Seminar Directors

Bruce Burgett Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
University of Washington Bothell

Randy Martin Professor and Chair of Department of Art and Public Policy
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

Seminar Description

There is a fable in which the research university and cultural studies at its moment of emergence share a golden age: born together of the post-WWII expansion of higher education, the institution and field share a progressive and triumphant commitment to the democratization of university access and the building of inclusive national cultures. The protagonists in this fable are most often the founders of the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, with a stress on their commitments to adult education and their interests in working class popular culture.

There are myriad reasons to be suspicious of this narrative. As many have observed, the golden-ness of the fabled age celebrated a specifically white, male, working class, Anglo subject position of professional and epistemological privilege that was already passing. Neither the university nor cultural studies were ever so homogeneous as to have enjoyed this sort of common origin or pinnacle. Most important for our current moment, the nostalgia that inheres in such backward glances neither helps orient toward the future nor positions the present prospects for the university or cultural studies.

This seminar “Cultural Studies and the University in Question” is intended to create a space where participants can rethink the fable of unity in terms of difference—something cultural studies itself has inclined us to do and something that the CSA should be positioned to do. Unsettling the unity of the past and present will enable us to imagine multiple trajectories for the future, to strategize interventions that unsettle the claims of scarcity that shape in the current social compact, and to refashion alliances inside and outside the university at a moment when claims of the latter to autonomy have become increasingly unsustainable.

The seminar is also linked to one of the founding research threads‚ ”Universities in Question” (co-edited by the seminar organizers), of Lateral: A Journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Our hope is that the seminar will engage conference-goers who may also be interested in becoming participants in that research thread.

Participants will be asked to submit in advance of the seminar a 5-10 page response to the CFP for the research thread, as it is posted on the CSA site. These responses can be new work, excerpts from published work or work-in-progress, and/or other sorts of mediations on the locations and potentials of cultural studies and the university today. These materials will be circulated prior to the conference among the seminar participants and will form the basis of our activities in the seminar. Other pre-conference readings may also be required, based on the suggestions of seminar participants.

Seminar Moderators

Bruce Burgett is Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. He is founding director of the UW graduate Certificate in Public Scholarship and a core faculty member in the Master of Arts in Cultural Studies at UW Bothell. He is the author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic, and co-editor of Keywords for American Cultural Studies (with Glenn Hendler). He is currently working on a book project entitled Sex, Panic, Nation and a second edition of Keywords. He has taught, researched, and published widely in the fields of American studies, cultural studies, and queer studies. He serves on the editorial and advisory boards of American Quarterly and American Literary History, and the press committee of the University of Washington Press. He is Vice President of the Cultural Studies Association and Chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. He serves on the Board of Trustees of Humanities Washington.

Randy Martin is Professor and Chair of the department of art and public policy at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where he directs the graduate program in Arts Politics. He is author of Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor and the Professional Turn; An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management; Financialization of Daily Life; On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left; Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics; Socialist Ensembles: Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua; Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self. He has edited several issues of the journal Social Text on academic labor, one of which was published as Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University. He serves on the board of edu-factory, an e-collaborative dedicated to the project of a global autonomous university. He has been past President of the Cultural Studies Association and currently sits on the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life.

Application Process

To apply to the seminar, please send a cv and short description (50-100 words) of your proposed contribution to the seminar to Bruce Burgett  and Randy Martin.