Panel 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 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 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: ‘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 ReadingEvent Review: SASA Conference 2022 (Online)
The annual conference of the Scottish Association for the Studies of America once again collated a wide variety of research, PhD chapters and other works in progress from wide variety of academics and postgraduate researchers. And as SASA recognizes the broadness of American Studies and therefore does not call for papers topically, it remains open to all postgraduate scholars on a topic they are interested and/or experts in. While the COVID19 pandemic gives little respite even two years in, this year again SASA conference was successfully held virtually, upholding the same enduring jovial and informal environment we have grown to know and enjoy. The new Chair of SASA, Hannah Jeffery, describes the annual conference as ‘a platform to get that kind of first experience as a PhD or master’s student to present because sometimes, obviously, that can be quite daunting especially if it’s a bigger conference.’[2] Therefore, SASA remains an […]
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 […]
Continue ReadingRoundtable Review: ‘American Studies in the Twenty-First Century’, BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
In his introduction to ‘American Studies in the Twenty-First Century’, Andrew Fearnley (University of Manchester), who co-organized the roundtable with Hilary Emmett (University of East Anglia), argued that the “greatest challenge that faces British American Studies is our subject’s diminishing profile among young people.” This panel sought to consider how we should explain what American Studies is today to the public and to potential American Studies undergraduates, who are increasingly being drawn away from American Studies towards other subjects. How do we explain this field to those who have little or no knowledge of what it is? What words best capture what it is we do today in American Studies departments, or in American Studies degrees? To begin addressing these questions, the roundtable brought together five speakers from different institutions around the United Kingdom. These speakers brought a variety of backgrounds and experiences teaching American Studies to the panel, a […]
Continue ReadingReview: PG BAAS Conference – Connection and Collective Action: Past and Present (Online)
This year’s British Association of American Studies (BAAS) Postgraduate Symposium inspired speakers and attendees alike to trace instances of connection, collaboration and action across both today’s and yesterday’s America. Amidst the ongoing isolation for many in 2020, organisers Molly Becker (University of Cambridge) and Jennifer dos Reis dos Santos (Aberystwyth University) would have been hard-pressed to choose a more thoughtful and vital theme, or more insightful papers for the day’s proceedings. Indeed, in their welcoming remarks, the organisers commented that they intended for this year’s theme to be as “open to as many different realms of American Studies and diverse interpretations” as possible. The resulting cross-disciplinarity was apparent across the symposium’s three panels and keynote presentation, with topics ranging between school desegregation in 1930s small town America, the political significance of St. Patrick’s Day parades, and the intersectional possibilities of Twitter discourse. Additionally, the inclusion of a ‘Publishing Opportunities for […]
Continue ReadingEvent Review: PG and ECR BAAS 2019: Communicating the United States
December, in London, awash with city folks and sightseers ready to be enthralled at the spectacle of the Christmas lights and Oxford Circus. Near St Pancreas lies a library which holds the largest collection of American Literature outside of the United States. Here in the Eccles Centre for American Studies was the British Association of American Studies Post Graduate conference of 2019.
Continue ReadingReview: HOTCUS Work-in-Progress Meeting 2019
Review: HOTCUS Work-in-Progress Meeting 2019, University of Oxford, 17 October 2019. At the second annual work-in-progress session, two developing articles were discussed: Liam O’Brien’s (University of Cork) paper, ‘Winning Back the Peace: The George H.W. Bush Administration and the Creation of Operation Southern Watch, 1992’ and Dr. Meghan Hunt’s (University of Edinburgh) piece, ‘”He was shot because America would not give up on racism”: Martin Luther King Jr. and the African American civil rights movement in British schools.’ Like last year’s event, papers were circulated before the session so attendees had time to read and develop comments for each paper. The goal of this session was to foster a supportive environment and to provide feedback which would aid the authors in the publication of their articles: this goal was met. There was an element of ‘article by committee’ which is often helpful to postgraduates and early career researchers who perhaps […]
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