[csaa-forum] CFP The State and US Culture Industries conference, United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, 25-26 June, 2015

[Rodney Taveira]

CALL FOR PAPERS

“The State and U.S. Culture Industries” conference

June 25-26, 2015
United States Studies Centre
Institute Building (H03), University of Sydney

CFP deadline: 1 May, 2015

Keynotes: Tricia Jenkins (Texas Christian University); William J. Maxwell (Washington University in St. Louis; via videolink); Jade Miller (Wilfrid Laurier University)

Following recent scholarship (Erin G. Carlston, William J. Maxwell, Timothy Melley) that renews questions of state power, national security, and cultural production, this conference seeks to appraise critically, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, the contemporary and historical interrelations between the state and the culture industries in the United States. Topics for exploration include:

  *   the relationship between government agencies (such as the CIA, FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon) and media formats (such as novels, film, video games, social media, news, and television series);
  *   the history of representations of the state and government agencies in various cultural forms;
  *   the historiography of critical theory (Frankfurt School, Birmingham School) and the US nation-state;
  *   the US state as cultural critic;
  *   how culture industries shape, support, or criticise US foreign policy;
  *   debates around cybersecurity, diplomacy, and media.

Outstanding papers will be invited to appear in a special journal issue.

Conference registration is free.

Travel bursaries are available for strong postgraduate proposals to help defray travel and accommodation costs.

Please email 250-word abstracts to rodney.taveira at sydney.edu.au by May 1, 2015.

Check ussc.edu.au/state_and_us_culture_industries for further information and updates.


Tricia Jenkins is Associate Professor of Film, TV and Digital Media at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas. Her book, The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television (University of Texas Press, 2012), examines the agency’s efforts to boost its public image in mass media. The book, which won the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title in 2013, is now entering its second edition and has been translated into Chinese, Turkish and Farsi. In addition to numerous academic journals, Jenkins' work on the intersection between media and the state has also appeared in or been cited in the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, the BBC World Service, The Washington Post, FOX and others.

William J. Maxwell is Professor in the Department of English and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His scholarship addresses the ties among African American writing, political history, and transatlantic culture.  He has published over forty articles and reviews, and three books. His first book, the award-winning New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism between the Wars (Columbia University Press, 1999), traced the source of the dialogue between literary "Blacks and Reds" to the dawning of the Harlem Renaissance, a moment when the definition of the stridently modern New Negro and the direction of the young Soviet Union were still up for grabs and still imagined as related matters. His second book, an edition of Claude McKay’s Complete Poems, was published by the University of Illinois Press in various formats in 2004, 2008, and 2013. Maxwell’s third book, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton University Press, 2015) draws on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, exposing the Bureau’s “ghostreading” of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. F.B. Eyes reveals that FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century. Maxwell has served on the MLA divisional committees on black American and twentieth-century American literatures. A former book review editor of African American Review and member of the editorial board of American Literature, he is now a contributing editor at American Literary History.

Jade L. Miller is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. She works on the political economy of creative production, global media flows, and cultural/media industry development. She is particularly interested in creative industries in the context of urban and regional agglomeration and the development of global cities, including studies of cultural industries policy from the micro to macro level.  She is working on a book project on the development of cultural industry hubs outside of dominant global cultural industry networks, with a focus on policy, new technologies, and alternative global connections in financing and distribution. This book has as its key case study the development and shifting shape of the robust Nigerian video film industry, known popularly as Nollywood. She is also working on a research project on the geography of Hollywood location shooting in New Orleans and the drawing of touring networks in the North American music industry.

Dr Rodney Taveira | Lecturer in American Studies
United States Studies Centre | Institute Building (H03) | The University of Sydney NSW 2006
T: +61 2 9114 2617| F: +61 2 9351 6877 | E: rodney.taveira at sydney.edu.au<mailto:rodney.taveira at sydney.edu.au>
W: http://ussc.edu.au/people/rodney-taveira

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