The Manhattan Project Turns 80: Reflections on the Nuclear Age March 12, 2022, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK 2022 sees the 80th anniversary of the official commencement of the Manhattan Project, the vast programme to build the atomic bomb. An undertaking of unparalleled scale and scope, the project’s ultimate success ushered in an era of atomic fear, fantastical atomic utopias, radioactive human and environmental carnage, and legacies up to the present day and into the distant future. The 2022 Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS) Winter Symposium takes the Manhattan Project as its starting point in the hope that this will provoke a wide-ranging discussion of the nuclear age and its histories. The symposium will feature an opening keynote by Dr Jonathan Hogg (University of Liverpool) and a closing keynote from Dr Linda Ross (University of Glasgow). There will also be a round table discussion reflecting on […]

WASN Panel: Call for Expressions of Interest The challenges of working in Higher Education have been particularly acute over the last two years. From the pandemic, to continuing industrial disputes over pensions, precarity and the race and gender pay gaps, as well as media exposure of some of the many instances of sexual harassment in Higher Education, gender continues to shape the practice of British American studies in profound ways. This WASN sponsored panel offers a space for dialogue about the challenges and opportunities faced by all who identify women and all those marginalized along the gender spectrum. We are looking for expressions of interest on a particular theme for up to 5 minutes from WAAS members. We are looking for speakers who represent different parts of the sector (including independent scholars) and career stages (from postgraduate researchers to Professors). Panellists can speak to any theme, but WASN especially welcomes […]

2022-01-03 Next issue: Sacred Spaces in the Americas—RIAS Vol. 17, Spring–Summer (1/2023) Edited by Lucie Kýrová and Nathaniel R. Racine “Human societies come and go on this earth and any prolonged occupation of a geographical region will produce shrines and sacred sites discerned by the occupying people, but there will always be a few sites at which the highest spirits dwell.” Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 279. The connections between the spiritual and natural world and the temporality and permanence of sacred places, as articulated by Vine Deloria, Jr., have found constant expression throughout the colonial history of the Americas. As European settlement advanced, many sites sacred to the Indigenous peoples were abandoned, destroyed, forcibly transformed, or left in obscurity for their own protection, only to gain new meanings within the conquering or enslaved cultures taking root. Thus we see modern Mexico City built […]

In Spring 2022, the British Association of American Studies will be hosting a series of Work In Progress Sessions within which Early Career Academics (ECAs) share their work. This will take on the format of 5-5-5 WIP Sessions:   5 ECAs will be selected and invited into a workshop group. Each ECA will write 5,000 words and share it with the other ECAs. The other ECAs will provide 5 key pieces of feedback on this piece.   The exact format of these workshops will be decided with the selected ECAs, but are likely to take the form of a one hour discussion once a week for 5 weeks. These workshops are intended to be collaborative, rather than prescriptive.   Whilst there is no specific theme to these works beyond this organisation’s focus on American Studies, an effort will be made to group ECAs according to discipline. We recognise that a […]

Conference dates: 22-25 June, 2022* Location: University of Edinburgh Plenary Speaker: Professor Melani McAlister (George Washington University ) Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS) is delighted to invite paper and panel proposals for our 2022 annual conference. Following the success of our first online conference in 2021, we are developing a hybrid format for 2022, with a range of both in-person and online events. We hope that this will accommodate those who want to meet in person in the beautiful city of Edinburgh, while also ensuring accessible offerings for all who wish to join us digitally. We will, of course, be keeping a close eye on government advice, and can pivot to an online-only event if necessary. Please consider your availability and preferences if submitting a paper or panel (see below for more information on submissions and the format of the conference). Call for Papers We welcome panels […]

Department of History, University of Reading, November 17-18, 2022 This workshop will bring together historians researching the roles that emotions played in the creation, maintenance, and experience of slavery in the Atlantic World. Fundamental to how enslavers wielded power, the enslaved also used emotion as a method of resistance, and it was clearly central to their everyday lived experiences. It is almost impossible to read testimony left by the enslaved, or sources produced by enslavers, without encountering mentions of acute feelings, yet studies are only recently beginning to emerge that explore slavery through the lens of emotion. The value of pursuing this avenue of research has been exemplified by recent historiographical turns focused on the ‘history of emotions’ and the analysis of archival silences. Historians of emotion have fruitfully demonstrated that to understand societies, we must explore how emotional conventions functioned and how ordinary people created their own emotional worlds. […]

