All sessions will take place in the Barker Center at Harvard University, located at 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. Room assignments will be added soon.
Note that minor changes may occur
Friday, June 21, 2024:
8:30-9:00: Registration & Coffee
9:00-10:30: Concurrent Panels
Reading and Writing Place
- Lee Nevitt, Tufts University, “Queer Experimentations in 19th-Century American Regional Literature”
- Yolanda Mackey, Penn State, “Mapping the Long Negro or ‘Harlem’ Renaissance in the Literary Imaginary”
- Andrew Suárez, Harvard University, “Una Nueva Genealogía: Revisiting Place in 20th Century Chicana Literature”
CHAIR: Lucas Dietrich, Lesley University, Framingham State University
Colonial Crossroads
- Charline Jao, Cornell, “Flowers of the Sea: Marine Specimens at the Anti-Slavery Bazaar”
- Julia K. Woodward, Boston College, “Multiple Multiplicities: Créolité and Cultural Crossroads in Caribbean Fiction”
- Katharina Weygold, Brown University, “African American Women and Haiti During the U.S. Occupation of Haiti, 1915 – 1934”
- Edward Hunt, Regis College, “Strategic Bridge? The Compact States as a Region in the American Empire”
CHAIR: Hannah Haynes, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
Photography in the New England Region
- Marina Wells, New Bedford Whaling Museum, “A Maritime Backdrop: Early Photography Studios in New Bedford”
- Jesse Dritz, Boston University, “‘There’s More Water Out There Than I Can Drink’: Reframing the Maine Coast in Salt Magazine”
- Maddie Webster, City of Boston, “Urban Renewal Photography and Black Homeownership Realities”
- Lauren Graves, Boston Athenaeum, “Where’s Boston?: Constantine Manos’s Bostonians”
CHAIR: Alisa Prince, Boston University
10:45 – 12:15: Concurrent Panels
Revisiting Texas
- Jonathan Silverman, UMass Lowell, “Race and Races: Life at Manor Downs”
- Dr. Dwonna Naomi Goldstone, Texas State University, “Black & Female & Liberal in Texas”
- Joel Huerta, University of Illinois Chicago, “Camelia La Tejana: A Look Back, Fifty Years Later”
CHAIR: Nicholas Bloom, Harvard University
Reconsidering New England
- Mary Renda, Mount Holyoke College, “To Conquer Outlying Regions: The Pursuit of Women’s Higher Education in New England”
- Hwayoung Yi, Texas A&M University, “Rethinking Jewett’s New England Regionalism”
- Olivia R. Jacobs, Boston University, “Appalachian Temporal Regionalism: New England’s Aesthetic Hallucination”
- Rajender Kaur, William Paterson University, “Revisioning the Regional: New England and Indian Ocean Worlds”
CHAIR: Lydia Ciollo, Fairfield University
Confronting Colonial Regionality
- Morgan Ridgway, Harvard University, “Toward Unknowing: Non-recognition, Lenape Insistence, and Troubled Geographies”
- kristen iemma, Brown University, “Records Confronting Borders: Archival Sovereignty in Twentieth Century U.S. Empire”
- Christopher Slaby, William & Mary, “Region in U.S. History and the People of the Waters That are Never Still: Mohican Homelands, the ‘Hudson’ River, and the Messiness of Place”
- Olivia Anne Lafferty, Brown, “Theorizing a Filipinx American Transpacific in the Wake of the Galleon Trade”
CHAIR: Megan McNamara, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
12:15 – 1:00: Lunch
1:00 – 2:30: Keynote, Joseph Rezek, Boston University
“The Captain and the Codex: John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia and the Transformation of Pocahontas”
2:45 – 4:15: Concurrent Panels
Material Cultures of/and Place
- Chloe Chapin, Harvard University, “Whiteness, Materialism, and American Regional Identity”
- Victoria Oliviero, Boston College, “New England Egyptomania: Boston’s Elite and Their Travels”
