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 […]

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 […]

Violence interpreted: Connections between the Violent Past of the United States and Conflict Today. Violent confrontations and racial discrimination have influenced the United States on multiple levels. At the beginning of the twentieth century the country confronted a wave of violent unrests that molded American society and prepared the ground for massive changes in political, social and financial realms. After a century, the country seems to still be affected by racial discrimination and police violence; the current global upheavals and the political rhetoric for the 2016 presidential election intensify the polarisation within American society. Scholarly interpretation of violence will lead to a better understanding of both past and present of conflict in the United States. We seek submissions for a forthcoming special issue of the European Journal of American Culture focusing on interpretations of violence in American society and the examination of possible historic recurrences. We are particularly interested in […]

 Organized by: ATSU Foreign Affairs and Development Office, Prof. Vakhtang  Amaglobeli Center for American Studies & John Dos Passos Association of Georgia.  Supporters: US Embassy in Georgia & Akaki Tsereteli State University We invite a variety of contributions that address any of the following topics: U.S. Literature U.S. Education System U.S. Culture Art Philosophy Mass Media Social and Women’s Issues U.S. History U.S. Politics Religion Law Economics Healthcare Ecology Georgian-American Relations Working Languages: Georgian and English  Style guides for papers: Conference proceedings will be published as a journal. Manuscripts should not ordinarily exceed fifteen standard pages (A4) including the abstract and the contributor’s short bio. All papers must conform to The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition in all matters of form and should be typewritten in MS Word 2003. Use Times New Roman: 12 pts fonts for the main text and all additional parts except endnotes and index (where you […]

CFP: Writing Shared Futures: African American Literature and Racialisation BAAS Panel at 'English: Shared Futures,' 5-7 July 2017, Newcastle, UK Contributions are invited for a BAAS panel at 'English: Shared Futures,' a large-scale conference spanning across the discipline. The panel 'Writing Shared Futures: African American Literature and Racialisation' will explore the significances of, and engagements with, racialisation in post-Civil Rights writing by African Americans. It will seek to ask how understandings of racialisation are connected with understandings of the future, and to examine the ways in which literary texts have questioned categories and binaries of race and have complicated views of the processes by which racial identity comes into being. Such processes might be made visible in contexts such as: migration and immigration multi-ethnic coalitions intersectional politics future worlds internationalism coming of age narratives popular culture/music/sport contemporary politics, especially the Obama years new technologies and social media Possible writers include […]

International Symposium October 19-20, 2017 École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon (France)  Thoreau from across the pond   Organized by Julien Nègre (ENS de Lyon) François Specq (ENS de Lyon) and Laura Dassow Walls (University of Notre Dame) Guest speakers (confirmed): -        Professor Branka Arsić (Columbia University) -        Professor William Rossi (University of Oregon)   In honor of Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday in 2017, this conference would like to interrogate the multiplicity of viewpoints from which he is read today. In recent years, Thoreau’s writings have been approached from a variety of perspectives: he has been envisioned as a poet and a philosopher, but also as a political thinker, a scientist of sorts, a surveyor, a lover of nature and an environmentalist. While these different perspectives complement each other to a certain extent, they also reveal how multifaceted his writings are, and how elusive his figure remains. Something resists in his texts, […]

‘US Elections in Historical Perspective’ Symposium 8th November 2016, The Institute of Americas, UCL No one needs reminding that the 2016 election has been a race like no other. Two historically unpopular candidates are claiming democracy is under threat. Ideological coalitions are breaking apart and the spectre of re-alignment hangs over the party system. To make some sense of it all, we’re organising a half-day symposium on ‘US Elections in Historical Perspective’ at the Institute of Americas on Election Day itself - Tuesday November 8th. We invite abstracts for 20-minute papers on American elections from any period of the nation’s history. Although we’re keen to look at elections in historical perspective, we do not require speakers to explicitly link back to the 2016 race. Given the nature of the event and the limited time frame, presentations can be fairly informal. In addition to the presentation of papers, there will be […]

Call for Papers Making America “Great”: Negotiating the Borders and Boundaries of Americanism Saturday 19th November 2016 University of Leeds Deadline for Abstracts: 23rd September 2016 The current US presidential election has witnessed the resurgence of a nostalgia for a past American “greatness”, defined in the popular imagination by specific boundaries and characteristics. Notably, institutional, social and economic power structures have shaped less inclusive definitions of American identity which continue to endure. Conversely, others propose that American “greatness” is characterised by the nature of always being in flux, incorporating and reshaping various identities, traditions and social norms. Whereas many other national identities are rooted in centuries of shared history, religious and cultural traditions or language, American national identity has less tangible roots and can, arguably, be characterised by a constant process of redefinition. The constantly changing nature of what it means to be American contributes to and builds upon what […]

Date: September 30, 2016 Location: Maryland, United States Subject Fields: American History / Studies, Contemporary History, Literature In her 1998 play How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel described Maryland as a place where “You can still imagine what how used to be before the malls took over. This countryside was once dotted with farmhouses. From their porches, you could have witnessed the Civil War raging in the front fields.” Considering the preceding quotation—as well as Maryland’s geographical and figurative status as a border state between the North and South—in terms of America’s complicated racial and social history, the following panel invites scholars from a variety of disciplines to present on the representation of Maryland in the American consciousness at NeMLA's 2017 conference in Baltimore, Maryland (March 23rd-26th). How has Maryland paradoxically been portrayed as a place of freedom and promise, and, more recently, a place of civil unrest and failed […]

Pynchon's New Worlds La Rochelle, France, June 5-9, 2017 Literary new worlds The 2017 International Pynchon Week will be held on the French Atlantic coast in the old harbor of La Rochelle, from which a number of Europeans set sail for the New World. The conference will be hosted by the Musée du Nouveau Monde, among its collection of Allegories of America. The conveners hope this liminal space on the margins of Europe will inspire Pynchon scholars to sail out towards yet unexplored territories, following some of the leads below or picking up any related or unrelated Pynchonian line.Convenors: Gilles Chamerois (Université de Brest) and Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd (Université de Poitiers) Pynchon's early fiction was published under the auspices of "new worlds:" "Low-Lands" was issued by New World Writing, a paperback magazine (volume 17, 1960); speculative fiction writer Michael Moorcock's New Worlds magazine ran "Entropy" in 1969. How "new" were and […]

CFP: Duality and Duplicity in African-American Literature Location: Marriott Waterfront, Baltimore, MD Dates: 23/03/2017 – 26/03/2017 Organization: Northeast Modern Language Association The idea that African-Americans are actual and full-fledged citizens of the United States is not a new one; the racism that prevents that idea to flourish is also not new. Recent events, including the death of Freddie Carlos Gray, Jr. in Baltimore, have brought to the fore the question of whether or not the United States values its black citizens, and extends to them the same rights as it does to its non-black citizens. The historical record has much to say on this point, but the literary record also is instructive in perceptions of race in the United States. This panel will explore the literary precedents to examine how tensions between citizenship and real-world status have formed the basis of works by American authors.  How do the literary works […]