Border Crossings:Translation, Migration, & Gender in the Americas, the Transatlantic, & the Transpacific Society for the Study of American Women Writers & Université Bordeaux Montaigne Dates: 5th – 8th July 2017 Venue: Université Bordeaux Montaigne, France Conference director: Stéphanie Durrans To maintain a continuity with their previous conference (in Philadelphia, November 2015) on liminality and hybrid lives, the organisers would like this first SSAWW conference in Europe to address the significance of “border crossing” in the lives and works of American women writers. Such experiences have always been important to American women. Early diaries and travel notes left by 17th– and 18th-century women provide us with valuable records of and about their migratory experience to the New World and their lives and experiences in America. Besides offering more records of such experiences, the 19th century also witnessed an explosion in travel writing, fiction, and poetry treating with travel, as growing numbers of American women writers […]

The organisers are pleased to invite you to participate in the Oxford Symposium on Religious Studies. The Oxford Symposium on Religious Studies is a forum for discourse and presentation of papers by scholars who have a particular interest in the study of religion. Registration for their Summer Session (1, 2 & 3 August) is now open. The meeting will be held at The Old Library in the Oxford University Church of St Mary.  Constructed in 1320, The Old Library is the first university (as opposed to college) building in Oxford and therefore uniquely important; this is where the nascent University began. The sessions will be hosted by Canon Brian Mountford MBE, Vicar of St Mary’s. Dr. Mountford is a Fellow and Chaplain of St Hilda’s College in the University of Oxford. You are invited to make a presentation and lead a discussion of a relevant aspect of religious studies, or […]

HOTCUS Annual Postgraduate Conference: ‘Winning minds and hearts: constructing national identity in US history.’ Friday 9th September 2016, Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne Keynote speaker: Dr Simon Hall (Senior Lecturer in American History, Leeds University) On 1 February 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asserted that ‘Americanism is a matter of the mind and the heart.’ Just a year after he approved the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, FDR’s statement about the inclusivity of American identity highlights one of the key questions scholars face when writing the history of the United States: what do we actually mean when we talk about US national identity? The distinction between what is and isn’t American has dominated the history of the twentieth century United States, from the Hollywood Blacklists of the 1950s and protests in the streets of Selma, Alabama in 1965, to clashes between construction workers and anti- Vietnam War protesters in New York City […]

The editorial committee now invites submissions for inclusion in a Special Issue of the journal on the work of Marilynne Robinson. To be published in Spring 2017, this Special Issue will explore the literary, historical, political, and religious contexts of Robinson’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction. Considering her role as a cultural figure and public intellectual in American society, this issue welcomes proposals on all aspects of Robinson’s writing.   Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to the Editors atirishjournalofamericanstudies@gmail.com by 22 July 2016. Successful contributors will be notified by 5 August 2016. Completed drafts of essays will be expected by 1 December 2016.   All contributions will be subject to anonymous peer review. Submissions should follow the 8th edition of the MLA style guide. Writers are asked to maximise the use of parenthetical citations, include a Works Cited list, and footnotes/endnotes should be avoided where […]

The protests against racial profiling and racist police brutality in the U.S. and Britain, Donald Trump's alarming comments about Muslims, the Confederate flag controversy in South Carolina, the all-white Academy Award nominations, the organization "Operation Black Vote" feeling compelled to urge people of color not to leave the political field to white people in the wake of the UK General Elections, the reactions of the European Union to the masses of refugees and many Europeans' xenophobic reactions to those seeking refuge: the specters of whiteness are still urgently haunting the western world. According to France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, Critical Whiteness Studies is currently in its third stage, riding its third wave so to say, questioning "the tendency towards essentializing accounts of whiteness by locating race as one of many social relations that shape individual and group identity" (2011: 3). While the discipline has established itself as an anti-racist […]