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 […]
Continue ReadingBook 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 […]
Continue Reading#USSOBOOKHOUR with Dr. Gavan Lennon
Analysing the ubiquity of the small town in fiction of the mid-century US South, Living Jim Crow is the first extended scholarly study to explore how authors mobilised this setting as a tool for racial resistance. With innovative close readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Lillian Smith, Byron Herbert Reece, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner and William Melvin Kelley, the book traces the relationship between activism and aesthetics during the long civil rights movement. Lennon reframes a narrative of southern literature during the period as one as one characterised by an aesthetics of protest, identifying a new mode of reading racial resistance and the US South. You can view his talk with the following Q&A here.
Continue Reading#USSOBOOKHOUR with Dr. Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard
Dr. Søndergaard’s talk is based on his recent book, Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights (Cambridge UP, 2020), which traces the role of human rights concerns in US foreign policy during the 1980s, focusing on the struggle among the Reagan administration and members of Congress. He argues that pressure from Congress pushed the administration to reconsider its approach to human rights and craft a conservative human rights policy shaped by anti-communism and selective democracy promotion. Through a number of case studies, he shows how liberals and conservatives selectively invoked human rights to further their agendas. He argues that this helped cement human rights as the core moral language in US foreign policy but also further politicized the meaning of the concept with a lasting impact on US human rights policy. You can view his talk with the following Q&A here. Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2o20) […]
Continue Reading#USSOBOOKHOUR with Prof. Daphne Brooks
Award-winning Black feminist music critic Daphne A. Brooks’s new book Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021) explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women in the recording studio and on stage. How is it possible, Daphne asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyoncé exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard UP, 2021) Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of African American Studies and Professor of Theater Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University and the author of Jeff Buckley’s Grace and of Bodies in Dissent, winner of the Errol Hill Award for outstanding scholarship in African American performance studies. She has written liner […]
Continue Reading#USSOBOOKHOUR with Thomas Cobb
Perceiving allegory: a discussion of Dr Thomas J. Cobb’s book, American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy: The Fragmented Kaleidoscope. Thomas Cobb Wednesday 24 March at 3 pm We are delighted to announce that our fifth #USSOBOOKHOUR will be at 3 pm, Wednesday 24 March 2021 with Dr. Thomas Cobb in conversation with Dr. Simon Willmetts and Kari Sund. In this Bookhour talk, Dr Thomas J Cobb discusses his experience of writing American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy: The Fragmented Kaleidoscope, a project based on his PhD thesis. Cobb will detail the challenges of expanding on the content of his PhD thesis, encompassing new methodologies in individual chapters and contending with the effect of Covid-19 on the predictions made in his final chapter. You can view the discussion here. American Cinema and Cultural Diplomacy: The Fragmented Kaleidoscope (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) Dr. Thomas J. Cobb (@DrThomasjCobb91) is an academic writing tutor and […]
Continue ReadingHaunting History: Gordon Chang’s Writing History without Documents: Chinese Railroad Worker Ghosts and American History
The building of the Transcontinental Railroad in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) was a symbol and achievement of unification, of future imperial growth. In his USSO Book Hour Talk, Writing History without Documents: Chinese Railroad Worker Ghosts and American History, Stanford historian of Sino-American relations Gordon Chang stated that so much of American history is railroad history. Most railroad history as American history is nationalistic, triumphalist, and technologically driven, focusing on ‘great white men’ and machines. In the name of Western expansion and “civilization,” technology changed Americans’ understanding of time, space, and distance. Paradoxically, the railroad simultaneously united and divided, connected and disconnected. A technologically advanced America in the late-nineteenth century was also the America of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Railroad history simultaneously involves the building of infrastructure and the ways in which a post-slavery America remained segregated after Reconstruction (Zoom 1:08:00-1:13:00). Moreover, it is also a […]
Continue Reading#USSOBOOKHOUR with Stephen Wertheim
You can register for this event here. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Putting America First, Forever: How the United States Suddenly Chose Armed Dominance Stephen Wertheim Thursday 4 February 4 pm, UK/ 11 am, New York/D.C. We are delighted to announce that our fifth #USSOBOOKHOUR will be at 4 pm, Thursday 4 February 2021 with the Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute, Stephen Wertheim. The event will end with a Q&A. Stephen Wertheim will talk about his new book Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020), which explores how the United States decided to become an armed superpower after World War II and invites us to question that decision. Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2020) For most of its history, the United States avoided […]
Continue Reading#USSOBOOKHOUR with John Wills and Patrick Jagoda
Register in advance for this meeting (click on it): https://york-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIkce-spjgoGdJ9hFe6-TfUn17kjecNJo-s After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Play America and Video Games in an Experimental Age John Wills and Patrick Jagoda Wednesday 9 December 2020, 4 pm, UK/ 10 am, Chicago We are delighted to announce that our fourth #USSOBOOKHOUR will be at 4 pm, 9 December 2020 with the two well-known and leading scholars in American Studies and Game Studies. The event will end with a Q&A. John Wills talks about his new book Gamer Nation that explores the relationship between U.S. culture and video games, highlighting a few gaming titles that in their own way have something distinctive to say about the American experience. Patrick Jagoda discusses his new book Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification, which explores ways that video games can be experimental — not only in the sense of problem solving, but also problem making that embraces […]
Continue ReadingWhat do Maps Mean to You?
J.R.R. Tolkien—writer, philologist, and academic—best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, is recognized by fantasy readers and scholars for his immersive world-building and detailed mapping of his secondary world, Middle-earth. In this Zoom BookHour, hosted by Jun Qiang of the University of York, Professor Robert T. Tally Jr. builds upon Tolkien’s quotation, “I wisely started with a map” (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien) to discuss his text, Topophrenia: Place Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination, regarding Tolkien’s works and the “literary cartography” of his world. USSO’s BookHour with Robert T. Tally Jr. discussed the intersection between the novel, ‘geocriticism’, spatiality studies, and literary cartography—or how we organize our space through writing—in relation to Tolkien’s physical and figurative mapmaking. While Topophrenia is not particularly written on Tolkien himself, Tally’s BookHour explored the possibilities of Tolkien’s literary cartography and how both the literal and figurative maps deepen […]
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