Book Review: American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron edited by Branka Arsić
Sharon Cameron’s critical output has slowed since her emergence as a major voice on American literature in the 1980s, but, as this beguiling and suggestive volume of essays shows, her influence continues to grow as it informs the most innovative approaches to the subject in the twenty-first century.
Continue ReadingBook Review: American History through Hollywood Film: From the Revolution to the 1960s by Melvyn Stokes
As a scholar of film and television rather than history, I have often been uncomfortable with the ways in which moving images are treated by historians, as either uncomplicated windows into the past or a means to demonstrate the historical ignorance of Hollywood filmmakers.
Continue ReadingBook Review: Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War by John Pinheiro
The primary argument of Missionaries of Republicanism is that the religious history of the Mexican-American War is the story of how anti-Catholicism emerged as being integral to nineteenth-century American identity as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant republic.
Continue ReadingReview: ANZASA Conference (Part Two)
In August 1964, the first Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association Conference was held at The University of Melbourne. When ANZASA returned to another Melbourne university – Monash – in 2015, the conference did not have a stipulated theme. One repeated area of interest, however, was race and discrimination in America. Another theme that emerged was a desire to continue the historical project of de-exceptionalising America by placing the United States in the context of the wider world.
Continue ReadingReview: ANZASA Conference (Part One)
Across the two days of the conference, the majority of speakers repeatedly returned to issues of races and discrimination. All four keynote speakers engaged with the racial aspects of their research. Thomas Doherty (Brandeis University) discussed the portrayal of Nazism in 1930s American cinema. Coupled with the erasure of explicit mentions of Judaism from the silver screen during the decade, films such Boys Town (1938) used allegory and avoidance to critique Nazi Germany within the political censorship of the Motion Picture Production Code.
Continue ReadingReview: BrANCA Reading Group: “Hope/Pessimism”
BrANCA’s first reading group of 2015 was hosted by Dr. Ed Sugden and took place at King’s College, London on 26 June. The selected text for the reading group was Sutton Griggs’s novel Imperium in Imperio (1899). Griggs’s self-published text has often been described as utopian, envisioning an all-black nation within Texas. The aim of the reading group was to explore Griggs’s little-read novel under the rubric of “Hope/Pessimism.”
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Poetry and Collaboration in the Age of Modernism’ Conference
Because the word “collaboration” can contain so much, ‘Poetry and Collaboration’ brought together scholars with wildly different interpretations of what it means to work together. The opening keynote by Peter Howarth (Queen Mary) set the tone by being generally definitional. For Howarth, the word could potentially replace “context” in discussions of historical environment, in order to give us a more active way to talk about the interactions between artists and their surroundings.
Continue ReadingReview: 2015 HOTCUS Annual Conference
The conference began with Professor Gary Gerstle’s (University of Cambridge) plenary lecture, ‘Colossus with Feet of Clay: The Troubled State of Government in Modern America’. It was a tour de force of fundamental questions of America’s history: from territorial expansion, to liberty, race and immigration, and even national security.
Continue ReadingReview: ‘Money Talks: Inequality and North American Identity’ Conference, 19th June 2015
Amy Bride reviews ‘Money Talks: Inequality and North American Identity’, a conference held at Nottingham University on the 19th June 2015, a collaboration between the 49th Parallel, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Birmingham.
Continue ReadingReview: The University of Nottingham Postgraduate Academic Retreat, 30 May – 6 June 2015
Timo Schrader and James Brookes, organisers of the University of Nottingham Postgraduate Academic Retreat, 30 May – 6 June 2015, look back upon the trip and its various strengths and weaknesses.
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