This may be of great interest to NEPCA members, given our strength in this area. The Journal of American Culture is planning a special issue titled "Mental Health and Illness in American Culture.” Those interested should submit an electronic abstract of 150-250 words on a topic that intersects mental health and mental illness and American culture. Contact Lawrence Rubin for more details: lrubin@stu.edu
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
NEPCA Book Prize
The Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA), a regional chapter of both the American Culture Association (ACA) and the Popular Culture Association (PCA), is pleased to announce our Peter C. Rollins Book Award competition. This annual prize will recognize the best scholarly monograph on any popular culture, culture studies, or American culture topic published in the previous year by an author who lives or works in New England or New York, or who has done so in the past two years.
We welcome nominations now through June 1, 2012. Eligible books will have been published in 2011 as original monographs representing the best, creative scholarship in this multidisciplinary field. Edited books, fiction, anthologies or collections will not be considered. The prize, a certificate of merit and $500.00 stipend, will be awarded to the author at the annual Northeast PCA/ACA conference at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, October 26-27, 2012.
To make a nomination, please mail one copy of the book (labeled clearly as NEPCA Book Award) to each member of the NEPCA Book Award Committee (below) by June 1, 2012. Please be sure to include your preferred contact information.
Dr. Carol-Ann Farkas
Rollins Prize Committee Chair
School of Arts and Sciences
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy
179 Longwood Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
Dr. Kristen Petersen
School of Arts and Sciences
Massachusetts College of Pharmacy
179 Longwood Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
Dr. Jeffrey P. Cain
Department of English
HC221A
Sacred Heart University
Fairfield, Connecticut 06825
Dr. Virginia S. Cowen
School of Health Related Professions
University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey
65 Bergen Street, Room 160
Newark, NJ 07101
Dr. Robert Weir
Department of History
Westfield State University
c/o15 Woods Road, Florence, MA 01062.
Monday, February 20, 2012
NEPCA Call for Papers
FIRST CALL for NEPCA
The Northeast Popular/American Culture Association is seeking papers on popular and American culture, broadly construed, for its annual fall conference to be held on Friday October 26 and Saturday October 27, 2012 on the campus of St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.
NEPCA conferences seek to be ones in which graduate students, junior faculty, independent researchers, and senior faculty convene as equals. NEPCA prides itself on offering intimate and nurturing sessions in which new ideas and works-in-progress can be aired, as well as completed projects. Papers are generally 15-20 minutes in length. NEPCA strongly encourages creative delivery of papers, though they can also be read.
Both individual papers and complete panels will be considered. The deadline for applications is June 1, 2012. Please send a 1-2 page paper proposal and a one-page vita to both the Program Chair Tim Madigan tmadigan@sjfc.edu and to the appropriate Area Chair for your paper.
See http://users.wpi.edu/~jphanlan/2010_NEPCA_CALL_FOR_PAPERS%5b1%5d.htm for a list of area chairs.
Review: Sports and Christianity Book
Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. By Shirl James Hoffman, Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2010. 978-1-932792-10-2
As the Tim Tebow phenomenon demonstrates, the relationship between religion and sports is a matter of perpetual controversy. Shirl James Hoffman explores this issue in Good Game: Christianity and the Culture of Sports. The book is not as comprehensive as the title suggests; the form of Christianity discussed is mainly evangelical Protestantism and the sports are mainly football and basketball. Hoffman does, however, take the tack that the connection between sports and Christianity has been to the detriment of Christianity rather than sports. Hoffman adopts Frank Deford’s formulation that the Christianity in sports is really what he dubs “Sportianity,”(14) a belief system that marries a Christian ethic of self-sacrifice to a “survival of the fittest” mentality that would make Herbert Spencer blush.
Hoffman devotes the first half of her book to the history of the relationship between Christianity and sports, and the second half to contemporary issues. The early church drew a distinction between play, on which the church took no stand, and organized sport (especially the blood sports favored by the Romans), which it rejected. By the ninth century, a tacit approval of play gave rise to liturgical ball games, some of which were the distant ancestors of baseball. Some organized sports, such as jousting, were so embedded in European culture that the church could make little headway against them. Fast-forwarding to the nineteenth century, organized sports took a beating from Southern evangelicals on the grounds that sports encouraged poor behavior and physical violence. Liberal Protestants, especially Washington Gladden of the First Congregational Church of North Adams, Massachusetts, led the charge against revivalism and in favor of the Christian utility of sports. Hoffman argues that three movements made sports acceptable to American Protestants. First was the Social Gospel movement, which linked physical to spiritual health. Second was the growth of the YMCA, which played up sports and downplayed Christianity as a means of getting unruly youths off the streets. Third was the ethic of “Muscular Christianity” which saw team sports as a way to build character, especially unselfishness and self-control. Curiously, Hoffman does not discuss the invention of basketball in this context, even though James Naismith was involved in “Muscular Christianity” and he invented the game in a Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA.
But what sort of character emerges from the fusion of Christianity and sport? Here Hoffman condemns evangelicals for too closely identifying with sports. The central problem, Hoffman believes, is that sports tend to encourage behavior unacceptable outside of a stadium. Hoffman cites the paradox of legendary football coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, who at the same time was held up as a model Christian sportsman and had a reputation as a cheater. To redress the subjugation of religion to sport, Hoffman calls for a more rigid separation of church and stadium. The proper example of the application of Christianity to sport, he argues, occurred in a college softball game where the opposing team helped carry a player who had hit a home run but could not make it to home plate on her own because she injured herself rounding first. While not as comprehensive as the title indicates, this intriguing study could easily be used a course on religious or sports history.
Robert Smith
Worcester State College
New Website on American Bandstand
Woody Guthrie Conference
The Grammy Museum is partnering with the Guthrie Foundation and Archives to create the centennial celebrations of Woody Guthrie’s life and work. Penn State University in State College, PA will host one of those events, a conference and concert, Woody@100: Woody Guthrie’s Legacy to Working Men and Women. Send 200-word abstracts to: woodyguthrie.psu.conference@gmail.com by March 15, 2012.
Virtual Music Collection Seeks Submissions
Shara Rambarran and Sheila Whiteley seek contributions for an edited text on
Virtual Bands, Virtual Music that will reflect upon its origins, its characters, its music(s), its scattered identity, its legacy, its worldwide membership, and circulation. Proposals should be 500 words maximum and should include keywords and a brief biog of the author. The deadline for submissions is May 31, 2012. Proposals should be submitted electronically to sheila.whiteley@googlemail.com and shararambarran@yahoo.co.uk
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