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October 2012 NEPCA established 1974

2012 NEPCA FALL CONFERENCE

NEPCA’s annual fall conference will convene Friday and Saturday October 26-26. This newsletter will provide conference information on the following:

• Travel directions

• Lodging and food suggestions

• Issues to be discussed at the executive council meeting

• Information on NEPCA prize winners

• The tentative conference schedule (see back of newsletter)

• Registration forms (see back of newsletter)

ALSO IN THIS NEWSLETTER

This newsletter will also contain the following:

• Information on the 2012 conference and a first call for papers

• A listing of area chairs

• Teaching tips

• Book reviews

• Member information

• A listing of NEPCA officers

• Information on NEPCA Journal, the organization’s online publication

(See back pages for schedule and registration forms.)

DIRECTIONS and PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Driving:

The conference will take place at St. John Fisher College. Those using a GPS system should program it for 3690 East Avenue, Rochester, NY 14618-3597.

St. John Fisher College is located 6 miles southeast of Rochester, NY, in the suburb of Pittsford. The New York State Thruway runs south of the city.

By Car:

• The easiest approach is from Thruway Exit 45, which is marked “Rochester-490.”

• From that point, take I-490 for about 10 minutes to Exit 25, Fairport Road/NY 31F.

• Turn left onto Route 31F going west and proceed to the main entrance of campus.

• The main entrance is 0.5 mile from I-490, at a traffic light where Fairport Road meets East Avenue (Route 96).

Those wishing to print a campus map before arriving should go to: 

Estimated driving times from major NEPCA area cites are:

|Buffalo, NY |1 1/4 hours |

|Syracuse, NY |1 1/2 hours |

|Albany, NY |4 hours |

|Pittsburgh, PA |4 1/2 hours |

|New York, NY |6 hours |

|Hartford, CT |6 hours |

|Boston, MA |7 hours |

 

Train:

The Rochester Amtrak Station is located at 320 Central Avenue Rochester, NY 14605 and is about 7 miles (and a 10 minute ride) from the St. John Fisher College campus. Cabs are readily available outside the train station. Here is the Amtrak Website: 

Air Travelers:

The Greater Rochester International Airport is located at 1200 Brooks Avenue. Rochester, NY 14624 and is about 10 miles (and a 15 minute ride) from the St. John Fisher College campus. Cabs are readily available outside the terminal. Here is the Greater Rochester International Airport Website:

WHERE TO EAT:

In your registration packets you will receive a booklet from the VisitRochester organization listing many restaurants by location and dining choices. A copy may also be found on its Website: 

WHERE TO STAY:

We have arranged for a special conference rate of $107.00 plus tax at the Brookwood Inn, 800 Pittsford-Victor Road, Pittsford, New York 14534. The rates will be available from Thursday, October 25th through Sunday, October 28th. You must make your reservation before September 26, 2012 to assure receiving the special rate. The hotel is 6 minutes and a 5-mile drive from the St. John Fisher College campus. Complimentary shuttle service to/from the Greater Rochester International Airport is provided. To make a reservation, call 585-258-9000 and be sure to ask for the NEPCA rate. The hotel’s website is

Other hotels (including estimated rates and distance from the campus) in the immediate St. John Fisher College area may be found at the following website:

ATTRACTIONS:

For those who have time before or after the conference, the following popular culture-related attractions should be of interest. Your registration packet will have discount coupons available, and details will be sent ahead of time as well:

The Corning Museum of Glass: 

The National Museum of Play at the Strong Museum: 

Ravenwood Golf Club: 

RockVentures Climbing and Teambuilding Center: 

The Susan B. Anthony Museum and House: 

For a list of other attractions see the VisitRochester Website: 

 

REMINDER: NO CREDIT CARDS!

Conference fees and dues must be paid by personal check, bank check, money order, or in cash. NEPCA does not accept credit cards or third-party services such as PayPal. It simply costs too much to use such services, which NEPCA would be forced to pass on in the form of higher fees. NEPCA prides itself on keeping conference fees and dues very low compared to those charged by other professional organizations.

GRADUATE-STUDENT PAPER AWARD

NEPCA awards an annual cash prize of $300 and certificate for the best graduate-student paper delivered at our fall conference. The Winner of the 2011 Graduate Student Paper Prize is Lindsey Hanlon of Boston College for her paper, " Drawing from the Margins: Truth, Fiction, and Power in Marissa Acocella Marchetto's Cancer Vixen."

The members of the Committee were: Amos St. Germain, Chair (Wentworth Institute of Technology), Carol Mitchell (Springfield College), Margaret Wiley (Colby-Sawyer College),

Bruce Cohen (Worcester State University), Andi McClanahan, (East Stroudsburg University).

Graduate students attending this year’s conference should contact their session chair to be eligible for the 2012 prize. Papers must be nominated by the session chairs.

ROLLINS BOOK PRIZE

The winner of the Peter C. Rollins Prize for the best book on popular or American culture published in 2011 is Daniel Cavicchi (Rhode Island School of Design) for his Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum. (See Books Reviews). Professor Caicchi will receive a certificate and a check for $500.

NEPCA thanks the 2010 Rollins Prize Committee: Carol-Ann Farkas, chair (MCPHS), Jeff Cain (Sacred Heart), Virginia Cowen (Queensborough Community College), Kristin Peterson (MCPHS), and Rob Weir, (UMass Amherst).

Nominations are now open for the 2012 Rollins Prize. Publishers should consult the NEPCA Website for details. Please note: Only publishers can only nominate books for the Rollins Prize; if you have published a book in 2012 and wish it to be considered for the 2012 Rollins Prize, please direct your publisher to:

Edited collections, reference works, and original creative works (novels, plays, etc.) are ineligible for the Rollins Prize.

CHECK YOUR LABEL!!!

Please check the label on your newsletter. If it says “Expired,” please pay your NEPCA dues right away. Send your check to: NEPCA, c/o Robert Weir, 15 Woods Road, Florence, MA 01062.

NEPA membership dues are very cheap–just $30 for those working fulltime in academia, and $15 for adjuncts, graduate students, emeritus professors, independent scholars, and interested members of the piublic. Does NEPCA need such paltry fees? Yes, it does. Your fees defray the (soaring) cost of the newsletter, pays postage and vendor fees, helps us maintain the online NEPCA Journal, pays stipends, underwrites the Rollins and graduate student paper prizes, and allows NEPCA to conduct yearly conferences. NEPCA gets no money from the national Popular Culture Association; it is entirely self-supporting. So please pay your dues! The membership rolls are periodically purged of non-renewing members. Please remain an active member to continue receiving NEPCA News and to be able to contribute to NEPCA Journal.

And Update Your Info

Has your e-mail or mailing address changed? Have you changed jobs? E-mail addresses often change due to mergers, switched providers, new academic servers, switching jobs, etc. If your e-mail or “snail mail” address has changed in the past two years, please contact NEPCA and let us know so we can update our database. Send a short note to: weir.r@ and I’ll update your file.

FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS—NEPCA 2013 CONFERENCE

NEPCA! Fall! Vermont! What’s not to like? NEPCA’s 2013 conference will be held on the campus of St. Michael’s College in Winooski, Vermont on October 25-26, 2013.

If you would like to present, chair, or comment on a panel for our next conference, send a 250-300 word proposal and a one page CV to: Jennifer Tebbe-Grossman:

Jennifer.Tebbe-Grossman@mcphs.edu

You should also send your proposal to one of the area chairs listed below. They can advise you on the nature, scope, and style of panels and presentations. They can also place you in the most appropriate panel. If your topic does not appear, contact Peter Holloran (listed below as “None”).

