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 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 ReadingEvent Review: The Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference 2022
The biennial Maple Leaf and Eagle Conference is an event of legendary status both in Helsinki and far outside Finland. For almost four decades, it has kept the tradition of the longest running conference at the University of Helsinki uninterrupted and has provided a dynamic venue of exploring and explaining the phenomenon that is North America. Despite the challenges and troubles of recent times, the event successfully took place in May 2022. For the first time in its history, the conference was organized in a hybrid form, both face-to-face and online. However, that was not the only thing exceptional about this year’s conference. It was set against a turbulent background of an unprecedented ongoing war and a refugee crisis in the middle of Europe, and Finland’s and Sweden’s historical decision to abandon their long-lasting policy of non-alignment in favor of applying for a NATO membership. These events are sure to […]
Continue ReadingReflection on ‘Responding to Sexual Violence in Higher Education – Organisations, Initiatives, and Activism’, BAAS 2022
Please note that this review contains discussion of sexual violence and harassment in higher education. First and foremost, the focus needs to be on the safety of individuals experiencing any form of sexual violence and to facilitate an open discussion on how to proceed with caution and confidence. Reader discretion is advised for trigger content such as personal experiences of sexual violence, struggle to fight against forms of sexual violence in higher education as well as information on silent forms of activism against sexual misconduct and violence. The British Association for American Studies (BAAS) Annual Conference, hosted by the University of Hull, was an opportunity to finally meet all those Americanists that many of us initially met and got to know as bobble heads in virtual conferences over the past two years. As always, BAAS’s supportive cohort spirit was palpable, as the conference offered the panels with topics ranging […]
Continue ReadingBAAS 2022 Panel Review: ‘Surveillance, Technology, and Discrimination in Literature and Culture Across the Americas’
‘Surveillance, Technology, and Discrimination in Literature and Culture Across the Americas’, British Association for American Studies Conference 2022, University of Hull, 21-23 April 2022 Surveillance and dystopian futures are increasingly urgent and generative areas of research for scholars of the contemporary Americas. Just recently, headlines have been dominated by the potential overturning of Roe vs Wade; consequently concerns have sparked over how data companies might be obliged by law enforcement to monitor women accessing abortion services.[i] What’s more, a two-year investigation by Georgetown University has revealed the extent of ICE’s data monitoring, pointing to the organisation’s increasingly expansive systems of domestic surveillance.[ii] It seems wholly fitting, then, that the BAAS 2022 conference hosted several panels exploring themes of surveillance. In particular, a rich and varied panel titled ‘Surveillance, Technology, and Discrimination in Literature and Culture Across the Americas’ discussed the intersections of surveillance, capitalism, gender, racialisation and dystopia in contemporary […]
Continue ReadingBAAS 2022 Panel Review: ‘Language and Multiculturalism in Contemporary Literature’
In the last thirty-five years, there has been a good deal of study of the relationship between language and multiculturalism, and between multiculturalism and contemporary literature. In ‘Language, Multiculturalism, and Identity: A Canadian Study’, a survey conducted by John Edwards and Joan Chisholm, the authors raise the probability of a weak link between language and group identity.[1] In ‘Disciplined to Diversity: Learning the Language of Multiculturalism’, Andrea Voyer stresses the connection between multicultural vocabulary and the construction of the socially acceptable, modern identities.[2] Pilar Villar-Argaiz explores the artistic visions of the multicultural Ireland in contemporary Irish literature.[3] Moreover, Adriano Elia conducts socio-historical analysis of multiculturalism through the lenses of cultural relativism and political correctness, based on two contemporary British novels, Londonstani by Gautam Malkani and The Islamist by Ed Husain.[4] However, none of these studies blends together three important elements – language, multiculturalism, and contemporary literature. In this respect, the […]
Continue ReadingBAAS 2022 Panel Review: ‘Ecologies of Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Culture’
F3 Ecologies of Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (sponsored by BrANCA) Opening the final day of BAAS 2022 was a BrANCA-sponsored panel titled “Ecologies of Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Culture”, chaired by Matthew Pethers (University of Nottingham). The panel brought together research in nineteenth-century American literature by Olivia Foster (Nottingham Trent University), and nineteenth century cultural history by Dr. Tom F. Wright (University of Sussex). Foster’s paper, “Cohabiting with the Environment: An Ecocritical Reassessment of Sarah Piatt and Emily Dickinson” sought to tease out the multifaceted relationships that these nineteenth century poets articulated with the natural environment in their works. On the other hand, Wright’s paper, “‘Orenda’ and the Indigenous Origins of Charisma”, looked to the Indigenous American concept of ‘Orenda’, which roughly means the collective spiritual power held in the energies of natural objects. Wright takes up the concept of ‘Orenda’ to re-think the Western […]
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Visibility/Invisibility: Representation and Community Formation in American Studies’, British Association of American Studies Postgraduate Symposium, Online, 4 December 2021.
One distinct advantage of the breadth of a field like American Studies is that the same prompt may be honestly engaged by a host of scholars without fear of repetition, only resonance. The unifying theme of the 2021 BAAS postgraduate symposium was ‘Visibility/Invisibility: Representation and Community Formation in American Studies’. Twelve short papers and a keynote address were presented by young academics, each one taking up, reframing or projecting a specific community as its subject. In the interest of brevity, this review will focus on those papers most relevant to my own work. All thirteen of them, however, merit serious consideration. From the first panel, arguments spoke across space to one another. Mori Reithmayr (University of Oxford) argued that José Sarria’s vibrant (if unsuccessful) run for mayor of San Francisco in 1961, the first by an openly gay man, was not evidence for the existence of a gay community already […]
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