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 […]

Border Control: On the Edges of American Art Thursday 25 and Friday 26 May 2017 Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool Waterfront, Liverpool L3 4BB, UK Convened by Julia Tatiana Bailey (Tate) and Alex J. Taylor (University of Pittsburgh) Supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art Recent histories of American art have strived to cross its boundaries and expand its limits. As migration and expatriatism have come to be understood among its defining characteristics, once carefully delineated edges between the national and the foreign seem increasingly porous. This shift corresponds with the dissolution of other kinds of borders. Artists have long transgressed the limits of artistic movement, medium specificity and other imposed restrictions, sometimes sneaking well outside the bounds of art itself. Historians of American art have also begun to more actively cross the disciplinary limits that once constrained the field. This two-day conference will bring together new scholarship exploring […]

CALL FOR PAPERS Pocahontas and after: historical culture and transatlantic encounters, 1617-2017   The British Library and the Institute for Historical Research, London March 16-18, 2017     A major international conference to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Pocahontas’ death.  Co-hosted by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and the Institute for Historical Research.   Additional support has been provided by the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture and The University of Warwick.   In 2017 the Anglo-American world will mark the 400th anniversary of the death of Pocahontas.  Numerous commemorative activities, from walking tours to talking monuments, have been planned on both sides of the Atlantic. Intense, closely focused interest in her life, is, of course, not a new phenomenon.  Her story has been romanticised at many points over the centuries, and multiple representations of Pocahontas (as Noble Savage, Mother of a Nation, […]

Heidelberg Center for American Studies 14th Annual Spring Academy Conference Heidelberg, Germany, 20-24 March, 2017 /Call for Papers/ The fourteenth HCA Spring Academy on American History, Culture, and Politics will be held from March 20-24, 2017. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one-week conference that provides twenty international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and discuss their Ph.D. projects. The HCA Spring Academy will also offer participants the chance to work closely with experts in their respective fields of study. For this purpose, workshops held by visiting scholars will take place during this week. We encourage applications that range broadly across the arts, humanities, and social sciences and pursue an interdisciplinary approach. Papers can be presented 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 […]

"A Return to the Archives” The Society for History in the Federal Government (SHFG) will hold its annual meeting on April 13, 2017, at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Building in Washington D.C. Throughout its 37-year history, SHFG has enjoyed a unique & fruitful relationship with the National Archives. As one of the nation’s primary stewards of its records, NARA’s holdings are indispensable to federal historians and public history professionals across the nation. In turn, SHFG members have used NARA’s resources for official work duties and personal projects. Thus, the Society’s annual meeting will highlight the interplay among archivists, historical researchers, and public history professionals that enables a greater understanding of our collective past. The program committee invites participants to broadly interpret the conference theme, “A Return to the Archives.” Topics might include: the impact of technology and archival resources on the sharing of public history; the challenges […]

CFP  Jimmy Carter and the ‘Year of the Evangelicals’ Reconsidered April 6-8, 2017 New Hampshire Institute of Politics, Saint Anselm College Manchester, New Hampshire In 1976 Newsweek magazine borrowed a phrase from pollster George Gallup and proclaimed that year the “Year of the Evangelicals.”  Both presidential candidates – Republican Gerald Ford and Democrat Jimmy Carter – claimed to be “born again” Christians, a claim made by one third of all Americans; and significant proportions of Protestants and Catholics told Gallup’s pollsters that the Bible should be taken literally, a marker of conservative evangelical Christianity.  This phenomenon caught journalists by surprise, and they struggled to understand this new segment of the electorate, beginning at the top with the candidacy of Jimmy Carter. The election of 1976 brought evangelicals back into the political arena. While many of these people supported Carter’s candidacy and made the difference in his election, the ways in […]

The Eccles Centre for American Studies, The British Library, London Monday 16 January 2017 Cold War Geographies Keynote Speaker: Professor Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics, Royal Holloway The British Library’s next major exhibition will focus on ‘Maps and the Twentieth Century.’ The Cold War had a seismic impact on global geographies during the second half of the twentieth century. Not only did it physically impact lands from the barren Nevada desert to the jungles of South East Asia, but the ideological conflict of the Cold War also had a significant impact on national borders, global cities and imagined geographies. The legacy of the Cold war on global geographies has had a profound effect upon the way in which nations now think about their place in the world and their relationships with each other. From an American point of view, this has had a particular influence on how the U.S. is […]

15 years after 9/11 there are many conspiracy theories related to the events that have been discussed in films, literature and social media. However, this is not the only conspiracy theory of such long endurance. Many more, like the Jewish world conspiracy, the survival of Nazi Germany on the dark side of the moon, Area 51, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and many more have led to a large production of films, literature and social media (blogs or vlogs). For the second volume of Entertainment we are interested in papers that analyze these conspiracy theories and in how far they are created, stimulated or re-defined by these media. Articles should range between 5000 and 8000 words and use footnotes (following the latest Chicago Manual of Style). For detailed information on the journal and the submission procedure, check: http://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/entertainment/about The deadline for an initial proposal (250 words and a short CV) […]