[MGSA-L] Revisiting Ludlow: A Special Colloquium, October 3

[Martha Klironomos]

Friday, October 3, 2014, 10:00 am – 4:30 pm, HUM 587 at the San Francisco State University campus.

"Revisiting Ludlow: Its Enduring Legacy"

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the Ludlow massacre, one of the most violent conflicts in American labor history. A politicized site of memory, Ludlow brings attention to immigrant subjectivities, working class consciousness and interethnic solidarity, while it generates interest in its resonance for the contemporary labor movement. The events surrounding the strike and the families of the strikers at Ludlow attract the interest of historians, archaeologists, journalists, poets and writers exploring social memory and its politics, the literary representation of the past, academic activism, public scholarship, and labor, ethnic and gender history. Local populations and organized labor annually honor the memory of those miners, women and children killed in the massacre.

To honor this special anniversary of the Ludlow massacre of 1914, the Center for Modern Greek Studies at San Francisco State University will host the colloquium, "Revisiting Ludlow: 1914/2014."  The colloquium brings together scholars, artists, journalists, researchers and museum curators with the aim of furthering the conversation about the scholarly and political significance of this seminal event. Writers with a distinguished record of work on Ludlow will introduce fresh perspectives and exchange ideas with scholars who are engaging with the subject for the first time. The colloquium provides a critical forum to present new scholarship and to revisit seminal texts on Ludlow. The aim is to promote cross-fertilization across genres and disciplines to further our understanding of Ludlow in relation to material culture, ethnicity, transnationalism, usable pasts, women's activism, academic politics, and the intersections of historical facts and fiction.

See the program and list of bios of the participants below.

Selected papers will be published in the first issue of a new peer-reviewed, on-line, journal tentatively called "Ergo: The Journal of Greek American and Transnational Studies" co-edited by Professors Martha Klironomos, SF State University, and Yiorgos Anagnostou, the Ohio State University, in 2015.

This event is being made possible by the generous support of the College of Liberal and Creative Arts, the Center for Modern Greek Studies at SF State University, Zeese Papanikolas, and the Modern Greek Studies Association.

It is also co-sponsored by the Departments of English, History, Humanities, Labor Archives and Research Center, and the American Studies program at San Francisco State University.

This event is free and open to the public. Please join us.

Please also RSVP if you are definitely attending by writing to <modgreek at sfsu.edu<mailto:modgreek at sfsu.edu>>

For directions and map of the campus, please visit: <http://moderngreekstudies.sfsu.edu<http://moderngreekstudies.sfsu.edu/>>

Program Committee:


Yiorgos Anagnostou
Zeese Papanikolas
Martha Klironomos

________________________________________________________________________________________


Ludlow Colloquium Program:


9:30 a.m.         Coffee

10:00 a.m.       Welcome and Introduction
Prof. Martha Klironomos, Modern Greek Studies/English, Director, CMGS, SFSU

10:10 a.m.       Remarks
Interim Dean, Daniel Bernardi, College of Liberal and Creative Arts

10:15 a.m.       Keynote – Why Ludlow Matters
Prof. Zeese Papanikolas, Writer, San Francisco Art Institute

I. Historical Contexts

10:45 a.m.       Ludlow in Context: Contemporary San Francisco Labor History
Catherine Powell, Director of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU

11:15 a.m.       “The Walking Wrath of God”: Mother Jones in Colorado
Prof. Elliott Gorn, American History, Loyola University Chicago

11:45 a.m.       Greek Diaspora and the Archaeology of Home
Prof. Kostis Kourelis, Art and Art History, Franklin and Marshall College

12:15 p.m.       Luncheon (on site)

II. Contemporary Circulations

2:00 p.m.         Reflections: Was it All for Nought?
Scott Martelle, Author, Journalist, & Editorial Writer for the Los Angeles Times

