Our group member Florian Zappe has organised a roundtable entitled “(Re)Thinking Academic Forms: A Conversation” as part of the upcoming Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in New Orleans.
On January 9, Florian will be joined by James Dowthwaite (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena), Daniel Fried (University of Alberta), Skye Shannon Savage (Columbia University), and Alice Tsay (The Huntington) to discuss the role that academic forms play in defining, shaping, fostering, or perhaps stifling the intellectual work we do as scholars in the humanities.
The roundtable is inspired by the discussions and activities within the Working Group on Academic Forms and aims for a critical and constructive (re)negotiation of the role of conventionalized and institutionalized form(at)s for the academic humanities and their functions in a larger socio-cultural and political context. This is a vital debate considering the rapid transformations of the contemporary university induced by various political and economic pressures, an ever-increasing internationalization of research and higher education and, last but not least, by technological developments such as digital humanities tools and A.I. applications.