Graduate Student Interest Groups

Klara Loc-Ling Boger: klboger@umich.edu, Holly Nelson: hollynel@umich.edu

The American Studies Consortium (ASC) aims to support interdisciplinary, transhistorical scholarship on topics related to the literature, history, culture, and politics of the Americas. Throughout the year, we host pubic lectures, writing workshops, film screenings, and reading group meetings. Our events bring together faculty and graduate students from multiple departments to engage in cross-disciplinary investigation of American cultural production.

We welcome interest and participation from any student or faculty member interested in American history, literature, and culture.

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Sania Hashmi, Daniel Weaver

Critical Contemporary Studies is a Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop dedicated to studying cultural production and politics from the 1960s to today. Our group facilitates cross-disciplinary dialogue about the complicated histories and pressing questions – socio-political, artistic, and technological – that structure contemporary life.

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• The structure and history of the English language
• Language’s function in discourse and discourse communities
• History of rhetoric
• Language ideologies
• Language variation and change
• Rhetorical strategies and their effects in the world
• The relationship between linguistic practices and literary form
• Literary practices
• Activities likely will include: discussion of readings proposed by group members, sharing of group members’ research and works-in-progress, lectures from visiting scholars, attendance at national conference

• Interdisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty from departments in LS&A
• Graduate students organize the events for the year
• Meets monthly to read a common text or discuss work-in-progress
• Invites two outside speakers to campus each year 
• Additional activities include roundtable discussions, symposia, and jobs workshops

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• Provides an interdisciplinary forum for professors and graduate students to discuss work in progress on poetry, poetics, and lyric theory
• Meets approximately three to four times a semester
• Invites outside speakers to present and discuss their work
• Has provided a forum for panel discussions, pre-circulation of conference papers, public lectures, article drafts, and thesis / book chapters
• Participation of graduate students (Marianna Hagler, Maya Day are current coordinators) has been integral in all aspects of the workshop’s running and planning
• The workshop encourages attendance by students and faculty working in a range of languages and creative and scholarly disciplines

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Coordinators: Surabhi Balachander, Emily Prifogle, Corinne Rushing 

Description: The Rural America Working Group is necessarily interdisciplinary–health science and public policy scholars benefit from speaking with environmental scientists and creative writers. Our members have interests in rural America as diverse as forest management, indigenous governance and politics, opioid addiction, local budgets, and race and ethnicity in literature. We are planning events to support opportunities to share work with an interdisciplinary audience, read published work from different disciplines, and hear from outside scholars in a variety of fields.

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