In AY 2007-08 the Department of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, will conduct a year-long review and inquiry into the state of the profession of English Studies, present and future. We will consider issues such as: 1) challenges to the supremacy of print culture (the place of film, digital media) 2) substantial changes in the visibility of previously less visible social collectivities 3) a desire to respond to globalization 4) challenges to the privileging of cultures of the past by privileging cultures of the present 5) increases and redeployment of ancillary disciplines brought to bear upon the literary arts and 6) investigations into the history of manuscript and print culture destabilizing the notion of an “originary text” and thus the canon itself 7) questions about the interactive potential of writerly and readerly activities. All of these concerns, and others, ask for scholars, writers, and students of literary studies in the United States to catch their breath on the landing place of general review and assessment. By opening ourselves wide to the issues that press upon us, we offer the occasion for re-thinking the field, expanding the idiom of thought, for the future of scholarship and, even more pressing, the future of education. It is the hope of the organizers that our review will lead to a more informed awareness than currently exists of how we might re-think the structure of our programs and how major curricular revision ought to proceed.

To this end, we have planned a series of four mini-colloquia extending over the coming academic year, each event organized around two brief, formal presentations by distinguished members of our profession (recommended by members of the Department). Faculty in the English Department and its graduate students, members of other Humanities departments at the University of Colorado and other regional universities are invited to attend. (On the day following the talks, the English faculty will meet with the speakers for an informal discussion of speculative curricular revision.)

October 11, 2007
            Lyn Hejinian—University of California, Berkeley
Poet and professor in the Department of English, Lyn Hejinian has been associated with Language writing since its inception in the early 1970s; her work in poetry and poetics is addressed to the possibilities inherent to a constructivist phenomenology, a dialectical community, and to the practice of heterogeneity. She is currently the co-director of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets, and the collaborative project The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, co-written with nine other poets.

            Alan Liu—University of California, Santa Barbara
Alan Liu works in the fields of new media studies, Romantic literature and art, and literary and cultural theory.  His latest book, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Cultural of Information, explores the relation between humanities research in the academy and new configurations of “knowledge work” in other sectors of society.  Liu has been the principal investigator of a number of collaborative, grant-driven projects (including the current University of California Transliteracies project on online reading), and has helped his English Department reorient itself around several internal cross-disciplinary, project-driven “centers” that bridge between research, curricular, and grant-raising activities.

November 8,  2007
            Kevin Dettmar—Southern Illinois University
Kevin Dettmar’s work shuttles between the poles of literary modernism and contemporary popular music.  He has served as president of the Modernist Studies Association, edits the Modernist Literature & Culture series for Oxford University Press, and serves as general editor of the Longman Anthology of British Literature; his books engage the literary politics of modernism.  In popular music studies, he has been instrumental in turning the lenses of literary and cultural theory to the study of rock & roll.  His current project is a cultural history of irony in the public sphere, 1830 to 9/11.

            Marlon Ross—University of Virginia
Along with his work in British Romanticism and literary historiography, the recent work of Marlon Ross focuses on 20th-century African American literature and culture, gender/masculinity studies, queer theory, and race theory.  He recently completed a book entitled Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era.  He has taught at four different institutions (all public or quasi-public) and at each has had occasion to serve on different projects involved with curricular reform, interdisciplinarity, reform of the tenure and review process, and faculty of color recruitment and retention.

February 28, 2008
            Melissa Mowry—St. Johns University
Melissa Mowry is the author of The Bawdy Politic: Political pornography and Prostitution in late Stuart England, 1660-1714 and articles on the complex interactions between cultural representations of gender and sexuality.  She is currently considering the imaginative possibilities available for thinking about and enacting community and collective action in the long eighteenth-century.  Her work has raised for her fundamental epistemological and political questions about what counts as evidence and ultimately, what counts as work in the current neo-formalist moment of literary studies.

            David Palumbo-Liu—Stanford University
A professor of Comparative Literature, David Palumbo-Liu’s fields of interest include social and cultural criticism, literary theory and criticism, East Asian and Asia Pacific America studies; among his books are The Poetics of Appropriation: The Literary Theory and Practice of Huang Tingjian (1045-1105) and The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, Interventions.  His current project addresses the role of contemporary humanistic literature with regard to the instruments and discourses of globalization, seeking to discover modes of affiliation and transnational ethical thinking.

April 3, 2008
            Wai Chee Dimock—Yale University
The William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, Wai Chee Dimock has most recently published Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time and a collaborative volume, Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature.  She is now at work on a book on genre, A Map of Kin and Kind: Epic, Lyric, Novel.

            William Keach—Brown University
William Keach teaches literatures and cultures in English.  He is particularly interested in relations between literary form and social and historical change, and between literary and political theory.  His recent publications include a new edition, with introduction, of Leon Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution which elucidates the complex way in which art informs—and can alter—our understanding of the world, and Arbitrary Power: Romanticism, Language, Politics.