AMERICAN PUBLIC CULTURES:
SPACE, PERFORMANCE, AND IDENTITY

Annual Meeting of the Mid-America American Studies Association

April 7-8, 2006, St. Louis, Missouri
The Hyatt Regency Hotel at Union Station
Hosted by Saint Louis University

The Mid-America chapter of the American Studies Associations will hold its
annual meeting in St. Louis with a full roster of panels, performances,
and roundtable discussions. Over 85 participants will present their
research and creative work.

The keynote speaker for the conference is Prof. Eric Sandweiss, Carmony
Chair in History at Indiana University. His talk is titled "The Day in
its Color: A Roadside Perspective on Midcentury America."

The conference is open to anyone having an interest in the study of
American history, literature, architecture, media, and culture. We extend
a special invitation to colleagues in museums, arts organizations,
community colleges, libraries, archives, high schools, and historical
societies.

The theme for this year's conference is "American Public Cultures: Space,
Performance, and Identity." The study of public culture brings together
many strands of scholarship, teaching, and practice. Public culture is the
enactment of rituals, symbols, expressions, and displays intended to
foster shared identities, build communities, and establish attachments to
place. It involves tangible resources such as architecture, landscapes,
and tools, as well as intangible resources such as memory, affiliation,
talent, belief, and place. Public culture, then, is the active
mobilization of these resources to define social relations and shape
public life.

Preliminary Program

2006 MAASA Conference Program

Friday April 7, 9:00am-10:30
Room 1

01 Christian Protest and Activism from the Antebellum Period to the
Present: Abolition, Anti-War, Evangelism, and Homophobia on the Fringes of
Faith

Divided Yet Not Conquered: Henry County, Indiana Female Abolitionists
Kendra Clauser-Roemer, Indiana University-Purdue University

The Universal Peace Union and the Dilemma of Political Activism
Thomas F. Curran, Cor Jesus Academy

Hell House: Conceiving a Community Theatre of Cruelty
Debra Levine, New York University

"God Hates" and "Fags": The Not-so-Shocking Shock Speech of Fred Phelps of
Westboro Baptist Church
Rebecca Barret-Fox, University of Kansas

Room 3

02 Visualizing Distinctions: Constructing Public Identities Through Images

Picturing the Tourist: Photographic Representations of Women in Holiday,
1946-1949
Cinda Nofzinger, University of Iowa

Instituting a Cultural Identity: The Dissemination and Display of the
Photographs of Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret
Karen Smith, University of Iowa

American Aesthetic Taste and the Blurring of Social Stratification in Life
Magazine
Jennifer Ambrose, University of Iowa

Room 4

03 Sonic Culture

"Like the Resurrection of Christ": Nasir Jones and the Construction of a
Hip-Hop Messiah
Josh Sopiarz, Saint Louis University

"The Medium is the Metaphor": Hip Hop Music Reclaiming the Urban Space of
Brooklyn and the Bronx
Brian Greening, Saint Louis University

Leykis 101: Using the Radio to Teach lost Boys How to Be Men
Matthew Thomas, University of Iowa

Friday, April 7, 11:00 - 12:30

Room 1

04 The Museum in American Culture

Complicating the Past: Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum Changes its Story
Regina Faden, Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, MO

"It's About Education": Little Rock's Central High School National Historic
Site Visitor Center
Janelle Collins, Arkansas State University

Crossing Broad Street: In Context Display and the Promotion of Cultural
Fluency at the Newark Museum
Lori Barcliff Baptista, Northwestern University

Room 2

05 Women in Labor: Female Work in Public and Private Schemes
Chair: Cheryl Lester, Univ. of Kansas

"It's Darned Hard Work, Bub": Constructions of Women's Working Bodies in
Bradley's Husband-Coached Childbirth
Jane Simonsen, University of Central Arkansas

Women, Labor and Class During the Great Depression: The Type II Sewing
Rooms of Cape Girardeau County
Ellen M. Ryan, Southeast Missouri State University

The Woman Driver and the Cold War Masculinization of Automobility
Cotton Seiler, Dickinson College

Manifesting Domesticity: Jessica Lynch and Jeffersonian Democracy
Linda M. Baeza, University of North Dakota

Room 3

06 Didactic Uses of the Built Environment

Interactions with Race: The Louisiana Purchase Exposition and Its Audiences
James Gilbert, University of Maryland

Urban Phoenix: St. Louis Union Station and Adaptive Use
William M. Gatlin, Southeast Missouri State University

The Nationalizing, Cultural and Educational Uses of The 1909 Hudson-Fulton
Celebration
Roger Panetta, Marymount College of Fordham University

Room 4>

07 "Inside Out": Public/Private Intersections

Marketing Democracy: Merging the Public and Private in Postmodern Politics
Joshua Roiland, Saint Louis University

