Pulp Studies Symposium – Oct 7-8

Posted September 27, 2016 in JMU Libraries News

James Madison University is hosting The 1st Annual Pulp Studies Symposium: Sensational Scholarship on October 7 & 8, 2016.

The deadline to registerr is September 30.  The registration fee includes dinner on Friday as well as breakfast & lunch on Saturday.  Don’t have time to attend the full conference?  Current JMU students, staff, and faculty may attend individual sessions of the conference for free!  See the schedule for sessions you might like to drop in on.

What is pulp studies?  According to JMU librarian Brian Flota, “Pulp magazines, made on cheap wood pulp paper and largely consisting of short fiction, were a part of the popular literary landscape from the 1890s to the 1950s. Because of the chemical composition of the pulps and because they were considered culturally disposable during their time, very few original issues of pulp magazines exist today. Recent scholarship focusing on the modernist and early postmodernist era of American literature has begun to reassess the value and merit of the writings in these magazines.”

This conference highlights emerging scholarship in the exciting and expanding field of pulp studies, which includes approaches and concepts from fields such as gender studies, English, literary criticism, library & information science, and more.

One exciting aspect of this symposium is that JMU’s Special Collections hosts one of the finest publicly accessible collections of pulp magazines in the United States, including a recent acquisition of over eighty issues of Street and Smith’s romance pulp Love Story. Some of these holdings will be featured at the symposium.  Check out this recent article for more about the pulp collection at JMU.

See you at the symposium! Questions? Please contact library-special@jmu.edu.