Center for 21st Century Studies is turning 50; You’re invited!

MILWAUKEE _ Scholars, students and artists from across the nation will gather at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Friday, Oct. 26, to celebrate a landmark moment on UWM’s path to becoming a major American research university.

The university’s Center for 21st Century Studies (C21), one of the nation’s first humanities research centers and a decades-long destination for some of the world’s foremost artists and thinkers, is turning 50. To celebrate, UWM will host a public symposium that will be a reunion for many who helped make the center a household name among artists, writers and scholars in the 1970s and ‘80s. The center was known as the Center for 20th Century Studies from its founding in 1968 until its name change in 2000.

“From the time I started graduate school at Berkeley in the mid-1970s, I knew about UWM from the Center for 20th Century Studies and the modern studies doctoral program, both of which were on the cutting-edge of critical theory in the academy,” explained Richard Grusin, director of the Center for 21st Century Studies and a UWM distinguished professor of English. “All of the most famous thinkers and many famous artists and writers came through Milwaukee in the center’s first decades. I’m excited to bring back to campus some of the key faculty and most successful graduates from the center.”

(From right) Film professor Patricia Mellencamp, former C21 director Kathleen Woodward, and former deputy director Carol Tennessen at a late-seventies event at the Center for 20th Century Studies.

The 50th anniversary symposium brings together renowned researchers who spent time at the center over the decades, including Kathleen Woodward, who directed the center for 20 years. Professor Emerita Patricia Mellencamp taught film at UWM for 30 years and spoke at many of its most influential conferences. Mellencamp’s work, in addition to the center’s major conferences on international film, helped establish film studies as a new academic discipline in the United States and abroad.

The symposium will be held 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 26, in Curtin Hall 175 and is free and open to the public. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Below is the full list of symposium speakers:

  • Amelie Hastie (Amherst College), “The Vulnerable Spectator: Feminism, Affect, Writing,” on our emotional responses to films from the 1970s to today
  • Andreas Huyssen (Columbia University), “Tracing Urban Imaginaries: Literature, Photography, Visual Art”
  • Tara McPherson (University of Southern California), “Platforming Hate: The Right in the Digital Age” on the rise of the “alt-right” and online platforms
  • Patricia Mellencamp (UWM), “UnCommon Women: Remembering the Center from my Third St(age)” on the emergence of feminist film theory at the center
  • Gary Weissman (University of Cincinnati), “On Photographing Nazi Camps” on the politics of aesthetics in contemporary photography of the Holocaust
  • Kathleen Woodward (University of Washington), “Global Biorisk, Radical Unpredictability, and Outbreak Narratives” on narratives of risk and contagion in popular culture.