The 2014 EASA Annual Conference was a huge success again this year. I was able to participate in and observe some great presentations on fascinating topics. LaSalle was a great host, and Philly was certainly an interesting backdrop. I wish they had built in time to watch the LaSalle-URI baseball game (A-10 pride!), but no dice. Here, in no particular order, are my immediate remaining thoughts on the weekend:
The 2014 Conference should retroactively be titled the “Megan McGee Yinger Conference”. Not only did she do a great job over the past few months organizing the event – a fact everyone who shares our office knows, firsthand – she walked away with one of two Simon J. Bronner Awards for Outstanding Graduate Paper. Since we share an office on campus and were in the same panel at the conference, I really feel like I also won, but I don’t want to steal her thunder.
Speaking of, our panel on “new pivotal texts” went very well. What fascinates me about the entire concept is how many different angles through which the idea can be addressed. Megan’s use of the New York Times‘ crossword puzzle as a visual signifier of intellect and status was nothing like Andrea Glass’s discussion on the impact of Taxi Driver‘s imagery in actualizing the virtual memory of 1970s New York City. Meanwhile, my own paper focused primarily on the establishment of a fan community around the movie, The Big Lebowski. The rhetorical and performative boundaries that community has created have helped transcend the movie from simply a “cult” film, but an actual cultural touchstone. I look forward to trying to convince the chair of the panel, Dr. John Haddad, to get us a book deal.
Immediately after, I served as moderator for the panel, “Fateful Interregnum: Culture Between the Wars”. Raechel Lutz, Jared Rife, Tiffany Weaver, and Kale Yu presented on various ways power relationships were being reinterpreted in the 1930s as the country looked toward an uncertain future. It’s always important to keep in mind that nobody in the 30s knew WWII was going to happen, so Americans were living and preparing their own futures – a fact reinforced by these papers.
Saturday morning, I attended the undergraduate roundtable, which featured three remarkable papers. Penn State’s Julia Chain presented on the ways in which the iconic “Rosie the Riveter” imagery was actually invented in the 1980s. Rowan’s Kaitlin Dannibale had a great paper on the role Thanksgiving and Christmas – and our obsession with food in both – play in eating disorders. Franklin and Marshall’s Patrick Mallon spoke on the importance of transitioning scholarship into digital environments by looking at the phish.net fan community. All three showed great poise and potential as Americanists, and I look forward to reading their full articles in EASA’s undergraduate publication, New Errands.
In part II, I’ll get into the fascinating roundtable on gender binaries, and, of course, my observations from the session on the state of American Studies scholarship in the wake of the ASA boycott.