Improvising American Studies Courses – A Workshop on Pedagogy, Programming, and Possibilities

Session Submission Type: Professional Development Workshop

Abstract

The ASA Committee on Departments, Programs, and Centers is hosting a professional development roundtable session on how to improvise American Studies curricula, pedagogy, and scholarship within institutions that do not have “American Studies” programs or courses. How do we incorporate interdisciplinary study in core/proficiency courses? In an academy where most scholars are not tenure-track faculty, and where there are more interdisciplinary scholars than there are secure employment opportunities in fields like American Studies, where and how are scholar-teachers carving space for our work? In other words, there are clearly far more American Studies scholars in the academy than there are American Studies jobs, so how, on a nuts-and-bolts practical level, does American Studies work get done?

The session will open with a roundtable conversation moderated by Dr. Jess Goldberg. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in a facilitated conversation rather than a traditional Q-and-A format where everyone in the room will be able to share and workshop pedagogical, curricular, and programmatic ideas that can be brought back to our various home institutions.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Jess A Goldberg, New Mexico Highlands University

Panelists

• Jane Robbins Mize, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

• Matty Hemming, Rice University

• Jaafar Aksikas, Columbia College-Chicago

• Juyoun Jang, Trinity University

• Terrell Taylor, College of William and Mary

Biographical Information

Jess A. Goldberg (they/she) is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Gender & Women’s Studies Program at New Mexico Highlands University, where they co-chair the President’s Council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. They are the author of Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) as well as numerous academic journal articles and chapters in edited collections. With Marquis Bey, they co-edited the special issue of GLQ titled Queer Fire: Liberation & Abolition in 2022.


Jane Robbins Mize is an Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her current book project, "Water Works: Experimental Narratives of Settler Industrialization," reveals how writers retheorize human-water relations at sites of large-scale industrial transformation. She is also a member of Products of Our Environment, a collective of incarcerated and non-incarcerated scholars, writers, and artists interested in the intersection of prison abolition and environmental justice.


Emily Gowen serves as Lecturer and Assistant Director of Studies for Harvard University's Committee on Degrees in History & Literature. In her research and teaching, Dr. Gowen mobilizes the tools of transatlantic book historical scholarship to rethink the literary history of the early U.S. Her current book project, which is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press, reimagines the transatlantic history of the novel by following the contested afterlives of early British prose fictions in the 19th century United States.



Eagan Dean is assistant professor of English at the College of Wooster. His research focuses on the cultural history of gender in the US, with particular focus on representations of trans and gender nonconforming figures in nineteenth century literature. His book project traces how authors used ideas about gender and its transformability as part of their political rhetoric. His writing can be found at Legacy, ESQ, and Women’s Studies and is forthcoming in the Harvard Library Bulletin and Transgender Studies Quarterly.



Matty Hemming is the Janice G. Doty Lecturer in Medical Humanities at Rice University. She has a PhD in English and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently working on her first book, Writing Reproductive Injustice: Narrative Refusal and the History of Healthcare, which explores how transatlantic literary writers such as Nella Larsen, Jean Rhys, and Toni Morrison critiqued reproductive injustices in Britain and the United States by harnessing aesthetic and political tactics of refusal.


Jaafar Aksikas is a Moroccan-American academic, activist, media personality and cultural critic. He is Professor of Media Studies and Communication at Columbia College Chicago, where he teaches at the intersection of politics, media, and civic media and activism. He is also President & CEO of the Institute for Global Media, Democracy and Culture, and was formerly President of the Cultural Studies Association (2014-2016). Jaafar Aksikas holds a Ph.D in Cultural Studies: Media Studies from George Mason University, USA and an MA in the Humanities from Al Akhawayn University, Morocco.


Juyoun Jang is Assistant Professor of English at Trinity University. She has taught incarcerated students across three states. Drawing on theories of fugitive pedagogy and the undercommons, she explores how collaborative intellectual spaces emerge across carceral and university contexts. She coedited The Global South special issue “Resistance & Incarceration” and translated Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir into Korean. She is completing her first book, Fugitivity, Confinement, and the Afterlife of Slavery in Contemporary African American Migration Narratives.


Terrell Taylor is Assistant Teaching Professor of speech at William & Mary University and an active coach and judge in high school and college competitive debate. His research focuses on rhetoric and poetics of black culture in the 20th century, politics & aesthetics, and race in new media & digital technology. His dissertation, "Gave Me Life: The poetics of vitality in Black literature and culture," analyzes themes of life, vitality, and energy in 20th century black writing. He was also a Mellon Foundation Fellow and a HASTAC fellow through Vanderbilt’s Center for Digital Humanities.