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

The Paranoid Style Revisited: Postwar American Cultural Politics and The Argosy Magazine John Rylands Library, Manchester, 28-29 June 2018 Half a century ago Richard Hofstadter published his influential essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics,’ in which he identified ‘heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy’ as a recurrent feature of the nation’s political life. Hofstadter’s thesis has in subsequent decades been at the centre of a rich and interdisciplinary scholarly discourse that has been attentive to the cultural politics of the Cold War period as read especially through the lens of gender, but also those of science and technology, mass media, and corporate capitalism, amongst others. In our current political moment Hofstadter’s call for critical reflection on the genesis, mechanisms and consequences of the paranoid style beckons with renewed urgency. The aim of this conference is to generate such reflection by engaging with and showcasing a rare research resource recently […]

Ninth BrANCA reading group: Voicing the Non-Human University of Birmingham, 29th June 2018, 1-5pm The ninth British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA) reading group will be held at the University of Birmingham, 29th June 2018. Among America’s most potent myths and symbols are an array of animal and non-human presences: from its national animal, the bald eagle, to the elusive white whale, Br’er Rabbit, the birds, flies, and dogs of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and, more recently, King Kong, Mickey Mouse and a whole panoply of Muppets. But to what extent is America interested in the non-human as non-human? Are the non-humans of American literature always performing in ways that exceed their status as non-human? In what ways do the American writers of the nineteenth century approach, or exhibit a sympathy with, such animals on their own terms? Is such an approach possible? Questions like these have been explored in the flourishing field of animal studies, perhaps most famously by writers like Donna Haraway – in When Species Meet (2007) and Staying […]