What is the history of the perception of the U.S. president – including as a global president – in the decolonized/ing world? At which junctures did that perception arise, shift, and assume contrasting if not conflicting forms? Who produced, consumed, spread, and contested it? And what does this theme tell us about globalization? These are key questions underlying this conference which, for three reasons, will focus on the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Firstly, Kennedy (and his administration) was greatly interested in decolonized/ing countries, which he saw as central to a changing world. Described by Arthur Schlesinger as “Secretary of State for the third world” , he unprecedentedly engaged also nonaligned countries, courted on the D.C. stage leaders of decolonized countries, and intensified public diplomacy and expanded polling worldwide. But simultaneously, he sought to not alienate European NATO allies that held colonies. Related, secondly, the time around 1960 was […]

My Dream or Yours: Make America ___ Again? University College Cork 26th November, 2016 The Irish Association for American Studies draws together scholars and researchers, new and experienced, on the island of Ireland, to bring fresh perspectives to the field of American Studies. The 2016 IAAS Postgraduate Symposium, “My Dream or Yours: Make America ___ Again?” encourages scholars to question cultural, political and social perspectives of the United States, historically, today, and tomorrow. The concept of American identity is one which has been continuously interrogated since the first colonies were established, and remains a pressing question in all facets of American life today. “My Dream or Yours: Make America ___ Again” is a one-day interdisciplinary symposium that seeks to provide an opportunity for Postgraduate Students and Early Career Scholars to share their ideas and add their individual voices to this melting pot of academic exploration. We welcome proposals for fifteen-minute […]

University of Valencia 9-10 March 2017 While the turn of the new millennium was received with general optimism, the first two decades of the 21st century proved to be much more tumultuous than expected for U.S. society. If the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 shattered to pieces both the real and the symbolical sense of national security, the ensuing international military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and natural catastrophes such as hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city of New Orleans in 2005 leaving a death toll of almost 1,500 citizens, notoriously heightened the sense of historical downfall. The situation was further aggravated by the current financial crisis, which, according to a report recently published in Yale Global Online, is the worst the world has seen since the Great Depression. In the new, globalized world of closely interdependent economies, what seemed a local subprime mortgage crisis in the summer of 2007 reintroduced […]

aspeers is the first and currently only peer-reviewed print journal for MA-level American studies scholars in Europe. It is a platform for the best work done by American studies graduate students below the PhD level. It aims to foster academic exchange among young Americanists across Europe, and to thereby advance the field as well as its genuine European perspective on ‘America’ and its presences and effects around the world. aspeers features a general section in addition to a topical one that brings academic works into a dialogue on one common theme. For the upcoming issue, this topical section will be organized around different notions of "American Monsters." Please feel free to send in work to have it considered for publication in aspeers if you are an American studies student at a European university and are looking to publish a paper without a topical restriction. or you are an American studies student at a European […]

BrANCA Panel at BAAS Conference 2017 The British Association of American Studies (BrANCA) invites proposals for a special panel at the British Association for American Studies Conference, 6-8 April 2017 at Canterbury Christchurch University. Each year BrANCA hosts a special panel at BAAS showcasing progressive, interdisciplinary work on the United States in the long nineteenth century. We invite proposals for papers for this year’s panel from all researchers working in the field. We are particularly interested in global, hemispheric and transatlantic approaches to key themes in nineteenth century literary studies, and papers that propose new ways of conceiving the field. Researchers at all stages are welcomed, and papers from postgraduates are particularly encouraged. 250 word proposals for 20-minute presentations, with a provisional title and brief CV, should be sent to Dr. Tom F. Wright, University of Sussex at tom.wright@sussex.ac.uk by Tuesday 25 October. Queries should also be directed to this address.

Call for Papers: HOTCUS Winter Symposium   Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library, London Saturday 18 February 2017 War and Conflict in Twentieth Century US Society and Culture Keynote Speaker: Professor Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck, University of London)   2017 marks the hundredth anniversary of US entry into the First World War. That conflict saw the emergence of the US as a global military power, but also had a profound impact on American society and culture. In subsequent years, war and conflict of various sorts have shaped the way that Americans think about their place in the world and their relationships with each other, and has molded the way that the US is viewed in international and transnational contexts.   This one-day symposium seeks to explore and re-assess the impact of war and conflict on US society and culture during the twentieth century. Panel and paper proposals are encouraged on […]

