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Volume 23: Fall 2018/Spring 2019

This is a time of exciting transition for the Cultural Studies Program. I am very pleased to announce that beginning next Fall, the Program will be led by the inestimable Raiford Guins (The Media School), who will take over the Director position. Serving as the Program Director has been one of the most intellectually rewarding, institutionally satisfying, and simply fun positions that I have held in the college. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity I have had to help facilitate the groundbreaking work being done at IU that keeps us at the forefront of Cultural Studies. Over the past seven years, I have been reminded daily how special it is to be surrounded by a cohort of colleagues as supportive, creative, and impassioned as you all. Fervently and sincerely: Thank you.

Ray comes not only with his wells of enthusiasm but also a vision to create a greater sense of Cultural Studies community across the academic year and extend the reach of our collective work beyond the bounds of the campus to a larger national and international audience. He is a bona fide Cultural Studies scholar—he holds a PhD in Cultural Studies

from the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds—and brings to the position his experience as the former Director of the Cultural Studies PhD Program at Stony Brook University, as well as extensive editorial, administrative, and scholarly expertise. We are fortunate to have his leadership at this time of institutional and professional change. You can learn more about Ray on page 5.

Allow me also to extend my deepest gratitude to Program Graduate Assistant Elizabeth Ryba (Comparative Literature), who is completing her appointment this Spring. You have all come to know Elizabeth as the person who communicates your accomplishments (which includes designing this newsletter!), works with you to cross-list your courses, and ensures the smooth functioning of the annual conference. She has been essential to our success over the past two years, and on behalf of the entire Cultural Studies Program, I thank her for all of her hard work. We will miss her next year!

We also welcomed Andrés Guzmán (Spanish and Portuguese) and Ranu Samantrai (English) as the newest elected members of the Advisory Commit-

Cultu

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New

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New Faculty 6 New Director 5 Spotlight 3

Letter from the Director

Learn more about our new Cultural Studies affiliated faculty

Learn more about the new Cultural Studies director, Raiford Guins

Read about the work of our faculty and graduate students during 2018-2019

Indiana University Cultural Studies Program

cstudies@Indiana.edu

Shane Vogel Program Director

Elizabeth Ryba

Graduate Assistant

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tee, as well as three new affiliated faculty (learn more about them on page 6). I thank Ryan Powell (The Media School) for his past two years of service on the Advisory Committee.

Those of you who attended our 23rd annual conference—“Visual and Material Cultures in Global Perspective”—will not need me to remind you of the phenomenal event put together by co-conveners, Ishan Ashutosh (Geography) and Olimpia Rosenthal (Spanish and Portuguese). The conference featured two keynote addresses by distinguished scholars: W. J. T. Mitchell (Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago) and Jason Dittmer (a leading cultural geographer at City College London). These dynamic speakers galvanized the event and participated in workshops for graduate students to discuss their published work. Other invited speakers included award-winning illustrator Chris Brunner (Savannah College of Art and Design), Laura Gutierrez (University of Texas-Austin), Agata Zborowska (University of Warsaw), and Ananda Cohen-Aponte (Cornell University), who joined 12 Cultural Studies faculty to present their work. It was yet another demonstration of the Program’s intellectual dynamism and interdisciplinary exuberance and a reminder of the unparalleled work we do here.

And that is not all we did this year! 2018 - 2019 was packed with events across campus that Cultural Studies was proud to co-sponsor. We contributed to a number of cinematic and artistic events: Barbara Hammer: Boundless featured screenings from five decades of the visionary feminist filmmaker’s work; Cinéma Sans Frontières: Beyond Francophone ‘Realities’ brought six French films to campus in February that explored the theme of cinematic “realities” and looked at the reflexivity of the medium to encourage people to see beyond the final product; the CUBAmistad film series once again brought films from Cuba and filmmaker Eugene Corr (Ghost Town to Havana, 2013) to campus.

We were especially proud to support the Out of Easy Reach exhibit at the Grunwald Gallery (and the associated “Abstraction as a Strategy of Refusal” symposium), which contained works by twenty-four U.S. based, female-identifying contemporary artists from the Black and Latinx Diasporas, and the Wounded Galaxies event celebrating the life of Indiana labor organizer Eugene V. Debs (including a screening of the new documentary American Socialist and a talk by renowned scholar of radicalism Paul Buhle). A number of stellar scholarly events capped the year, including the Religious Studies Department’s Blackness and the Human series, the annual Critical Ethnic Studies symposium, a lecture by cultural theorist Timothy Brennan (University of Minnesota), and graduate student conferences in the Departments of English, Germanic Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese. To cap off the semester, the fabulous Madison Moore presented “Dance Mania: A Manifesto for Queer Nightlife” to a standing room only crowd at The Back Door. Blending lecture and performance, Madison reminds us of the deep relationship between what we study and how we live.

