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) […]

HISTORICAL FICTION IN THE UNITED STATES SINCE 2000: CONTEMPORARY LITERARY RESPONSES TO THE PAST Call for papers: One-day symposium on 21st-century American historical fiction Date of conference: Saturday 18 March 2017 Location: University of Nottingham, UK Call for papers deadline: 1 December 2016 Historical fiction in English constitutes its own enduring tradition but in recent years, it has enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and commercial popularity, as such scholars as Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons have argued. This one-day symposium at the University of Nottingham will explore how recent writers in the United States have engaged with the form. In what sense are American writers reinterpreting the past to produce what Elodie Rousselot has termed “neo-historical fiction”? Which periods are they examining? And why do US writers favor particular historical eras and episodes over others? Potential topics for papers (lasting no longer than 20 minutes) might include, but are […]

HISTORICAL FICTION IN THE UNITED STATES SINCE 2000: CONTEMPORARY RESPONSES TO THE PAST Call for papers: One-day symposium on 21st-century American historical fiction Date of conference: Saturday 18 March 2017 Location: University of Nottingham, UK Call for papers deadline: 1 December 2016 Historical fiction in English constitutes its own enduring tradition but in recent years, it has enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and commercial popularity, as such scholars as Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons have argued. This one-day symposium at the University of Nottingham will explore how recent writers in the United States have engaged with the form. In what sense are American writers reinterpreting the past to produce what Elodie Rousselot has termed “neo-historical fiction”? Which periods are they examining? And why do US writers favor particular historical eras and episodes over others? Potential topics for papers (lasting no longer than 20 minutes) might include, but are certainly […]

***DEADLINE EXTENDED Britain, Canada, and the Arts: Cultural Exchange as Post-war Renewal 15-17 June 2017 CALL FOR PAPERS Papers are invited for a major international, interdisciplinary conference to be held at Senate House, London, in collaboration with the School of English, Communication and Philosophy (Cardiff University) and the University of Westminster. Coinciding with and celebrating the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, this conference will focus on the strong culture of artistic exchange, influence, and dialogue between Canada and Britain, with a particular but not exclusive emphasis on the decades after World War II. The immediate post-war decades saw both countries look to the arts and cultural institutions as a means to address and redress contemporary post-war realities. Central to the concerns of the moment was the increasing emergence of the United States as a dominant cultural as well as political power. In 1951, the Massey Commission gave formal voice in […]

'Borders vs. Bridges: (Trans)nationalism in the Americas since 1968' 3rd Annual Conference, 11-12 May 2017 For a long time, transnational trends have inspired social, political, economic and cultural transformations across the globe.  In the Americas, and particularly since 1968, there have been numerous examples of bridge-building across borders.  From Human Rights and transitional justice processes to solidarity movements and the international trade agreements of more recent times, building bridges between nations has been seen as a means of progress across the Americas. Today, developments across the region seem to signal a 'centrifugal' tendency towards isolationism and nationalism.  Propelled by complex social phenomena such as migration, human displacement, economic instability and political upheaval, many are turning to the erection of barriers - real and imagined - as a means to cope with uncertainty.  In the US, discourses based on nationalism are on the rise.  Meanwhile, in Latin Americas, the slowdown of […]