Back in March 2020, with events dropping like flies from university calendars everywhere in the face of the global pandemic, we at OxEARS decided to enter the brave new world of remote seminar participation. We hope it will not seem an exaggeration to say that our move online has been a roaring success. With the opportunity to welcome experts not just from Oxford, not just from the UK, but from all around the world, the seminar has gained a new lease of life as a forum for scholarly exchange. Going into the academic year 2020-21, therefore, we will be continuing with this approach amidst the ongoing uncertainty about the safety of face-to-face meetings. Although it is a shame not to be able to invite our presenters and guests to the Turf Tavern or the King’s Arms after a meeting, the advantage of being joined by participants in London, Edinburgh, Turin, […]

What Happened? Continuities and Discontinuities in American Culture The 27th Biennial Conference of NAAS & the 11th Biennial Conference of SAAS Uppsala, Sweden, May 20-22, 2021 While it appears to be perennially tempting to see one’s own time as exceptional and unprecedented, it is nevertheless safe to say that our present time is perceived by many as characterized by crises of different kinds (democratic, humanitarian, environmental, medical, and economic crisis) to an unusually high degree. As a result, the stakes are high when it comes to identifying causes and cures and the political, media and academic communities are all concerned in their different ways with constructing narratives that make sense of what is happening: Backlash, renewal, apocalypse? Whatever their political, ideological or theoretical underpinnings or agendas, all mobilize tropes of either continuity – understood for instance as progress, degeneration or intensification – or discontinuity – understood for instance as a break […]

After a very successful pilot during the summer months, the organisers decided to continue BAAS PGR Work in Progress Session for the winter term. The sessions will run on the second Friday of each month during October-December between 15:00-17:00. (9th of October, 13th of November, and the 11th of December)   The organisers invite postgraduate students to present a work in progress on any topic and period related to the Americas – music, visual culture, art, literature, history, politics etc. Postgraduates are encouraged to circulate any piece of writing they see fit – it can be a dissertation chapter, book review or an essay in preparation for a peer review submission. Each session will consist of three presenters and five readers to provide in-depth feedback in a collegial and supportive atmosphere. Upon submission, the organisers will try as much as possible to curate the sessions based on some common ground – themes, period or genre […]

After a very successful pilot during the summer months, the organisers decided to continue BAAS PGR Work in Progress Session for the winter term. The sessions will run on the second Friday of each month during October-December between 15:00-17:00. (9th of October, 13th of November, and the 11th of December)   The organisers invite postgraduate students to present a work in progress on any topic and period related to the Americas – music, visual culture, art, literature, history, politics etc. Postgraduates are encouraged to circulate any piece of writing they see fit – it can be a dissertation chapter, book review or an essay in preparation for a peer review submission. Each session will consist of three presenters and five readers to provide in-depth feedback in a collegial and supportive atmosphere. Upon submission, the organisers will try as much as possible to curate the sessions based on some common ground – themes, period or genre […]

Being Hospitable: Languages and Cultures Across Borders The unifying theme for the 2021 MLA International Symposium is Being Hospitable: Languages and Cultures Across Borders, to be understood in the broadest possible senses of both hospitable and language and as a defiant counter-gesture to the currently inhospitable, even hostile, nature of world politics. The word and concept of hospitality will embrace a wide range of disciplinary interpretations, including Ethics (philosophies of self/other, from existentialism to deconstruction) Welcoming the radically other (tout autre) Political theory (from identity politics to the “politics of alterity”) Gender fluidity Decolonial thinking (different modes of “writing back” to the Empire) Ongoing refugee and migration crisis International law and human rights Adoption (particularly international) Medical humanities (notably around the concepts of health, well-being and care, hospitals and hospitality) Social anthropology (rituals of welcoming the other) Security studies and conflict studies (hospitality and hostility) Problematizing the notion of hospitality […]

The IAAS Postgraduate Symposium “Parallel Lives in America” Virtual Event via Zoom 13th-14th of November, 2020 Last year, the Irish Association for American Studies’ Postgraduate Symposium, titled “The Land of the Unfree”, sought to interrogate the legitimacy of democracy in America. One year on, in the midst of a global pandemic, this legitimacy has not only been interrogated, but put on trial. In the U.S., the COVID-19 pandemic has both exacerbated and exposed already existent crises: social, political and economic, among others. Referred to by The New York Times as “The Pandemic Inequality Feedback Loop”, research has shown that individuals of lower economic strata and minority groups are both more likely to contract the virus, and to die from it. From bulk buying to wide-spread job losses, the concerns and priorities of American citizens have existed on a wide spectrum according to relative levels of privilege and oppression. The 2020 […]

