodating only about 15 presenters per year.
The proposed conference at the Huntington Library 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. With the Huntington Library’s deep and diverse archival strengths in 20th and 21st century literature in English, history of science, medicine, technology, and histories and cultures of California, the American West, and the Pacific Rim, along with Caltech’s strengths in literary studies, visual culture, media studies, and their intersections with science and technology, we believe these sites in San Marino and Pasadena would be ideal venues for a major conference reflecting on the past twenty years of contemporary American literary studies and setting agendas for new directions in the field. Such a field-wide endeavor would require the participation of scholars across all levels of employment and professional contingency, so the Huntington Library Research Division’s conference sponsorship, combined with funding and resources from Post45 and Caltech, represents a rare opportunity to organize a contemporary literary studies conference that is genuinely accessible for graduate students, contingent faculty, independent scholars, and others with limited or no research and travel funding.
The Huntington’s strengths in the regional history, media, and culture of Los Angeles, California, the American West, and the Pacific would provide a basis for engaging with the conference location not just as a convenient venue, but also as an analytic vantage point from which to examine the state and future of our field. This perspective would align well with recent Post45 publications related to California and transpacific studies, including the “Mike Davis Forever” Contemporaries cluster; Christopher Grobe’s article, “The Programming Era: The Art of Conversation Design from ELIZA to Alexa” in Post45 Journal; Post45 Board Member Adrienne Brown’s The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (Stanford University Press, Post45 Series, 2024) and Joseph Jeonghyun Jeon’s Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century (Stanford University Press, Post45 Series, 2019). We would encourage submissions and organize sessions that engage with these and other aspects of the Huntington Library’s research agenda.
This proposed conference deviates both from Post45’s and the Huntington Library’s standard meeting formats while maintaining many of their strengths and advantages. Like most conferences at the Library, Post45’s annual works-in-progress research symposia are two-day single-stream gatherings that enable substantial, sustained discussion among a small group of scholars. For this conference, we’re envisioning a format that maintains this depth of engagement while opening participation to a wider community of scholars and catalyzing conversations, sparking collaborations, and initiating research clusters that will extend beyond the on-site meeting.