Circulations: blood, ideas, books, money, people, contagions, politics, trade. All of these economies, both literal and figurative, operate within and across the porous boundaries of the United States. From the virtual circulation of futures markets and viral video to the embodied circulation of migrants and goods, the economies of the United States ride any number of waves of circulation, some voluntarily, some much less so.

The goal of this conference is to investigate, interrogate, interrupt, and intervene in the various circulatory systems that run through both the United States of America and American Studies. How do ideas, people, and goods circulate? How do different kinds of economies and currencies – monetary and otherwise – shape us and the field of American Studies?

To what extent are metaphors of circulation useful in imagining intellectual networks, such as those produced by the Internet, trans-disciplinary (and transnational) collaborations, or academic activism? How, too, are limits on movement like incarceration and immigration restriction connected to enforced movements like extraordinary rendition and deportation? How do we theorize the metastasizing meanings of circulation? How do we study moving targets? What challenges does the study of circulations pose to traditional forms of knowing and scholarship, and what opportunities does it make available? How might we reconfigure Marxist, post-structuralist, or other theoretical approaches in American Studies to account for these new global, economic, and political circuits? How do we construct archives for studying such mobile phenomena?

Schedule and registration information are available at the NYMASA website, www.nymasa.org. For more information, email nymasa08@gmail.com.