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Mid-America Chapter
Please visit the new MAASA website at http://www.midamerica-asa.net! MAASA covers eleven states, including Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, in the mid-continent area. It publishes the journal American Studies, (currently produced at the University of Kansas American Studies program) four times per year. ASA members residing in the region are automatically MAASA members. Others can become members by checking the appropriate box on the ASA membership form) as well as by subscribing to American Studies. Members joining through ASA are entitled to all membership privileges except for the journal. To receive the journal you must subscribe to it. To subscribe to the journal, please visit http://www2.ku.edu/~amerstud/.
Community Blog
Stone-Suderman Award for American Studies Vol. 48
The Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA) is pleased to announce that Colin R. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University, is the winner of the Stone-Suderman Prize for the best essay published in Volume 48 of American Studies. His essay, “Camp Life: The Queer History of Manhood in the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933-1937” argues that CCC camps were sites of negotiation over the meaning of masculinity in the 1930s, concluding that “life in the CCC was anything but straight and narrow.”
The award committee noted the essay’s range of relatively untapped New Deal sources—including newspaper articles, photographs, and cartoons—that contest prevailing assumptions about the CCC by bringing to light practices ranging from drag performances to linguistic play. In addition, Johnson argues that understandings of gender and sexuality were created and contested not only in urban areas that are most often the focus of scholarship on queer masculinity; rural locations also function as spaces for forging masculinities.
Johnson earned his Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. His research interests include rural life, cultural geography and land use, and the history of technology and agriculture. A version of the essay will be included in a manuscript tentatively titled The Little Gay Bar on the Prairie: Gender, Geography and the Invention of Sexuality in Non-Metropolitan America.
Winner of the 2009 Katzman-Yetman Award - Bess Williamson
The Mid-America American Studies Association (MAASA) is pleased to announce that Bess Williamson, Ph.D. candidate in American History at the University of Delaware, is the winner of the 2009 Katzman-Yetman Prize for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper for Technology and Disability Identity: The Toomey J. Gazette, 1958-1969. Ms. Williamson presented her winning paper on the Toomey J. Gazette at the 2009 Identities and Technoculture Conference, co-sponsored by MAASA and the University of Iowa¹s Center for Ethnic Studies, held April 3 ¬-4 in Iowa City.
The Cleveland-based Toomey J. Gazette began as a newsletter affiliated with a polio rehabilitation center and expanded into a community newspaper “by, for, and about” readers who suffered severe physical disabilities after surviving acute cases of polio. Ms. Williamson’s paper explores how technical information-sharing through the Gazette helped build community identity among people with disabilities in postwar America.
The awards committee was impressed with how Ms. Williamson’s paper engaged with important and intersecting issues in the fields of technology studies, medical history, and identity studies. In the process, Ms. Williamson made a convincing case for the larger historical significance of her particular case study. Ms. Williamson¹s winning paper is part of her larger dissertation project, entitled “The Right to Design: Disability and Access in the United States, 1945-1990.” This spring, Bess Williamson is a Baird Society Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries.
In the strong 2009 competition, two other entrants earned honorable mention. The awards committee recognized Alexander Bonus of Case Western Reserve University for his entry, “Johann Maelzel, the Metronome, and Mechanized Music in Nineteenth-Century America,” and Emily Laurel Smith of the University of Minnesota for her entry, “Classifying the Needy: Disability and the TV Techno-Makeover.”
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3/25/10: Mid-America American Studies Association Conference– Call for Papers
“Studying ‘America?’ Critical Conjunctures for the 21st Century”
In 2010, MAASA will mark the 50th anniversary of American Studies with a conference examining generative moments and regenerative possibilities in scholarship about culture and society in the U.S. This anniversary provides an opportunity to critically examine American Studies and American Studies as sites for producing ideas about what it means to study America. Taking the archive represented by fifty years of American Studies as a starting point—but not an endpoint—we hope to thoughtfully investigate the political, cultural, and economic ramifications attending current and past paradigms for studying “America.”
MAASA has a long tradition of providing a site for graduate students and faculty to workshop together. We honor the work of graduate students through the Katzman-Yetman graduate student paper prize ($250+review by American Studies) and the Kolmer mentoring award for faculty ($250). Those wishing to submit papers or nominees for these prizes should visit our website at http://mid-america.asa.net.
We seek panels, workshops, discussions, or other forms of creative expression that may address the conference themes by 1) investigating past, present, and potential paradigms of interdisciplinary work in publications, in the academy, in the media, in public performances, and in the community or 2) modeling the variety of contemporary ways of engaging the study of “America.”
In addition, the conference will honor the retirement of David Katzman, longtime editor of the journal American Studies, and author of Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (1973); Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (1978); 3 edited collections; and, with Mary Beth Norton and William M. Tuttle, People and a Nation (1982). Thus, we welcome submissions for sessions focused on African American Life and History.
Proposals are due on or before January 11, 2010. Proposals for complete panels/discussions are preferred over individual submissions. Panel proposals should include 1) session title, 2) session abstract (250 words or less), 3) titles of individual papers, 4) abstracts of individual papers (250 words or less), and 5) information for each participant (name, contact information, affiliation, 1-page CV). Proposals for discussions or creative presentations should include 1) Session title; 2) session abstract (500 words or less), and 3) information for each participant (name, contact information, affiliation, 1-page CV). Proposals should be submitted electronically as a single Word document to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
For conference updates and information, please visit our website at http://midamerica-asa.net.
Submitted by Jane E Simonsen
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