We look forward to seeing you at our annual meeting, to be held in Detroit, 6–8 November 2025, where we will explore the theme of “Creativity & Renewal.” The deadline for submissions is 1 May 2025, and you will find the CFP at this link. We are thrilled to announce that our keynote speaker will be Dr. Casey Nelson Blake.
Casey Nelson Blake is a Professor of History at Columbia University. Blake works on modern U.S. intellectual and cultural history, with an emphasis on the relationship between artistic modernism, cultural criticism, and democratic citizenship. His publications include Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford; The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State; The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution; and At the Center: American Thought and Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century (co-authored with Daniel H. Borus and Howard Brick). His critical essays and reviews have appeared in the American Scholar, Commonweal, Dissent, the Nation, Raritan, and Telos, among other publications. In addition, Blake is the founding Director of Columbia’s Center for American Studies and of the Freedom and Citizenship program, which has provided humanities education and community engagement opportunities to hundreds of underserved high school students.
And here is a preview of the keynote theme, “Experience as Art”: Reversing the terms of John Dewey’s book on aesthetics, Art as Experience, the lecture traces an alternative modernist tradition of cultural theorists, artistic communities, and practicing artists committed to a vision of everyday life lived as art. They imagined the aesthetic realm as a site for human flourishing and solidarity, and not only for the making of art objects. With Henri Lefebvre they hoped that “In the future the art of living will
become a genuine art.”
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