Review: 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 ReadingWilliam Faulkner by Kirk Curnutt
Kirk Curnutt’s William Faulkner, the latest in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series, is a valuable contribution to the abundance of biographical materials on Faulkner, one of the United States’s foremost modernist authors. In under two-hundred pages, Curnutt provides a concise, informative, and highly readable account of Faulkner’s life and work. ‘Sole owner and proprietor’ of Yoknapatawpha County (which he famously termed as his ‘own little postage stamp of native soil’[i]); author of nineteen novels and several dozen short stories; and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1950) and the Pulitzer Prize (1955, 1963), Faulkner’s legacy and position in American letters is indisputable. At the same time, however, Faulkner was also a fiercely private individual, who balked at reporters and biographers intruding upon his home and family. In a letter to his editor, Malcolm Cowley, Faulkner emphasised his distaste for ‘photographs’ and ‘recorded documents’.[ii] He professed his ‘ambition to be, as […]
Continue ReadingBook Review: Constructing Presidential Legacy: How We Remember the American President by eds. Michael Patrick Cullinane and Sylvia Ellis
From presidential farewell addresses to depictions of presidents in film, advertising and literature, Michael P. Cullinane and Sylvia Ellis’s edited volume Constructing Presidential Legacyoffers a valuable addition to the growing body of literature concerning American presidential legacies.
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 ReadingReview of Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past, edited by Renee C. Romano and Claire Bond Potter
This collection of fifteen essays brings together a range of specialist academic perspectives on the remarkable cultural phenomenon that is Hamilton: an American Musical. It will be of interest to a wide range of people: fans of the show; professional scholars from a range of disciplines; and the general reader. It is an essential library purchase for anyone considering teaching courses which include this musical.
Continue ReadingOur Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan
Aaron O’Connell is a veteran of the Afghanistan war — the aptly dubbed ‘latest longest’ one for the United States — where he served as Special Assistant to General David Petraeus. The book’s title evokes both the spectre of America’s other endless war, that in Vietnam, as well as the pervasiveness of war in American political and cultural life. This is only the most recent of America’s ill-advised and destructive campaigns abroad, and it will not be the last. Yet while the war in Afghanistan occupies a place of particular importance in the litany of American wars, both because of its duration and its temporal location as a marker of the pre- and post-9/11 grand strategy of the United States, it is being fought at increasing distance from American consciousness. Indeed, one well-known political commentator recently remarked that America is no longer at war today, having apparently forgotten that this […]
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 ReadingMore on War by Martin Van Creveld
“You may not be interested in war, but war may be interested in you.” (p.1) How many of us want to read about war? Does it remind us all of pain, loss, blood and misery? Martin Van Creveld’s newest book, “More on War”, is not a story of these things. He uses examples drawn from military history to explain what war is and add More to what we already know on this difficult subject.
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