2016 PAMLA Conference Special Address Luncheons

2016 PAMLA Conference Special Address Luncheons

We will be having a number of very special events at the upcoming PAMLA conference at the Westin Pasadena, including two terrific luncheons and addresses, and a Forum that is sure to be fascinating. The two luncheons do involve an extra fee. Go here to make luncheon reservations: https://www.pamla.org/2016/registration-info

On Friday, November 11, we would love you to join us for the 2016 PAMLA Presidential Address and Luncheon. The luncheon does involve an extra fee, but is entirely worth it. This year, our Presidential Address will be delivered by 2016 PAMLA President John M. Ganim, Distinguished Professor of English, University of California, Riverside. Professor Ganim’s address is titled “The Haunted Library.” Ganim will explore the contradictions built into the architectural programs of library buildings which result in a deep tension in library design between technical and human requirements. This tension is often dramatized, not only in the conflict between symbolic and programmatic form, but in the very uses of the library. The Apollonian image of the library disguises a darker, more esoteric and private desire expressed in the often strange uses and abuses of the library. Architects have occasionally implicitly understood this dichotomy and expressed it in their structures. This lecture will be illustrated with slides and film clips.

John M. Ganim is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California-Riverside and the 2016 President of PAMLA. He has served as President of the New Chaucer Society and has been a Guggenheim Fellow. His most recent books are Medievalism and Orientalism, which was translated into Arabic by the Kalima Foundation, and Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages. His earlier books, Style and Consciousness in Middle English Narrative and Chaucerian Theatricality, have just been reprinted in the Princeton University Press Legacy Library series. He received the Distinguished Humanist Research Lecture Award, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, University of California, Riverside in 2014. He has lectured extensively at universities here and abroad, most recently in Australia, where he was a member of an Australian Research Council grant team studying international medievalisms.

To join us for the 2016 PAMLA Presidential Address and Luncheon, go here to make a reservation and pay: https://www.pamla.org/2016/registration-info

On Saturday, November 12, we would love for you to join us for our 2016 PAMLA Plenary Address and Luncheon. PAMLA President John Ganim has arranged for us to hear a wonderful Plenary Speaker, Edward Dimendberg of the University of California, Irvine. Professor Dimendberg’s Plenary Address is titled “Lebensraum on the Pacific: The Gestation and Legacy of Anton Wagner’s Book on Los Angeles.”

Professor Dimendberg will be speaking about Los Angeles. Werden, Leben und Gestalt der Zweimillionenstadt in Südkalifornien, a doctoral dissertation published in 1935 by the German geographer Anton Wagner (1904-2001), and the first scholarly study of the emergence of Los Angeles as a metropolis. Wagner was a student of geographer Oskar Schmieder at the University of Kiel. Although Reyner Banham expanded upon Wagner’s investigation in Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), Wagner’s work otherwise has received little commentary since its initial publication. It treats the Los Angeles’ street grid, the development of the city’s transportation infrastructure, patterns of urbanization, the architecture of the bungalow and the rancho, and ephemeral forms such as tourist hotels, billboards, and beach culture. That Wagner conducted extensive participant-observer research and statistical investigations in the city, walked across it, and took 500 photographs of different neighborhoods during the 1930s, contributes to the enduring fascination of his project. The recent rediscovery of the Wagner archive now makes it possible to frame Wagner’s investigation in relation to the little-known facts of his life (such as his extensive travel in Latin America) and repudiate the false claims that Wagner sympathized with German National Socialism.

Edward Dimenberg, Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, is co-editor with Anton Kaes and Martin Jay of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (1994) and the author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004) and Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images (2013). He currently is editing a critical edition of Anton Wagner’s book on Los Angeles to be published by the Getty Research Institute. A recipient of a University of California Presidential Fellowship in the Humanities, Dimendberg also has received fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the J. Paul Getty Trust, the Center for Creative Photography, and the International Research Center for Cultural Sciences in Vienna. Currently he serves on the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Publication Committee of the Modern Language Association, and the Faculty Editorial Committee of the University of California Press.

To join us for the 2016 PAMLA Plenary Address and Luncheon, go here to make a reservation and pay: https://www.pamla.org/2016/registration-info