American Politics Group of the Political Studies Association Annual Conference 2017 ‘Change and Continuity in U.S. Politics’ Call for Papers The forty-third annual conference of the American Politics Group of the Political Studies Association will be held at the University of Leicester (UK) from Thursday 5 to Saturday 7 January 2017. The keynote speaker will be Dr Lara Brown, Associate Professor at George Washington University (https://gspm.gwu.edu/dr-lara-brown) There is a broad conference theme: ‘Change and Continuity in U.S. Politics’. This theme can be approached in various ways; papers might, for example, take a long term historical perspective when thinking about political development or might reflect on the more immediate consequences of the 2016 election results.  We will also be happy to receive proposals considering subjects and material beyond this particular theme. For example, papers or panel proposals examining contemporary US political institutions or processes, foreign policy issues or political history are […]

CFP Special Issue: The Literature of the Anthropocene The concept of the Anthropocene, deemed by Bruno Latour “the best alternative we have to usher us out of the notion of modernization”, blurs the distinction between human and geological history (Dipesh Chakrabarty). It speaks, too, to contemporary fiction’s concern with the place of humans on the planet, the ways in which they shape - and are shaped by - the natural and technological environments through which they move, and the broader relation between the early twenty-first century moment and ‘deep’ time. Although the value of the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch is still being considered by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the term is already widely in use to denote the era in which human beings have become a major geological force with significant socio-political implications. Indeed, “In the Anthropocene, social, cultural and political orders are woven into and co-evolve […]

10th Annual African American Studies Spring Symposium The University of Texas at San Antonio Thursday, April 6, 2017 Keynote Speaker Jericho Brown Abstract Submission Deadline | October 31, 2016 @ 5:00PM EST $300 Honorarium* Each year the University of Texas at San Antonio hosts a daylong African American Studies Spring symposium. On this 10th anniversary, the symposium invites presentations from across the disciplines that examine the complexity of Intersectional Black Identities. The event offers a space to explore all that “intersectionality” has signified and all that it has become. This stimulating symposium will set the stage for collective exploration and celebration of Intersectional Black Identities across social and cultural realities. Topics will include a broad range of lived experiences, intellectual inquiries, and creative representations. The work of keynote speaker Jericho Brown, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, provides a pathway for (re)considering the axes and edges […]

The International Auto/Biography Association Chapter of the Americas Conference: May 15-17, 2017 Lives Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas A Symposium in Honour of Marlene Kadar To be held at the Centre for Feminist Research, York University, Toronto. We invite proposals for the third biennial meeting of IABA Americas that will be held at the Centre for Feminist Research in Toronto with support from the US Fulbright Program. The conference will explore the multiple lines that gendered lives in the Americas cross, both physical borders and intangible boundaries. The conference is dedicated to the celebration of the scholarship of Marlene Kadar, a Canadian theorist and critic whose contributions have dramatically changed the field by pushing the conceptual boundaries of what constitutes life writing and expanding its interdisciplinary methods of study. The themes suggested below relate to and amplify Kadar’s research interests and are clustered around issues of […]

The Fictional First World War: Imagination and Memory Since 1914 An International Conference at the Centre for the Novel Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen, 6-9 April 2017 Plenary Speakers: Oliver Kohns, University of Luxembourg; Randall Stevenson, University of Edinburgh; and Steven Trout, University of South Alabama. The First World War was a very real event. However, since August 1914, authors have been writing their own versions of it. During the war, novels and short stories shaped public opinion about the conflict. After its close, fiction became a means of recalling and re-examining events. The war was ‘fictional’ in other ways too. Many supposedly truthful accounts of the war, whether in newspaper reports or in personal memoirs, were not as factual as they seemed. Wartime writing in combatant nations was heavily censored; post-war writing was often flawed by the passing of time and the experience of trauma. So, while […]

The CFP for the British Association for American Studies Annual Conference (6-8 April 2017) is now open. Conference and panel proposals may be sent toBAAS2017@canterbury.ac.uk by 1 November 2016. Follow the conference on Twitter (@BAAS2017) and find more details here: https://www.canterbury.ac.uk/arts-and-humanities/school-of-humanities/american-studies/research/baas-annual-conference-2017.aspx In 2018 BAAS and the European Association for American Studies will jointly host the annual BAAS and biennial EAAS conference (4-7 April 2018) in London. This will be a collaboration between King’s College, London, UCL and the Eccles Centre at the British Library. The 2019 conference will be hosted by the University of Sussex. We are now soliciting bids from institutions interested in hosting the conference in 2020. The deadline for this is 31 December 2016. Individual or joint bids - for example, from two institutions located in the same city - are both welcome. Further information - including a sample bid - can be obtained from the Chair of the Conferences Subcommittee, Dr Paul […]