Review: ANZASA Conference (Part Two)
In August 1964, the first Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association Conference was held at The University of Melbourne. When ANZASA returned to another Melbourne university – Monash – in 2015, the conference did not have a stipulated theme. One repeated area of interest, however, was race and discrimination in America. Another theme that emerged was a desire to continue the historical project of de-exceptionalising America by placing the United States in the context of the wider world.
Continue ReadingReview: ANZASA Conference (Part One)
Across the two days of the conference, the majority of speakers repeatedly returned to issues of races and discrimination. All four keynote speakers engaged with the racial aspects of their research. Thomas Doherty (Brandeis University) discussed the portrayal of Nazism in 1930s American cinema. Coupled with the erasure of explicit mentions of Judaism from the silver screen during the decade, films such Boys Town (1938) used allegory and avoidance to critique Nazi Germany within the political censorship of the Motion Picture Production Code.
Continue ReadingReview: 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.”
Continue ReadingReview: ‘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.
Continue ReadingReview: 2015 HOTCUS Annual Conference
The conference began with Professor Gary Gerstle’s (University of Cambridge) plenary lecture, ‘Colossus with Feet of Clay: The Troubled State of Government in Modern America’. It was a tour de force of fundamental questions of America’s history: from territorial expansion, to liberty, race and immigration, and even national security.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Money Talks: Inequality and North American Identity’ Conference, 19th June 2015
Amy Bride reviews ‘Money Talks: Inequality and North American Identity’, a conference held at Nottingham University on the 19th June 2015, a collaboration between the 49th Parallel, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Birmingham.
Continue ReadingWhat We Learned: Organiser’s report on the 1st Americas Postgraduate Conference at the UCL Institute of the Americas
In part two of our 1st Americas Postgraduate conference double header the organisers James Hillyer, Anthony Teitler, Thomas Maier and William Sawyers offer some useful organising tips for next year.
Continue ReadingReview of the 1st Americas Postgraduate Conference at the UCL Institute of the Americas
Nik Kyriacou reviews the 1st Americas Postgraduate conference at UCL’s Institute of the Americas in our first conference review double header.
Continue ReadingReview (Part Two) of IAAS Annual Conference
The design and implementation of a runaway artificial intelligence was a concern felt by many of the panellists. An AI that proved particularly threatening was one that may be built upon the incorporation of human minds into a computer network. The potential for an omnipresent surveillance filtered into an important term used at the conference – ‘hive mind’.
Continue ReadingReview (Part One) of IAAS Annual Conference
Usually in conferences, there are one or two panels that do not quite fit the theme. Not this year. Tied together by an excellent plenary from Dr. Lee Jenkins (University College Cork) it demonstrated the power that sight, surveillance, and vision possess on a multi-disciplinary scale.
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