Speakers
respondents,
co-editors,
contributors
Venue
Online
Date
Join us online to explore and celebrate the publication of the special edition of the New American Studies Journal (vol. 76, 2025): What Makes an American “Classic”? co-edited by Caterina Domeneghini and Claire Barnes.
Please join us online on Zoom.
With discussions by the co-editors, contributors, and our guest respondents:
- Wiebke Denecke (MIT)
- Glenn Most (University of Chicago/Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)
- Tessa Roynon (author of The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction)
About the issue:
From "great books" courses and the valorization of a "classical liberal education" to the cultural machinery which shapes canonicity, "What Makes an American Classic?" (New American Studies Journal vol. 76) considers just what that question means today against 2025's socio-political backdrop. The issue seeks to interrogate the "classics" (with a large or a small "c") with curiosity, with critique, and without a necessary impetus to valorize tellings of them which have been shaped by institutional pressures along the way. Can we acknowledge the influence of a piece of work without pushing it into the categorization of objective timelessness? Can we explore its impact using a more nuanced set of critical tools? Can we make the American Classic—and the conception of America itself—strange again?
Contributors (many of whom will be attending the launch event):
- Constanze Güthenke (Oxford)
- Susan Hegeman (University of Florida)
- Emily Coit (University of Chicago)
- Edwin Frank (founder and editorial director of NYRB Classics)
- David Lehman (poet; editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and general editor of The Best American Poetry)
- Willard Spiegelman (Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX) and Constance Everett-Pite (Oxford)
- Joseph Horowitz (cultural historian and author of Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall)
- Robert Burns Stepto (Yale)
- Alexander Manshel (McGill)
- Rochelle Gurstein (essayist and critic, author of Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art)
- Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz (Hamilton College), Rhodessa Jones (director; founder of The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women/HIV circle), and creative practitioners from The Medea Project core troupe.