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As the Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher webspace of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS), U.S. Studies Online showcases cutting- edge research by, and professional development support for, American Studies scholars at an early stage in their careers.
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BAAS 2023 Panel Review: 8H-GreenBAAS Panel ‘”Our House is Still on Fire”: New Research in Environmental American Studies’
BAAS 2023 Panel Review: 8H- GreenBAAS Panel ‘“Our House is Still on Fire”: New Research in Environmental American Studies’ Since debuting at 2021’s BAAS Annual Conference, GreenBAAS’s panels have become something of an annual fixture, acquiring a reputation for interdisciplinarity, provocativeness, and contemporary relevance. These features were again apparent as GreenBAAS re-convened on the final day of the BAAS 2023 Annual Conference for a panel chaired by Christine Okoth (Lecturer, KCL) and entitled, after a quotation from Greta Thunberg, ‘Our House is Still on Fire.’ Building on ‘Teaching Environmental American Studies in a Time of Crisis’ (BAAS 2021, published in The Journal of American Studies) and ‘Code Red: Embedding the Climate Crisis in the American Studies Curriculum’ (BAAS 2022, published in Transatlantica), 2023’s discussion offered a wide-ranging discussion with two overwhelming themes: the diversity of environmental thought and the imbrications of climate crisis with global imperialism and settler colonialism. Ananya […]
Continue ReadingBAAS 2023 Panel Review: 5E-Negotiating American Spaces
BAAS Panel Review: 5E- Negotiating American Spaces From the musings of the Transcendentalists to Turner’s frontier thesis, Chicano Aztlán, and the intercommunal visions of the Black Panthers, space has long been critical to American Studies. On April 13th, an all-star interdisciplinary team of PhD students from the University of Manchester found a space at the BAAS 2023 Annual Conference to negotiate this keyword. Across four presentations, their striking and wide-ranging papers investigated “how space operates within our research fields across various literature and media and how different groups have negotiated space across society.” The chairperson Samson Thozer opened proceedings with a lyrical examination of the poet Robert Hayden’s (1913-1980) writings regarding his childhood and adolescent home, the Detroit cultural hub and magnet for Black migrants during the Great Migration, Paradise Valley. Paradise Valley was a consistent source of inspiration for Hayden. The first Black Poet Laureate, Hayden once remarked that […]
Continue ReadingBook Hour with David Watson’s Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction
The next U.S. Studies Online Book Hour will take place 28th April 2023, at 4pm GMT/12pm EST with Dr. David Riddle Watson and his first monograph, Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan Crime Files Series, 2021). Dr. Watson teaches at Central Carolina Community College. He completed his Ph.D. in 2019 from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His work focuses on the intersection between rhetoric, literature, and real-world events. He is currently working on his second monograph Surveillance Noir, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Truth to Post-Truth traces the networks of thought about what is real and what is not from the Vietnam War through the end of the Cold War and the rise of the “post-truth” moment of our present day. The book is a philosophical journey through post-truth America. Furthermore, the book examines questions of truth and relativism, turning to detectives, both […]
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