2009 Keynote Speakers

Paul Anderson, Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Anderson is a leading scholar in the fields of African-American and U.S. intellectual history, specializing in the representation of African American music from the Harlem Renaissance to the present.

Rob Nixon, Rachel Carson Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He will be reading from a work of creative nonfiction in progress entitled The Prince of Patience.

2009 Professional Development Plenary Sessions

• Teaching and Desire: Panelists will include Drs. Rob Nixon, Christine Huguet, Senior Lecturer at the Université of Charles de Gaulle Lille 3, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Associate Professor of English at Tulane University, and Pravina Shukla, Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University. Moderated by Dr. Yung-Hsing Wu, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisiana.
  
• Dissertation into Book: This roundtable brings together a variety of professionals who will give practical advice on this all-important topic. Confirmed participants include Dr. Henry Glassie, Professor Emeritus of Folklore, Indiana University and current editor of the Material Culture series at Indiana University Press; Craig Gill, Assistant Director and Editor-in-Chief at the University of Mississippi Press; and Paul Anderson, Center for Afroamerican and African Studies and Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. Moderated by Dr. Christine DeVine, Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisiana.

Published Collection from 2008 Conference

In early 2009 Cambridge Scholars Press will publish a collection of essays from the 2008 Louisiana Conference entitled On and Off the Page: Mapping Place in Text and Culture edited by M.B. Hackler and Ari Adipurwawidjana.

Conference Overview

Photo courtesy of Robert McKinney Jr.

The Louisiana Conference on Literature, Language and Culture is organized specifically with the emerging scholar in mind. Often at the cutting edge of research, methodology, and scholarship, advanced graduate students and junior faculty are simultaneously embarking on new professional opportunities. This conference seeks to forefront this juxtaposition in the belief that it can yield productive thinking. In bringing together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, we especially seek to nurture the best work possible in these fields as well as the potential cross-pollination between them, doing so in individual presentations, amongst papers, and even across panels. At the same time, in bringing together scholars at this particular moment in their careers we seek to highlight — in workshops, panels, plenaries, keynotes — the ways in which institutional practices inflect how academics do what we do. It is our hope that when intellectual inquiry meets institutional analysis, each emerges the stronger.

This conference is hosted by the Department of English, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.