Documents
Description
The document is a bureaucratic technology, one that offers “proof in support of a fact,” performs a “know-show function,” and holds “social power” as both a “representation of a fact” and an “inscription of an act.” Documents are “social objects” to which “human beings collectively award status functions,” and they are “instruments of bureaucratic organizations” that “are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, even the organizations themselves.” These formulations (from Suzanne Briet, Lisa Gitelman, Maurizio Ferraris, Barry Smith, Matthew S. Hull, respectively) offer the beginnings of a notion of the document as an object that testifies to, teaches about, memorializes, or otherwise registers some social concept agreed upon by two or more people.
This ACLA seminar welcomes participants eager to take documents seriously and enter colloquy about how documents figure into the stories people tell, the lives they lead, the world they co-create, and the record they leave behind. Papers may bear upon the ways that documents drive literary narratives across genres and national traditions, the ways they set the terms of cultural production, the ways they fuel the cultural industries, the ways they structure everyday experience, the ways they articulate a relation to the past or present or future.... Of particular interest are presentations that trouble existing notions of what counts as a document, how documents function, where documents exist, who or what acts with or upon documents, and/or who or what is acted upon by documents.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Olivia Milroy Evans is an Assistant Professor of English at Samford University, where she teaches and writes about poetry and television. She holds an MA from UVA and a PhD from Cornell. Her book manuscript, Documentary Poetic Form, explores how documentary project books adapt methods from academic writing and experiment with poetic forms. You can find her writing in Callaloo, Contemporary Literature, Jacket2, and Word & Image, and forthcoming at Post45 Contemporaries and The Velvet Light Trap.
Speaker Bio
Scott Kushner is Associate Professor and Acting Chair of Communication Studies at the University of Rhode Island. His current book project, Enclosing Performance: How Venues Mediate Culture (under contract with University of Minnesota Press), sits at the intersection of media studies, cultural studies, and the history of technology. Published work has appeared in venues including Technology & Culture, Space & Culture, and Internet Histories.
Speaker Bio
Paul Benzon (he/him/his) is an Associate Professor in the English Department and Director of the Media and Film Studies Program at Skidmore College. He is the author of Archival Fictions: Materiality, Form, and Media History in Contemporary Literature (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), and his writing has also appeared in PMLA, Narrative, Media-N, College Literature, and Criticism.
Speaker Bio
Hannah is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. She studies the bureaucratic treatment of immigration legal claimants across a variety of media, including literature, film, photography, and historical documents from the early 1990s to the early 2020s.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Samirah Tabassum is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and Humanities at BRAC University, Bangladesh. She served as a Fulbright fellow at Cornell University from 2024-2025, where she co-taught at the Department of Asian Studies. She is a research associate of the Rickshaw Art Archive, and has over five years of experience as a research consultant collaborating with UN Women, UNHCR, BRAC, OSUN, GNWP, and Naripokkho among others.
Speaker Bio
Katherine Payne holds an MFA in creative nonfiction writing and literary translation from Columbia University and a PhD in comparative literature from CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st-century documentary poetics. She is the co-translator of Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living by Anne Dufourmantelle. Her work has appeared in Apogee, Transformations, and other publications. She is an editor of the literary magazine Crescendo: A Community of Writers.
Speaker Bio
Meg Worley is an Associate Professor of Writing & Rhetoric and Film & Media Studies at Colgate University. The Venn diagram of her research and teaching includes circles labeled Paleography, Grammar, Statistics, Typography, Data Visualization, and Biblical Exegesis.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Preeshita Biswas is a PhD candidate in Literature at Texas Christian University. Her research unfolds at the intersections of British and Japanese imperialisms, Bengali nationalism, and multiethnic Asian postcolonialisms, focusing on the transimperial complexities of the plurilingual, polycentric nineteenth century and beyond. Funded by an MLA fellowship, her dissertation examines intimate, transimperial networks among Bengal, England, and Japan.
Speaker Bio
Joy Zhu is a 7th year PhD candidate at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. Her dissertation is tentatively titled "Stabilizing Phenomena: Zhang Hongzhao’s Epistemologies of Geology (1919-1956)."
Speaker Bio
Deepak is an anthropologist and assistant professor at IIIT-Delhi. His work is on the sociality of technology, specifically, screens, interfaces and computational technology, including AI. Other interests include political anthropology, violence, popular culture and the sociality of imagination. Deepak co-founded an art collective - 0penstudi0 - combining art and anthropology to curate collective imaginations in works of public art co-produced with communities in the margins.