Join The A.V. Club at The University Of Chicago’s Conference On Jersey Shore Studies
To most, MTV’s Jersey Shore is just a weekly, 60-minute joke. But even in its fourth season, the show received an average of 7.3 million viewers each week—nearly quadrupling the numbers of viewers for MTV mainstay The Real World—and, over the past few years, introduced the American public to an entirely new lexicon of slang terms like “grenades” and “gorilla juiceheads.”
Because of the shows undeniable presence in popular culture, The University Of Chicago is throwing a Conference On Jersey Shore Studies, an academic look into the world of Guidos and Guidettes tomorrow, Oct. 28.
A wealth of academic writers are presenting papers at the conference with super-serious topics like “GTL (Gym, Tan, Labor): Reproducing Labor-Power On The Shore,” “The Jersey Saga: Honor Culture In Medieval Iceland And Modern Seaside,” and “Foucault’s Going To The Jersey Shore, Bitch!”
Somehow, being total gluttons for spray-tanned punishment, three writers from The A.V. Club’s Jersey Shore beat—Nathan Rabin, Genevieve Koski, and Marah Eakin—got wrangled into speaking on a panel moderated by RedEye’s Georgia Garvey. The sure-to-be weird panel, along with the rest of the conference, is free and open to the public, but interested parties must register online first.
