Review: Irish Association for American Studies Annual Conference 2019
Conference Review: ‘Confidence-Men and Hucksters, Corruption and Governance in the U.S.’, Irish Association for American Studies Annual Conference, University College Cork, Ireland, April 12th-13th 2019 https://iaas.ie/iaas-annual-conference/ Interested in the parallels between Donald Trump’s presidency and the 2004 novel The Plot Against America, in January 2017, The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/philip-roth-e-mails-on-trump) contacted acclaimed Jewish-American novelist Philip Roth for comment. His response? Donald Trump is ‘just a con artist.’ For Roth, Trump is more aptly captured in Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, a novel which ‘could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam.’ Indeed, it is this meeting of fact and fiction described here by Roth – recent political developments along with Melville’s complex and remarkably prophetic 1857 novel – that motivate the theme of this year’s Irish Association for American Studies Annual Conference, held in University College Cork, Ireland from the 12th-13th April, 2019. Roth’s remarks were recalled […]
Continue ReadingReview: Exposing Secrets: The Past, Present and Future of U.S. National Security Whistleblowing and Government Secrecy
Review: Exposing Secrets: The Past, Present and Future of U.S. National Security Whistleblowing and Government Secrecy, New York University London, 17-18 January 2019 “The stories that have impact, the ones that change things, come from whistleblowers.” The former defence and intelligence correspondent for The Guardian and publisher of Edward Snowden’s revelations, Ewen MacAskill, noted on the need for whistleblowers to expose secrets. Relating to journalism and the press, whistleblowers can and have provided essential information. The ethos of governmental secrecy often spelt severe consequences aimed at those who commit the courageous act of whistleblowing. Co-organised by Kaeten Mistry (University of East Anglia) and Hannah Gurman (New York University), this conference represented a culmination to the Arts and Humanities Research Council sponsored project ‘Blowing the Whistle: The Hidden History of Whistleblowing and the Rise of the U.S. National Security State.’ Inviting scholars, intellectuals, journalists, advocates, and whistleblowers themselves, the conference provided […]
Continue ReadingReview: Scottish Association for the Study of America Annual Conference 2019
Review: Scottish Association for the Study of America Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh, 2 March 2019 After falling victim to the 2017 Beast from the East at St. Andrew’s, this year’s Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA) conference was held in a thankfully snow-free Edinburgh and celebrated a special anniversary. Twenty years on from the society’s 1999 founding in an Edinburgh pub, SASA has become a highlight for those working in the fields of American Studies and American history both in and around Scotland. From its humble beginnings to an ever-expanding organisation and conference that brings together scholars from many nations at various career stages, and covering a plethora of interdisciplinary topics, SASA 2019 did not disappoint. With forty-two speakers and fifteen panel sessions, this year’s conference saw the largest number of presenters and papers, along with one of the highest attendance records. This not only shows the breadth […]
Continue ReadingReview: IAAS Postgraduate Symposium
‘This is America? Shaping, Making and Recreating’, IAAS Postgraduate Symposium, Trinity College Dublin, 10 November 2018 Programme: https://issuu.com/iaas/docs/iaaspg18_programme.docx The 2018 postgraduate symposium for the Irish Association for American Studies, co-organised by Postgraduate and Early Career Caucus co-chairs Sarah Cullen and James Hussey, set out to explore the narrative creation and recreation of American history and culture across all forms of media, and the extent to which America continues to write and re-write itself. Throughout the day, various themes and debates emerged, many of them centring on the fundamental malleability of ‘Americanness’ and the resilience and irrepressibility of minority voices in American culture. While each paper touched on a different cultural strain with regard to the notion of ‘American identity’, the overarching premise may be described as an investigation of the ideological construction of America. After opening remarks by Dr Jennifer Daly (Trinity College Dublin), secretary for the IAAS, co-organiser James […]
Continue ReadingBAAS PG Conference 2018: Keynote Review
USSO Keynote Competition Winner – James West, ‘Write Me In: Dick Gregory and the 1968 Presidential Campaign’, BAAS PG Conference 2018, 3rd Nov. 2018 Available at: https://northumbria.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=9082ec92-31b2-4771-921e-a98d00a2fbb9 James West (University of Northumbria) opened 2018’s USSO Keynote speech with a list of Dick Gregory’s occupations: ‘activist, author, artist, conspiracy theorist, nutritionist, athlete . . . and Presidential candidate’. He went on to characterise the comedian as a kind of real-life ‘Forrest Gump’ and this light-hearted and evocative phrase not only reflected the seeming unreality of Gregory’s life and his association to major historical and political events, but also set the tone for an engaging and informative discussion. This levity was maintained throughout the keynote and was appropriate given Gregory’s own career as a comedian and the wry humour which pervaded his campaign and his response to it. Despite numerous humorous moments there was a sustained analytical engagement with the topic throughout, […]
Continue ReadingConference Review: ‘The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies’, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, November 29 – December 1, 2018
in the province of American Cultural Studies, the (re)turn to aesthetics is indeed more recent and takes a far more political perspective than seen in the ‘return’ of aesthetics within the more philological and less politically oriented quarters of the MLA since the late 1990s. The former is animated by the utopian desire that conference host Johannes Voelz (Frankfurt) described as a central characteristic of American Studies as practiced under the auspices of the American Studies Association. As speaker Lee Edelman (Tufts University) put it, what was at stake in the Frankfurt conference was really the ‘the progressive return of the aesthetic’.
