By Director Anne Basting In early September, Professor Jennifer Johung (C21’s Lead Faculty Advisor) and I met up on the 9th floor of Curtin to get the lay of the land at C21. It was quite a trip.  Much of it hadn’t changed since I was first here in 1995.  Then, over...

Artist Dick Blau got a dog. Out of his walks, he got to know the street, to see the traces of those who had passed through, to meditate its random, often mysterious beauty, and to witness the moments of its pathos.

Read this darkly funny in-progress comic by Ivan Ascher about how COVID-19 is turning college campuses upside down--or were they already being turned upside down by administrative politics, new student attitudes, and the neoliberalization of higher ed? Ivan Ascher is an associate professor of political science at the University...

By Levi Bryant Reprinted with permission from Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture. Levi Bryant is Professor of Philosophy at Collin College. He was the 2016 keynote speaker at UWM's Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, sponsored by the Center for 21st Century Studies, on February 19, 2016. You can...

by Maureen Ryan In a well-timed bid for the attention of television audiences brimming with New Year’s resolve, Netflix released Tidying Up this January, a domestic advice program starring the Japanese organizational expert Marie Kondo, whose 2014 book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up topped bestseller lists. On each episode of Tidying Up, Kondo...

by Molly McCourt (PhD Candidate in English, C21 Graduate Fellow) My research focuses on social constructions of masculinity that have captivated the collective American imagination since the nation’s fraught beginnings. Through the lens of period pieces in 21stcentury television, I examine the myth of the self-made man and his pursuit...

By Allain Daigle and Krista Grensavitch For the last two years, C21 Graduate Fellow Allain Daigle and C21 Tennessen Scholar Krista Grensavitch have been collaborating on short videos that explore feminist teaching practices. Krista is a PhD candidate in History; Allain is a PhD candidate in English. Together, we’ve worked...

By Kalling Heck As part of their “Tributes” series, the Milwaukee Film Festival invited the staff of Chicago based film criticism website The Dissolve for a statement and subsequent conversation on the state of cinema. This conversation was followed by a screening of Brian De Palma’s 1981 Blowout, a film...

By Stephanie Youngblood Finales are notoriously difficult to pull off, but in the last episode of AMC’s Breaking Bad, which ended its five-season run this past Sunday, a lot of things worked. The music was great, the acting was terrific, and the New Mexico desert fulfilled its role as television’s...

By Wendy Hui Kyong Chun ***This talk was given on 1.4.2013 at the MLA.  It focuses on a paradox surrounding DH: the disparity between the hype surrounding DH and the material work conditions surrounding much DH (adjunct/ soft money positions, the constant drive to raise funds, the lack of scholarly...