BrANCA 5th Biennial Symposium: Opening Up Friday 13th -  Saturday 14th May 2022 King's College London and online ​The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists is pleased to announce dates for its much-delayed biennial symposium on Friday May 13th and Saturday May 14th 2022, 1pm-6.30pm. ​This will be a hybrid event held online and at King’s College London to allow participation for those who may not wish to travel. By starting at 1pm London time we hope to allow for virtual attendance from colleagues around the world. It will cost £20 for full time faculty and is free for all others. In addition, some travel grants might be available for postgraduate students. For those who wish to attend in-person there will be a full Covid risk assessment in advance. The theme of the conference is “Opening Up”. We will likely not have seen many of our friends and colleagues for a […]

Proposal Deadline: 8 April 2022 The 2022 ASANOR conference will be held at Nord University from September 29 to October 1. We welcome papers from a wide range of fields, including literature, history, political science, linguistics, and cultural studies, that explore the role of the sea in the American experience. From the Puritan pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock to the digital nomads stopping over in San Francisco, the multifarious interchange across the seas has, for better or worse, shaped the nation; whether through the unspeakable horrors of the Middle Passage or the grateful arrival of huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the ceaseless, multidirectional traffic of people, ideas, values, expressions, aesthetics, and wares has defined and ceaselessly redefined what we think of as American. This process is sometimes slow and gradual, sometimes precipitate and radical, but whether through generations of involvement with economic and cultural energies or a lightening extension […]

Proposal Deadline: 8 April 2022 The 2022 ASANOR conference will be held at Nord University from September 29 to October 1. We welcome papers from a wide range of fields, including literature, history, political science, linguistics, and cultural studies, that explore the role of the sea in the American experience. From the Puritan pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock to the digital nomads stopping over in San Francisco, the multifarious interchange across the seas has, for better or worse, shaped the nation; whether through the unspeakable horrors of the Middle Passage or the grateful arrival of huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the ceaseless, multidirectional traffic of people, ideas, values, expressions, aesthetics, and wares has defined and ceaselessly redefined what we think of as American. This process is sometimes slow and gradual, sometimes precipitate and radical, but whether through generations of involvement with economic and cultural energies or a lightening extension […]

The BrANCH committee is pleased to invite paper and panel proposals for our 29th annual conference, to be held at College Court, University of Leicester, 7-9 October 2022. The following Call for Papers for BrANCH 2022 at College Court is issued in the expectation that the Covid-19 rules will be sufficiently relaxed, and the various vaccinations sufficiently effective, that the conference can be held in person in October.  The committee will be keeping a close eye on the situation. —–0—– We are delighted to announce that the Parish Lecturer for 2022 will be Professor Susan-Mary Grant of the University of Newcastle.  Until recently the Chair of BrANCH, Professor Grant has made a major contribution to the study of nineteenth-century American history in the United Kingdom.  She is the author of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.: Civil War Soldier, Supreme Court Justice; The War for a Nation: The American Civil War; and […]

International conference Organised by SEARCH (UR 2325, Université de Strasbourg), MGNE (UR 1341, Université de Strasbourg), CHER (UR 4376, Université de Strasbourg), Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin With the support of the MISHA (Maison Interuniversitaire des Sciences de l’Homme - Alsace) and the Institut Universitaire de France CALL FOR PAPERS "Uncertain landscapes": representations and practices of space in the age of the Anthropocene Maison Interuniversitaire des Sciences de l’Homme – Alsace Université de Strasbourg 20-21 October 2022 Keynote speakers: Mark Cheetham, Department of Art History, University of Toronto and Lina Prosa, playwright, Palermo “A working country is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation” (Williams, 1973). In this well-known statement, Raymond Williams expresses the view, often reformulated by cultural geographers and philosophers since the 1980s, that the idea of landscape always supposes a distancing process, whether it is a dissociation between the observed […]

In recent years, the gap between the poorest and the wealthiest in society has increased exponentially and exacerbated the stark inequalities that have long existed in American society. This has been further impacted by the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has also raised a number of questions surrounding the treatment of those that were/are in poverty by the government, employers, educators, and society. Amidst these transformative changes in the United States, gross inequalities only grew. This conference will highlight the intersections between poverty and other facets of 20th century US history, such as; work and work relations, government support and programs, racialisation, the healthcare system and socioeconomic inequalities. Throughout the 20th Century, state initiatives attempted on various levels to reduce the socioeconomic inequality that existed throughout the US, for instance the growth of government programs that either aimed to tackle the gross unemployment levels or the changes that […]