If you'd like to be an area chair, please contact Rob Weir: weir.r@

American Literature and Fiction: Mark Madigan, Nazareth College, English Department, Rochester, NY 14618, mjmadiga@naz.edu

Celebrity and Entertainment: Carol Mitchell, 27 Woodside Circle, Sturbridge, MA 01566 carol_mitchell@spfldcol.edu

Celtic Studies: Margaret Wiley, Colby-Sawyer College, Humanities, 541 Main St., New London, NH 03257, MWiley@colby-sawyer.edu

Comics and Graphic Novels: Lance Eaton, 87 Thurston St. # 1, Somerville, MA 02145, lance.eaton@

Ethnic and Race Studies: Sally Hirsh-Dickinson, 233 Switch Road, Andover, NH 03216

shirsh-dickinson@

Fashion and Body Image: Joe Hancock, Drexel University, 64 Stuart Drive, Norristown, PA 19401, jhh33@drexel.edu

Film and History: Cynthia Miller, 484 Bolivar St., Canton, MA 02021, cynthia_miller@emerson.edu.

Folklore and Folk Culture: TBA

Gender, Identity, Sex, and Sexuality: Don Gagnon, Western CT State University, 221 Willow Springs, New Milford, CT 06776, GagnonD@wcsu.edu

Global Cultures: Frank A. Salamone, Iona College, 715 North Avenue, New Rochelle, NY 10801-1890, fsalamone@iona.edu

Health, Disease, and Physical Culture:  Jennifer Tebbe-Grossman, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, School of Arts and Sciences, 179 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115,  jennifer.tebbe@mcphs.edu

History and Uses of the Past: James P. Hanlan, WPI, 100 Institute Road, Worcester, MA 01609-2280, jphanlan@wpi.edu

Horror: Michelle Ephraim WPI, 100 Institute Road, Worcester, MA 01609-2280, Ephraim@wpi.edu

Humor: Jeff Cain, Sacred Heart University, 5151 Park Ave. Fairfield, CT 06825 cainj@sacredheart.edu

Labor Studies: Bruce Cohen, Worcester State College, History Department, Worcester, MA 01602-2597, bcohen@worcester.edu

Marketing and Advertising: Rick Magee, Heart University, 5151 Park Ave. Fairfield, CT 06825, mageer@sacredheart.edu

Music: Christopher Scott Gleason, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Management Wentworth Institute of Technology, 550 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, gleasonc@wit.edu

New England/New York Studies: Marc Stern, Bentley College, History Department, Waltham, MA 02452-4705, mstern@bentley.edu

Philosophy and Popular Culture: Tim Madigan, Dept. of Philosophy,

St. John Fisher College, Rochester NY 14618, tmadigan@sjfc.edu

Politics: TBA

Psychology:

Religion: June-Ann Greeley, Sacred Heart University, 5151 Park Ave. Fairfield, CT 06825, greeleyj@sacredheart.edu

Science and Technology: Amos St. Germain, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Humanities Division, 550 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, stgermaina@wit.edu

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Legend: Michael Torregrossa, 34 Second St., Smithfield, RI, 02917, Popular.Culture.and.the.Middle.Ages@

Sports: Robert Weir, 15 Woods Road, Florence, MA 01062, weir.r@

Television: Carol-Ann Farkas, MCPHS, 179 Longwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, Carol-Ann. Farkas@mcphs.edu

Urban Studies: Lisa Boehm, Worcester State College, Urban Studies Department, Worcester, MA 01602-2597; lboehm@worcester.edu

Visual Culture and Digital Media: Sue Clerc, Buley Library, Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven CT 06515, clercs1@southernct.edu

War and Culture: Mark Van Ells. Queensborough Community College, 222-05 56the Ave. Bayside, NY 11364, mvanells@qcc.cuny.edu

World Literature: Robert Niemi, St. Michael's College, English Department, Colchester, VT 05439, rniemi@smcvt.edu

None of the Above: Peter Holloran, Worcester State College, Department of History, Worcester, MA 01602-2597, 617-876-6635, pholloran@worcester.edu

WOULD YOU LIKE TO HOST A NEPCA CONFERENCE?

NEPCA seeks host institutions for 2015 and beyond. If you think you’d like to host a NEPCA conference on your campus, please contact Executive Secretary Rob Weir (weir.r@) or chat with Rob at the fall conference.

THE CULTURED CLASSROOM

If you have an example of a successful classroom lesson or strategy involving the use of popular and/or American culture, please share it with your colleagues. Contact weir.r@

In this Amos St. Germain considers the conundrum of teaching culture and history at college in which very few students are humanities-oriented.

Culture Studies: Science and Technology in the Classroom

When you teach at an institute of technology offering degrees in engineering/architecture/technology/design and management, the liberal studies/general education component must fit into some of the most highly structured curricula in all of American education. You have to introduce styles of thinking to students within a very limited number of courses and credit hours. While only about ten percent of college students will ever consider majoring in mathematics, science, engineering or technology, a ninety-seven percent placement rate upon graduation, even in this today’s job market, has provided Wentworth with rising enrollments.

In History of Technology I try to introduce historical thinking. I also try to carry out the wisdom of what technology and culture studies guru, Mel Kranzberg, noted years ago: “Technology is neither positive nor negative nor neutral.” Within the next thirty years my students will be engineers, designers, architects, managers and entrepreneurs. They will be running the country and if they don’t understand the relationships between technology and society, who will?

At the start of the semester we look at primates coming down from the trees staring at their opposable thumbs and by the end of the semester we have people in the space shuttle. I utilize the best one-volume history of technology available, Science and Technology in World History by McClellan and Dorn. I supplement the text with a variety of articles from Invention and Technology, a science and technology magazine aimed at the general reader. Students consider everything from piece on engineering your baby and the impact of mechanical harvesters on agriculture, to the effect of vacuum cleaners on modern life.

For research projects I ask students out to find out about the achievements of people they may never have heard of, people such as Gertrude Elion, Charles Steinmetz. and Alexander Coulter. They write research papers and, in teams, produce technology-rich oral presentations. In my lectures I integrate the insights of popular science and technology scholars such as Henry Petroski and Samuel Florman, and modern food history scholars such as Richard Wrangham and Tom Standage. I also draw inspiration from James Burke’s classic Connections series. Students will forget subject matter specifics, but I hope they will see connections between science and technology and all the other areas of life.

My course materials are available to all who might wish to see them. Email stgermaina@wit.edu

Amos St. Germain

Humanities and Social Sciences

Wentworth Institute of Technology

BOOK REVIEWS

Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum. By Daniel Cavicchi, Wesleyan University Press: Middletown, CT, 2011.

NOTE: This book is the winner of NEPCA’s 2011 Peter J. Rollins Book Prize.

The United States in the 19th century is the setting for Daniel Cavicchi’s exploration of musical culture. This period encompasses a shift from the active pursuit of making music to a passive experience of watching and listening. Cavicchi is not a music historian, nor is he a musicologist. But he takes a comprehensive approach in his research to describe social, cultural, and economic factors involved in the creation of musical audience.

Until the early 1800s, for most of the working class in the United States, music was made, not heard. Making music was a family and community event, particularly in the home around a parlor piano. Immigrants brought their own instruments, but plunking, singing, and strumming were part of the social fabric. Performances were available, but they were often the product of amateurs, parade bands, or singers accompanying traveling circuses. Amateur music was unpolished, parade bands were militaristic or political, and singing circus performers were not necessarily talented. Other than the urban social elite, most people did not simply listen to music, particularly to performances of high quality.

The mid-19th century saw the dawn of professional orchestras in New York, Boston, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. Attending concerts was a new phenomenon. Ticket prices ranged from affordable to outrageously high, according to diaries and reports. Concertgoers, from the rising middle class, modeled their role as audience members after their experience as congregants in church. They sat, quietly and politely listening to the performance in the same manner as a sermon. The formality of a concert was unusual for the middle class, but oddly appealing, and eventually became the norm.

