Application Advice: Gerald Ford Presidential Foundation
This month I am visiting the United States for eighteen days to conduct primary source research central to my PhD thesis, ‘Spies, civil liberties and the Senate: the 1975 Church Committee’. It is the first time I have been to the US, and it is mainly due to the award I received from the Gerald Ford Presidential Foundation that I am able to spend such a significant amount of time there.
Continue ReadingApplication Advice: Eccles Centre European Postgraduate Award
Writing applications can be a scary undertaking, especially if you have only recently graduated and cannot yet boast with an impressive list of publications or extensive work experience in any specific area. You might even feel that you have not achieved anything truly noteworthy so far – except, maybe, making it through college alive.
Continue ReadingApplying for Research Funding: Four Key Principles
I have had some success in this area, having raised funds during my PhD and the first five years of my career from the AHRC, BAAS, the British Academy, Duke University, the University of Edinburgh, the Fulbright Commission, and the University of Nottingham. I have also served on the committee of HOTCUS, for which I have judged postgraduate travel awards on several occasions.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965 by Eric Schickler
Beginning his history with Roosevelt’s election in 1932, Schickler argues that civil rights was, put simply, ‘not part of the programmatic liberal vision in the early 1930s’ (27). With African American voters generally loyal to the party of Lincoln, and with Roosevelt attempting to appease both the organized labor movements of the South and West (who were generally resistant to civil rights) and conservative northeastern business interests, it took the creation of the Congress of Industrialized Organizations (CIO) in 1935 to bring African Americans into the coalition and redefine New Deal liberalism.
Continue ReadingStorify of our #bookhour on HYSTOPIA by David Means
On Tuesday 2nd August 2016, Dr Dorothy Butchard, Dr Ciarán Dowd, Dr Deirdre Flynn, and Dr Dan King joined #bookhour organiser Dr Diletta De Cristofaro to chat about David Means’ Hystopia, in the longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2016. The discussion focused on the form of the novel, both in its postmodern nested narratives and framing devices, and in its various story arcs; on the relationship between alternate history and trauma, as well as on that between individual agency and state intervention; and, finally, on the text’s use of Baudrillardian tropes and its problematic depiction of women.
Continue ReadingWhen a novel changes a social system: Mary Jane Ward’s The Snake Pit (1946) and the US state psychiatric hospital
It is rare for a novel to radically affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, yet Mary Jane Ward’s novel, The Snake Pit (1946), drew widespread critical attention to the plight of the mentally ill in American state asylums. It is not claiming too much to say that treatment of the insane began its long, unsteady road to improvement after Ward’s fiction had reached out to a huge, popular audience, tackling a subject that had previously been taboo.
Continue ReadingPrimaries as Sports and Spectacle: Sports Metaphors in Twenty-First Century Presidential Primary Debates
‘The Brawl Begins’, an article about the 2016 primaries in The Economist provides the most overt manifestation of how a discourse of sports has permeated contemporary political reporting. Describing elections as a “jaw-dropping spectacle” or referring to the Iowa caucuses as the “opening round” in a political boxing match, a prime example of horse-race journalism, is particularly prevalent in presidential primary elections.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Literary Fiction: The Ways We Read Narrative Literature by Geir Farner
What can a linguist do for Americanist literary critics? Plenty.
Continue Reading“FACTS TAKE A BACKSEAT TO MYTHS” – BREXIT FROM AN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE. An Interview with Leif Johan Eliasson
As the UK is still waking up to a radically changed political, social and economic outlook, our European Relations Katharina Donn editor asked Prof. Leif Johan Eliasson for his take on the Brexit referendum. The author of America’s Perceptions of Europe (Palgrave Macmillan 2010) offers a sobering perspective on transatlantic relations in the face of populism, regionalism, and domino effects.
Continue ReadingMy Research: Juliet Williams
‘My Research’ is a new feature that aims to introduce and summarise the research and work of Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers within the field of American and Canadian Studies. Sit back, and get to know some of the craziest, challenging, and rewarding places researchers have been taken to…
Continue Reading