The protests against racial profiling and racist police brutality in the U.S. and Britain, Donald Trump's alarming comments about Muslims, the Confederate flag controversy in South Carolina, the all-white Academy Award nominations, the organization "Operation Black Vote" feeling compelled to urge people of color not to leave the political field to white people in the wake of the UK General Elections, the reactions of the European Union to the masses of refugees and many Europeans' xenophobic reactions to those seeking refuge: the specters of whiteness are still urgently haunting the western world. According to France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, Critical Whiteness Studies is currently in its third stage, riding its third wave so to say, questioning "the tendency towards essentializing accounts of whiteness by locating race as one of many social relations that shape individual and group identity" (2011: 3). While the discipline has established itself as an anti-racist […]

Cultures of Conservatism in the United States and Western Europe between the 1970s and 1990s Anna von der Goltz (Georgetown University, Washington D.C.), Martina Steber (University of Konstanz), Tobias Becker (German Historical Institute London)   In recent research the decades between the 1970s and the 1990s are interpreted as a time of revolutionary change triggered by economic crises, in which the parameters and conditions for our present times were set. Conservatism looms large in this quite influential narrative; after all, the Reagan and Thatcher governments in the United States and in Britain implemented economic and social policies that fundamentally changed the welfare state economies of the boom years. Conservatism is therefore often interpreted as neoliberalism in conservative guise, as the defining political ideology of finance capitalism. However, conservatism was a much more diverse phenomenon than these interpretations suggest. While economics and politics were certainly crucial in the fashioning of a […]

Call for Papers The Global Pursuit of Equality: Women, Networks, and Networking 1800-2000 26-27th September 2016, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) Following the interdisciplinary graduate and early career researchers workshop held in May 2016 on the theme of ‘The global pursuit of equality: women, networks and networking 1800-2000’, the next event will be a two-day conference held on the same theme at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) from the 26-27th of September. This conference will bring together graduate and early career researchers alongside senior scholars to explore the ways in which women’s local, national and international networks helped to facilitate equality, drive political, economic, cultural and social change, and challenge overlapping systems of oppression over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the conference, there will be two keynote lectures by economist and writer Devaki Jain and the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia […]

Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies University of Southern Denmark, Odense, May 22-24, 2017 American Colors: Across the Disciplinary Spectrum Color defines America. First of all color defines America through ideas of slavery, race, and civil rights. W.E.B. Du Bois’ claim that ‘The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line’ is certainly hard to deny in an American context. Yet American Colors are far from all about race. The respective colors of the Democratic and the Republican Party, since 1976 partitioning the country into demographics of blue and red, are significant reminders of the power of American Colors to divide and contrast. On the other hand, American Colors are not necessarily divisive, even if they stay distinct. Whether it is in the color of the rainbow, as seen on the pride flag of the LGBT community, or in the idea of ethnic and racial […]

Edited Collection on Joe Brainard deadline for submissions:  August 15, 2016 full name / name of organization:  Yasmine Shamma, Honors College of Florida Atlantic University contact email:  yshamma@fau.edu Edited Collection on Joe Brainard First and Second Generation New York School poetry is so frequently lined with or bound by Joe Brainard’s artwork that its material seems inextricable from the cherries, jacks, and starts so commonly occupying the real and influential side-lines of their poems. In this way, Brainard’s work occupies the literal margins of New York School Poetry, while also figuratively influencing the aesthetic ones. Brainard was not only an illustrator and friend to many New York School poets, he was also an avid letter writer, collage artist, miniature artist, cartoonist, and serious poet. His art, friendship and poetry provide a point from which to reconsider The New York School’s often chronicled relationship to The New York School of Painting […]

Date: September 22, 2016 to September 24, 2016 Location: United States Subject Fields: American History / Studies, Law and Legal History, Government and Public Service, Political Science, Political History / Studies Illinois State University is proud to announce a conference to mark the 150th anniversary of ex parte Milligan (1866), sponsored by Illinois State University and the David Davis Mansion on September 22-24, 2016 at the Marriot Hotel, Normal Illinois. Written here in Bloomington, Illinois, Davis’s decision held that trial by military commissions was acceptable only where there was a real war and where civilian courts were impaired. Long dormant, Milligan has assumed new centrality in our political and constitutional debates arising out of the so-called “war on terror.”  We invite established scholars, practicing professionals, or graduate students from all fields to submit proposals on historical, legal, constitutional or political subtopics related to the Milligan decision itself, its antecedents, or […]

