Extended Deadline: NYU CALC "Networked New York," Mar. 9, 2012 (deadline Jan. 5)

"Networked New York" - call for papers

The Colloquium in American Literature and Culture at New York University invites proposals for our 2012 spring conference, "Networked New York." This symposium will take place on Friday, March 9, 2012, and will feature a keynote address by Marvin Taylor, Director of Fales Library & Special Collections and founder of the Downtown New York Collection.

We envision this conference as a forum for examining systems of interrelation among writers and artists who live, work, commune, and clash in New York City, whether physical New York (the city's buildings, streetscapes, neighborhoods), digitized New York (its blogs, websites, tweets), or institutional New York (its libraries, archives, museums). We aim to enable discussion about literary, artistic, and intellectual coteries in New York – past and present – and to consider the influence of such communities on the cultural production the city generates as well as on the city itself. To these ends, we hope to include papers from a range of historical and disciplinary contexts.

Our keynote panel will probe the specific concerns that the geographies and institutional landscapes of New York City bring to bear on archives and collecting in both contemporary and historical contexts. To this end, we also seek papers that may address similar subjects, particularly radical archives in New York and/or key strategies for making and using contemporary archives in the city. How does one address the archival presence or absence of certain communities or spaces in New York City?

Other potential paper topics include but are not limited to explorations of the following:

- Neighborhood dynamics and artistic communities


- Collaborations among artists, writers, readers, viewers


- Circulation of ideas and materials


- New York street life and material culture


- Urban space and identity


- Sites, scenes, and modes of interaction


- Digital media and the city

Please send a brief CV and abstract, 300-500 words in length, to Annie Abrams and Blevin Shelnutt atnyucalc@gmail.com by January 5, 2012. Please direct any questions about the conference to this address.