Radical Print Cultures in the US South
University of Leeds and online, Thursday, 15 February, 2024
Keynote speaker: Sharon Monteith, Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Cultural History, Nottingham Trent University.
In 2017, Jonathan Daniel Wells argued that the future of Southern intellectual history should focus on periodicals. While American print culture studies has firmly cemented itself in academia, with recent surveys of the field including New Directions in Print Culture Studies (2022) and Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (2019), as well as studies of individual publications and movements such as E. James West’s A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago (2022), print culture in the South continues to be understudied in spite of the production of a variety of culturally significant and high profile journals, book publishers, and magazines in the region. We are witnessing a growing interest in Southern print culture studies, largely from the University of Georgia Press’s ‘Print Culture in the South’ book series. This hybrid conference on ‘Radical Print Cultures in the US South’ seeks to explore what kinds of protest and activist cultures existed in the South, how print culture was used as a means of engaging in political struggle in a region so often associated with backwardness and conservatism, and to centre the role of countercultural movements in landmark events in US history and culture.
The conference brings together a diverse group of international scholars from literature, history and communications to explore the topic, and includes a keynote lecture by Distinguished Professor Sharon Monteith (Nottingham Trent University). The event is generously supported by BAAS and the Bibliographic Society.
All welcome to join us either in person or online! Please visit our webpage for programme and registration details.
For any enquiries, please contact Dr Sian Round and Amanda Stafford (conference co-coordinators) at: southernradicalprintcultures@gmail.com
