Sound like fun? Maybe they’ll talk about “alterity” also! KC Johnson at Minding the Campus (H/T Instapundit) takes a look at the program for the 2013 American Historical Association conference, especially at the priceless paper titles. Did you know that 1945-1965 “saw the physical body as a site of cultural diplomacy?”  You missed that when you read your George Kennan, eh?

Not that I should talk. My latest political science conference paper’s title is “Cowboys and Corpses: The Moral Perils of the State of Nature in The Coen Brothers’ True Grit.” Yeah, I messed up by getting the word moral in there sans quotation marks. I’ll do better next time. And I now discern Peter’s master plan: by inviting me to write a paper on TRUE GRIT and corpses, he knew he’d be giving my academic CV a decisive edge!  A way to dress up my penchant for “dead white guys!”