BAAS 2023 Panel Review: 8H-GreenBAAS Panel ‘”Our House is Still on Fire”: New Research in Environmental American Studies’
BAAS 2023 Panel Review: 8H- GreenBAAS Panel ‘“Our House is Still on Fire”: New Research in Environmental American Studies’ Since debuting at 2021’s BAAS Annual Conference, GreenBAAS’s panels have become something of an annual fixture, acquiring a reputation for interdisciplinarity, provocativeness, and contemporary relevance. These features were again apparent as GreenBAAS re-convened on the final day of the BAAS 2023 Annual Conference for a panel chaired by Christine Okoth (Lecturer, KCL) and entitled, after a quotation from Greta Thunberg, ‘Our House is Still on Fire.’ Building on ‘Teaching Environmental American Studies in a Time of Crisis’ (BAAS 2021, published in The Journal of American Studies) and ‘Code Red: Embedding the Climate Crisis in the American Studies Curriculum’ (BAAS 2022, published in Transatlantica), 2023’s discussion offered a wide-ranging discussion with two overwhelming themes: the diversity of environmental thought and the imbrications of climate crisis with global imperialism and settler colonialism. Ananya […]
Continue ReadingBAAS 2023 Panel Review: 5E-Negotiating American Spaces
BAAS Panel Review: 5E- Negotiating American Spaces From the musings of the Transcendentalists to Turner’s frontier thesis, Chicano Aztlán, and the intercommunal visions of the Black Panthers, space has long been critical to American Studies. On April 13th, an all-star interdisciplinary team of PhD students from the University of Manchester found a space at the BAAS 2023 Annual Conference to negotiate this keyword. Across four presentations, their striking and wide-ranging papers investigated “how space operates within our research fields across various literature and media and how different groups have negotiated space across society.” The chairperson Samson Thozer opened proceedings with a lyrical examination of the poet Robert Hayden’s (1913-1980) writings regarding his childhood and adolescent home, the Detroit cultural hub and magnet for Black migrants during the Great Migration, Paradise Valley. Paradise Valley was a consistent source of inspiration for Hayden. The first Black Poet Laureate, Hayden once remarked that […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird, by Gene Andrew Jarrett
A comprehensive biography of Dunbar was long overdue. His brief life was influenced by most of the major forces affecting Black life after emancipation: the legacy of slavery, Reconstruction, civil rights, migration from South to North, city life and the limited integration it brought. His remarkable and swift ascent to fame showed the possibilities and the limitations of Black art for a population that sorely needed public voices. I understand Dunbar’s central place in the story of the late nineteenth-century better now than I did, and for that reason I am glad I read Jarrett’s biography. Still, I hope that those who seek this story in the future will have the opportunity to read a revised edition.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Ecology of Dakota Landscapes: Past, Present, and Future by W. Carter Johnson and Dennis H. Knight
Ecology of Dakota Landscape has beautifully blended the ecological attributes of landscapes of the Dakota region of the United States, its geological and ecological developments in recent centuries and the present environment, and prospective approaches to climate change. What is more, the book defines the changes in the region’s climate change and ecosystem, thus identifying the reasons and options for protecting it.
Continue ReadingBook Review: A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border Across Indigenous Lands by Benjamin Hoy
Author Benjamin Hoy successfully supports his three arguments and provides a foundational understanding of the racialised history of North American border control policies and their impact on Indigenous communities. Since the movement of people in the Americas is a prominent topic in today’s policy debates, this book offers an indispensable description of how current immigration policies were first developed to control the mobility of these Indigenous populations along with the formerly enslaved and Asia-Pacific immigrants.
Continue ReadingM3GAN and ChatGPT– A Critique of Contemporary AI?
