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Research

Cyborgs, Simians and San Francisco (part two) – Vampires and Mood-Organs

In part two of Antonia Mackay re-reads LA and San Francisco through the fantastical bodies in Cold War fiction.

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Cyborgs, Simians and San Francisco (part one) – Bodies and the American West

“Bodies become like cities” in LA and San Francisco, argues Antonia Mackay, as these places stretch the boundaries between American fantasy and reality.

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Loyalist Lawyers: Exiles from the American Revolution

For my book project, I’m investigating lawyers who lived in 18th century Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Towards the end of the century, these individuals took a leading role in conducting the American Revolution, and also in the creation of the legal structures that became new state governments and the national government of the United States. As lawyers, they were also a bit of a closed community, speaking an arcane language filled with terms that others could not understand unless they shared the same training: words like fee tail male, executrix, intestacy, writs of attachment, or tripartite bonds were their stock in trade, plus Latin tags for every occasion. Being part of this community of men trained in the same field held them apart from all others, as well as holding them together in a sort of invisible association.

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Review: BrANCA Reading Group: “Hope/Pessimism”

BrANCA’s first reading group of 2015 was hosted by Dr. Ed Sugden and took place at King’s College, London on 26 June. The selected text for the reading group was Sutton Griggs’s novel Imperium in Imperio (1899). Griggs’s self-published text has often been described as utopian, envisioning an all-black nation within Texas. The aim of the reading group was to explore Griggs’s little-read novel under the rubric of “Hope/Pessimism.”

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America’s First Muslim Convert: Alexander Russell Webb

The Nineteenth Century was a period of unprecedented religious innovation within the United States, writes John L. Crow (Florida State University). It was also at this time that America started looking east and paying attention to the religions of India, China, and Japan. By the end of the century, the first American Buddhist organization was founded by Japanese missionaries in California. It was during this period when so many eyes were looking east that Alexander Russell Webb found Islam.

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Storify of our #bookhour twitter chat on STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel

On Tuesday 28th July, Diletta De Cristofaro discussed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel with Fran Bigman, Niall Harrison and Dan King. The panel focussed on the contrast between the beauty and violence of the post-apocalyptic world, and whether the novel could be considered a “quiet” post-apocalyptic novel; the structure of the plot and the connections it traces between space and time; the binary “great” art/popular culture – especially in light of the comic Dr Eleven and of the Shakespeare performances – and the lack of creativity of the post-apocalyptic world. Catch up on the storify here.

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The religious life of Malcolm X

Considering the profound impact Islam had on the life of Malcolm X, particularly in shaping his political views and changing his ideology of racism, Preeti Bath argues, it is an aspect of his life that needs to be further researched in order to truly understand the religious journey of Malcolm X (Malik E Shabazz), from an atheist to a minister for the NOI to a Sunni Muslim.

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In Memory of E.L. Doctorow (1931-2015)

Tuesday 21 July Great American novelist E.L. Doctorow passed away. Today U.S. Studies Online features a profile of E. L. Doctorow’s life and works as written by Richard H. King, Emeritus Professor of American Studies, University of Nottingham. “Doctorow’s stylistic and novelistic flexibility allowed him to present a much richer and more interesting America than that of his contemporaries Gore Vidal, John Updike and Philip Roth.
We will miss him greatly.”

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Review: ‘Poetry and Collaboration in the Age of Modernism’ Conference

Because the word “collaboration” can contain so much, ‘Poetry and Collaboration’ brought together scholars with wildly different interpretations of what it means to work together. The opening keynote by Peter Howarth (Queen Mary) set the tone by being generally definitional. For Howarth, the word could potentially replace “context” in discussions of historical environment, in order to give us a more active way to talk about the interactions between artists and their surroundings.

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As American as Apple Pie: U.S. Female Converts to Islam

As U.S. citizens who understand American cultural and societal norms, American female converts to Islam are in a good position to serve as advocates and agents for change, not only for themselves, but also on behalf of their fellow Muslim Americans. These American voices are offering a challenge to both the greater non-Muslim American community and the Muslim American community in clearly articulated, individual voices saying: I am a ‘real American’, I am a ‘real Muslim’, I am ready to have the conversation. You bring the vanilla ice cream – I’ll bring the apple pie.

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