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Join us online to explore and celebrate the publication of the special edition of the New American Studies Journal (vol. 76, 2025): What Makes an American “Classic”? co-edited by Caterina Domeneghini and Claire Barnes. With discussions by the co-editors, contributors, and our guest respondents: Wiebke Denecke (MIT), Glenn Most (University of Chicago/Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa), Tessa Roynon (author of The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction).
About the issue: From “great books” courses and the valorization of a “classical liberal education” to the cultural machinery which shapes canonicity, “What Makes an American Classic?” (New American Studies Journal vol. 76) considers just what that question means today against 2025’s socio-political backdrop. The issue seeks to interrogate the “classics” (with a large or a small “c”) with curiosity, with critique, and without a necessary impetus to valorize tellings of them which have been shaped by institutional pressures along the way. Can we acknowledge the influence of a piece of work without pushing it into the categorization of objective timelessness? Can we explore its impact using a more nuanced set of critical tools? Can we make the American Classic—and the conception of America itself—strange again?
