Americas Studies:
The New, Newest Thing

A Roundtable Discussion

Friday, May 7 / 11:30AM - 1:30PM / Oakes Mural Room

This event culminates this year’s focus on questions of comparability and interdisciplinarity as we consider new frameworks for national and transnational area studies. The discussion will center on the essay "Ungrounding Knowledges Offshore: Caribbean Studies, Disciplinarity and Critique," by Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine. Discussion topics include the relationships between interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, and multidisciplinary scholarship; scales of comparison; the international United States; and categories of cognitive mapping.

UCSC FACULTY DISCUSSANTS: Don Brenneis (Anthropology), Kirsten Gruesz (Literature),
and George Lipsitz (American Studies)

MODERATORS: Susan Gillman (Literature) and Tricia Rose (American Studies)

Bill Maurer’s research queries globalization narratives by looking into the entanglements of subjects and objects of law, property and value. His first book, Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands (Michigan, 1997), on the colonial transformation of the British Virgin Islands from a backwater of small-scale farmers and traders into a booming offshore financial services center, led him to question the cultural ramifications of finance capital and the conceptions of mobility animating contemporary financial forms.

For more information, and for copies of Professor Maurer’s paper, please contact Susan Gillman (sgillman@ucsc.edu) or Tricia Rose (trose@ucsc.edu).

Sponsored by the New Comparative Formations in U.S. Studies Research Cluster

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