OGSCL (The Organization of Graduate Students in Comparative Literature) announces its fall semester program of events, with its first biennial series of Dialogues in Cultural Studies.

We have brought together University of Massachusetts and Four College faculty to present papers "in dialogue" on topics such as youth culture, cinema, digital and visual culture, translation studies, popular music, theories of post-nationalism, and ethical issues in Cultural Studies. 

In the absence of a specific program in Cultural Studies we want to celebrate our community's output across departmental and disciplinary boundaries.   We have established this series to work in tandem with a spring conference, part of Comparative Literature's ongoing commitment to Cultural Studies. 

Randall Knoper, Associate Professor of English and American Studies, commented, "OGSCL has managed to pose these dialogues on questions that are urgent: matters of ethics, identities, and aesthetics in new global contexts that turn the old formulas upside-down; the changing configurations of musical and visual culture in an electronically mediated world that is hard to keep up with; the dispersals and recombinations of  youth cultures and subcultures that peculiarly become both more strange and more familiar by the minute.  Our best chance to make sense of these things may be to join our efforts--connecting departments, institutions, theories, media.  I'm grateful to OGSCL and the Comparative Literature Department for providing the opportunity to do this, and I'm looking forward to the whole series of events."

Comparative Literature Department Chair Bill Moebius said, "When OGSCL approached me last November about 'Dialogues in Cultural Studies,' I was delighted and excited.  This initiative captures the spirit of Comparative Literature, which has always sought to bring the study of the cultural and the literary  together, honor differences in language and culture, foster dialogue among specialists from a variety of disciplines that bear on the study of cultural texts.  I am very happy to see this initiative go forward, and proud that our graduate students have led the way. Three cheers!"

The series will meet approximately every other Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. in Herter 301 or Herter 601.  The free series is open to the public, aimed especially at Five College students working within the Humanities and Social Sciences.  Undergraduate and graduate students who attend the series may enroll for a colloquium credit for Comlit 595A: S-Cultural Studies.

A full schedule with room assignments can be found online, or you can contact us for more information at OPDICS@yahoo.com.  This a stimulating series will be all the better for the full involvement of all the Campus communities. 
 

• to facilitate on-going dialogues between faculty and students across departmental and disciplinary boundaries in the absence of a program specifically in cultural studies;
• to promote greater awareness of current faculty research projects in the area of cultural studies within the Five College community;
• to provide a forum for faculty to present new research in an informal and collegial setting;
• to provide students with exposure to methodological and theoretical issues and problems in cultural studies;
• to provide new graduate students and advanced undergraduate students with a place to learn about interdisciplinary studies;and
• to create an opportunity for students to recognize and make use of faculty resources within the Five College community.