Media and Literary Studies: Past, Present, and Future
A conversation in the Rifkind series about the state of the humanities
November 16, 2026
5:00PM to 6:30PM
Rifkind Center (NAC 6/316) or Online (via Zoom)

Please use this link to join via Zoom

How are new media ecologies changing literary production and literary culture, criticism, and scholarship? What is the relationship between the work done at institutions of higher education and the discussion on social media platforms? Between academic scholarship and its alternatives? Our two guests are literary scholars with influential profiles on Substack, where they have also discussed these questions.

Jeffrey Lawrence teaches 20th- and 21st-century US and Latin American literature at Rutgers. He is the author of Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (OUP, 2018). A translator from Spanish, in 2024 he also published a novel in Spanish, El americano, and co-founded Libreria Bocabierta, a Spanish-language bookshop in the East Village. His public-facing writing has appeared in The Point, Lit Hub, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and LARB. His substack, Avenues of the Americas, focuses on contemporary literature and culture across the Anglophone and Hispanophone worlds: https://avenuesofamericas.substack.com/

Julianne Werlin teaches early modern literature at Duke. Her first book was Writing at the Origin of Capitalism (OUP, 2021). The forthcoming Renaissance Authors: A Demographic History, charts the births, marriages, and deaths of 645 authors to show how life patterns shaped writing in the period. A new project, Literary Generations, is a longue durée account of generational change in literature. She writes reviews for The Chronicle of Higher Ed. Her substack, Life and Letters, focuses on the evolution of literary genres and styles in light of trends in demography, economics, urbanization, and biography: https://lifeandletters.substack.com/