Cultures of Conservatism in the United States and Western Europe between the 1970s and 1990s Anna von der Goltz (Georgetown University, Washington D.C.), Martina Steber (University of Konstanz), Tobias Becker (German Historical Institute London)   In recent research the decades between the 1970s and the 1990s are interpreted as a time of revolutionary change triggered by economic crises, in which the parameters and conditions for our present times were set. Conservatism looms large in this quite influential narrative; after all, the Reagan and Thatcher governments in the United States and in Britain implemented economic and social policies that fundamentally changed the welfare state economies of the boom years. Conservatism is therefore often interpreted as neoliberalism in conservative guise, as the defining political ideology of finance capitalism. However, conservatism was a much more diverse phenomenon than these interpretations suggest. While economics and politics were certainly crucial in the fashioning of a […]

Call for Papers The Global Pursuit of Equality: Women, Networks, and Networking 1800-2000 26-27th September 2016, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) Following the interdisciplinary graduate and early career researchers workshop held in May 2016 on the theme of ‘The global pursuit of equality: women, networks and networking 1800-2000’, the next event will be a two-day conference held on the same theme at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) from the 26-27th of September. This conference will bring together graduate and early career researchers alongside senior scholars to explore the ways in which women’s local, national and international networks helped to facilitate equality, drive political, economic, cultural and social change, and challenge overlapping systems of oppression over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the conference, there will be two keynote lectures by economist and writer Devaki Jain and the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia […]

Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies University of Southern Denmark, Odense, May 22-24, 2017 American Colors: Across the Disciplinary Spectrum Color defines America. First of all color defines America through ideas of slavery, race, and civil rights. W.E.B. Du Bois’ claim that ‘The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line’ is certainly hard to deny in an American context. Yet American Colors are far from all about race. The respective colors of the Democratic and the Republican Party, since 1976 partitioning the country into demographics of blue and red, are significant reminders of the power of American Colors to divide and contrast. On the other hand, American Colors are not necessarily divisive, even if they stay distinct. Whether it is in the color of the rainbow, as seen on the pride flag of the LGBT community, or in the idea of ethnic and racial […]

Edited Collection on Joe Brainard deadline for submissions:  August 15, 2016 full name / name of organization:  Yasmine Shamma, Honors College of Florida Atlantic University contact email:  yshamma@fau.edu Edited Collection on Joe Brainard First and Second Generation New York School poetry is so frequently lined with or bound by Joe Brainard’s artwork that its material seems inextricable from the cherries, jacks, and starts so commonly occupying the real and influential side-lines of their poems. In this way, Brainard’s work occupies the literal margins of New York School Poetry, while also figuratively influencing the aesthetic ones. Brainard was not only an illustrator and friend to many New York School poets, he was also an avid letter writer, collage artist, miniature artist, cartoonist, and serious poet. His art, friendship and poetry provide a point from which to reconsider The New York School’s often chronicled relationship to The New York School of Painting […]

Date: September 22, 2016 to September 24, 2016 Location: United States Subject Fields: American History / Studies, Law and Legal History, Government and Public Service, Political Science, Political History / Studies Illinois State University is proud to announce a conference to mark the 150th anniversary of ex parte Milligan (1866), sponsored by Illinois State University and the David Davis Mansion on September 22-24, 2016 at the Marriot Hotel, Normal Illinois. Written here in Bloomington, Illinois, Davis’s decision held that trial by military commissions was acceptable only where there was a real war and where civilian courts were impaired. Long dormant, Milligan has assumed new centrality in our political and constitutional debates arising out of the so-called “war on terror.”  We invite established scholars, practicing professionals, or graduate students from all fields to submit proposals on historical, legal, constitutional or political subtopics related to the Milligan decision itself, its antecedents, or […]

I invite proposals for a collection of essays that examines the theme of revenge in American fiction, film, and television. Vengeance – that quest for violent reciprocity – is one of storytelling’s oldest and most enduring plots. But in the modern American imaginary the familiar shape of retribution assumes a new form. Over and over, avengers on page and screen desire not only blood but also symbolic victories. In Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996) a troubled protagonist named John Smith yearns to kill the one “white man was responsible for everything that had gone wrong” for Native Americans. In Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), an outraged financial analyst assassinates a billionaire who upset the “balance” of global capitalism. For these characters, personal grievance turns into political statement, and payback evolves from a selfish drive into a systemic reckoning. From bloodthirsty class warriors in The Iron Heel (1908) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) to anti-patriarchal furies of Beloved (1987) and Foxfire (1993) to contemporary assailants […]

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 […]

REFRAMING FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY University of Toronto, Canada, SEPTEMBER 28–30, 2017 A conference hosted by the Toronto Photography Seminar What is family photography? Scholars have often understood the genre as simply snapshots of domestic scenes—images  that reflect and produce normative notions of family. Yet, family photographs are more complex than we think: they can also include images taken by a wide spectrum of producers, including the press and the state; they frequently circulate between private and public spheres, linking personal memories with national and even global histories; and, just as importantly, they don’t just illustrate families, but also shape the very idea of family, as racialized and gendered social structures. Foundational thinkers including Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jo Spence, Marianne Hirsch, Martha Langford, Deborah Willis, and others, have offered influential terms for investigating family photographs, respectively, as: an affective punctum; middlebrow art; means of reinforcing domestic ideology; conduit for postmemory; integrally […]

'Populism in historical perspective'   Symposium  2nd November 2016, European Institute, University College London   The last decade has seen the rise of politicians, parties and governments to whom the label 'populist' can usefully be applied. This is true not only in Europe, but also in North and South America, Turkey, India and elsewhere. British media responses to this global shift have focused on the 'Brexit' referendum result and the short term consequences of the 2008 financial crash. There has been less interest in historicising these phenomena or locating them in an analysis of twentieth and twenty first century democracy. Yet this would be a useful endeavour, involving study not only of twentieth century populists like Pierre Poujade or Juan Perón, but also a wider project investigating the development of modern mass society since the late nineteenth century.   The UCL European Institute and UCL Centre for Transnational History therefore […]