Culture

Review (Part Two) of IAAS Annual Conference

The design and implementation of a runaway artificial intelligence was a concern felt by many of the panellists. An AI that proved particularly threatening was one that may be built upon the incorporation of human minds into a computer network. The potential for an omnipresent surveillance filtered into an important term used at the conference – ‘hive mind’.

Review (Part One) of IAAS Annual Conference

Usually in conferences, there are one or two panels that do not quite fit the theme. Not this year. Tied together by an excellent plenary from Dr. Lee Jenkins (University College Cork) it demonstrated the power that sight, surveillance, and vision possess on a multi-disciplinary scale.

Review of ‘Avant-Gardes Now!’ Symposium

Throughout the whole day there were repetitions of specific phrases which became tagged to the definition of avant-garde. Notions of simulation and mimicry were frequently raised in relation to the differences between what is imagined, and what is supposed.

May Day and the future of workers’ internationalism

The conference “Workers of all lands unite? Working class nationalism and internationalism until 1945,” (University of Nottingham) highlighted how workers, now more than ever, need an international movement, one that can tackle the issues raised by a globalized system of production. (Review by co-organisers and labour scholars Lorenzo Costaguta and Steven Parfitt)

“The Land Entire Saturated”: Commemorating the Civil War Dead at 150 years

  April 9th, 2015 marked the sesquicentennial commemoration of the surrender of the General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to the Army of the Potomac under the command of General Grant. The surrender sounded the death knell for the shattered Confederacy. Appomattox was no cause for outpourings of joy; the conflict had dragged on for over four years and claimed the lives of over 620,000 American citizens.[1] Proportionately, if the war had occurred during the sesquicentennial years, the number of casualties would be approximately 6.2 million. Some historians argue that the 620,000 figure falls short of the mark, with James David Hacker estimating that the number may be as high as 850,000. As an internal struggle, the vast majority of the dead remain within the nation’s boundaries. Familiar battlefields act as sites for the concentration of their memory, there is no foreign Tyne Cot or Thiepval for this American bloodletting. […]

(In)Visibility, Race and Ethnicity in American Women’s Writing throughout the Twentieth Century

This blog series focused on American women writers, a partnership between The Society for the Study of American Women Writers and U.S. Studies Online, explores the field through several lenses that range from recovery to religion and from war to transnationalism. Leah Milne opens the series with a post about how ethnic American women writers tackle the idea and status of invisibility.

Blogs on Togs: Dress History Research in an Overseas Archive

SHAW’s series opens with Alison Goodrum’s discussion of visiting the designer Elizabeth Hawes’ archives in New York. Professor Goodrum explores the challenges and joys of both using overseas archives and starting a blog about her research trip.

Gae Pride Parades: The Impossibility of Queerness in Irish America at the St Patrick’s Day Parades

2015 marks twenty-five years since the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization’s (ILGO) first application to march in New York City’s St Patrick’s Day parade on Fifth Avenue. Still the world’s largest celebration of the day, it was rejected by the event’s organizers, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), a Catholic Irish-American institution. Backed up by the Supreme Court, the AOH not only removed the ILGO from the parade, but also succeeded in barring the organization’s right to protest against its own exclusion on the basis that, “as the parade was a celebration of Irish ethnicity, the AOH had a right to discriminate against the ILGO, based on the tacit acceptance that an a priori condition of being Irish was an active intolerance of homosexuals, and therefore no expression of an identity that was simultaneously Irish and homosexual was possible” (O’Donnell 136). The last twenty-five years have included ongoing queer exclusions […]

Deconstructing ‘Uncle Tom’ Abroad: The Case of an American President

The character of Uncle Tom experiences the benevolent paternalism and cruel exploitation of chattel slavery, and eventually dies at the hands of a malicious master. What does it mean for a twenty-first century presidential candidate, who became the 44th President of the United States, to be described in such terms? The rhetorical implications of this epithet demonstrate how media and popular culture shape ideas about history, race, and politics, even beyond the United States.

60 Seconds With Peter Molin

To usher in a new series of 60 seconds interviews for 2015 we have invited contemporary war literature experts Assistant Professor Aaron DeRosa (California State Polytechnic University), Assistant Professor Peter Molin (Rutgers University) and Associate Professor Patrick Deer (New York University) to tell us a little bit more about themselves and their expertise.

DeRosa, Molin and Deer will lead our January #Bookhour discussion on Phil Klay’s REDEPLOYMENT on the 27th January 2015, 9-10pm GMT.

“How did you come to your current area of research?”

“My own military deployment to Afghanistan in 2008-2009 inspired me to begin reading contemporary war literature. I started my blog Time Now: The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars in Art, Film, and Literature to publicize great work and initiate conversations on the subject.”