The Institute for Critical US Studies is pleased to announce the schedule of its inaugural conference, “Reconstituting the U.S.,” February 24-26.

As part of the conference program, we will be offering three seminars, each led by one of the three keynote speakers, Rosa-Linda Fregoso (Chair of Latin American and Latina/o Studies at UCSC), Neil Smith (Dept of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at CUNY), and Steven Hahn (department of History at the University of Pennsylvania).

Since attendance at the seminars is limited to 25, we ask that you RSVP (to clight@duke.edu) by February 10 at the latest if you plan to attend.
(seminar readings are posted below)

See below for a full conference schedule:
(for information on PARKING)

Thurs (2/24)
3-5pm
230 Franklin Center:: Seminar #1, led by Neil Smith
Readings:
*H.D. Harootunian and Masao Miyoshi, Introduction: The "Afterlife" of Area Studies, from Miyoshi and Harootunian, eds., Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Duke U Press, 2002)
*Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman, "Futures," from Wiegman and Pease, eds., The Futures of American Studies (Duke U Press, 2002)
*Joel Beinin, "Wise Words on Deaf Ears" from Index on Censorship (3) 2003
* Neil Smith, "The Lost Geography of the American Century," American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (UC Press, 2003)

7-9pm
230 Franklin Center:: Seminar #2, led by Steven Hahn
Readings:
* W.E.B. DuBois, "The Propaganda of History" from Black Reconstruction
*E.P. Thompson, "The Sale of Wives," from Customs in Common
*Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past, Preface and Ch1, Ch2 (optional), and Ch3

Friday (2/25)
12-2pm
230 Franklin Center:: Seminar #3, led by Rosa Linda Fregoso
Readings:
*Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics" from Public Culture 15 (1) (Duke U Press, 2003)
*Saskia Sassen, "The Repositioning of Citizenship", from Berkeley Journal of Sociology (2004)
*Gayatri Spivak, "Collectivities," from Death of a Discipline (Columbia U Press, 2003)
*Wendy Brown, "Suffering the Paradoxes of Rights" from Wendy Brown & Janet Halley, eds. Left Legalism/Left Critique (Duke U Press, 2002)
*Rosa Linda Fregoso, chapter one from meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (UC Press, 2003)

4:30-6:30pm
240 Franklin Center:: Opening comments by Jan Radway, directly followed by
Keynote #1- Steven Hahn, "Grassroots and the Transnational"
Response by Maurice Wallace

6:30-8:30pm
Reception in the Franklin Center Basement Cafe

Saturday (2/26)
10am-12pm
Rare Book Room, Perkins Library
Keynote #2- Rosa-Linda Fregoso, "'We want them alive!': Collectivities and the culture of Human Rights"
Response by Ian Baucom

1:30-3:30pm
Rare Book Room
Keynote #3- Neil Smith, "Beyond Global/Local: Remaking Area Knowledge and the New Geography of Empire"
(followed by response and discussion)
Response by Wahneema Lubiano

4-6pm
Rare Book Room
Roundtable Discussion: “Reconstituting the US”
Discussants: John Jackson (Duke, Cultural Anthropology), Joy Kasson (UNC, American Studies), Sarah Shields (UNC, History), and Laura Wexler (Yale, American Studies and Women's and Gender Studies)

Keynote Speaker Bios:

Rosa Linda Fregoso is Professor and Chair of Latin American & Latina/o
Studies at University of California at Santa Cruz. She received her PhD in
Comparative Studies, Language, Society, and Culture from the University of
California, San Diego. Her research interests include theories of
representation, cinema and media, cultural studies, and transnational
feminist studies. Her publications include meXicana encounters: The Making
of Social Identities on the Borderlands, (University of California Press,
2003), The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Works by Lourdes Portillo, (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2001), Miradas de mujer, Co-Edited with Norma
Iglesias, (Tijuana/Berkeley: CLRC and Colegio de la Frontera-Norte, 1998),
and The Bronze Screen. Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Before coming to Academia, Professor
Fregoso worked as a radio and television journalist. Between 1979-1982,
she produced and hosted “The Mexican American Experience" for the Longhorn
Radio Network (an NPR affiliate). A weekly radio-program, "The Mexican
American Experience," aired nationally on public and commercial radio
stations. From 1977-79, she produced and hosted "Telecorpus," a daily
talkshow that aired on KORO-TV.

Steven Hahn is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History at the
University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University and
is a specialist on the social and political history of nineteenth-century
America, on the history of the American South, and on the comparative
history of slavery and emancipation. He is the author of The Roots of
Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia
Upcountry, 1850-1890 (Oxford University Press, 1983), coeditor (with
Jonathan Prude) of The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation:
Essays in the Social History of Rural America (University of North Carolina
Press, 1985); and (with Steven Miller, Susan O'Donovan, John Rodrigue, and
Leslie Rowland) of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation,
1861-1867. Series III: Land and Labor in 1865 (Cambridge University Press,
2004). Professor Hahn’s latest book, A Nation Under our Feet: Black
Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
(Harvard University Press, 2003), won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the
Bancroft Prize in American History, and the Merle Curti Prize in Social
History of the Organization of American Historians. Professor Hahn has
been actively involved with projects that promote the teaching of history
in the public schools and that make humanities education available to
diverse members of the community. He is currently at work on the Nathan I.
Huggins Lectures in African-American History to be delivered at Harvard
University in 2007, and on a history of the United States from 1840 to 1900
to be published in the Penguin history of the United States.

Neil Smith was trained as a geographer (PhD, Johns Hopkins), and his
research explores the broad intersection between space, nature, social
theory and history. He teaches in urban anthropology, cultural anthropology
and environmental anthropology, and directs the Center for Place Culture
and Politics at the City University of New York. His urban interests
include long term research on gentrification, including empirical work in
North America and Europe and a series of theoretical papers emphasizing the
importance of patterns of investment and disinvestment in the real estate
market. He also writes more broadly on New York City, focusing especially
on the "revanchist city" which has filled the vacuum left in the wake of
liberal urban theory. His interests in social theory include political
economy and Marxism and lie behind his theoretical work on uneven
development. From the global to the local scales, he argues, our spatial
worlds are constructed and reconstructed as expressions of social relations
and especially as expressions of capitalist social relations. Uneven
development is in many ways the hallmark of capitalism. More recently he
has been studying the "geography of the American Century," trying to
understand the ways in which global economic development in the twentieth
century -- up to and including so-called globalization -- represent
specific expressions of US power and responses to it. His publications
includes American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to
Globalization (University of California Press, 2002), The New Urban
Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (Routledge, 1996), Uneven
Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Basil Blackwell,
1991).

for information on PARKING:
Franklin Center:
After 4pm, free parking is available in the Pickens Lot (across Trent Drive)
Before 4pm, please park in the Medical Center lot. Parking vouchers will be available at the daytime Franklin Center events.
Rare Book Room (in Perkins Library):
Duke staff, faculty, and students in possession of a Duke i.d. may park in the lots adjacent to the Allen Building.
Visitors may find parking either outside the Chapel or in the parking garage adjacent to the Bryan Center.
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