Throughout the book Cavicchi explores societal factors that contributed to the rise of the commercialization of music, which in turn fed into other 19th century innovations from technology to celebrity. Profit could be earned from concert ticket sales, as well as goods and services. The job of music dealer evolved to include music lessons along with sales of sheet music and instruments. Rail travel made it possible for performers and their instruments to travel easily. The hype that greeted Jenny Lind’s U.S. debut was unparalleled. No one in the United States, not even her impresario P.T. Barnum, had heard her sing. Yet her reputation and Barnum’s skills as a promoter created a remarkable sensation in which thousands clamored to secure a ticket to hear Lind, a form of what modern scholars describe as a form of commodity fetishism. In like manner, Lind’s tour also established patterns now called product endorsements (Lind-inspired hats, gloves, furniture), which added to the spectacle.

Ticket prices for many current musical performances ranged from those affordable to the working class to astronomical levels that restricted entrance to those of substantial means. At whatever price, though, the public was inexorably transformed from active to passive, from makers of music to consumers of it.

This is a fascinating book that embraces a wide array of resources to capture a picture of an unusual time in American musical cultural history. The quotations from and analyses of diaries are particularly intriguing and well presented. Perhaps because Cavicchi is not a music historian, his research and reporting is fresh and relatively unbiased.

The timing of this publication creates an interesting juxtaposition. At present, music performances in 21st century culture are placing more emphasis on amateur performances. The rise of American Idol and other televised performance competitions is giving the stage over once again to participation rather than the passive listener whose development was documented by Cavicchi. While the role of much of the audience continues to be that of passive listeners, there is the hope that more Jenny Linds (or Taylor Swifts) are among us, somewhere, waiting to be discovered.

The book would be particularly suited to seminars on American cultural history or courses on the business of music. It would also be a useful addition to classes examining trends in society and the arts.

Virginia S. Cowen, PhD

University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey

From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898. By Bonnie Miller. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011.

Note: This book was the runner-up for the 2011 Rollins Prize.

Vietnam was America’s first “living room war,” but the 1898 Spanish-American War was the first one in which “media spectacle” (2) played a key role in why the United States went to war, how war was justified, how Americans viewed its progress, and how they formed postwar perceptions. (Newspapers played a key role in the Civil War as well, but on a regional rather than national level. Moreover, the first newspaper halftone photograph did not appear until 1880.)

University of Massachusetts Boston assistant professor Bonnie Miller shows us 83 images (photos, engravings, cartoons) that provide fodder for one of her theses: that the Spanish-American War was too complex to be reduced to simplistic narratives in which yellow journalism is the main cause of the conflict and unmediated imperialist ideology its aftermath. For instance, although a muscular foreign policy certainly found justification in the Spanish-American War, critics drew upon the same imagery to fashion anti-imperialist screeds. There was, in short, no such thing as “an” American view of the war. In one delicious set of contrasts, Miller presents an image of a lean Uncle Sam toning his muscles on a punching bag labeled “Increased Navy” (156), a graphic depiction of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theory of navies and empires. A few pages later, though, we view a more ambiguous image: a triumphant Uncle Sam resting his bloated stomach upon a podium (176). As Miller notes, the image might be viewed as “rising prosperity,” or it could “suggest excessive engorgement” (176). Exactly! Other images remind us that wars are seldom as glorious as hawks would have them be, and their aftermath generally ushers in unanticipated challenges and problems.

Among the conundrums is what to do with empires once obtained. Within the hegemonic logic systems of many late Victorians, the ideal scenario would have been to acquire foreign lands devoid of foreigners. Miller shows this with graphic clarity in the Philippines. Before the war, Filipinos and rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo were depicted as fair-skinned, upright, and noble; after each had the audacity to resist American control with the same fervor with which they had opposed Spanish rule, they appeared as dark-skinned, dirty ragamuffins. In fact, one shocking aftermath of the war was the lightening speed with which all those who fell under U.S. imperial rule–Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Chamorros, Filipinos, Hawaiians, Ladinos–lost their personhood and were depicted as semi-human savages. The stereotyping of post-imperialist success is as vicious and as racialized as that applied to African Americans and the Chinese.

The book is visually rich, though some of Miller’s analyses rest upon Straw Man assumptions. (Who actually reduces the war to the single cause of journalism?) Miller also transgresses the line between complexity and reading too much into her images and ignoring simpler explanations. For example, she is keen to explode one of the “persistent myths” that the war was foisted upon President McKinley by a “war-hungry public manipulated by a sensationalistic press and jingoistic political culture” (10). First, few historian with whom I’m aware absolve McKinley of harboring preexisting imperialist motives. Second, Miller’s own evidence actually strengthens older views that yellow journalism was central in leading citizens to dance to the drumbeats of war. Miller tries to have it both ways. Later on she’s perfectly happy to see “imperial iconography” (187) as having a “profound and long-lasting” (232) impact on expansionists and anti-imperialists alike. Why pull the punch in the first instance, but not the second?

Despite my analytical disagreements, I highly recommend this book. Historians already know about much that is contained in Miller’s volume, but seldom has it been assembled in one place with such detail. Miller’s historical examination adds immeasurably to current debates over visual media and how images alter public opinion.

Robert E. Weir

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture. By Richard Pells. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-300-18173-9

Conventional wisdom holds that since the advent of movies, creeping “Americanization” has inexorably homogenized global culture. In the standard telling, regional and indigenous filmmakers, musicians, and artists were no match for juggernauts such as Hollywood, Tin Pan Alley, or market-driven art and architectural preferences. The very word “modern” tends to conjure U.S. institutions and icons such as MGM, the Metropolitan Opera, MOMA, the Chrysler Building, Orson Welles, Frank Capra, George Gershwin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Andy Warhol….

In the best tradition of path-breaking scholars, Richard Pells turns conventional wisdom upside down. He neither denies the economic power of American culture, nor ignores its impact on global tastes, but he does take a major swipe at how much of that culture can be stamped “Made in the USA.” In his telling, much of what has been labeled “American culture” abroad is actually a re-export. In fact, virtually all that passed as “modern” during the 20th century was European in origin. The most obvious example of this is Hollywood, which was built largely by immigrant Jews such as Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner brothers. Likewise, many of the entertainment world’s greatest stars were immigrants: Irving Berlin, Charlie Chaplin, Gretta Garbo, Cary Grant, Bob Hope, Al Jolson, Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino….

The above connection is pretty well known, but Pells calls our attention to style as much as personality; in essence, he wants us to concentrate more on the European influences of Ingmar Bergman, not Ingrid. Without Ingmar Bergman, he argues, there would be no Woody Allen. In like fashion, the Hollywood dream machine owes a debt to Georges Méliès, film noir to German expressionism, 1970s movies to the French New Wave, and Martin Scorsese to Sergio Leone. What Pells does with movies he does also to art, music, and architecture. Try imagining Jackson Pollock without Picasso, or Marsden Hartley without Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, or Franz Marc. Can one divorce the skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan from the Eiffel Tower, or Broadway’s floodlit streets from the Champs-Elysées? In a particularly incisive chapter tantalizingly titled “From Rite of Spring to Appalachian Spring (99-129),” Pells shows the connections between challenging composers such as Stravinsky, Bartók, and Debussy and those thought to be quintessentially “American,” such as Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, and Virgil Thompson. Even jazz, Pells reminds us, thrived in expatriate communities in Berlin, Copenhagen, Paris, and Stockholm before it took off in Harlem. Later on the acceptance of be-bop and experimental jazz danced down roads surfaced by Dadaism and surrealism. (And so did Disney!)

The true American genius, Pells argues, lay in controlling the marketplace, not ideas–in “selling modernity (89),” not in inventing it. The issue at hand is hybridization, not Americanization. He holds no truck with Europeans intent upon blithely labeling U.S. imports as cultural imperialism. As he sagely writes, a “willingness to ignore cultural boundaries was at the core of modernism. And it was precisely the blending of highbrow and popular styles that enhanced the appeal of America’s culture for multiethnic and foreign audiences by capturing their varied interests and tastes…. [T]hey were not so much instruments of seduction as ingredients in a hybrid culture, part American and part foreign (401-02).” He ends his study by contemplating the myriad ways in which the rest of the world has caught up to the United States and speculates that postmodernist American culture is unlikely to command the economic hegemony of its modern cousin.