The future of Cultural Studies at IU is auspicious, largely because of the commitment and brilliance of our faculty and graduate students. Thank you again for the opportunity to serve as your Director.

—Shane Vogel, April 2019

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Volume 23: Fall 2018/Spring 2019

Scott Herring received a 2019-2020 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for “The Aging of American Modernism,” a book-length study on American modernism and the late-life work of prominent avant-garde figures Djuna

Barnes (1892–1982), Tillie Olsen (1912–2007), and Charles Henri Ford (1908–2002); and lesser-known figures Samuel M. Steward (1909–1993), Ivan Albright (1897–1983) and Mabel Hampton (1902–1989).

Additionally, he published essays in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (co-written with Karen Tongson), Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (to be reprinted in Queer Objects collection from Routledge; Modernism /modernity Print Plus, and the collection Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies by Sam See, edited by Christopher Looby and Michael North.

Stephanie Kane gave a paper titled “From the Horse’s Mouth: Notes for a Multispecies Ice Law,” at a workshop called “Questioning Territory: Extending Concepts of Territory through Engagement with Experience, Affect and Embodiment” at the University of Albany, SUNY, in early March of this year.

Faculty Spotlight

Congratulations to all Cultural Studies Program faculty on their many accomplishments over the past academic year. Please continue to keep us updated on your work so we can highlight your news on our website throughout the year, in addition to recognizing you in the annual newsletter.

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Faculty Spotlight (continued): Jason McGraw’s article, “Sonic Settlements: Jamaican Music, Dancing, and Black Migrant Communities in Postwar Britain,” appeared as an invited article in a special issue on “Music Histories” in the Journal of Social History (Winter 2018). James Naremore's Film Noir: A Very Short Introduction has just been published by Oxford University Press, as part of their "Very Short Introductions" series of monographs. In January, his essay "The Death of the Auteur: Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind" was published in Cineaste magazine. Also this year, he and Jonathan Rosenbaum recorded a commentary track for Criterion's Blue-Ray edition of The Magnificent Ambersons. In late March, he will deliver an invited lecture at Columbia University, entitled “An Aftertaste of Dread: Cornell Woolrich in Fiction and Film.”

Olimpia Rosenthal published an article called “Guamán Poma and the Genealogy of Decolonial Thought” in the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. She also co-convened our annual conference, “Visual and Material Cultures in Global Perspective, along with Ishan Ashutosh. Shane Vogel published Stolen Time: Black Fad Performance and the Calypso Craze (University of Chicago Press, 2018). This past year he has given talks about his work at Rutgers University and New York University

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Meet the New Director

Raiford Guins is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in The Media School at Indiana University. He earned his MA and PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Game After: A Cultural Study of Video Game After (MIT Press, 2014) and Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He has also co-edited Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon (MIT Press, 2016), The Object Reader (Routledge, 2009), and Popular Culture: A Reader (Sage, 2006). His writings on game history appear in the following journals and magazines: The American Journal of Play, The Atlantic, Cabinet, Design and Culture, Design Issues, Digital Culture & Education, Game Studies, Journal of Design History, Journal of Visual Culture, and Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture.

Guins edits the MIT Press book series, Game Histories (with Henry Lowood) and in summer 2019 will launch, ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories, a new online journal devoted to the critical historical study of games. He is currently completing his next book: Atari Design: Impressions on an Everyday Cultural Form, 1972 - 1979 (Bloomsbury Academic). After that, Guins will (briefly) step away from video game history to ask: “How do we feel connected to a football club when we aren’t local, born and bred, or even reside in the same country?” His future book project, “Feeling Leeds,” will be a personal exploration on the emotional attachment and cultural practices of supporting Leeds United from abroad.

Meet the Cultural Studies Advisory Committee!