I invite proposals for a collection of essays that examines the theme of revenge in American fiction, film, and television. Vengeance – that quest for violent reciprocity – is one of storytelling’s oldest and most enduring plots. But in the modern American imaginary the familiar shape of retribution assumes a new form. Over and over, avengers on page and screen desire not only blood but also symbolic victories. In Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996) a troubled protagonist named John Smith yearns to kill the one “white man was responsible for everything that had gone wrong” for Native Americans. In Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003), an outraged financial analyst assassinates a billionaire who upset the “balance” of global capitalism. For these characters, personal grievance turns into political statement, and payback evolves from a selfish drive into a systemic reckoning. From bloodthirsty class warriors in The Iron Heel (1908) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) to anti-patriarchal furies of Beloved (1987) and Foxfire (1993) to contemporary assailants […]

REFRAMING FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY University of Toronto, Canada, SEPTEMBER 28–30, 2017 A conference hosted by the Toronto Photography Seminar What is family photography? Scholars have often understood the genre as simply snapshots of domestic scenes—images  that reflect and produce normative notions of family. Yet, family photographs are more complex than we think: they can also include images taken by a wide spectrum of producers, including the press and the state; they frequently circulate between private and public spheres, linking personal memories with national and even global histories; and, just as importantly, they don’t just illustrate families, but also shape the very idea of family, as racialized and gendered social structures. Foundational thinkers including Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jo Spence, Marianne Hirsch, Martha Langford, Deborah Willis, and others, have offered influential terms for investigating family photographs, respectively, as: an affective punctum; middlebrow art; means of reinforcing domestic ideology; conduit for postmemory; integrally […]

'Populism in historical perspective'   Symposium  2nd November 2016, European Institute, University College London   The last decade has seen the rise of politicians, parties and governments to whom the label 'populist' can usefully be applied. This is true not only in Europe, but also in North and South America, Turkey, India and elsewhere. British media responses to this global shift have focused on the 'Brexit' referendum result and the short term consequences of the 2008 financial crash. There has been less interest in historicising these phenomena or locating them in an analysis of twentieth and twenty first century democracy. Yet this would be a useful endeavour, involving study not only of twentieth century populists like Pierre Poujade or Juan Perón, but also a wider project investigating the development of modern mass society since the late nineteenth century.   The UCL European Institute and UCL Centre for Transnational History therefore […]

Violence interpreted: Connections between the Violent Past of the United States and Conflict Today. Violent confrontations and racial discrimination have influenced the United States on multiple levels. At the beginning of the twentieth century the country confronted a wave of violent unrests that molded American society and prepared the ground for massive changes in political, social and financial realms. After a century, the country seems to still be affected by racial discrimination and police violence; the current global upheavals and the political rhetoric for the 2016 presidential election intensify the polarisation within American society. Scholarly interpretation of violence will lead to a better understanding of both past and present of conflict in the United States. We seek submissions for a forthcoming special issue of the European Journal of American Culture focusing on interpretations of violence in American society and the examination of possible historic recurrences. We are particularly interested in […]

 Organized by: ATSU Foreign Affairs and Development Office, Prof. Vakhtang  Amaglobeli Center for American Studies & John Dos Passos Association of Georgia.  Supporters: US Embassy in Georgia & Akaki Tsereteli State University We invite a variety of contributions that address any of the following topics: U.S. Literature U.S. Education System U.S. Culture Art Philosophy Mass Media Social and Women’s Issues U.S. History U.S. Politics Religion Law Economics Healthcare Ecology Georgian-American Relations Working Languages: Georgian and English  Style guides for papers: Conference proceedings will be published as a journal. Manuscripts should not ordinarily exceed fifteen standard pages (A4) including the abstract and the contributor’s short bio. All papers must conform to The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition in all matters of form and should be typewritten in MS Word 2003. Use Times New Roman: 12 pts fonts for the main text and all additional parts except endnotes and index (where you […]

CFP: Writing Shared Futures: African American Literature and Racialisation BAAS Panel at 'English: Shared Futures,' 5-7 July 2017, Newcastle, UK Contributions are invited for a BAAS panel at 'English: Shared Futures,' a large-scale conference spanning across the discipline. The panel 'Writing Shared Futures: African American Literature and Racialisation' will explore the significances of, and engagements with, racialisation in post-Civil Rights writing by African Americans. It will seek to ask how understandings of racialisation are connected with understandings of the future, and to examine the ways in which literary texts have questioned categories and binaries of race and have complicated views of the processes by which racial identity comes into being. Such processes might be made visible in contexts such as: migration and immigration multi-ethnic coalitions intersectional politics future worlds internationalism coming of age narratives popular culture/music/sport contemporary politics, especially the Obama years new technologies and social media Possible writers include […]