This is an important book. Pells, an emeritus professor from the University of Texas at Austin, has long been at the fore of 20th century cultural studies through works such as Radical Visions and American Dreams (1973) and The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (1985). Some readers may take umbrage with his use of the term “modernism” and, indeed, it sometimes feels as if Pells slaps the label onto everything that occurred in the 20th century. Pells largely views modernism itself as a set of tendencies rather than a hard-fast definition. Is the movie “All the President’s Men,” for example, really a form of film noir? That seems a stretch, and those looking for holes can find them. But then again, who bothers to debate an inconsequential book? Pells argues that what we call 20th century American culture was, at its core, the birth of global culture. Number me among the convinced.

Robert E. Weir

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. By Shirl James Hoffman, Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2010. 978-1-932792-10-2

As the Tim Tebow phenomenon demonstrates, the relationship between religion and sports is a matter of perpetual controversy. Shirl James Hoffman explores this issue in Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. The book is not as comprehensive as the title suggests; the form of Christianity discussed is mainly evangelical Protestantism and the sports are mainly football and basketball. Hoffman does, however, take the tack that the connection between sports and Christianity has been to the detriment of Christianity rather than sports. Hoffman adopts Frank Deford’s formulation that the Christianity in sports is really what he dubs “Sportianity,”(14) a belief system that marries a Christian ethic of self-sacrifice to a “survival of the fittest” mentality that would make Herbert Spencer blush.

Hoffman devotes the first half of her book to the history of the relationship between Christianity and sports, and the second half to contemporary issues. The early church drew a distinction between play, on which the church took no stand, and organized sport (especially the blood sports favored by the Romans), which it rejected. By the ninth century, a tacit approval of play gave rise to liturgical ball games, some of which were the distant ancestors of baseball. Some organized sports, such as jousting, were so embedded in European culture that the church could make little headway against them. Fast-forwarding to the nineteenth century, organized sports took a beating from Southern evangelicals on the grounds that sports encouraged poor behavior and physical violence. Liberal Protestants, especially Washington Gladden of the First Congregational Church of North Adams, Massachusetts, led the charge against revivalism and in favor of the Christian utility of sports. Hoffman argues that three movements made sports acceptable to American Protestants. First was the Social Gospel movement, which linked physical to spiritual health. Second was the growth of the YMCA, which played up sports and downplayed Christianity as a means of getting unruly youths off the streets. Third was the ethic of “Muscular Christianity” which saw team sports as a way to build character, especially unselfishness and self-control. Curiously, Hoffman does not discuss the invention of basketball in this context, even though James Naismith was involved in “Muscular Christianity” and he invented the game in a Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA.

But what sort of character emerges from the fusion of Christianity and sport? Here Hoffman condemns evangelicals for too closely identifying with sports. The central problem, Hoffman believes, is that sports tend to encourage behavior unacceptable outside of a stadium. Hoffman cites the paradox of legendary football coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, who at the same time was held up as a model Christian sportsman and had a reputation as a cheater. To redress the subjugation of religion to sport, Hoffman calls for a more rigid separation of church and stadium. The proper example of the application of Christianity to sport, he argues, occurred in a college softball game where the opposing team helped carry a player who had hit a home run but could not make it to home plate on her own because she injured herself rounding first. While not as comprehensive as the title indicates, this intriguing study could easily be used a course on religious or sports history.

Robert Smith

Worcester State College

The Global Grapevine: Why Rumors of Terrorism, Immigration, and Trade Matter. By Gary Alan Fine and Bill Ellis. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN 9780-19-973631-7.

The Global Grapevine is both humorous and horrifying. Authors Gary Alan Fine (Northwestern) and Bill Ellis (Penn State, emeritus) blend sociology, literature, and folklore to look at the cycle and meaning of rumors in the post-9/11 United States. Theirs is, in part, an update of the pioneering work done in urban folklore by Jan Brunvand in the 1980s and 1990s. As the book’s subtitle suggests, they hone in on three phenomena whose profiles were raised by 9/11: terrorism, immigration, and international trade.

Central to their understanding of how rumors circulate is a distinction between the “politics of credibility” and the “politics of plausibility. (24)” One must be able to imagine a thing before it can become a rumor. The collective angst and fear emanating from the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania made horror scenarios much more plausible, they note, but we should not lose sight of the political motives embedded in spreading or accepting a rumor. Take 9/11. Among the rumors associated with it is the building surfer, the legend that one man escaped doom by surfing the falling debris some 80 stories to safety. It is patently absurd and physically impossible, but metaphorically it reinforces a belief in American superiority, inventiveness, and an indomitable refusal to be defeated. More ominous were rumors whose political motive was to reinforce anti-Arab sentiment: the tale that Arab cab drivers (or employees) were absent from the World Trade Center on 9/11, that “grateful terrorists (32-34)” gave advance warnings to kind strangers, that Arabs danced in the streets in celebration, or that Satan’s face appeared in the rising smoke of the Twin Towers. Each reinforced Arabs as “The Other,” and a dangerous one at that.

Or maybe it was the Jews who were responsible for 9/11. Fine and Ellis show how that 9/11 legend has old roots indeed, including the Black Death hysteria, the Dreyfus trial, and the Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion, a hoary piece of anti-Semitic literature circulating since 1897 (based on an 1864 French satire). The authors link Arab/ Jewish rumors to a larger unease over immigrants and foreigners accelerated by 9/11. Ellis offers a case study of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, a decaying mine town revitalized when a meatpacking firm expanded, and lured thousands of Caribs to the city. They may have literally saved Hazelton, but that’s not the story told by longtime residents who see the newcomers as carriers of disease, drugs, and violence.

Hazelton is part of a larger cycle of American cautionary tales over things such as foreign-made goods and the danger of being an American tourist abroad. Many of the rumors–poisonous snakes in clothing linings, contaminated Corona beer, murderous Hispanic gang initiations, deadly spiders in bananas–are decades-old and nearly all have been debunked by Brunvand and urban legend websites. Current anti-immigrant rumors, for example, bear resemblance to tales such as Mrs. O’Leary’s cow starting the Great Chicago Fire, Typhoid Mary, and 19th-century hysteria over Catholics and the Chinese.

So why do these rumors persist? In part because they simplify that which is complex; in part because rumors insulate racist and nativists by allowing them to speak the unspeakable in disguised form. But rumors are also fed by their plausibility–some Palestinians did celebrate 9/11, Osama bin Laden once did get aid from the United States, some Chinese goods have been contaminated. Fine and Ellis argue that since globalism is here to stay, we can expect more rumors and we should evolve strategies to cope with them. They recommend aggressive challenges to new rumors, though they suspect that time and stability are the greater healers. Like globalism, diversity is also a permanent part of society; we might as well get used to it.

This book is hysterical in both of the common meanings of the word–both funny and frightening. It is exceedingly well written and would work very well in the classroom, a coffee klatch, a community readers’ group, or a breezy private read.

Robert E. Weir

University of Massachusetts Amherst

An Engineer’s Alphabet: Gleanings from the Softer Side of a Profession. By Henry Petroski, Cambridge University Press: New York, 2011.

Henry Petroski is a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke University and the author of some seventeen books. He is a world known scholar on the subject of structural failure, but this, his most recent book is important as a pleasing introductory text in technology and culture studies.

This small book (343 pages, but only 7 ½ inches by 4 ½ inches) is an abecedarian, an introductory work in a field with its subject matter arranged in twenty-six alphabetically ordered chapters. It is coffee table book in everything but size, is well written and entertaining. Sections of it are self-contained so it can be consulted for knowledge or pleasure at any time. The book has more than thirty illustrations and Petroski”s encyclopedic entries make for fun reading. Petroski writes a monthly column for Prism, the magazine of the American Society for Engineering Education, and is a regular contributor to the magazine, American Scientist. One sees reflections of this upon his style as he writes not only for his fellow engineers, but for the general reader as well. It is difficult to make science and engineering clear and understandable, but Petroski achieves this with aplomb.

