Registration for the Dylan @80 conference is now open and the event itself is less than a month away. Behind the scenes, the Institute staff is working to create not just a dynamic virtual program, but opportunities for real interaction and engagement throughout the three-day celebration of Dylan’s eight decades. And in this post, we’re excited to more details about a panel that focuses on the riches of The Bob Dylan Archive® here in Tulsa.
The catalog for the archive contains over 800,000 entries and covers a vast collection of objects ranging from session tapes and notebooks to letters, photographs, film, and physical artifacts. What is it actually like to work with this material? And what can it tell us about Dylan’s music and creative process? This panel will feature an interactive roundtable discussion with scholars who have worked directly with these materials. It will be moderated by Mark Davidson, Archive Director for the Woody Guthrie Center and the Bob Dylan Center.
Anne Margaret Daniel, ‘If I Writ on Your Book, Love / Just You Blot Out My Name’: Revision and Effacement in Dylan’s Drafts
Anne Margaret Daniel teaches literature and humanities at The New School University in New York where she specializes in Modernism and in Irish literature. The editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last unpublished short stories, “I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories” (Scribner 2017), she is currently at work on a biography of Fitzgerald. Follow her @venetianblonde.
Nathan Blue, ‘Don’t Send Me No More Letters, No’: Fan Mail By the Letter
Nathan Blue is an English MA student at the University of Tulsa who currently works with the Bob Dylan Archive® studying fan letters sent to Dylan in 1966. He presented on Bob Dylan and the Blues at the 2019 South Central Modern Language Association Conference in Little Rock, AR. In addition to Nathan’s studies into the intersections of literature and popular music in the 1960s, his interests also lie in twentieth-century literary modernism, semiotics, and linguistics.
Michael J. Kramer, ‘One Should Never Be Where One Does Not Belong’: The Elusive Magical Mysteries of John Wesley Harding
Michael J. Kramer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at SUNY Brockport where he specializes in modern US cultural and intellectual history, transnational history, public and digital history, and cultural criticism. He is the author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (Oxford University Press, 2013) and is currently at work on This Machine Kills Fascists: What the Folk Music Revival Can Teach Us About the Digital Age.
Sean Latham, Dealing with Devil
Sean Latham is the Pauline McFarlin Walter Endowed Chair of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Tulsa where he serves as Editor of the James Joyce Quarterly and founding director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities. He is an internationally recognized expert in the field of modern literature and culture and has written or edited ten books, including Am I a Snob? (Cornell 2003), The Art of Scandal (Oxford 2009), the Little Review Ulysses (Yale 2015), and The World of Bob Dylan (Cambridge 2021).