Class : Culture

Amy Schrager Lang, Syracuse University, and
Bill V. Mullen, Purdue University, Editors

Class: Culture, a new book series from the University of Michigan Press, is designed to lend energy and direction to the disparate and rapidly growing body of work addressing the impact of class on the framing and formation of U.S. and global culture. It takes its impetus from the urgent new attention, within the American academy and outside it, to ever-increasing disparities of wealth and their cultural effects in what has been called the new "Gilded Age." Evidence of the impact of class on academic discourse and public life is everywhere—from the blockbuster sales of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and hip-hop music CDs to the vitriolic charges of class warfare by politicians to the energetic international opposition to corporate globalization and war.

Class: Culture aims to capture this confluence of interest in class across the scholarly disciplines and across the boundary dividing the academy from surrounding communities. At its center will be the publication of books that offer new paradigms for considering what class is and how class "works" in U.S. culture. This series will foreground work that advances our understanding of class differences, the lived experience of class, and especially, the inscription of these in the arts and letters, their ramifications in visual and social history, and their structuring of political economy across time and region.

Class: Culture will explore the full range of cultural expressions of class. The editors particularly seek work in the following areas:

• Literature and visual culture
• Popular culture, especially film, television, music, and new media
• Commodity culture and its institutions
• Race theory and ethnic studies
• Feminist and gender studies
• Transnational and postcolonial migrations
• Public education and cultural literacy
• Queer studies

Writers, scholars and activists interested in submitting material to the series or seeking more information may contact:

Amy Schrager Lang
aslang@syr.edu

Bill V. Mullen
bvmullen@purdue.edu

LeAnn Fields
lfields@umich.edu

[Main Series page]