This is the list of panels for the 15th SAAS Conference. Prospective participants are now invited to email the abstracts of their proposals directly to the chair of the selected panel using this form. The deadline for submitting abstracts is October 15, 2020. 1) “Domestic Spaces, Safety, and the (Micro)Political in the United States” Panel Chair: Rodrigo Andrés and Cristina Alsina Rísquez, Universitat de Barcelona. E-mail: rodrigoandres@ub.edu / alsina@ub.edu 2) "McCarthyism and Cold War Literatures: A Cultural Response to Fear and Paranoia" Panel Chair: María Laura Arce Álvarez, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid E-mail: laura.arce@uam.es 3) "Unauthorized Mobility, Disposable Living: Migrants, Drifters and Nomads in Contemporary North American Literature and Culture" Panel Chair: Paula Barba Guerrero and Mónica Fernández Jiménez, Universidad de Salamanca / Universidad de Valladolid E-mail: paulabarbaguerrero@usal.es / monica.fernandez@uva.es 4) "The Phenomenology of Fear and Resilience in Women's Poetry: The Role of Poetic Creativity and the Artistic Process" Panel […]

AMERICANISTS VIRTUAL MEET-UP 15:00 (GMT) 30th October 2020 This is a free online event for PhD students, aimed at creating a stronger sense of community for those of us researching within the broad field of American Studies. This event will give PhD students the opportunity to give a short, five minute presentation on their research, and to meet others working in similar areas. If your research focusses on the Americas, and you would like to sign up for the virtual meet-up, please register at https://forms.gle/nJEyFk75rGynsN1W9 by Friday 23rd October. Feel free to contact patrick.1.turner@kcl.ac.uk or a.djelid@pgr.reading.ac.uk if you have any questions.

For the 2020 BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, we welcome proposals that reflect aspects of this year’s theme, Connection and Collective Action: Past and Present. This year has seen an unprecedented reexamination of the ways we interact with one another, be it on an international, governmental, institutional, or personal level. While coming together physically is more complicated than it ever has been, this year has also seen people around the world unite to challenge engrained systems and demand change. This Symposium will enable us to participate in our own evaluation and interrogation of methods of connection and collective action in American history and culture. We seek to touch upon the following questions: How have people taken collective action historically, and how does this reflect on our present historical moment? How are cultures shaped by the points of connection and conflict that arise between the people that form them? How can our connection […]

Call for Papers The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for its annual Spring Academy on American Culture, Economics, Geography, History, Literature, Politics, and Religion to be held from March 22-26, 2021. The HCA Spring Academy provides twenty international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and thoroughly discuss their Ph.D. projects. The HCA Spring Academy additionally offers workshops held by visiting scholars. We encourage applications that range broadly across the arts, humanities, and social sciences and pursue an interdisciplinary approach. Participants can present papers on any subject relating to the study of the United States of America. Possible topics include American identity, issues of ethnicity, gender, transatlantic relations, U.S. domestic and foreign policy, economics, as well as various aspects of American history, literature, religion, geography, law, musicology, and culture. Participants are requested to prepare a 20-minute presentation of their research project, which will be followed by a […]

Conference will take place January 29th and 30th, 2021, online via Zoom   William Faulkner (1897-1962) has long been considered one of the foremost modernist authors to emerge from the United States. Faulkner’s authorial obsessions have typically been described as including time, history, and the fraught definition of “Southernness” in the aftermath of the Civil War, emancipation, and the quest for Civil Rights. However, starting with the publication of the edited volume Faulkner and Postmodernism (1997), critics have sought to recontextualise Faulkner as a “postmodernist” and even “transgressive” author, whose work explores the darker side of humanity and sets a precedent for writers including William S. Burroughs and Cormac McCarthy to explore the nature of sexuality, racial identity, violence, and much more. This conference builds upon these developing scholarly concerns, working to show that Faulkner is no mere regional or even traditionally modernist author who is fixated solely upon his […]

The 55th JAAS Annual Meeting will be held on June 5th and 6th, 2021 at Keio University, Tokyo. The JAAS Annual Meeting Program Coordinating Committee invites JAAS members to send paper proposals for the “Independent Paper Sessions” to be held on June 5th, 2020. If you are interested in giving a paper, please send by email a proposal that includes (1) your name, (2) your affiliation, (3) the title of your paper, (4) a summary of your paper (approximately 800 words) and (5) five keywords to the JAAS Annual Meeting Office (program@jaas.gr.jp) by November 20th, 2020 (Japanese Standard Time, JST). The 55th Conference may be held online, if the of COVID-19 pandemic is not sufficiently resolved. Please check JAAS official website for the latest information. Only JAAS members can submit a paper proposal. Proposals from non-members will be reviewed if their membership application is received by November 20th, 2019 and […]