Boston College scholar to lecture on 'rust belt canon'

Carlo Rotella of Boston College will give a talk titled "The Rust Belt Canon: Cultural Legacies of the Industrial City" on Tuesday, Sept. 14 at 6 p.m. in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.   Admission is free and open to the public. 

The lecture will draw upon music, literature, and film to show how the industrial city survives in American culture. Long after the era when manufacturing was of primary importance in determining the form and function of great American cities, echoes and byproducts of that era still circulate in both explicit and subsurface ways in our culture, carrying powerful charges of meaning rooted in industrial-era conceptions of work, play, gender, race, and other matters of import. 

An English professor and director of the American Studies Program at Boston College, Rotellaspecializes in teaching American literature, American Studies, urban literatures and cultures, and creative nonfiction writing. He has held Guggenheim, Howard, and Du Bois fellowships and received the Whiting Writers Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, and the American Scholar's prizes for "Best Essay" and "Best Work by a Younger Writer."

His work covers a broad array of subjects and forms. His books include  Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (2003),  Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt (2002), and  October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (1998). He has also published articles and essays The New Yorker,  New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and American Quarterly, among other periodicals.

The Department of English, the Office of the Dean of Special Programs, and the Office of the First-Year Experience are sponsors of the lecture.