Petroski’s twenty-six chapters are a display of the breadth and variety of technology and culture studies. The chapters are of varied length. For example, his entry in the “Z” section consists of an entry on Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is a mere two hundred words, while a “B” entry titled “back of the envelope” involves five pages of writing, calculating, and engineering. He justifies giving that much space to the quirky “back of the envelope” entry by explaining that the habit of educated guessing is a necessary but vanishing skill in the field of engineering. Petroski offers a wide range of subjects, including: famous engineers from the ancient past to the present, notable authors who studied engineering, works in film and fiction that feature engineering, famous engineering disasters, and the history of the development of engineering codes of ethics and professional societies. One also finds a brief history of the development of engineering education, and of academic subjects such as material science, engineering science, and engineering drawing. He also details crucial issues in engineering in the twentieth century and challenges for the future of the profession.

Petroski as scholar and practitioner rejects the concept of academic silos and the two- cultures argument that posits that the culture of the arts is different from that of engineering and the sciences, that they have little in common, and that professionals in each are contemptuous of each other. In An Engineer’s Alphabet the reader glimpses the wide range of topics covered by Petroski in his previously published (and voluminous) books, articles, and columns. It is both a good read and an important contribution and introduction to the history of technology and technology and culture studies, one on which you can nibble as much as you want any time you want.

Amos St. Germain

Wentworth Institute of Technology

Fighting the Current: The Rise of American Women’s Swimming, 1870-1926. By Lisa Bier. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7864-4028-3. 220 pp. + photos, notes, bibliography, index.

Who knew that could make such a splash in reconfiguring American gender roles? Lisa Bier, a librarian at Southern Connecticut State University, reminds us that today’s female Olympians owe their right to compete to a pioneering generation of strong-willed women who pushed beyond societal disapproval and slowly shed clothing layers, sexism, and Victorian strictures.

Bier opens with a refreshingly honest admission–that she’s a slow writer and researcher. Her original intent was to write a biography of Gertrude Ederle, the plucky 20-year-old who, in 1926, became the first woman to swim the treacherous English Channel. Before she could complete that work, however, several other biographies hit the market. Much like Ederle, who failed in her first attempt at the Channel, Bier rethought her plan. We can be glad that she did; Fighting the Current gives Ederle’s feat a deeper context than it might otherwise have had.

Swimming is, today, such a routine activity that it may surprise readers to learn that aquatic women were rare for much of Western history. Indeed, among the joys of Bier’s book are the small details that we often overlook. Even most fishermen’s wives knew how to swim, though they lived by the coast and routinely rowed out to sea in small boats. Clothing proved a major obstacle. Boys and men often stripped naked to take the plunge, but society would countenance no such boldness from women. Many readers have probably laughed at old photos of 19th century bathing costumes for women, but have we stopped to consider that these were for the beach, not the water? As Bier relates, many of these were made of wool and, once wet, would have added as much as 45 pounds to a swimmer’s body weight. That is, if she could stay afloat at all; many of the costumes billowed and filled with water. Late Victorian water maidens fought knockdown battles with moralists merely for the right to strip off stockings and ditch attached skirts! Those who wished to swim competitively–as opposed to paddling about in sex-segregated bathing platforms in an age before most homes had running water–faced challenges such as aspersions on their femininity, dire medical prognoses, and a host of structural obstacles.

Obstacles came in both physical and ideological forms. There were few swimming pools in the late 19th century, nor were there many water treatment facilities. Urban swimmers, such as those who formed the influential New York Women’s Swimming Association, dove into rivers fouled with sewage, dead animals, and toxic waste. And even when young women proved their mettle in various amateur races and exhibitions they faced institutional discrimination. Pierre de Coubertin created the modern Olympic games in 1896, but women were barred; none would swim until the 1920 Antwerp games.

Bier’s story is one of women’s steely determination to dive through gender barriers. It was this, after all, that made Ederle’s feat possible in the first place. Ederle is the focus of the final third of the book, but most readers are likely to find more revelations in the short biographies of less-remembered pioneers such as Charlotte Boyle, Ethel Golding, Annette Kellerman, Helen Meany, Rose Pitonof, Ailenn Riggin, and Helen Wainwright. As for Ederle, the story of her post-Channel life is, in many ways, as fascinating as her big swim. Suffice it to say, Ederle was an early victim of celebrity and what we today call paparazzi culture.

Bier is strongest when telling stories and recounting detail, though one longs for a bit more hard-hitting analysis in the book. For instance, the National Women’s Lifesaving League helped smooth the waters for competitive swimmers. Placing it in the context of social housekeeping theory would help illumine why that was able to do so. Nor does Bier pay attention to sexuality; part of the brief against women’s swimming clubs involved whispered rumors of lesbianism. Nonetheless, this seemingly modest book is so rich that it sneaks up on you like a racer making a charge to the finish.

Robert E. Weir

University of Massachusetts Amherst

CULTURE NUGGETS

By Rob Weir

A few thoughts on four new books–let’s call them two hits and two misses. Shamus Rahman Khan published a book I never thought I’d enjoy: Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton University Press). My initial thought was, who wants to read about a bunch of pampered rich kids? I was wrong. Khan both attended and taught at St. Paul’s in Concord, New Hampshire before moving on to Columbia. His is both a participant and a participant observer’s view of how elites are constructed, and a vital reminder that kids are still kids, even when they are being inexorably socialized for a predetermined role. It’s a book about hormones, social roles, peer pressure, racial identity, and social class. I highly recommend it, and it would work well in a sociology class.

Lois Harrison Kahan, The White Negress (Rutgers University Press) explores the collision between black and Jewish culture in early 20th century America. That’s not new ground, but Kahan vividly illustrates the elision with examples from literature and the vaudeville stage. She also looks at both sides of the coin by looking at the compromises and enhancements made by black artists such as Zora Neale Hurston when they engaged in “interethnic exchanges.” Kahan also intriguingly argues that Jewish performers such as Sophie Tucker symbolically donned blackface as a way of asserting authority generally reserved for Jewish men. I’m less persuaded by empowerment arguments for those Jewish artists who literally donned blackface, but I confess skepticism over that line of argument from all who have advanced it. Read Kahan’s fine book and make up your own mind about what it means when Jewish and black cultures intersect.

There was a time in which Jimmy Breslin was viewed as a pathbreaking writer and a gritty and sardonic observer of American culture; that time was the 1970s. His newest book, Branch Rickey (Viking), is a rambling look at the man best known for signing Jackie Robinson. Breslin knows how to mine the archives for tasty anecdotes, but there’s not much here that baseball fans don’t already know. And Breslin’s chatty non-linear writing seems both dated and more suited for a talk show couch.

Mark Gornik, Word Made Global: Stories of African Christianity in New York City (Erdmans) takes us inside three New York churches: the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, the Church of the Lord (Aladura), and the Redeemed Christian Church of God International Chapel. The first body is mainstream and located in Harlem, the second is Pentecostal and situated in the Bronx, and the third is in Brooklyn, but is part of a citywide network of churches that dabble in faith healing and actively proselytize. Gornik’s first chapter discusses the globalization of African Christianity and is, in my estimation, the book’s most useful part. We meet the pastors and congregants of the three churches under discussion, but the portrait is that of Christian churches that happen to have African immigrants in them. I was more interested in why that matters rather than probing varieties of faith. Gornik is the director of City Seminary and is, naturally, more focused on religious doctrine than ethnography. Fair enough, but wouldn’t most readers want to know how these churches would look different if attendees were, for example, white people from the Ukraine?

FINANCIAL CONTRIBUTIONS WELCOME

NEPCA is a nonprofit organization registered in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Our operating expenses come from conference fees, membership dues, and your donations. If you’d like to make a donation (tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law) please mail a check to: NEPCA, c/o Robert Weir, Executive Secretary, 15 Woods Road, Florence, MA 01062.