In an interview about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Matt Murray from the Wall Street Journal asks Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella ‘do we need to learn math anymore? Why learn math?’[i] The New York Times article ‘Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach’, retells the story of a teacher catching a student using ChatGPT to cheat on a paper. They described the AI-generated essay as ‘the best paper in the class […] with clean paragraphs, fitting examples and rigorous arguments’.[ii] ChatGPT is a large language model chatbot, which means it has been trained on extremely large datasets in order to generate answers to text-based prompts. Large parts of the internet are scraped to gather information to train ChatGPT to give effective and well-written answers, or put plainly, ‘these algorithms are shown a bunch of text in order to understand how text functions’.[iii] ChatGPT has both been penned as the most […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years.
The University of Tennessee Press, $65 John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling: Critical Essays on the Interwar Years (ed. Aaron Shaheen and Rosa Maria Bautista-Cordero) spotlights John Dos Passos’s (1896-1970) interwar writing career in consideration to his self-reputed role as a contemporary ‘chronicler’. This volume of essays is split into four parts: ‘Chronicling War and its Aftermath’, ‘Chronicling American Commercial Culture: Manhattan Transfer’, ‘Chronicling Political Ambivalence in the Age of Totalitarianism’, and ‘Chronicling the America-Europe Divide’. Notably, the essay collection succeeds in maintaining Dos Passos’s relevance not only as an eminent modernist whose montage/camera-lens narrative techniques are disparate to that of other modernists, but also as a figure struggling to remedy the division between fiction and non-fiction. Woven with Dos Passos’s wavering political leanings and residencies in Europe, John Dos Passos’s Transatlantic Chronicling nestles itself in the long-line of criticism surrounding the author. Its relevance lies in how his corpus is […]
Continue ReadingPanel Review BAAS 2022: ‘Rethinking Identity and Place in the South: Cultural Production and Community Formations’
One of the advantages of returning to an in-person conference format is the opportunity to benefit from all the modes of knowledge exchange on offer over the three-day period—from panels, to keynotes, to workshops. One such example was the BAAS 2022 roundtable titled “Rethinking Identity and Place in the South: Cultural Production and Community Formations”. This roundtable featured scholars from a range of disciplines, enabling multiple perspectives on Southern identity to come into dialogue with one another. Rather than the more conventional format of panel presentations, this roundtable featured four short papers before opening up to an extended Q&A, which invited the audience to actively participate in the discussion. The roundtable began with four 5-10 minute papers from Simon Buck (Northumbria University), Robyn Shooter (Kings College London), Chris Lloyd (University of Hertfordshire) and Siân Round (University of Cambridge). Buck opened the presentations with a discussion of the Music Maker Relief […]
Continue ReadingBAAS 2022 Panel Review: ‘Considering Presidential Legacies: Reagan and Trump’
The British Association of American Studies (BAAS) Conference 2022 at the University of Hull was a hybrid format, with some panels happening in-person at the beautiful Hull campus, and other panels accessible online. Being at Hull for the conference, but also in charge of chairing one of the online panels on the first day, April 21st, I squirrelled myself away in one of the meeting rooms ready for the 13:00-14:30 BST panel entitled ‘Considering Presidential Legacies: Reagan and Trump’. After a few technical hitches – understandable given that this was the first panel session of the conference – Sarah Thomson, Clodagh Harrington and Alex Waddan were ready to present their papers. The theme of the panel explored how US presidents secure their policy legacies, and how far they have a role in what comes after their years in office. As the chair of this panel, I was really excited to […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: FDR in American Memory: Roosevelt and the Making of an Icon by Sara Polak
Sara Polak. FDR in American Memory: Roosevelt and the Making of an Icon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2021), £54. In FDR In American Memory: Roosevelt and the Making of an Icon, Sara Polak evaluates how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s image was constructed to resemble that of an American icon. In thematic chapters, Polak examines the changes and key points of Roosevelt’s public image, and also the individuals that created it. She persuasively shows how Roosevelt’s public image, and its shaping, still allows for him to be considered as one of America’s most popular presidents, over 75 years after his death. Polak’s work remains key in discussing the scholarship of America’s memory of the New Deal, but also sheds further light on the tools that were, and continue to be, used by American presidents to ensure that their legacy would remain for several decades. Building on FDR’s World: War, Peace, […]
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