Review: ‘Writing Back: Subverting Dominant Narratives’
The ’Writing Back’ conference—engaging with contemporary politics and culture to often overlooked texts and media—provided an exploration of American identity which went beyond canonical texts and dominant areas of scholarly consideration.
Continue ReadingReview: Marilynne Robinson Symposium
While, as Ames states in Gilead, “Memory can make a thing seem more than it was”, this is certainly not the case for this thought-provoking and timely symposium. In providing a forum for discussion of new perspectives and research on Robinson’s work, the event was a resounding success.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Ideas and Transformations in the Americas’, UCL Institute of the Americas PG Conference
Interdisciplinary panels, ranging from the ‘Unheard Voices of the Caribbean’ to ‘Transnational Perspectives of the US’, stimulated lively debate and reflection between chairs and audiences. These, and others, engaged with a range of historical approaches and topics.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Radical America: Revolutionary, Dissident and Extremist Magazines’, The Second Network of American Periodical Studies Symposium
The legacies of these radical publications are still being felt, even as scholars continue to explore the origins, struggles, and issues surrounding a movement that, though it may appear in different places and at different times, often finds itself struggling with the same debates around politics, publication, and censorship wherever and whenever it might manifest.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Civil Rights Documentary Cinema and the 1960s: Transatlantic Conversations on History, Race and Rights’
The remarkable collection of films shown throughout the conference demonstrated how documentaries could intervene in the historiography of the civil rights movement. The makers of these films, often in collaboration with historians, used their documentary films to question dominant narratives, uncover unknown stories, and expose overlooked figures in the civil rights movement.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Mothering Slaves: Motherhood, Childlessness, and the Care of Children from Slavery to Emancipation’
‘Mothering Slaves: Motherhood, Childlessness, and the Care of Children from Slavery to Emancipation’, University of Reading, 19-21 April 2016. Following events at the University of Newcastle and the Universidade de São Paulo, this third meeting of the Mothering Slaves Research Network sought to bring together experienced and new researchers, from a wide range of disciplines and several continents with a shared focus on the intersections of trans-Atlantic slavery and motherhood. The Atlantic framework encouraged scholars to think more comparatively about the concept and practice of motherhood within enslavement. The three-day conference adopted a fresh outlook to topics such as abortion, childcare, childhood, childlessness, infanticide, rape, and reproduction, to name but a few. Over the three-day period, scholars came together to share research into the lives of women, mothers, and children from across the Americas. While the great majority of papers looked to North America, predominantly the antebellum South, there was an […]
Continue ReadingReview: European Association for American Studies Conference 2016
To an historian – like myself – a panel entitled ‘Digitextualities – Spatialities, Fluidities, Hybridities’ seems perplexing at first, but the fact such papers could sit alongside those on nineteenth century slave history or modern American literature demonstrates EAAS’s inclusiveness. The exceptional coordination of such a large and international conference was a credit to the organisers.
Continue ReadingReview: IBAAS Joint Conference
If social media is anything to go by, ‘IBAAS’ the joint conference between the Irish and British Associations for American Studies was ushered in with much excitement. Twitter was inundated with #IBAAS16 updates of those making their way to Belfast. The typically erratic Northern Irish weather may have surprised some but it did little to dampen spirits. Over three days almost one hundred panels treated attendees to papers from an international cohort of academics, demonstrating the breadth and scope of American Studies. Despite, or perhaps because of, the variety of interests, the conference generated a significant amount of cross-panel discussion and thought.
Continue ReadingReview: Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Scottish Association for the Study of America
Snow dusted the horizon on 5 March, 2016, as the Scottish Association for the Study of America –affectionately known as SASA – gathered at the University of Stirling for its seventeenth annual conference. Promoting research into all forms of Americana, the SASA conference this year showcased the broad range of American Studies, History, and Literature, undertaken by doctoral, early career researchers, and established academics throughout Scotland and beyond.
Continue ReadingReview: American Historical Association Annual Meeting
The AHA Presidential Address by Vicki L. Ruiz (University of California, Irvine) entitled, ‘Class Acts: Latina Feminist Traditions, 1900-1930’, challenged the dominant historiographical genealogy of Latina feminism, which typically focuses on seventeenth-century Mexican women poets and then jumps to the 1970s Chicana movement. Instead, Ruiz explored the work of two key early-twentieth-century Latina labour activists: Puerto Rican Luisa Capetillo and Guatemalan Luisa Moreno (born Rosa López Rodríguez).
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