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Texts and Places - Oct 9-10, 2010
full name / name of organization:
Center for Urban and Global Studies, Trinity College
As part of the growing field of the history of media, this workshop will explore how the production and reception of the written word shapes and is shaped by particular places and their inhabitants.
The workshop will create intellectually coherent panels and discussion groups so that scholars from different fields can engage productively around a central theme or question. Participants will be asked to pre-circulate their papers so that each session can be devoted to an informed discussion of the subject.
Speakers and discussants will include Lisa Gitelman (NYU), Robert Gross (Univ. of Connecticut), John Kelly (Univ. of Chicago), Jonathan Rose (Drew Univ.), and Barbara Sicherman (Trinity College).
We invite proposals for papers that consider such questions as the following:
1. How does the cultural significance or meaning of texts (including but not limited to books, letters, pamphlets, newspapers, websites, or images) change in different global societies or cultures?
2. What role have texts played in defining local or global identities?
3. How do reading and writing affect different members of the same (urban, national, regional, ethnic, global) community?
4. Is there a relationship between the canonicity of texts and the sacredness of places?
5. How do texts create or transform real or imagined places?
6. How do texts create audiences, and what is the relationship of audiences to place?
7. What are the implications of seemingly placeless digital texts for the definitions of places?
Please send a brief abstract and cv to by March 31, 2010. Direct questions to the same address or to Jonathan Elukin, Christopher Hager, or Seth Sanders, each of whom can be reached at .
TEXTS AND PLACES