Continue ReadingReview: HOTCUS PG & ECR Conference 2018
Review: ‘Uses and Abuses of the American Past’, HOTCUS PG & ECR Conference, University of Nottingham, 20 October 2018 ‘Uses and Abuse of American Past’, held on 20 October this year, addressed a variety of contemporary issues. Like the BAAS conference on 1968, scheduled just two weeks later, this conference cast an eye to the theme of the ‘appropriation of history’. Conference themes often tend towards today’s politics, organising their thoughts around a present-day issue. It is not surprising, then, that scholars have absorbed, or seek to address, our supposed post-facts era. Smoothly organised by Mark Eastwood (University of Nottingham) and the HOTCUS (Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States) committee, the selection of this year’s theme struck a suitably contemplative note. Each paper, in its own way, sought to consider changing norms. Some, more specifically, hinted at the issue of distortion of history, reinforcing that it is, as we all […]
Continue ReadingConference Review: ‘Did Liberalism Fail in the United States after 1945?’
The overarching question the conference sought to address, ‘Did liberalism fail in the United States after 1945?’ was well chosen, and of particular relevance to our present historical moment. As attention on both sides of the Atlantic turns towards the upcoming American midterm elections, it is clear that research on contemporary American political history continues to be in high demand among scholars and the public alike.
Continue ReadingReview: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2018: Faulkner and Slavery
Review: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2018: Faulkner and Slavery, University of Mississippi, 22-26 July 2018 “What did slavery mean in the life, ancestry, environment, imagination, and career of William Faulkner?” This was the guiding question posed by the Call for Papers of this year’s annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, centered on the theme “Faulkner and Slavery,” and held at the University of Mississippi. As more work is undertaken across the globe to re-contextualize historical monuments, and to recover subjugated narratives, critical re-evaluations of the past are central to current scholarship; the time to critically re-assess Faulkner’s relationship to slavery is now. While on the surface, Faulkner’s own interaction with “the peculiar institution” might appear somewhat secondhand – the author was born in 1897, thirty-two years after the Emancipation Proclamation – the specter of slavery was never far from his life. Through his African American “Mammy”, Caroline Barr (born an enslaved person somewhere […]
Continue ReadingReview: The British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies Biennial Conference: What Happens Now 2018
Review: The British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies Biennial Conference: What Happens Now 2018, Loughborough University, 10-12 July 2018 If the inaugural British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) conference is anything to go by, academics are a dedicated lot. Even persistent hot weather and a World Cup semi-final did not deter over a hundred scholars from gathering at Loughborough University for three days of literary exploration. What Happens Now 2018 (WHN18) evolved from the conference series of the same name that was hosted by Lincoln University from 2010 onwards. In Loughborough the title proved to be a particularly apt description of the conference’s scope. WHN18 showcased the variety of contemporary literary studies as a field, as well as its ability to address pressing issues within academia and beyond. Three broad themes connected many of the papers. Some presenters explored the ability of literary studies to facilitate social activism by making […]
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