- Astrid Tvetenstrand, Boston Athenaeum, “From Canton to Newport: Kingscote, Chinese Art, and the Transnational Circulation of American Taste”
CHAIR: Charles Park, Berkshire Community College
Tourism & Conservation
- Anne Boyd, Boston University, “Driving Davis Out West: The Jefferson Davis Highway’s Westward Expansion in 1940s California”
- Ella Howard, Wentworth Institute of Technology, “Regionalism and Historic Preservation Districts”
- Dan McKanan, Harvard Divinity School, “Conservation, New England Style”
CHAIR: Marina Wells, New Bedford Whaling Museum
Rural, Urban, and In Between
- David Faflik, University of Rhode Island, “Back of the Bus: Race and the Integration of Red Sox Nation”
- Jack Carey, University of Alabama, “Odd Couples: Notes on Teaching Comparative Regionalism in ‘the Southern Trough’”
- Brian Murphy, Williams College, “From Nowhere: A Midwestern Memoir”
CHAIR: Ethan Goodnight, Harvard University
4:30 – 6:00: Reception, hosted by Harvard’s American Studies Program
Saturday, June 22, 2024
9:00-10:30: Concurrent Panels
Space and Place, Visualized
- Justin Wolff, University of Maine, “Here, There, Everywhere: Picturing Catastrophe Across Time and Space”
- Jarkko Tanninen, University of Nottingham, “Out of the Boondocks: (Re)Performing Regional Imaginaries in Contemporary American Photography”
- James Emmett Ryan, Auburn University, “New Orleans Cinema and Social Change, 1940-1970”
CHAIR: Betsy Walters, Boston University
Locating the Native Great Lakes and the Midwestern Anti-Region
- Dylan Nelson, Harvard University, “Regions, Territories, and Homelands: The Longue Durée and Indigenous Trajectories in the Great Lakes”
- Kabl Wilkerson, Harvard University, “Regionalism and the Question of Great Lakes Indian Removal: Region as Method and Analytic”
- Saffron Sener, Harvard University, “Spectral ‘Superstition:’ Politics, Gender, and the Pursuit of Power in the Early Midwest”
CHAIR: Carolyn Parker-Fairbain, Boston University
Diaspora and Immigration
- Amanda Rivera, Yale, “Archival Ambivalences: The Colonial Limitations and Ethnographic Potentials of Puerto Rican Diaspora Archives in Southern Connecticut”
- Hannah Haynes and Izzy Beauchamp, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, “Immigration in the Berkshires: Evaluating Berkshire County as a Context of Reception for New Migrants”
- Walter E. Suarez Becerra, Independent Scholar, “Peruvians in the United States: Tracing Diaspora and Incorporation”
CHAIR: Andrew Suárez, Harvard University
10:45 – 12:15: Concurrent Panels
Destabilizing Boundaries, Remaking Regions: Pedagogical and Artistic Projects from the Vermont-Quebec Borderland
- Amy Howe, Champlain College
- Gene Pendon, artist
- Melissa Proietti, Champlain, Montreal Campus
- Weiling Deng, Champlain College
Regional Consumables
- Rachel Ciampoli, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “‘The Indigenous Posey of the Soil’: Eastman Johnson’s Maple Sugar Paintings and the Aesthetics of Elision”
- Andrew Green Hannon, PhD from Yale, Panama Rose’s The Hashish Cookbook: Authenticity and Authorship from Beat Morocco to the Hip Lower East Side
- Claire Bunschoten, Boston University, “‘What Northern Hands Made’: Crafting Vanilla Bean Terroir and Fetishizing Place”
CHAIR: AnnMarie DeMichiel, The University of Rhode Island
Mapping Indigenous Worcester, A Film Screening and Conversation
- Colin Novick, Greater Worcester Land Trust
- Gwenn Miller, College of the Holy Cross
- Sarah Luria, College of the Holy Cross
- Gordon Ward, Officer, Quinsigamond Band (Nipmuc)
- Aleksandra Tugbiyele, Officer, Quinsigamond Band (Nipmuc)
- Jo Elle Moody, Officer, Quinsigamond Band (Nipmuc)