It is a strange time to be a UK-based researcher in American studies. The industrial action of the past few years speaks to the crisis of the modern university, and particularly in the humanities—finding a striking crystallisation in American studies, where enrolments decrease year on year and departments face… Continue reading
The Crucible, The National Theatre, 14 Sep-15 Nov 2022 On a drizzly November afternoon, Salem’s Essex Street feels dampened by post-Halloween stillness. With the decorations packed up for another year, tourist season is officially over and the town becomes another run-of-the-mill corner of New England until next fall’s regalia rolls… Continue reading
The Lone Leopard, the new novel by Dr. Sharifullah Dorani, speaks to Afghanistan’s diversity, historical turbulence and future uncertainty through the coming-of-age story of four friends; Ahmad, Bakhtash, Wazir and the defiant young woman Frishta – as their intersecting, often conflicting paths are shaped by years of civil war, Taliban rule and American occupation. Continue reading
One of the advantages of returning to an in-person conference format is the opportunity to benefit from all the modes of knowledge exchange on offer over the three-day period—from panels, to keynotes, to workshops. One such example was the BAAS 2022 roundtable titled “Rethinking Identity and Place in the South:… Continue reading
‘Surveillance, Technology, and Discrimination in Literature and Culture Across the Americas’, British Association for American Studies Conference 2022, University of Hull, 21-23 April 2022 Surveillance and dystopian futures are increasingly urgent and generative areas of research for scholars of the contemporary Americas. Just recently, headlines have been dominated by the… Continue reading
F3 Ecologies of Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (sponsored by BrANCA) Opening the final day of BAAS 2022 was a BrANCA-sponsored panel titled “Ecologies of Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Culture”, chaired by Matthew Pethers (University of Nottingham). The panel brought together research in nineteenth-century American literature… Continue reading
If the 2000s were infested with zombie horror and alien invasions, what can we make of the recent resurgence of Lovecraftian tentacled monsters in film and television? In a blog post from October 2016, Roger Luckhurst traces the re-emergence of Lovecraftian themes to Netflix’s Stranger Things, arguing that the… Continue reading