Friday, March 27 3:00
110 Robb Hall, Hintz Family Alumni Center With Reception to Follow
“Cultural Deliteracy: The Project of Offloading The Humanities”
E.D. Hirsch’s popular education jeremiad, Cultural Literacy (1987), was published in the midst of a financial crisis which was both precipitated by the growth of private equity funds and facilitated their further concentration. This address uses the cultural literacy and the junk bond as a starting point for theorizing how and why humanities education has been continuously defunded and decentered in U.S. higher education while simultaneously being propagandistically treated as having sirenic control of student political actions.
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies, and host of The American Vandal Podcast. He is co-editor of the Routledge Companion To Literature & Economics (2018) and has published extensively in Mark Twain studies, the political economy of mass media, and critical university studies. He is also currently working on a book triangulating the rise of private equity, education technology, and neoliberal university administration, tentatively titled Deliberate Deliteracy.