DIRT

The New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA) announces a call for papers for our 2010 annual one-day conference:

DIRT

Saturday, December 4th, 2010
9:00am-5:30pm
St. John’s University in Downtown Manhattan

Dirt is among the most material but also the most metaphorical and expressive of substances. This conference seeks to explore how people imagine, define, and employ the various concepts and realities of dirt. What does it mean to call something dirty? How do we understand dirt and its supposed opposite, cleanliness? How do we explain the points at which we draw the line between clean and dirty, what we embrace and what we refuse to touch? Drawing on multiple disciplines we hope to uncover and foreground the (often unconscious) centrality of the metaphors and actualities of dirt to U.S. cultures, values, and lived experiences.

Possible formulations of this keyword include (but are not limited to):


* Dirty words
* Dirty pictures and dirty minds
* Dirt and disorder
* Hygiene
* Trash
* Dirt and art
* Waste, human and otherwise
* Excess and excrescences
* Germophobia
* Fear of impurity
* Chthonic dirt
* Sanitation
* Urban construction and destruction
* Getting the dirt: gossip, revelation, exposure
* Filthy lucre
* Washing one’s hands
* Animals and animality
* Dirty jokes
* Dirty politicians
* Corruption and scandal
* Ecology/sustainability
* Dirt collectors (hoarders, Collyers syndrome, cat ladies)
* Getting down in the dirt (reality shows, mud wrestling, spectacle)
* Landfills and parks design
* Disgust, repulsion, nausea
* “Dirty immigrants” and other epithets


We seek proposals from all academic disciplines and particularly encourage “nontraditional” presentations including performance, visual art, mixed-media, and pedagogy.

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to nymasadirt@gmail.com by Friday, September 10th.


Sarah E. Chinn
English Department
Hunter College, CUNY
695 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10065

sarah.chinn@hunter.cuny.edu
(212) 772-5178