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 […]

Reissued Call for Papers: Labor and Capital in U.S. History. Annual Meeting of the Historians in the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), February 11–12, 2022, Mainz. Deadline: November 30, 2021. The organisers note that planning for the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Historians in the German Association of American Studies (DGfA) has been difficult because of the ongoing pandemic. To provide the best possible experience under the circumstances, they have decided to move the conference “Labor and Capital in U.S. History” to a “digital plus” format. This means that all panels will take place online, with an option for those wanting to come to Mainz to attend in-person if the pandemic situation improves. Accordingly, they are also reissuing the call for papers with these changed conditions in mind. The DGfA conference will take place February 11–12, 2022, virtually via Zoom and Gather and, hopefully, with an in-person option at […]

For the 2021 BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, we invite proposals from postgraduates and early career researchers across all disciplines and time periods that reflect aspects of the theme, Visibility/Invisibility: Representation & Community Formation in American Studies. The past two years have seen a renewed visibility of global activist movements, and we aim to both analyse how we as a community unearth narratives historically excluded from mainstream understanding, including how our work has been informed by recent sociopolitical, cultural, and economic movements working to amplify marginalised voices and perspectives. We seek to answer the following questions: what do we understand by the terms  ‘visibility/invisibility? How might gatekeeping and canonical understanding affect communities, representation, and our understanding of these terms? How does this impact the content of our research and our methodologies? How do we ensure the visibility of systematically minoritised voices? Is visibility/invisibility truly binary, and if so, how does this duality […]