I am co-organizing a seminar on The Production of Modernist Disciplinarity at this November’s MSA in Boston with Jonathan Goodwin (University of Louisiana, Lafayette). As a supplement to the very terse description you can find on the site, here is a slightly longer one:
The Production of Modernist Disciplinarity
Recent modernist studies are characterized by the aspiration to expand geographically, chronologically, and across media. Yet the core of “modernism” as an aesthetic, a period, and a canon of writers and artists has proven strikingly stable. This seminar invites new approaches to studying modernist disciplinarity itself, including (but not limited to) quantitative approaches, like citation analysis and probabilistic modeling, that have recently been brought to bear on disciplinary history in the humanities. How can we understand (or change) the forces that either stabilize or disrupt scholarship on modernism?
This was meant to underline that though Jonathan and I are both interested in quantitative methods for understanding disciplinary continuity and change, this is not an exclusively quantitative or “digital” seminar. All approaches are welcome. Please don’t hesitate to write me (contact information at right) or Jonathan (joncgoodwin@gmail.com) if you have any questions.
Conference registration is open. Seminar registration officially closes tomorrow, September 1. The conference early-registration discount ends September 15.
Despite any rumors you may have heard to the contrary, our seminar will not be a Zimbardo-style experiment on the production of disciplinarity.