Ranu Samantrai (English)

2018-2020

Andrés Guzmán (Spanish and Portuguese)

2018-2020

Ryan Powell

(The Media School)

2017-2019

Meet the new director of the Cultural Studies Program

Raiford Guins

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Meet Our New Affiliated Faculty

Marika Cifor (Information and Library Science)

Marika Cifor is Assistant Professor of Information and Library Science in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Egineering. Previously, she was Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. She is a feminist scholar of archival studies and digital studies. Her research investigates how individuals and communities marginalized by gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and HIV-status are represented and how they document and represent themselves and their social groups and movements in archives and digital cultures. This multidisciplinary scholarship uncovers how archives and digital technologies and cultures are shaping identities, experiences, and social movements. Currently, she is working on a book and digital project, Viral Cultures: Activist Archives at the End of AIDS, that examines the critical potential of the emotions and memories that are recorded and produced by archives documenting HIV/AIDS activism during the 1980s and 1990s. The book also investigates the activation of these records on contemporary digital platforms by artists, archivists, and activists. She is also working on a series of projects examining how digital media and data are constructing and reproducing normative concepts of bodies, health, and sexuality as member of the Border Quants: Feminist Approaches to Data, Bodies and Technologies Across Borders research team.

Walton Muyumba (English)

Walton Muyumba is Associate Professor of English. His areas of specialization and interest include African American literature, African Diaspora literature, late nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature, literary and arts criticism, creative nonfiction, Black Atlantic studies, jazz studies, cultural studies, pragmatism, and postcolonial studies. Currently, he is completing a book

about contemporary American literary art and popular music. He is also building projects on John Edgar Wideman’s literary works and about ethnic American art in the age of terrorism. His scholarship has appeared in The Cambridge History of American Poetry, College Literature, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisational Studies, and Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice. He publishes frequently in The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, The Crisis, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, and Oxford American, among other outlets.

Bret Rothsetin (Art History)

Bret L. Rothstein is Associate Professor of Art History. He works primarily on the cultural work of images and objects. He has published extensively on early Netherlandish devotional culture, on sixteenth-century humanist wit, and

on the sociocultural ramifications of ludic objects. He is the founding editor of the book series Cultures of Play: 1300-1700. His most recent book-length project, The Shape of Difficulty: A Fan Letter to Unruly Objects, will be published by Penn State University Press in May.

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Job Posting: Graduate Student Assistant for the Cultural Studies

Program [Fall 2019/Spring 2020]

The Cultural Studies Program seeks a graduate assistant to begin August 1, 2019. The graduate assistant will work closely with the Director of Cultural Studies in managing the day-to-day operation of the program. Responsibilities include:

• working with Registrar and scheduling officers from affiliated departments to joint-list classes with Cultural Studies

• working on the annual newsletter • monitoring email • communicating pertinent information through the Program's

electronic mailing lists • maintaining the Program website • additional administrative tasks as necessary

Compensation: The position begins on August 1, 2019 and is configured as a 10hr/week position through May 31, 2020. The stipend is $7500.

Qualifications: The ideal candidate should be comfortable working both independently and collaboratively. Strong time management, problem-solving and communication skills as well as a positive attitude are a must. This is a work-study position and the assistant will need to file a FAFSA and be eligible for Federal Work Study funding.

How to Apply: Please send a cover letter expressing interest and qualifications to Shane Vogel, Director, at cstudies@indiana.edu by April 22, 2019. Direct any questions regarding the position to Shane Vogel at shvogel@indiana.edu.

Announcements

Brantlinger-Naremore Essay Prize The Cultural Studies Program is pleased to announce this year’s winners of the Brantlinger-Naremore Essay Prize in Cultural Studies. Aaron David Ellis, PhD student in the Department of Anthropology, received first place for his essay “Illegal Stills: A Critical Fabulation of Alcohol Consumption by Black People.” The essay was produced in C701/A543 Imaging Race: Photography and the Arcive, taught by Professor Faye Gleisser.

Morgan Morales, MA student in the Department of History and Jewish Studies, received second place for her essay “All the Tragic Period: The Łódź Ghetto Photography of Henryk Ross,” The essay was produced in C701/H745 East European Historiography, taught by Professor Maria Bucur-Deckard.

The Brantlinger-Naremore Prize recognizes an essay written by a graduate student that offers a serious engagement with issues in the field of Cultural Studies either at the theoretical level or by modeling analyses of cultural artifacts and processes. Essays that have been written for graduate classes, either joint-listed within the program or in other departments are eligible for submission. The Cultural Studies Program congratulates these students for their impressive contributions to the field! With our gratitude to this year’s judges, Susan Lepselter (Anthropology) and Ryan Powell (The Media School).