NEPCA ARCHIVE

NEPCA maintains a permanent archive at Worcester Polytechnic Institute library. If you have materials you think should be archived, please contact Rob Weir: weir.r@ Those seeking to access archived NEPCA materials should contact: Rodney Obien, Archivist, W. P. I., Gordon Library, 100 Institute Road, Worcester, MA 01609.

 

NEPCA JOURNAL

NEPCA maintains an electronic journal that provides the latest news, conference details, and professional information for its members. Details on professional conferences, scholarly opportunities, calls for papers, grants, etc. now appear in the online NEPCA Journal, which is updated regularly and is not as time sensitive as the newsletter. NEPCA Journal also publishes peer-reviewed book reviews. Check out NEPCA Journal at:

Please also note that NEPCA Journal is not the same as the NEPCA Website. You should still consult the latter for all information that relates to the business side of NEPCA.

The Website URL is:

The NEPCA Journal URL is:

Book reviews are actively sought for the peer-reviewed online journal. Contact Rob Weir if you’d like to write one (or more!): weir.r@

Your Accomplishments: Please let NEPCA know if you’ve published a book or an article, presented a paper, won an award, or gotten a promotion so we can share the news with your friends and colleagues.

NORTHEAST POPULAR CULTURE/

AMERICAN CULTURE ASSOCIATION OFFICERS

President 2012 Don Gagnon (WCSU)

Past President 2011 David Tanner (MCPHS

Executive Secretary/Editor Robert Weir (UMass-Amherst)

Program Chair 2011 Conference Tim Madgian (St. John Fisher)

Executive Council [term expires] Carol Mitchell (Springfield College) [2014]

Jennifer Tebbe-Grossman (MCPHS) [2012]

Carol-Ann Farkas (MCPHS) [2013]

Lance Eaton [2013]

Virginia Cowen (Univ. of Dentistry of NJ) [2013]

NEPCA WebSite:

See the NEPCA Website for a list of past presidents as well as past conference sites.

TENTATIVE CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Note: Only those papers designated by an asterisk (*) have been confirmed as of the press time for NEPCA News (August 1). Those seeking official confirmation of presentations should pick up the final conference schedule, which will be distributed upon registration.

Deans, department chairs, and others seeking to confirm the actual attendance of those listed on the program should contact Executive Secretary Robert Weir after the conference.

Session One: Friday, October 26, 2012: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM

Registration: Registration will begin at 2 pm in Basil Hall: Golisano Midway Level.

American Literature

Chair: Rose De Angleis, Marist College

*Rose De Angelis (Marist College): “Transforming Womanhood in Louisa Ermelino’s The Sisters Mallone”

Dustin Hannum (University of Rochester): “Identities Politics: Sheppard Lee, Sentimentality, and the Antebellum Problem of Personhood”

Sanna Oh (Ewha Womens University): “Mothers May Soar in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon”

Richard J. Gerber (Independent Scholar): “Goo Goo Goo Joob!:The John Lennon/James Joyce Connection Through Lewis Carroll’s “Looking-Glass”

Comics and Graphic Novels I:

Chair: TBA

Bond Benton and Daniela Peterka-Benton (SUNY Fredonia): “When the Abyss Looks Back: Treatments of Human Trafficking in Superhero Comic Books”

*Paul J. Spaeth and Phillip G. Payne (St. Bonaventure University): “Jack Kirby’s (Captain) Americans”

Charles Natoli (St. John Fisher College): “Little Orphan Annie and Conservative Politics”

Global Cultures:

Chair: TBA

Daisy V. Domínguez (The City College of New York): “Native American Athletes and Sports on on Film: Intercultural Dialogs”

*Emma Elise Pierce Schell (Independent Scholar): “Considering Digital Borders: Online Fans (of Korean Dramas) and Transnational Identity”

Emma Dassori (Pine Manor College): “Gozzi and the Commedia dell’Arte: Salvaging the Sacchi Company”

*Lois Ascher (Wentworth Institute of Technology): “‘Sharing Strangers’: Strangers in the Village”

Marketing and Advertising:

Chair: TBA

Tiffany Knoell (Bowling Green State): “Quality You Should Know: Advertising and Warner Bros. Animation, 1931-1941”

*Robert MacGregor (Bishops University): “Rat Poison Advertising in America: The First 100 Years”

Christian Nelson (Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences): “Dove and the Beauty Double Bind”

Philosophy I: Ethics and Popular Culture:

Chair: Tim Madigan, St. John Fisher College

*Tim Delaney (SUNY-Oswego): “Street Gang Portrayal in Popular Culture”

*Gerald J. Erion (Medaille College): “Through the Fun-House Mirror: Jon Stewart on TV’s Entertainment Bias”

*Tim Madigan (St. John Fisher College: “‘And Good-Bye to You Too, Old Rights of Man’: Ethical Dilemmas and Billy Budd”

Religion:

Chair: TBA

*Tim Davis (Columbus State): “Monk’s Bread: The History of the Commercial Bakery at the Abbey of the Genesee”

*Sabatino DiBernardo (University of Central Florida): “A Religion Problem: Classification and the Pathologizing of the Religio-Political Other”

*Jim Y. Trammell (High Point University): “Selling Entertainment and Salvation: Thoughts Toward Analyzing Christian Media Marketing”

Visual Culture and Digital Media I:

Chair: Tom Proeitti, St. John Fisher College

Tom Proietti (St. John Fisher College): “The Social Revolution: The Future of Media”, a Panel Discussion with 4 Rochester Media Experts

War and Culture: When the Battle is Over: Wars and Their Aftermath

Chair: Mark Van Ells, Queensborough Community College

*Kyle Reinson (St. John Fisher College) and *Carolyn Vacca (St. John Fisher College): “American Hero, Meet Corporate Culture: America’s First Veteran-Owned Radio Station and the Struggle for Identity”

Ginger Cucolo (Independent Scholar): “History of Dog Tags”

*Steven Gardiner (Zayed University): “In the Shadow of Service: Veteran Masculinity and Civil-Military Disjuncture in the United States”

5:15-6 PM Wine and Cheese Reception: 5:15-6 PM

6:00- 7:00 PM Keynote Session

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:

SCOTT EBERLE

Dr. Scott Eberle is Vice President for Play Studies at The Strong Museum and editor of the American Journal of Play. He holds a doctorate in Cultural History from the University at Buffalo, and has developed dozens of exhibits for The Strong’s National Museum of Play, lectured widely on historical interpretation, and contributed articles to the American Journal of Play, the Journal of Museum Education, Death Studies, and History News. He is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of four books, including Classic Toys of the National Toy Hall of Fame: A Celebration of the Greatest Toys of All Time! Currently he is co-editing Handbook of the Study of Play, slated for publication in 2014.

Saturday October 27, 2012

Registration: Begins at 8 am in Basil Hall: Golisano Midway Level. Registration is ongoing throughout the day, but coffee and refreshments will be served to those who arrive before Saturday’s first session.

