What are the new stories waiting to be told about the history of literary study, its critical fields, and its key techniques and methods? How does this moment of genuine existential crisis for universities impact our relationship to these histories? We address these questions in a day-long symposium gathering scholars who have made the study of humanistic practices, techniques, and disciplines central to their work. Our conversations will open up on several nodes of related interest: rethinking the past and projecting the future of literary studies’ bedrock technique, ‘close reading’; comparing the computational methods and digital humanities of the early 20th and early 21st centuries; examining the long history of “the Global Anglophone” as a literary field; and revisiting the particular pasts of two anchors of the contemporary humanities, Black Studies and Queer Theory.

Participants include: Sarah Allison (Loyola), Elaine Auyoung (Minnesota), Marina Bilbija (Wesleyan), Brian Glavey (South Carolina), Chase Gregory (Bucknell), Yohei Igarashi (UConn), Benjamin Kahan (Louisiana State), David Nee (Louisiana State), Mathias Iroro Orhero (Louisiana State), Casey Patterson (Louisiana State), Joel Rhone (Louisiana), Christopher Rovee (Louisiana State), Jessica Valdez (Louisiana State), Johanna Winant (West Virginia), and Olivia Xu (Northwestern).

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Sponsored by LSU’s Department of English, Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the LSU College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the LSU Humanities Center