Tag archive for consumer culture

Teaching the Hunger Games in the Undergraduate American Studies Classroom

Following is a post that I wrote for the blog of the American Studies Journal. Here’s the link to the piece in its original context. Last semester, I ended my introductory American Studies seminar, Popular Culture and American Childhood, with M.T. Anderson’s wonderful 2001 young-adult dystopia…

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Call for Papers: From Decay to Deterioration: Questioning the Aesthetics of Abandonment

I’m working on putting together a panel for the 2011 American Studies Association conference. The Call for Papers is below. The decay of the built environment has become a subject more of aesthetic fascination than of fear for many twenty-first-century Americans. Real communities such as…

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Drowning in Toys

Sotheby’s, in New York, auctioned off Malcolm Forbes’ toy collection today. I heard about it through a Margot Adler story on NPR, which filled me in on the history of this giant conglomeration of nineteenth and early twentieth-c playthings. Forbes was the kind of man…

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