Unpublic Art: Public Art in Prisons
Marianne Williamson, Texas Christian University

"History Is Our Word for What Really Happened": Method and Form of a
Mixed-Genre Life Story
Joseph Harrington, University of Kansas

Friday, April 7, 12:30 - 2:00

08 Presidential Luncheon
Infantasia
Jeffrey Miller, MAASA President

Friday, April 7, 2:00 - 3:30

Room 1

09 Racial Exoticism and Nineteenth Century American Literature
Chair: Nelson Hathcock, Saint Xavier University

Performing Passing and Mimicking Minstrelsy in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead
Wilson
Roshuanda D. Cade, Saint Louis University

Eastern Motifs in the Tales by Washington Irving
Nigar Isgandarova, University of Kansas

Room 3

10 Practices of Looking, Rituals of Seeing: Visual Transculture, Public
Memory, and the Discourses of Visual Studies (roundtable
discussion)
Chair: Norman Yetman, University of Kansas

Commemorating Abjection, Sanitizing Colonization: Representation, Memory,
Vision, and Seeing along Roadsides in Mid-America
D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Learning to See: Representations of Black Masculinity in the Work of Gordon
Parks
Maurice Bryan, Jr., Ottawa University

Lynching, Torture, and Public Memory
Richard Schur, Drury University

Room 4

11 Father Petit and the Potawatomi Trail of Death
Chair: Shirley Willard, Fulton County Historical Society

Presentation and roundtable discussion.

Friday, April 7, 4:00 - 5:30

Room 1

12 Representing Architecture in Artistic Media (Literature and Music)
Chair: Jane Simonsen, Univ. of Central Arkansas

The Petrified City: Antiquity and Modernity in Melville's Bartleby
Nick Yablon, University of Iowa

Booth Tarkington and the Golden Age
Malcolm Woollen, Pensylvania State University

The Creole Zydeco Dance Halls of Rural Lousiana: Twentieth Century
Vernacular Places of Cultural Performance, Identity and
Expression
Deborah Marcella Rehn

Room 3

13 Race, Performance, and Public Cultures on American Waters

Sailing into the 21st Century: Racial Identity, Colorblind Ideology, and
the Role of the Freedom Schooner Amistad
John Kille, Saint Louis University

Navigating an Aqueous Color Line: Race and Recreation along the Potomac
River, 1877-1927
Andrew W. Kahrl, Indiana University

Operation Cock and Awe, or, How George W. Bush Staged the Second Coming
Aboard a Battleship and Sold the Homeland on Fascism in
the Process
Shawn Wedel, Saint Louis University

Room 4

14 Monuments and Mourning: Public Sites of Memory in American Culture

Up Against the Wall: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial as Site of Ritual,
Memory, and Public Mourning
Kim S. Theriault, Dominican University

The Utilitarian War Memorial: Pallbearer of Idealism?
Bruce Thomas, Lehigh University

"That Which Has Been": The American Cemetery as Public Memory
Robin Hanson, Saint Louis University

Silent No More: Cemeteries as Memory
Kimberly K. Porter, University of North Dakota

Saturday, April 8, 9:00 - 10:30

Room 1

15 Anglo-American Cultural Conflicts of the Late Eighteenth Century
Chair: Joseph Heathcott, Saint Louis University

Printed in England: "America" and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1789-1800
Wil Verhoeven, University of Groningen

British Land Policy at Detroit, 1760-1796
Ray DeBrueler, Western Michigan University

Room 3

16 Reclamation and Recovery: Mid Twentieth Century American Masculine and
Feminine Domestic Spaces
Chair: Margaret Garb, Washington University in St. Louis

Pumpkin Pie and Armageddon: Gendered Space and the Bomb Shelter in Cold War
America
Ann Kordas, Rhode Island College

Reclaiming Masculinity in Post-World War II America: Visual Culture and the
Development of the Den as a Domestic Male Sphere of
Refuge, Escape and Resistance to Conformity
Patricia Rooney, Saint Louis University

The Dialectics of "Placenessness and Boundedness" in Richard Wright and
Gwendolyn Brooks' Kitchenettes
Elizabeth Schroeder, Saint Louis University

The Architecture of Masculinity and Consumption: The Bachelor Pad
Jessica Sewell, Boston University

Room 4

17 Public Visual Culture

Wheelmen and Bloomer Girls: The Bicycle Craze of the Gilded Age
Kathleen McDonough, State University of New York

EROS Magazine: Towards a Public Counter-Culture
Charles F. Williams, University of Iowa

The Vandyke, the Labcoat, and the Syringe: Performing Science in
Advertising Medical Institutes, 1900-1920
Suzanne M. Fischer, University of Minnesota

