Guest Lecture Stanley Corkin (University of Cincinnati)
Critically acclaimed as one of the best television shows ever produced, the HBO series The Wire (2002–2008) is a landmark event in television history, offering a raw and dramatically compelling vision of the teeming drug trade and the vitality of life in the abandoned spaces of the postindustrial United States. With a sprawling narrative that dramatizes the intersections of race, urban history, and the neoliberal moment, The Wire offers an intricate critique of a society riven by racism and inequality.
Focusing on the show's depictions of the built environment of the city of Baltimore and the geographic dimensions of race and class, Stanley Corkin analyzes how The Wire's creator and showrunner, David Simon, uses the show to develop a social vision of its historical moment, as well as a device for critiquing many social "givens." In The Wire's gritty portrayals of drug dealers, cops, longshoremen, school officials and students, and members of the judicial system, Corkin maps a web of relationships and forces that define urban social life, and the lives of the urban underclass in particular, in the early twenty-first century. He makes a compelling case that, with its embedded history of race and race relations in the United States, The Wire is perhaps the most sustained and articulate exploration of urban life in contemporary popular culture.
Stanley Corkin is the author of Connecting the Wire: Space, Race, and Post-Industrial Baltimore (Texas, 2017) as well as Starring New York: Filming the Grime and Glamour of the Long 1970s (Oxford 2011), Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History in the Culture and the Moving Image Series (Temple, 2004), and Realism and the Birth of the Modern United Stares: Cinema, Literature, and Culture (Georgia, 1996). Dr. Corkin also co-edited, with Phyllis Frus, The New Riverside Edition of Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, and other Selected Writings (Houghton Mifflin, 2000). Professor Corkin's peer-reviewed articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in a number of journals, including Jump Cut, the Journal of Urban History, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Prospects: An American Studies Annual, Journal of American History, Cinema Journal, College English, College Literature, and Cineaste.
Imagining the New, New Boston, 1970-2014, Professor Corkin’s current research project and the final installation in the urban trilogy, will center on the branding of Boston and historical events that have made the city an iconic one in the United States. The project explores the multifarious meanings and divergent conceptual spaces—intellectual, political, geographical, visual, and cultural—of the “new” Boston as forged in the historical time period from 1970 to the present. Professor Corkin is Charles Phelps Taft Professor and Niehoff Professor of Film and Media Studies . He is a Professor of History and English at the University of Cincinnati, where he has been on the faculty since 1987.
The event is free and open to the public.
This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies in cooperation with the Office of International Relations.
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