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

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

Community Building and Articulations of Race and Gender at Georgia Douglas Johnson’s 'Saturday Nighters': African American Theatre and The S Street Salon

This article is adapted from a presentation given at the London Arts and Humanities Partnership postgraduate conference, 21st January 2022 During the Harlem Renaissance period, 1461 S Street, Washington D.C., the home of Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877-1966), represented an important hub of creativity and community for African American women writers. ‘Saturday… Continue reading

Book Review: Understanding Jennifer Egan by Alexander Moran

Understanding Jennifer Egan by Alexander Moran is the first book-length study to provide critical analysis of all of Jennifer Egan’s published fiction to date. Arriving in the same year as Ivan Krielkamp’s A Visit from the Goon Squad REREAD,[i] the rising critical attention to Egan’s work is a welcome sight, correcting the tendency to overlook Egan’s constant and significant presence in contemporary fiction. Continue reading

Taking Notice: Nature and Climate Change Deniers in American Climate Fiction

Climate change is no taboo topic as in recent years, figures and organisations such as Greta Thunberg and WWF have brought the on-going environmental crisis to the media’s forefront, presenting us with frankly terrifying statistics about our planet’s future if radical changes to our destructive behaviours are not made. Literature… Continue reading

Book Review: The American Weird: Concept and Medium edited by Julius Greeve and Florian Zappe

The American Weird is an essay collection divided in two parts: ‘Concept’ and ‘Medium’. Its claim to originality lies in the latter part’s focus on manifestations of the weird in non-literary media running the gamut from film and music to television and videogames. Naturally, however, these cannot be discussed in isolation from the first part’s question of ‘concept’ – of what the weird is. Continue reading

When Mariah met Lutie – Luke Cage, The Street and the cultural capital of TV comic adaptation

Content Warning: Graphic Images (violence, severed heads) Netflix released the first series of Luke Cage in September 2016 to immediate acclaim. Cheo Hodari Coker, the producer of the Marvel comic adaptation, uses the richness of African American culture to create a hyper-real Harlem as the backdrop for his eponymous hero…. Continue reading

Hollywood in the Age of Trump: USSO Special Series

  Questions remain over whether former President Donald Trump will fade away or return, Grover Cleveland style, for another election cycle in 2024. Trump’s single term in office was memorable for its quality of sensory overload and contribution to a culture of partisan desensitisation in the Republican Party. The relationship… Continue reading