This year’s Goldring Symposium, Gender and Race in Contemporary America, will bring two highly acclaimed scholars to the U-M campus: Professor Janice Radway from Northwestern University and Professor Harry Elam from Stanford University.
The Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern, Janice Radway also holds an appointment as Professor of American Studies. Radway is widely known for her scholarship on readers, reading, and books. She is the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, which recently won the Fellows Book Award as a “classic” in the field from the International Communication Association. In addition, Radway has co-edited with Michigan’s Kevin Gaines and Penny Von Eschen, American Studies: An Anthology. She is working on an oral history of girls, their underground publishing efforts during the 1990s, and their subsequent lives.
Harry J. Elam, Jr. is the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow for Undergraduate Education, Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, and Director of the Committee on Black Performing Arts. His scholarly work focuses on contemporary American drama, particularly African American and Chicano theater. In addition, he has directed theatre professionally for more than eighteen years. Most notably, he has directed several of August Wilson’s plays, including Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Two Trains Running, and Fences. Elam is the author of Taking it to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka; The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson and co-editor of four books.
The symposium will take place Thursday March 14, 2013 at Palmer Commons.
Symposium: 4:00PM – 6:00PM Forum Hall
Reception: 6:00PM – 7:30PM Great Lakes North
This event was made possible by the generous contribution of Gregory W. Goldring, an alumnus of the Department of American Culture, who helped to establish the Goldring Symposium on Media and American Popular Culture in 2011.