Session Two: Saturday, October 27, 2012: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM

Dance I: Rewriting Dance’s Recent History: The Performance of American Cultures

Chair: Maura Keefe, The College at Brockport

*Maura Keefe (The College at Brockport): “Gender Warriors or Dying Swans?: A Historiography of and by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo”

*Elizabeth Osborn (The College at Brockport): “Democracy as Both Noun and Verb: The Explicit Politics of Judson Dance Theatre”

Karl Rogers (the College at Brockport): “A Camp Site of Desire: Paul Swan Dances Queerly”

Ethnic and Race Studies I

Chair: Mark Madigan, Nazareth College

*Alan D. Meyer (Auburn University): “’A Rare Bird….’: Race, Masculinity, and the Community of Pilots in Postwar America”

Nicole Bishop (Niagara University): “White Masculinity in the 21st Century Imagination: The Moral Code of the Reluctant Outlaw on Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy”

Daniel McNeil (DePaul University): “‘We can’t disguise the fact that there are Black people in the film’: White Liberals, Black Radicals and the Neoliberal Revolution”

Gender, Identity, Sex and Sexuality I: (In)Visible Men: Queer Performativity and Theatricality

Chair: Donald Gagnon, Western Connecticut State University

*Ryan M. Burns (University of Rhode Island): “Make a Man Out of You”: Masculine Subjectivities in the Films of the “New Disney Era”

* Stefanie Goyette (Harvard University): “Travestied Words, Illegible Genders: Transvestism and Interpretation in the Old French Fabliaux”

TBA

Health, Disease and Physical Culture I: Contextual Interpretations of Health and Illness

Chair: Jennifer Tebbe-Grossman, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

Sophie Freestone (University of Chicago): “the Pestilence of London: Women, Hygiene, Prostitution and Pollution”

Virginia S. Cowen (University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey): “The War for Health”

*Nicole C. Wertz Edinboro University of Pennsylvania) and Chris J. Minns (Indiana University of Pennsylvania): “The Framing of Health in Health Magazines”

Science Fiction, Fantasy and Legend I: Visions of the Future

Chair: Michael Torregrossa, Independent Scholar

*Cory Matieyshen (National University): “Bert the Turtle Won't Save You: American Science Fiction Prose and Criticism of Nuclear Civil Defense During the 1950s”

*Derek Newman-Stille (Trent University): “Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl In The Ring and the Use of Speculative Fiction to Disrupt Singular Interpretations of Place”

Özüm Ünal (Bahçeşehir University): “Mothering the ‘Other’: Representation of the Decentered Bodies in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men”

Shannon Tarango (University of California Riverside): “Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games As a work of Dystopian Young Adult (YA) Fiction And The Politics of Resistance”

Sports I: Field of Dreams: Minor League Baseball

Chair: Robert Weir, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Frank A. Salamone (Iona College): “Growing Up with the Rochester Red Wings in the Forties and Fifties”

*Joseph Price (Whittier College): “Out on a Wing: Reading Frontier Field”

*Robert Weir (University of Massachusetts Amherst): “Chicks Dig the Long Ball, but GMs Prefer a High OBS”

Session Three: Saturday, October 27, 2012: 10:15 AM-11:45 AM

Comics and Graphic Novels II:

Chair: TBA

*Lindsey M. Hanlon (Boston College): “Picturing the Enemy: The Construction of the Islamic Other in Post-9/11 Comic Anthologies”

Alicia Remolde and Kristen Julia Anderson (Montclair State University): “Muted Mutant Powers: Gender Inequality in Marvel’s X-Men Universe”

TBA

Dance II: Dance in Popular Culture

Chair: Maura Keefe, The College at Brockport

Amanda McCullum (The College at Brockport): “American Reality Shows: Bodily Agency and the ‘Other’”

Oluyinka Akinjiola (The College at Brockport): “Dancing the Orishas: Exporting a Constructed Form of Popular Culture from Havana to Arcata”

*Kevin S. Warner (The College at Brockport): “The Visible Effects of So You Think You Can Dance: Reactions to a Popular Culture Phenomenon in Dance Education”

*Janet Schroeder (The College at Brockport): “Hybrid or Happenstance?: Vernacular Dance Traditions in Mexico and Appalachia”

Ethnic and Race Studies II

Chair: Mark Madigan, Nazereth College

Samantha Earley (Indiana University Southeast): “Evangelizing Political and Social Change for Nineteenth Century African American People: A Reading of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw’s Spiritual Autobiography Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labors of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw”

Chrystel Pit (University of Massachusetts-Lowell): “KLVL, la voz latina: Radio as an Ambassador of Racial Tolerance in Houston, Texas, 1950s-1980s”

Stacy Shaneyfelt: “Beauty and the Beast: An Exploration of the Ugly American Myth and the Postcolonial Otherness in Lahiri’s ‘Interpreter of Maladies’”

Gender, Identity, Sex and Sexuality II: Men on the Margins: Masking Sexuality In and Behind the Prose

Chair: Donald Gagnon, Western Connecticut State University

Benjamin Welton (West Virginia University): “Unmasking the Other: Political and Racial Others in Selected Transatlantic Fiction, 1922-1935”

*Ryan Segura (Independent Scholar): “Detecting The Phallus: Homosocial Bonding in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and A Study in Scarlet”

*Heidi Wallace (Buffalo State College): “The Objective Death of Reinaldo Arenas”

Health, Disease and Physical Culture II:

Chair: Carol-Ann Farkas, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy And Health

Carolyn Roy-Bornstein, MD (Tufts University School of Medicine): “The Other Side of the Stretcher: A Pediatrician/Mother Examines Injury, Illness and Loss from a New Patient Perspective”

*Victoria Longino (Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences): “‘The Building’ and God’s Hotel: Contrasts in Modern Medicine and Lessons in Empathy”

*Sandra Dutkowsky (Ithaca College): “The ‘Unpresentable’ in Illness Narratives”

Science Fiction, Fantasy and Legend II: Old Legends, New Stories

Chair: Michael Torregrossa, Independent Scholar

Mary Bridgeman (Trinity College Dublin): “Complex subjects in Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood”

*Laura Wiebe (McMaster University): “Witches, Elves, and Bioengineers: Magic and Science in Kim Harrison’s The Hollows”

*Kathleen Mulligan (Providence College): “Robin Hood: from ‘History’ to Folklore and Back Again”

Michael Torregrossa (Independent Scholar): “Once and Future Kings Revisited:The Theme of Arthur Redivivus in Recent Arthuriads of the Comics Medium”

Sports II: The Politics and Economics of Baseball

Chair: Robert Weir, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Michael Lomax (University of Iowa): “A Reshuffling Market: The Pacific Coast League’s Efforts to Become a Third Major League and How the Braves Made Milwaukee Famous”

Michael Haupert (University of Wisconsin La Crosse): “The Demand for Baseball and the Growth of the Entertainment Business”

*Bradley A. Rogers (LeHigh University): “Dispatches From the Heart of the Reagan Era”

11:45-1:10 Lunch, Annoucements, and Awards

Session Four: Saturday, October 27, 2012: 1:15 PM-2:45 PM

Gender, Identity, Sex and Sexuality III: Nationhood/Personhood: Latino, Latina, and Spaces Between

Chair: Donald Gagnon, Western Connecticut State University

*Joelle Mann (Buffalo State College): “Women of Epic Proportions: Speaking from the Borders of a Dominican-American Epic”

*Katie Grainger (University of Washington): “A Discursive Analysis of the Contemporary Representations of the Femme Fatale in Hollywood and Latin American Film”

Melanie Huska (University of Minnesota Twin Cities): “Illegitimacy and Redemption: Gendered Representations of the Nation in Mexican Historical Telenovelas”

Health, Disease and Physical Culture III: The Writers and Readers Circle:  Vital Signs from Popular Culture and Beyond

The Writers and Readers Circle is an informal session that anyone attending the NEPCA conference may participate in by reading from their own or from another author’s creative and expressive writing related to health care.  Attendees are welcome to read and reflect on their own health care related writing (poetry, excerpts from longer works such as short stories, memoirs, narratives--published, unpublished, in progress, incubating, etc.) to an interested, supportive audience.  Attendees may also read and comment on writing by other authors from popular culture/American culture and beyond and from contemporary and earlier times on subjects that reflect on health care from such perspectives as those of patients, caregivers, family, etc.  The Writers and Readers Circle Chair will facilitate the session.  Please bring your writing and favorite literature to the conference.

 

Chair: Christine Parkhurst, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences

Christine.Parkhurst@mcphs.edu

History and Uses of the Past I

Chair: TBA

Alyssa Anderson (New York University): “Nunca Más: The Role of Narrative in Creating Justice in Post-Dirty War Argentina”

Dougie Bicket (St. John Fisher College): “Staying above the Fray: The Strange Case of the National Park Service in an Era of Hyper-partisanship”

*Allyson Perry (West Virginia University): “’Soon the Feminine Sex Invaded the Teaching Ranks’: The New Woman and Gender in Late-Nineteenth-Century West Virginia “

*Alexander Simmeth (University of Hamburg Germany): “‘Krautrock’ and the Transnationalization of Popular Culture”

Philosophy II: Philosophy and the Zeitgeist

Chair: Tim Madigan, St. John Fisher College

*Patricia Drumright (Monroe Community College): “The Phantom of the Opera: Spectacular Musical or Archetypal Story?”

