Book 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… Continue reading

Book Hour with Dr. Kevin Waite, the author of West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire

  The next U.S. Studies Online Book Hour will take place 17th March 2023, at 4pm GMT with Dr. Kevin Waite, who will talk with us about his first – and award-winning – book, West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (The University of North Carolina Press,… Continue reading

‘Malign Living Structures’: Functions of the Survey Image in “Soil Erosion – A National Menace” (1934)

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies The land survey photograph, as represented by the first two pictures here, is a category of image that circulated widely in scientific journals and official publications during the 1930s. Severe droughts and dust storms between… Continue reading

Greetings from Amarillo: Stephen Shore’s postcard play

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies Greetings from Amarillo – “Tall in Texas” (1971) is a set of ten 3½x5½-inch postcards made by the American photographer Stephen Shore. Each card shows a landscape image of Amarillo’s built spaces: the sunned faces… Continue reading

‘Maysville? That’s a white town’: “The Harder They Fall” and Blackness in the Western Landscape

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies The popularity of the Western as a genre solidified the frontier mythology as one of the building myths of the American nation and its cultural iconography. However, the Western carries sinister implications in its ‘good… Continue reading

The Changing face of black masculinity in American Horror Cinema

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Lanscapes in American Studies  The representation of blackness and black masculinity within American horror films has been a multifaceted and complicated journey that has reflected societal changes. However, the 1960s changed this narrative when, shortly after the assassination of… Continue reading

A Nuisance to the University: Why People’s Park is Facing Oblivion

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies Visiting People’s Park in Berkeley, California, for the first time, as I did in September of last year, is a visually arresting experience. As I walked through the park’s entrance on Dwight Way, just south… Continue reading

Juan Downey’s Dialectical Cybernetics

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies In October 2021, President Sebastián Piñera declared a state of exception in the southern regions of Biobio and La Araucania in Chile to legitimise the military repression of a Mapuche protest demanding the repatriation of… Continue reading

The Changing Landscape of Teaching Twentieth-Century American Literature: Bringing Disability Studies into Undergraduate Seminars

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies For decades, American Studies in the UK has had a glaring underrepresentation in terms of the presence of disability in twentieth-century American literature. In the twenty-first century, scholarship is moving towards looking at disability studies,… Continue reading

The Backlash in Love: Reclaiming Choice in Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and ‘Meg Ryan Fall’

In September 2022, journalist Meg Walters lambasted the growing ‘quirky aesthetic’ of the recent online trend ‘Meg Ryan Fall’: TikToks and Tweets which seasonally recreate the fashions and dialogue of Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally (1989), Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998).[i] [ii] [iii] [iv] For… Continue reading