Deadline: December 14, 2001

This is an update of my previous CFP. As I said, I plan on proposing a panel on the CBS television program The Education of Max Bickford for the American Studies Association conference in Houston, November 14-17, 2002. Papers may address any aspect of the series, and I've added a few more possible topics, issues, terms for critical analysis, and so on. As before, one may place the phrase "Hollywood representation of" at the beginning of the first eight listed.

1. Tenured, grumudgeonly, middle-aged, out of touch Old Liberal male American Studies academic;
2. Young, energetic, hip, sexy, "feminist" female American Studies academic;
3. "Traditional" American Studies (e.g. FDR) versus popular cultural studies (e.g. Shirley Temple);
4. Sexual relations/politics among faculty and students;
5. Transgenderism/transexuality/sexual difference among faculty members;
6. American Studies as sexy (!);
7. Identity politics among faculty members and students (e.g. "shaming" episode);
8. American Studies historian as neuropathological but intellectually fair;
9. Max Bickford as Hollywood version of popular journalistic representations of Culture Wars;
10. Idea of network producers inviting American Studies academics to contribute story ideas for TV show "about" American Studies academics;
11. White liberalism and the legacy of sixties activism;
12. Triumphant intellectual paternalism;
13. The authentic university campus (and experience) as quintessentially New England in composition/architecture/character;
14. The deployment and inextricability of raced/urban bodies as "un-local color";
15. The ability of liberalism to subsume radical ideology/action in a way that both diffuses its potency and celebrates its "good intentions" generating a "happy ending" (i.e. narrative closure, or sweeping it under the rug?).
16. Max as American Studies academic simulacrum, as mythic archetype, as part of an Imaginary;
17. "Ideology critique," "Culture Industry," etc., applied to program;
18. Bickford as narrative "about" higher education;
19. Bickford and popularization of American Studies, assimilation into college curriculum;
20. Bickford vis-à-vis 11 September.