2:30 p.m.         Two Worlds in Conversation: From Academic Text to Public Eye
Lamprini Thoma, Film Producer & Writer; Nikos Ventouras, Film Director & Photographer

3:00 p.m.         Ludlow and Historical Memory: Centennial Reflections from Colorado
Prof. Thomas Andrews, History, University of Colorado

3:30 p.m.         Reclaiming a U.S. Labor Hero: The Many Lives of Louis Tikas
Prof. Yiorgos Anagnostou, Modern Greek Program, Ohio State University

4:00 p.m.         Ludlow and the Poetics of Memory
Prof. David Mason, English, Poet, Colorado College

4:30 p.m.         Closing
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Bios of participants:

Yiorgos Anagnostou is associate professor of Modern Greek and American ethnicities at the Ohio State University. He works on ethnicity and diaspora from an interdisciplinary perspective. He is the author of Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America. His most recent article is "White Ethnicity: A Reappraisal," published in Italian American Review.

Thomas G. Andrews is associate professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a specialist in the social and environmental history of the Rocky Mountain West. His first book, Killing for Coal:  America's Deadliest Labor War won the Bancroft Prize, as well as other honors. His next book, Coyote Valley: Environment and History in the Colorado Rockies, will be published by Harvard University Press in fall 2015.

Elliott J. Gorn, Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, is author of Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America, and Dillinger's Wild Ride: The Year that Made America's Public Enemy Number One.

Martha Klironomos is Professor of Modern Greek Studies and English Literature and the Director of the Center for Modern Greek Studies, the Nikos Kazantzakis Chair, at San Francisco State University. Her research interests lie in Greek and British modernist literature, British and American travel literature to Greece and Greek American literature.

Kostis Kourelis is an architectural historian who specializes in the archaeology of the Mediterranean from the medieval to the modern periods. He also investigates how medieval material culture has shaped modern notions of identity, space and aesthetics particularly during the 1930s. Research on the archaeology of labor includes surveys of deserted villages in Greece and oil-boom man camps in North Dakota. Publications include Houses of the Morea: Vernacular Architecture of the Northwest Peloponnesos (1205-1955), The Archaeology of Xenitia: Greek Immigration and Material Culture, Punk Archaeology, “Byzantine Houses and Modern Fictions: Domesticating Mystras in 1930s Greece” and “'Byzantium and the Avant-Garde: Excavations at Corinth, 1920s-1930s.”

Scott Martelle is the author of several books of history, including Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West, and Detroit: A Biography. His most recent book was The Admiral and the Ambassador: One Man's Obsessive Search for the Body of John Paul Jones. His current project about the man who killed John Wilkes Booth will be published in April 2015.

David Mason has written or edited fifteen books, including Ludlow: A Verse Novel, Sea Salt: Poems of a Decade, 2004-2014, News from the Village (memoir) and The Scarlet Libretto. He served as poet laureate of Colorado from 2010 to 2014.

Zeese Papanikolas has published three books on American cultural and historical themes. His biography Buried Unsung: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre was first published in 1982 and brought out in a paperback edition by the University of Nebraska Press in 1991. His most recent study, An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopaters of the Modern World will be published by Stanford University Press in the fall of 2015.

Catherine Powell is the Director of the Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University. Catherine is co-chair of the Labor Archives Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists, coordinator of the Bay Area Labor History Workshop and a board member of the Fund for Labor Culture and History. She is co-editor of The San Francisco Labor Landmarks Guide Book: A Register of Sites and Walking Tours.

Lamprini Thoma, is a producer who for the last 30 years has been working as journalist, radio producer and script writer. She has covered wars in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and West Africa. She has worked in print, online and broadcast media, including the BBC’s now defunct Greek service. She created the first specialized newspaper column on the Internet in Greece, an initiative which still makes her proud.

Nikos Ventouras, Director of the documentary "Palikari: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Masscare." He works in IT, and as a columnist and photographer for major Greek publications. He is an accomplished audio-visual production professional, his work ranging from sound recording to directing.