aspeers, the first and currently only graduate-level peer-reviewed journal of European American studies, encourages fellow MA students from all fields to reflect on the diverse aspects and implications of health in American culture. They welcome term papers, excerpts from theses, or papers specifically written for the eighth issue of aspeers by 12 October 2014. If you are seeking to publish work beyond this topic, please refer to our general call for papers.

General Call for Papers

For the general section of its seventh issue, aspeers seeks outstanding academic writing demonstrating the excellence of graduate scholarship, the range of concerns scrutinized in the field, and the diversity of perspectives employed. They thus explicitly invite revised versions of term papers or chapters from theses written by students of European Master (and equivalent) programs. For this section, there are no topical limitations. Contributions should be up to 10,000 words (including abstract and list of works cited). The submission deadline is 12 October 2014.

Topical Call for Papers on “American Health”

From the health checks on Ellis Island to long-standing and recently increasing debates about the (un-)Americanness of different models of health care to Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign aimed at improving the health of Americans, public discourse in the US has continually connected notions of health to notions of Americanness and has negotiated one via the other. Moreover, a culturally relevant, broad, metaphorical usage of health is evidenced in the omnipresence of such phrases as “the health of the nation,” “crime epidemic,” and even “Bieber fever.” Not surprisingly, the topic of “American Health,” broadly conceived, has garnered significant attention among scholars in a variety of disciplines.

aspeers will, therefore, dedicate the topical section of its eighth annual issue to “American Health.” The journal seeks to further explore the topic and the manifold scholarly opportunities and interpretative potentials it offers for MA-level American studies in Europe. With a host of disciplines—ranging from political science and history to medicine, legal studies, cultural studies, and beyond—devoting scholarship to this topic, they welcome papers from the various fields, methodologies, and approaches American studies draws upon as well as inter- and transdisciplinary submissions. The following thematic clusters, then, might spark but do not delimit ideas for possible submissions:

• health, medicine, and capitalism: body optimization, the health risks of
  poverty, the commodification of reproduction, etc.
• the normative power of “healthy”: fat shaming, the impact of the APA’s
  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the
  legalization of medical marijuana, etc.
• negotiations of injury, disease, and health in literature, movies, TV,
  music, art, etc.
• the politics and legalities of health: the Hobby Lobby case, social
  security, biological warfare, etc.
• health intersecting with other categories of difference like race, gender,
  class, sexuality, ability, age, etc.
• the history of health in the US: female hysteria in the nineteenth
  century, food safety, the evolution of health institutions, etc.
• the language of health: metaphors and rhetorics of health and disease in
  political debates, religious texts, ecological discourses, etc
• At www.aspeers.com/2015 you can find additional
  information as well as our submission guidelines.