UCL Americas Research Network 2024 Conference – Historical Roots, Modern Realities: Nationalism Across the Americas

Call for Papers: Death and Celebrity Wednesday 6th June 2018, University of Portsmouth   Keynote Speakers: Dr Ruth Penfold-Mounce, University of York Dr Samantha Matthews, University of Bristol   ‘Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil’ (John Milton)   ‘Fame is a food that dead men eat’ (Henry Austin Dobson)   This one-day symposium seeks to interrogate the role of death in the construction, negotiation and perpetuation of celebrity identity. For the ancients, true fame was necessarily posthumous, but in modernity, too, there remains an enduring fascination with what Andrew Bennett terms ‘the immortality effect’. Following the death of a celebrity, a variety of agents – friends, family, fans, professional associates, arts and heritage bodies – may interact to frame his/her legacy for posterity; moreover, celebrities themselves may take an active role in choreographing their cultural afterlives while still alive. Yet, while cementing, augmenting or rehabilitating the celebrity’s public […]

SANAS Biennial Conference The Genres of Genre: A Conference on Form, Format, and Cultural Formations Nov. 2 and 3, 2018, Lausanne North American Studies have always had an intense but ambivalent relationship to genre, as these narrative patterns have participated in nationalist processes as well as in narratives of resistance. Emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century from concerns about naturalism and realism, American literary scholarship after WWII avoided the politicized post-war atmosphere by making the ‘romance’ the quintessential American novel genre, while cinematic genres such as the musical or the Western contributed to amplifying the mythic dimension of American self-definition. Since then, American Studies scholars have pioneered influential work on melodrama, the American Gothic, the jeremiad and other genres. Concurrently, Canadian literature’s prominent nation-building narratives were framed as documentary tales of regionalism, historical novels and social realism before evolving into dystopian and postmodern fiction, most famously by Margaret […]

Université de Lille 3, UFR LEA, France, 12 octobre 2018 Over the last thirty odd-years, a growing number of film and TV productions have left the confines of Hollywood studios, either to benefit from interesting tax incentives or to find new scenery that can visually surprise audiences. The popular success of some of those ‘runaway’ films or TV series then prompted many fans to walk in the footsteps of Luke Skywalker in Tunisia (Star Wars), of Frodo in New Zealand (Lord of the Rings), of Harry Potter and his friends in Great Britain, of Katniss Everdeen in North Carolina (Hunger Games), of Daenerys or Jon Snow in Ireland or Malta (Game of Thrones), thus significantly increasing the number of visitors to those places and countries. Some of those tourists strongly wish to re-live on site what they saw on screen while others are simply curious to visit the filming locations. […]