Ryan M. Dahl (Independent Scholar): “All Joking Aside: Interpreting the Joker as a Sane and Philosophically-Driven Entity”

*Joseph Marren (Buffalo State College): “The Mertonian Journalist”

David White (St. John Fisher College): “Philosophy: Popular, Professional, and Curative”

Science and Technology

Chair: Amos St. Germain, Wentworth Institute of Technology

*Dana W. Paxson (Independent Scholar): “Convergences and Collisions: Literature, Technology, Publishing, Visions, Inventions, by One Author”

*Frank Rooney (Wentworth Institute of Technology): “The Betrayal of Technology or the Aphrodisiac of Power: An Essay”

*Lita Tirak (College of William and Mary): “The X-Ray Lady: Surveillance and Identity of the New Woman"

Sports III: Reinforcing and Challenging Norms

Chair: TBA

Michael L. Thomas (University of Chicago): “Within the Code: Rugby and the Ethics of Sport”

*Laura Troiano (Rutgers): “Everybody’s Neighborhood Stadium: Memory and Baseball in Newark, NJ”

Donghyuk Sin (University of Iowa): “Alone in the Middle of Nowhere: Stories of the Cultural Plight of Korean Minor League Baseball Players”

*Dominic Longo (Independent Scholar): “The Circus Comes to Town: Hank Aaron and the Indianapolis Clowns in Buffalo”

Visual Culture and Digital Media II:

Chair: TBA

*Justin LaLiberty (Independent Scholar): “XXX Parodies, Spectatorship, Fandom and the Public Acceptance of Eros Iconography”

*Robert Niemi (St. Michael’s College): ““Fascist Kitsch: Reprising the 'Art' of Thomas Kinkade"

*Brian Peterson (Shasta College): “Watching Swing Music: Visual Culture of the American Dance Orchestra, 1935-1941”

Session Five: Saturday, October 27, 2012: 3:00 PM-4:30 PM

Gender, Identity, Sex and Sexuality IV: Violence and Gender Issues in Film

Chair: Donald Gagnon, Western Connecticut State University

Chelsea Daggett (Boston University): “The Importance of Psychoanalytic Feminism to Post-feminism: Sucker Punch”

Diana Direiter (Independent Scholar): “Pow! Right in the Kisser: Why is Violence Against Women Entertaining?”

Zehui Dai (University of Arkansas): “Captivity Narratives and the Positions of Female Captives in Soldier Blue and Dances with Wolves”

*David Tanner (Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences): “Cape Fear and Cuckoo’s Nest: Cultural Discourse on Dangerous Men”

History and Uses of the Past II

Chair: James Belpedio, Becker College

*Cynthia B. Ricciardi (Independent Scholar): “Genealogy in the 21st Century: The Dramatic Potential of Lineage”

John Woolsey: “Picturing and Policing the Catastrophe: The Neohumanitarian Imaginary and the Haitian Earthquake of 2010”

James R. Belpedio (Becker College): “Lux Presents Noir: The Presentation of Film Noir Adaptation to Radio on ‘Lux Radio Theater’”

Thomas Grace (Erie Community College): “Kent State Revisited”

Music

Chair: Christopher Culp, University of Buffalo

*Christine A. Kelly (George Washington University): “‘A Link in a Chain:’ An Audiotopic Analysis of Pete Seeger, 1955 – 1962”

Zachary Richter (Western Connecticut State University): “Revealing the Spectacle Between Bass Drops: a Situationist Reading of Nero”

*Adam Szetela (University of Massachusetts Amherst: “‘Go to Obama Rallies Screamin' Out McCain!’: An Exploration of Tyler the Creator, Post-Race Hip-Hop, and Minstrel Performance in the 21st-Century”

Christopher Culp (University at Buffalo): “No-place Like Queer Utopia: Failed Optimism in Musical Theatre”

Television

Chair: Carol Mitchell, University of Massachusetts

*Tom Gallagher (La Salle University): “Leverage and Alcohol Addiction”

*Andrea McClanahan (East Stroudsburg University of PA): “Is Prince Charming Still a Prince?: A Critical Analysis of the Portrayals of Prince Charming and Masculinity in Current Television Programming”

*Todd Sodano (St. John Fisher College): “The West Wing”

*Amos St. Germain (Wentworth Institute of Technology): “WOOF: Rin Tin Tin and the Hero Dogs”

Visual Culture and Digital Media III:

Chair: TBA

*Jeremy Sarachan (St. John Fisher College): “’Missing Daddy’: The Exclusion of Fathers in Mainstream Parenting Magazines”

Leah Shafer (Hobart and William Smith Colleges): “I Can Haz an Internet Aesthetic?!? LOLCats and the Digital Marketplace”

*Don Vescio (Worcester State University): “Digital Memory Never Forgets”

*Diane Williamson (Independent Scholar): “Children’s Television and Emotional Literacy”

EXECUTIVE COUNCIL MEETING:

Executive Council Meeting: 4-5 pm, Location TBA at luncheon

NEPCA board members (unless chairing a panel) will gather at 4 to decide matters upon which only board members can vote (as per NEPCA bylaws). A brief general meeting will be held at the rise of the final session, which any NEPCA member is invited to attend and give input. Issues will include:

• Election of new executive board members

• Initial assessment of the conference

• Updates on future conferences

• Vote to accept invitation of St. Michael’s College

• Vote to appoint program and arrangements chairs

• Treasury and membership report

• Development of a presentation template

• Does NEPCA need a policy on panel presentations? Should these count as papers?

NORTHEAST POPULAR CULTURE/

AMERICAN CULTURE ASSOCIATION

MEMBERSHIP AND REGISTRATION FORM

35th ANNUAL CONFERENCE:

St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY

NAME ..................................................................................................

MAILING ADDRESS...................................................................................

………………………………………………………………………………

ZIP CODE ………………………

OFFICE PHONE NUMBER ……………………………………

CELL PHONE…………………………

E-MAIL……………………………………..

MEMBERSHIP: NEW.......... RENEWAL......... (Check One)

AFFILIATION....................................................................

RANK…………………………………

SPECIALIZATION.........................................................................................

FEES:

Please mail your personal check (payable to NEPCA) by October 10 (if not on the program) to:

Robert E. Weir. Ph.D.

NEPCA Executive Secretary

15 Woods Road

Florence, MA 01062

Please Note: Fees must be paid by either personal check or in cash. NEPCA cannot process credit card or PayPal transactions.

NEPCA receives no membership fees from the Popular Culture Association of America or the American Culture Association. We meet all operating expenses from our conference revenue; hence presenters must join NEPCA in order to give papers.

( ) CONFERENCE and LUNCH REGISTRATION by mail............................$70

Fees for full-time faculty

( ) CONFERENCE and LUNCH REGISTRATION by mail............................$60

Fees for adjuncts, graduate students, independent scholars, retired

( ) CONFERENCE REGISTRATION in person..........................................$80/$70

( ) FRIDAY RECEPTION....................................................................Yes ( ) No ( )

( ) ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP DUES

For full-time faculty………………………......................................$30

( ) ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP DUES

For graduate students, undergraduate, adjuncts, retired, independent scholars,

Emeritus faculty, part-time ..................................................................$15

( ) LIFE or INSTITUTIONAL MEMBERSHIP................................................$150

( ) NEPCA FUND CONTRIBUTION (tax deductible)..……………………….$............

TOTAL CHECK (IN US FUNDS)...........................................................$.............

Please note in which hotel/motel you made reservations:

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