Virginia Humanities Conference
MARCH 30-31, 2007
Christopher Newport University

Walt Whitman called America a “nation of nations.”  But 400 years after Jamestown’s founding, what and who has our nation become?  What portion of our national self-concept is real, and what portion is myth?  The invention of America led to epochal results, but how do we fairly evaluate those results?  Relative to our 400 years of history, where are we now and where are we heading?  The 20th Century has been called The American Century, but what will our role be in the 21st?  Will Yankee ingenuity continue to reinvent America?  How do we measure up to the Jeffersonian ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all?  Where do the humanities fit in?  What can we learn from literature and the arts about America?

Conference participants are also invited to attend a joint lecture by historians
James McPherson and David Hackett Fischer
on the evening of Thursday, March 29, 2007

Keynote Speaker:
Pauline Strong, Ph.D., Anthropologist,
University of Texas, Austin

Dr. Pauline Turner Strong is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women's & Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.  An award-winning undergraduate and graduate teacher, Dr. Strong has participated in the development of many interdisciplinary initiatives, including those of Connexus: Connections in Undergraduate Education, and the University of Texas Humanities Institute, which she serves as Associate Director.  Dr. Strong’s research centers on the representation of race, ethnicity, gender, and nationality in U.S. public culture.  She is the author of Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives, which won an Honorable Mention for the 2000 Chicago Folklore Prize, and the co-editor of New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, Representations (University of Nebraska Press, 2006). She has also published more than two dozen articles in the fields of anthropology, folklore, ethnohistory, cultural studies, museum studies, gender studies, American Studies, and Native American Studies. She has served as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and Councilor of the American Society for Ethnohistory.  Dr. Strong received her bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Colorado College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago.