Review: BAAS PG Conference 2017 – CHASE PG/ECR Workshop (Day Two)
The programme of sessions was designed to help PGR and ECR attendees appreciate the value of ‘networks, collaboration and friendship’, as well as thinking about obstacles they may face during their early years in academia.
Continue ReadingReview: BAAS PG Conference 2017 – Post-Truth and American Myths (Day One)
Rounding off 2017 (the year of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’), this year’s British Association for American Studies postgraduate conference was a timely, enlightening scholarly event, centred on concepts of ‘truth’, myth-making, and cultural fact and fiction in American society.
Continue ReadingBAAS PG Conference 2017: Keynote Review
Malone’s paper was ambitious in scope, appealing to a range of different disciplines and drawing upon an impressive range of source material and methodological approaches. Despite the often serious nature of her subject matter, Malone’s paper was peppered with humorous asides, keeping the audience’s attention and demonstrating her skill as a speaker.
Continue ReadingReview: Black Art, Black Power: Responses to Soul of a Nation
Nine speakers, four panels, one day: the highly-anticipated conference organised by the Tate Modern in conjunction with their Soul of a Nation exhibition was not only incredibly broad in the number of topics discussed but simultaneously rich in detail.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space by Robert T. Tally Jr.
The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space is the sixth collection of essays in a series edited by Robert T. Tally Jr. who is also general editor of the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Continue ReadingBook review: Out of Oakland, Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War by Sean L. Malloy
Sean L. Malloy’s book provides a convincing and engaging history of the internationalism of the Black Panther Party (BPP). It is a valuable contribution to scholarship on the BPP, black internationalism, and the intersection of issues of race and the Cold War.
Continue ReadingReview: North American Resources at the British Library
The day formed a sort of whistle-stop tour of a public institution that wants to be used. The organisers were more than forthcoming about the importance of human resources in finding material. For all the database searches possible, the subject librarians themselves have decades of experience and indispensable knowledge which they want to disseminate more widely. Like the promotion of analogue, the human face becomes a mascot for remembering how scholarship must seek to maintain a contact with material reality, as it then gains capacity to enrich both academic and public spheres.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘A More Perfect Union’: IAAS PG Symposium
Closing in on a year of turbulence and violence, the symposium’s question of American unity was extremely pertinent. The relationship between past and present, language and truth, healing and communities, and narrative, trauma, and identity emerged throughout the day.
Continue ReadingReview: Presidents and Premiers Workshop, Newcastle University, 26-27 May 2017
Dr Martin Farr, Professor Mike Cullinane and Todd Carter report back on the the success of the Presidents and Premiers workshop, held at Newcastle University on 26-27th May 2017.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American Niceness: A Cultural History by Carrie Tirado Bramen
When the current U.S. president, as Bramen puts it in her wide-ranging cultural study, ‘epitomizes the bombastic chauvinism of the Ugly American’ (1), the concept of American niceness sounds at best like an out-dated but innocuous cliché and, at worst, like a dangerous fiction. As American Niceness sets out to prove, the trope of the kind and generous American has yet to fall out of fashion and the role that it has played in disguising a long history of ugly violence might account for its unstinting survival.
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