Historicizing Heritage (weekend workshop)

Organized by Carolyn Dinshaw and Christine Hoffmann

Co-sponsored with West Virginia University

How are familial, ethnic, and regional heritages constructed, and what affects and politics are mobilized in the processes? What do historical narratives and reenactments – be they factual, counterfactual, utopian, or all three – allow individuals and communities to reveal, desire, perpetuate, or protest? Participants in this weekend workshop will consider some effects of historicism by exploring public, performative, and literary examples of heritage-making from both modern and premodern sources. Those traveling to Morgantown, West Virginia will be well situated to consider the ardor for, and pursue alternatives to, heritages conceived as purity, insularity, or sanctification of an antiquity that never existed. Reductive or fanciful characterizations of Appalachia often equate it with an antiquated, even premodern, past. The state of West Virginia, like the Appalachian region it centers, is a frequent site of discourses of heritage that promote both solidarity and isolationism, both innovation and obsolescence. While gathered in this contact zone of contradictory legacies, workshop participants will contribute to an open-access, multidisciplinary “How to do things with heritage” syllabus, and session leaders will share and encourage research on the ways primary source material can be enfolded into heritage-making.

Organizers: Carolyn Dinshaw, previously the Julius Silver Professor of English and Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University, has just accepted the role of Senior Program Officer for Higher Learning with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her research and teaching have always engaged the issue of relationships between past and present. In How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (2012), she touches on humans’ affective bonds with land and landscapes; her current research further pursues imaginary places and mirages. Christine Hoffmann is an Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University, where she writes and teaches about shared epistemologies between twenty-first-century social media and early modern humanist philosophy. She is the author of Stupid Humanism: Folly as Competence in Early Modern and Twenty-first-Century Culture (2017) as well as several essays on the uses and abuses of humanist practice for the fashioning of selves and societies.

Invited Speakers: Jane Anderson (New York University), Kimberly C. Borchard (Randolph-Macon College), Matthieu Chapman (State University of New York at New Paltz), Jason Cohen (Hanover Research), Lowell Duckert (University of Delaware), Mary Louise Pratt (New York University), and Kathleen Stewart (The University of Texas at Austin).

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday evening through Saturday, 26–28 May 2022 at West Virginia University. 

Apply: 7 March 2022 for admission and grants-in-aid to support travel and lodging. 

Questions? Please contact [email protected]