Register
Register here for the annual meeting and to begin or renew an ASA membership
Register here to submit a proposal through the ASA's 2012 submission site.
Register here for JHU Press and ASA membership services, including online access to American Quarterly and the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online.Register here to join an ASA community. Only current ASA members may contribute to the community blogs. Registration is not required to submit display or text ads or news and events or to view many pages. We will refuse posts that are not of professional interest to ASA members.
Click here for membership FAQ's
Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
de Baca, Michael Alvar. "Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture in the 1960s," History of American Civilization, Harvard University, June 2009. Advisor: Jennifer L. Roberts
Anne Truitt (b. 1921, d. 2004) is an American, Washington, D.C.-based sculptor best associated with minimalism. Since the 1950s, Truitt was deeply influenced by the narratives of Marcel Proust, linking sensation and place through the apparatus of memory. The artist’s interest in geographically situated mnemonics specifically informed her turn from expressionist sculpture to minimal-type sculpture in 1961. This dissertation focuses on Truitt’s early, minimal-type works, which interconnect two historical transitions: the first having to do with the broader phase change from modernist painting to a minimalist tendency in formation circa 1960; and the second having to do with the place of memory in history simultaneously undergoing a kind of hermeneutic revision. Though reference and abstraction are in fraught relation where it concerns the interpretation of midcentury art, this project investigates memory as the most salient feature of Truitt’s early works, represented by the fences, gates, garden walls, and tombstones from the remembered landscapes of her childhood on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. They provide an entrance into a whole range of mnemonic references that suggests something more than their formal art historical context can explain. Through a protracted study of how memory was imperative to her practice, this dissertation demonstrates how Truitt hypostatized the mutual connection between the essentially private experience mediated by modernist painting, and an open, public form of subjectivity that came increasingly to be associated with minimal sculpture. Each chapter in this dissertation organizes itself around a sculpture that represents a site of transit between contiguous tropes connected across history. I center my attention on three: First (1961), Hardcastle (1962), and Valley Forge (1963), mapping out a trajectory from an essentially private experience of sculpture to its greater public and relational dimensions as the artist’s practice grew in maturity
Quick Links
American Quarterly [official journal site]
American Quarterly [editorial site]
Encyclopedia of American Studies
Encyclopedia of American Studies [editorial site]