Review: War of the Worlds: Transnational Fears of Invasion and Conflict, 1870-1933
One of the aims of the conference was to expand the time frame for Invasion Fiction, from pre-1914 fiction into the inter-war years, and to draw connections and comparisons to other parts of the world outside of Britain.
Continue ReadingReview: Transatlantic Studies Association Conference 2017
The ‘unofficial’ theme that permeated the conference was the future of the Anglo-American relationship in the age of Trump and Brexit. As concerns continue to grow on both sides of the Atlantic, scholars are attempting to gauge the wider repercussions of both developments and what this means for the role of the US and Britain in world politics.
Continue ReadingReview: Queer Subjects and the Contemporary United States
Queer Subjects and the Contemporary United States was a colloquium born of the present moment. Focused on discussions of what queerness means under the Trump administration, this conference set out to consider the ways queerness figures within a contemporary social, political, and cultural U.S. context.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Border Crossings: Translation, Migration, and Gender in the Americas, the Transatlantic, and the Transpacific’
The conference themes invited participants to explore the broad spectrum of possibilities generated by cross-cultural interactions and the challenges posed to literary canons to express the nuances and complexities of cross-cultural lives.
Continue ReadingReview: Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association 2017
The Posthumanist Modernism stream was prompted by two deceptively simple questions: What is modernism? And what is Posthumanism? The former question has been the subject of debate for years. The latter is the title of Cary Wolfe’s ground-breaking 2010 book on the subject. An international, comparative approach to these slippery concepts was a refreshing alternative to the often Anglo-centric focus of Modernist Studies in Britain.
Continue ReadingReview: Theorising the Popular 2017
Although assumptions persist regarding ‘popular culture’ as mass-produced, wholly commercial or vacuous, popular texts and practices are now so deeply embedded in western lifestyles that any supposed distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture require persistent challenging.
Continue ReadingReview: The Eleventh International Melville Society Conference
The eleventh international Melville Society conference was a leviathan of an event, demonstrated by its need for two reviews. Spanning four days, it offered an intensive and diverse range of panels, seminars and activities, which allowed the participants to engage actively with an impressive range of various aspects of current Melvillean scholarship.
Continue ReadingReview: The Eleventh International Melville Society Conference
Organised around the focus of ‘Melville’s crossings’, the event covered the breadth and depth of Melville studies and paid close attention to Melville’s dialogues with philosophy and aesthetic theory, his own travels across the globe, and the idea of borders and thresholds within his works. Echoing these crossings, the event itself traversed the boundary between the academic and the public, including panels, seminars, and plenaries but also public engagement in the form of an afternoon at the British Library.
Continue ReadingReview: Ecology, Economy, and Cultures of Resistance: Oikoi of the North American World
Taking as its starting point the fact that ecology and economy are inextricably linked, this two-day symposium sought to explore the ways in which the resistant nature of the humanities, particularly North American scholarship, can address these intertwined concerns.
Continue ReadingReview: Lives Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas
One aspect of this was in the arranging of one-to-one meetings between participating graduate students and senior scholars, providing an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and advice from persons they might not otherwise encounter. As one of the participating junior scholars, this was a particularly valuable element of the event.
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