Skills development

From Academia to Parliament: How academics can support the Foreign Affairs Committee

A few months ago I attended a half-day workshop at the Houses of Parliament as part of an effort by the Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) to engage with the research and expertise of academics and, in particular, early career scholars.

My Research: Juliet Williams

‘My Research’ is a new feature that aims to introduce and summarise the research and work of Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers within the field of American and Canadian Studies. Sit back, and get to know some of the craziest, challenging, and rewarding places researchers have been taken to…

My Career Story: Matthew Shaw, Librarian

U.S. Studies Online is excited to introduce our new segment “Career Stories”.  Our “Career Stories” feature is an attempt to incorporate more professional development posts on U.S. Studies Online and address some of the wider anxieties in the postgraduate and early career cohorts regarding employment, employability and the options available. We hope to include interviews with professionals in a variety of research or American studies related positions. With us this week is Matthew Shaw, Librarian at the Institute of Historical Research. Current role How would you describe your current role at a job interview? Looking after a unique library that supports historical research not just in London, but nationally and across the world. It’s both a time capsule of how historical thinking has developed, and at the forefront of digital developments. What professional organizations are you associated with and in what ways? British Association for American Studies has been vital for keeping up with […]

Looking For Moses in NYC

In this post, PhD candidate (University of Exeter) Alice Levick shares her experiences from her research trip to New York where she went looking for Moses. Robert Moses, to be precise, the hugely influential public official responsible for so many of New York’s most enduring urban developments.

My Career Story: Philip Hatfield, Curator at the British Library

U.S. Studies Online is excited to introduce our new segment “Career Stories”.  Our “Career Stories” feature is an attempt to incorporate more professional development posts on U.S. Studies Online and address some of the wider anxieties in the postgraduate and early career cohorts regarding employment, employability and the options available. We hope to include interviews with professionals in a variety of research or American studies related positions. With us this week is Philip Hatfield, Curator for Digital Mapping at the British Library. From 2011-2015 Philip was also the Curator for the Canadian, Caribbean and U. S. Collections at the British Library. He holds a PhD in Cultural Geography. Current role How would you describe your current role at a job interview?  I’m responsible for managing born digital maps and digitised historic old maps at the British Library, as well as helping researchers engage with this material in innovative ways. The Library also holds a developing body […]

Curating LGBT History Month: Lessons Learned

February 2016 featured the most successful LGBT History month event series the University of Nottingham has ever seen. Hannah Rose Murray, programme organiser, reflects on the challenges she faced when curating the series and what systems of support she needed in place when she began. The post concludes with a series of event reviews from postgraduates in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham.

Fault Lines in American Studies: Re-evaluating Academic Conference Models

In the first month of my PhD I read Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz’s daring article on academic conferences in American Quarterly. “American Studies as Accompaniment” criticizes, amongst other things, the institutionalized, egotistical model of scholarship that prioritizes the scholar over the work or discussion:

“Because of the publications, presentations, positions, honors, and awards enumerated on it, the CV circulates out in the world as a strange surrogate for the person whose work it describes . . . The CV represents scholarly achievement largely as individual activity capable of being measured in quantitative terms. The work that scholars actually do, however, is innately collective and qualitative . . . scholarly conversations are cooperative creations, the product of collective communications in which all participants play a part.”

In writing this post I intend to expand on Tomlinson and Lipsitz’s reflections to make visible the flaws in our field with regards to conferences and, more importantly, offer feedback to postgraduates in the ways they can approach conference organizing.

What is, and how to do, LGBT History?

In this post, Dr Mark Walmsley, independent scholar and a member of the Academic Advisory Panel to Schools OUT UK, discusses the shift in attitudes towards engaging with LGBTQ issues within HE at a research, teaching, and ‘impact’ level. Mark argues that “in an age of ‘impact agendas’ and ‘public engagement initiatives’, Universities should not be ignoring a sizeable community that is often crying out for academic support and interest… It is time that LGBT history is not something we contribute to in February, but something that we actively take into account throughout the academic year.”

My Career Story: Rachel Walls, Academic Skills Development Tutor

U.S. Studies Online is excited to introduce our new segment “Career Stories”. With us this week is Rachel Walls, Academic Skills Development Tutor at the University of Leeds. Rachel holds a PhD in Canadian Studies from the University of Nottingham.

Listening to Rosa Parks

If all of us who are students of the black freedom struggle listen to rather than simply about Rosa Parks, writes Say Burgin, we stand to gain a much more profound understanding of racial justice, of why Parks would be a staunch supporter of Black Lives Matter today, and of why she told a group of Spelman students in 1985, ‘don’t give up and don’t say the movement is dead.’