Saturday, April 8, 11:00 - 12:30

Room 1

18 Vice and Virtue

"A Happy Wineland" and "Good Grapes for All": Viticulture in America
1840-1870
Erica Hannickel, University of Iowa

For the Suppression of Vice and Immortality: Vice, Community, and Law in
Revolutionary America
Scott Taylor Morris, Washington University in St. Louis

Bringing Domestic Violence into Public View: E.D.E.N. Southworth, the Law,
and Wife Abuse in the 1850s
Jeffory A. Clymer, University of Kentucky

Alcoholics Anonymous and America: The Rejection of a Strictly Naturalistic
Worldview
Nicole Haggard, Saint Louis University

Room 2

19 Entertainment Interface: Race and Identity
Chair: Jeffrey Miller, Augustana College

Transnational Public Culture? Creating South African Identity through
American Entertainment
Jennie Sutton, Washington University in St. Louis

Las Sucursales Norteamericanas: Hollywood Branch Offices in
Pre-Revolutionary Havana, Cuba
Megan Feeney, University of Minnesota

To Kill a Mockingbird: A Visual Propaganda on Behalf of White Southerners
Ying Ye, Saint Louis University

Room 3

20 Teaching Local Collections / Making Global Connections
Chair: Angela Miller, Washington University in St. Louis

A Fond Destruction: St. Louis' "Great Fire" of 1849 and Images of Urban
Disasters
Adam Arenson, Yale University

Reading the Nation through the Vernacular Photograph: Occupational
Portraits and the Performance of "American Labor"
Angela Dietz, Saint Louis University

St. Louis' 1849 Cholera Epidemic: A Dialogue between the Past and the
Present
Rob Wilson, Saint Louis University

Room 4

21 The Peale Family and American Naturalism
Chair: Andy Walker (tentative)

Fake Fruit: Deception and Wit in the Still Life Painting of James Peale
Megan Walsh, Temple University

Sublime or Ridiculous?: Charles Willson Peale's Strategic Use of the
Mastodon and its Audience
Matthew H. Fisk, University of California, Davis

Saturday, April 8, 12:30 - 2:00

Keynote Lunch
"The Day in Its Color": A Roadside Perspective on Midcentury America
Eric Sandweiss, Indiana University

Saturday, April 8, 2:00 - 3:30

Room 1

23 Culture and Ideas in Bricks & Mortar
Chair: Jeffrey Smith, Lindenwood University

McKinley High School and the Progressive ideas about Education
Nicholas Abbott, Lindenwood University

Gilded Age Water Tower in St. Louis
Amy Toti, Lindenwood University

Blanchette Bridge and its Role in the Urban Sprawl in St. Louis
Anthony Smith, Lindenwood University

Room 2

24 Public Dramas in Dance, Theater, and Film

Creating a Public Scandal: The Bergman-Rossellini Scandal and American
Popular Culture in 1949-1950
David Smit, Kansas State University

Public Debates over Civil/Sexual Rights: The Case of Katherine Dunham's A
Touch of Inocence
Kimberly J. Banks, University of Missouri Kansas City

Producing Audience: The Emotional Rhetoric of Tennessee Williams's Sweet
Bird of Youth
Laurie A. Smith, Saint Louis University

Room 3

25 Design and the Public Realm
Chair: Joseph Heathcott, Saint Louis University (tentative)

The New American Town Commons
Patrick James Hyland, Jr., Kent State University

Walter T. Bailey and the Architecture of the (Colored) Pythian Bathhouse
and Sanitarium
Mikael D. Kriz, Saint Louis University

Displacement through Discourse: Implementing and Contesting Public Housing
Redevelopment in Cabrini Green
Deidre Pfeiffer, University of California Los Angeles

The Poem as Built Environment
John Estes, University of Missouri-Columbia

Room 4

26 Camera Obfuscura: Constructing Others and American Identity
Chair: Don Conway-Long, Webster University

Day Walker: Taxonomy, Teratology, and Hybridity in the Neo-Vampire Film
"Blade"
Henry T. Brownlee, Jr., Saint Louis University

Reading Photographs, Reading History: Chinese Women in America at the Turn
of the Twentieth Century
Zhaochun Li, Saint Louis University

False Faces in the Mirror: National Identity and Ameridian Photographs
Clara M. Núñez-Regueiro, Saint Louis University

Remapping Eastern Europe in America: "Us" and "Them" in Photographs
Alicja Sowinska, Saint Louis University

For the preliminary program as well as details on registration,
accommodation, and venue, visit the conference web site at:

www.slu.edu/colleges/AS/amers/sitebody/projects/MAASA/MAASA.htm

For further questions, please contact Terri Foster in the Department of
American Studies at Saint Louis University at 314.977.2911 or
fostertlslu.edu.