Call for Papers The Hip Hop and Higher Education online conference is a one-day event, funded by the British Association for American Studies (BAAS), that will take place on Thursday 15th July 2021. Through this conference, we seek to do three things: Provide a space for people to exhibit and enjoy the critical, creative and communal elements of Hip Hop Interrogate Hip Hop's exclusion from higher education, linking it to intersecting systems of oppression and discrimination which underpin the university and wider society Explore the merits and possible dangers of incorporating Hip Hop into formal sites of higher education In order to reflect and honour the dynamism of Hip Hop, music and performance will feature throughout the day. In that vein, we not only invite artists, academics (early careers/established) and members of the Hip Hop community to submit proposals for papers, but also group presentations, performances, videos, virtual exhibitions, discussion […]

WHAT, WHEN & WHERE American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT) 40th International American Studies Conference Movement and Mobility in America Online Conference June 28-29, 2021 Movement and mobility lie at the core of American society. Whether through immigration, internal migration, social mobility, or domestic and global expansionism, the United States has always been defined as a nation of frontiers and pioneers, a country that is constantly (re)defining itself, where self-(re)invention is part of the American dream. Movement and mobility in the American context can also be physical, sociological, psychological, or political, as in the case of mobilizing for racial justice, such as with the Black Lives Matter movement that is sweeping the nation. The Trump Administration has prompted a reevaluation of movement and mobility across the political spectrum. While some argue that this has stimulated a visible resurgence in activism and a revival of social movements in the United States, […]

CfP DEADLINE: FRIDAY 12 MARCH 2021 Rothermere American Institute University of Oxford 20-22 April 2021   In the mid-twentieth century two mutually influencing revolutions took place, one technological and one socio-political; the emergence of television and the advent of the civil rights movement both fundamentally altered American society and the wider world. Today, social media and digital technologies are reshaping social relations, while the renewed visibility of white supremacist activism has precipitated a new chapter in the long struggle for racial equality. This conference will put the study of the past in conversation with current debates about media, technology, and race. The first day of the conference is dedicated to research development workshops. Participants will have the opportunity to give and receive feedback on in-progress work and meet scholars researching similar topics across a range of disciplines. Abstracts may consider issues of race and ethnicity across news, entertainment, and social media. […]

‘Presidents and Place’ - Edited collection - Dr Thomas Cobb and Dr Olga Ackroyd From the frontier of Manifest Destiny ideology to the contest between industrialism and agrarianism implicit in the Civil War, ideals of place have both driven the United States’s economic development and accentuated its political divides. Appreciation of the United States today still often derives from how place differs for its citizens; from the strife of the ‘Rustbelt’ to the glamour of the ‘Sunbelt’, the US is remarked on, perhaps more than other Western country, for its cultural and climatological heterogeneity. The history of US presidents’ upbringings and home state affiliations, however, presents a comparative uniformity. Seven out of the fifteen presidents who preceded Lincoln were born in Virginia, a hegemony which outlasted the frontier ideology purveyed by presidents Andrew Jackson and James Polk. In the decades between Appomattox and the New Deal, it was Ohio’s turn […]

This edited collection seeks to explore the representation of the First Lady in a range of different texts and media. The collection aims to examine the President’s wife in a purely cultural context by investigating the ways in which she has been represented, embodied, characterised and commemorated in film, fiction, memoir, photography and portraiture, television, theatre, education, museum studies, fashion, and social media. Beyond the White House is an original work that makes use of cultural interpretation to reconfigure the figure of the First Lady as a culturally authoritative individual possessing the ability to sway, change, inspire, and manipulate public attention and opinion. Moving away from biographies and histories, this is the first volume of its kind to consider the representation of the First Lady figure through the prism of popular culture – and therefore consider her impact upon ‘cultural politics’ – and the first to regard her as a strategically important socio-cultural […]

Call for Papers 3rd Young Scholar Symposium: Sharing Critical Testimonies of Wellness in Times of Crisis February 2022 Various interpretations of what constitutes health and the normal functioning of human beings have been around even before the Hippocratic “break from divine notions of health” (Green). The most prevalent ones, like Christopher Boorse’sfamous theory of health, define health via negativa as the absence of disease and sub/dysfunction. However, an alternative, positive view of health, partially powered by interdisciplinary investigations of conditions in which people function for sustained periods of time under other than “normal circumstances” (Boorse 7–8), has claimed the spotlight in the past few decades. Moreover, a critical turning point along the millenia-long trajectory of health discourse in the West, the lack of value neutrality in dominant definitions of health, and of the practices these definitions underpin and legitimize, has been emphasized in recent years. On the broad tracks of […]

As we head into the 20s of the 21st century, we mark the centennials of key O’Neill plays that introduced his voice to a wider audience. Beyond the Horizon premiered on Broadway in 1920 and ushered in a uniquely American tragic form. The Emperor Jones also opened on Broadway in 1920 and was a work that both experimented with emerging expressionist theatrical techniques and broke the color line on Broadway. The Hairy Ape, staged by the Provincetown Players in 1922, criticized capitalist structures and pointed out the fragility and fallibility of the American Dream. Tapping into the zeitgeist of the early 1920s, a time when rapid changes in technology and industry, sudden shifts in workplace environments, and clashes between and among individuals based on differences of race, class, and gender swirled around the cultural and societal ether, O’Neill’s works reflected the longing and belonging that permeated the contemporary culture. A […]