Skills development

Book Hour with David Watson’s Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction

The next U.S. Studies Online Book Hour will take place 28th April 2023, at 4pm GMT/12pm EST with Dr. David Riddle Watson and his first monograph, Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan Crime Files Series, 2021). Dr. Watson teaches at Central Carolina Community College. He completed his Ph.D. in 2019 from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His work focuses on the intersection between rhetoric, literature, and real-world events. He is currently working on his second monograph Surveillance Noir, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. Truth to Post-Truth traces the networks of thought about what is real and what is not from the Vietnam War through the end of the Cold War and the rise of the “post-truth” moment of our present day. The book is a philosophical journey through post-truth America. Furthermore, the book examines questions of truth and relativism, turning to detectives, both […]

Book Hour with Dr. Kevin Waite, the author of West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire

The next U.S. Studies Online Book Hour will take place 17th March 2023, at 4pm GMT with Dr. Kevin Waite, who will talk with us about his first – and award-winning – book, West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (The University of North Carolina Press, 2021) Dr. Waite is a political historian of the 19th-century United States with a focus on slavery, imperialism and the American West. He received his PhD in 2016 from University of Pennsylvania, and currently holds a position as the Associate Professor of Modern American History in the Department of History at the University of Durham. Dr. Waite will, firstly, speak of his award-winning first book, West of Slavery, in which he explores how American Southerner slaveholders extended their political dominion across the American West in the mid-19th century, and in the process triggered series of events that, ultimately, hastened the coming of […]

Innovative Teaching: Some Reflections on its Pitfalls & Promises

The term “innovation” is often bandied about in UK HE, frequently from on high. It carries with it a whiff of business speak and bureaucracy—certainly, if so-called tech bros ran the university, they’d be calling on us to “always innovate!” in the way Frederic Jameson once exhorted us to “always historicize!” In the business world, the term carries with it a sense of catering to an unarticulated need—Apple realizing we needed smart phones before we did, say—or, more generally, (and here I’m quoting from the online Business Dictionary instead of the OED) “the process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value for which customers will pay.” In the context of teaching American Studies in the UK, I think it’s worth remarking that “innovation” isn’t the key word most often used in US HE to describe what I think we mean when we use […]

The Things They Posted: Social Media Officers in Teaching

Adorning the front page of its May 1972 issue, GIRDA – an Asian-American monthly – had a cartoon of a white American officer in Vietnam demanding of an Asian-American soldier to “kill that gook, you gook.” In April 1975, the United States undertook Operation Babylift, which evacuated approximately 3,300 South Vietnamese babies, who would be resettled in the US and its allies. President Gerald Ford publicly posed for pictures cradling orphans. Ten years later, British musician Paul Hardcastle released ‘19’, a song named after the (disputed) average age of American soldiers in Vietnam, and which became the top selling single in 13 countries for 1985. I am well-versed in the Vietnam War. I took a master’s module on the war, wrote my subsequent dissertation on the media’s role in the conflict, and I designed my own course entitled the Vietnam War in American History and Culture. And yet, I must […]

USSO and BAAS PG WORKSHOP: Turning the Page – from Dissertation to Book Manuscript

Turning the Page – from Dissertation to Book Manuscript Wednesday 11 November 2020, 4 PM (London)  Three excellent researchers, Dr. Hannah-Rose Murray, Dr. Harriet Earle, and Dr.  Thomas J. Cobb are kindly sharing their publishing experience in this workshop on how to transform your Phd dissertation into a monograph.  Invited Speakers: Dr. Hannah-Rose Murray Dr. Hannah-Rose Murray is an Early Career Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on recovering and amplifying formerly enslaved African American testimony (including forgotten slave narratives, oratory and visual performance), specifically focusing on their transatlantic journeys to Britain between the 1830s and the 1890s. She has created a website (www.frederickdouglassinbritain.com) that maps their speaking locations across Britain, and has organized numerous community events including talks, performances, podcasts, plays and exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic. Her first book, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles was published […]

WRAP for USSO – Serena Williams: Race, Representation and Feminism

Each year the University of Winchester invites undergraduate students to apply to participate in the Winchester Research Apprenticeship Programme (WRAP). An extra-curricular scheme, WRAP provides students with the opportunity to work with academic staff on ‘live’ research projects lasting up to four weeks. This reflective piece shares a case study WRAP project from our American Studies programme which aimed to contribute to the enhancement of an existing final year module, entitled: ‘African American History and Culture’.

Music and Social Movements

The Importance of Sherry Receptions; or, Where Are All The Women In This Archive? First Impressions as the Cadbury Library BAAS Archive Intern

n spring 2017, BAAS and the Cadbury Research Library became partners in a project to develop and promote use of the BAAS archive, held in Special Collections at the University of Birmingham. They sponsored an internship open to PGRs and ECRS to conduct a piece of research exploring gender, race and class in BAAS and British academic life. The internship also offered the opportunity for researchers to receive training in archive skills and gain experience in disseminating research to a wider public. The award was made to Sabina Peck, PhD student in U.S. history at the University of Leeds.

The Stettheimer Dollhouse: A Life and Salon in Miniature

For twenty years, the Stettheimer salon (1915-1935) reigned as one of the central cultural hubs of 20th-century New York. Led by sisters Florine, Ettie, and Carrie, the salon cultivated an influential network of modernist artists, writers, and musicians, which would inspire and facilitate most of the sisters’ creative endeavours, including Carrie’s dollhouse replica of the salon: the Stettheimer dollhouse. An amalgamation of both Stettheimer salon locations, the dollhouse functions as a microcosm of the Stettheimer salon. Notable salon guests contributed a number of miniature paintings and sculptures to the dollhouse, whilst also providing Carrie with encouragement to persevere with the project.

Research Skills as Survival Skills in the Post-Truth Age

In the first post of our brandnew series “Critique, Outreach, Practice,” Katie Myerscough advocates research skills as survival skills for secondary school students.