Review: 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.
Continue ReadingReview: Border Control: On the Edges of American Art
Liverpool’s Merseybeat sound of the 1960s was influenced by American records brought in by the many US sailors arriving in the port each year. The Atlantic ‘border’ between Liverpool and the USA was wide but porous. Tate Liverpool was a particularly appropriate place, therefore, for the ‘Border Control’ conference.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology by David H. Price
David H. Price’s Cold War Anthropology is gripping and unusual. The author has previously explored the significant role anthropology has played in military strategies in his 2008 book, Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War. This latest offering delves deeper underneath the surface in order to analyse the global post-war moment, and as such examines a cardinally different political context.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Battle for Bed-Stuy: The Long War on Poverty in New York City by Michael Woodsworth
In recent years Brooklyn has become trendy. While the intertwined forces of displacement and gentrification have reshaped only select areas of Brooklyn, there can be no question that the national and international reputation of New York City’s most populous borough has been thoroughly transformed.
Continue ReadingBook Review: The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace by Susan L. Carruthers
Historical amnesia has created the impression that the reconstruction of Germany and Japan along liberal capitalist lines was a foregone conclusion in 1945. In reality, however, the decision to occupy was a contested question for both Washington’s decision-makers and for soldiers on the ground, many of whom would become reluctant participants in America’s project of democratic nation-building.
Continue ReadingReview: Special Relationships: Poetry Across the Atlantic Since 2000
The one-day symposium held at the Rothermere American Institute (RAI) at the University of Oxford on ‘Poetry Across the Atlantic Since 2000’ featured an arresting array of speakers from both sides of the Atlantic. Ultimately, the conference served to highlight not only the multifariousness of poetic production since the year 2000, but more importantly, how poets and literary critics from the U.S.A., Europe, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa conceive of their evolving literary concerns and cultural relationships in a rapidly globalizing world.
Continue ReadingReview: Hardboiled History: A Noir Lens on America’s Past
‘Hardboiled’ refers to crime fiction, narratives usually focalised through tough or cynical detectives and centring primarily on organised crime in prohibition-era United States. The genre of noir, however, categorises fiction that takes the perspective of a victim, suspect or spectator. While closely related to the Hardboiled genre, these differing perspectives are notable. Thus, the ‘Noir lens on America’s Past’ promised to interrogate these genres, the manner in which they addressed social anxieties, and their continuing legacy and influence.
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