Animals in Detective Fiction Since its origins in the mid nineteenth century, detective fiction has been populated by a huge array of beasts. If the genre begins, as is widely supposed (though not without some debate), with Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), then detective fiction’s very first culprit is an animal. Such beastly instances of criminal violence are among the genre’s most recurrent figurings of the non-human. Accordingly, like Poe’s frenzied ourang-outang on the spree in Paris, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) identifies a murderous aggression as part-and-parcel of animal nature. Detective fiction accommodates gentler and more law-abiding creatures too, however. Wilkie Collins, often thought of as the founder of the British detective novel, depicts the villain Count Fosco in The Woman in White (1859) surrounded by his ‘pretties’, ‘a cockatoo, two canary-birds and a whole family of white mice’, while Koko and […]

On 19th May 2017 Liverpool John Moores University will host the second annual International History and Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century conference. After the success of last year’s conference, we are looking to continue again with the wide-range of themes relevant to international history and diplomacy in the twentieth history. The aim of this year’s symposium is to gather a range of academics from all relevant disciplines who have international history, diplomacy, politics, humanitarianism and human rights history as their main subjects of interest to share their research in a multi-disciplinary environment.   The twentieth century was shaped by the changing dynamics of international relations. The first half of the century was dominated by the old European Imperial powers and the rivalry between these nations that ultimately lead to the outbreak of two world wars. The aftermath of the Second World War however had a monumental effect on the balance […]

The musical Hamilton, which opened on Broadway in August 2015 after a successful run at the Public Theater, has, in just a few years, become an awards powerhouse, a political lightning rod, and a cultural touchstone. Lin-Manual Miranda’s epic work, based on Ron Chernow’s sweeping biography of Alexander Hamilton, stands at the intersection where history and historical accuracy converge, where rap and showtunes merge, and where pop culture and high (or middlebrow) culture meet. Hamilton is simultaneously a groundbreaking musical theater experiment and an heir to the musical’s historical legacy, and it is in this divided, even contradictory role, that the musical finds its success. Musicologist Paul Laird (University of Kansas, kuvillancico@gmail.com) and theater scholar Mary Jo Lodge (Lafayette College, lodge@lafayette.edu) invite scholars from a wide range of disciplines to create essays about Hamilton for a proposed forthcoming edited collection with publication interest from Oxford University Press. For this scholarly volume, they seek chapters of 5000-6000 words that […]

Society for the History of Women in the Americas Annual Conference Thursday 6th July 2017 The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities The Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW) welcomes proposals for its tenth annual conference, co-organised with The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and the Rothermere American Institute. We invite 250 word abstracts for 20-minute presentations on any topic, geographical period, chronological time, or theme related to the history of women in the Americas. We also welcome comparative papers between two countries in the Americas or one in the Americas and a country outside the region. The conference welcomes papers from scholars at any stage of their career, especially graduate students. Diana Paton, the William Robertson Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh, will deliver the keynote lecture. Please submit abstracts along with a 100-word biography to shawconference2017@gmail.com by the 10th April 2017. […]

CALL FOR PAPERS (extended deadline) “Before and after Beat exploded: Essential studies on ruth weiss.” ruth weiss has worked for almost seven decades – and at 88 continues to work – with a plurality of artistic forms: she has authored around twenty poetry books, performed and recorded Jazz & Poetry, written more than ten plays, exhibited her water-color haiku paintings, acted in films and even written and directed one. As such, weiss embodies the artistic confluence of the 1950s and 1960s bohemia, breaking down, as Randy Roark writes, “the barriers between word, film, song, painting, and theatre”. Despite her extensive poetry career and very active participation in the West Coast buzzing artistic community since the early 1950s, weiss has remained an essentially overlooked figure in poetry history. This neglect might be representative – or shall we say a consequence – of the overshadowing of female artists within the Beat Generation […]

Call for Papers Australia New Zealand American Studies Association (ANZASA) Conference Australian Catholic University, North Sydney Campus, Sydney, Australia 27 June – 29 June 2017 The 2017 ANZASA conference will be held in North Sydney, hosted by the Australian Catholic University’s National School of Arts. ANZASA is an association dedicated to the research of all aspects of U.S. culture, politics and society. Its biennial conferences are in keeping with this mission. They provide a forum for discussion across the broad spectrum of American studies, involving presenters from multiple disciplines. In this tumultuous year for American society and its place in the world, papers are invited from those in American studies – and also from others considering the place of American history, culture, literature, politics or foreign policy in global or transnational contexts. Proposals for panels and individual 20-minute papers are welcome, as are submissions for other formats such as roundtables […]

CALL FOR PAPERS: Magazines on the Move: North American Periodicals and Travel A one-day seminar hosted by the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, Nottingham Trent University, in collaboration with the Network for American Periodical Studies Tuesday 6th June 2017, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus Keynote speaker: Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University) Organisers:      Prof Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University); Dr Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University); Dr Rebecca Butler (Nottingham Trent University); Dr Sue Currell (Sussex University). This 1 day-seminar will focus on the relationship between North American travel writing and the periodical format. Its primary purpose is to facilitate historical and critical discussion of narratives of travel in North American periodicals. We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers that examine accounts of travel to, within, or from North America, published in North American periodicals. Topics to be examined in considering the interplay between the travel experience, the written and/or visual record […]

Testimony, Memory and Reading Trauma in Representations of the Holocaust 15 July 2017, University of East Anglia, Norwich (UK) “I am choking, I am drowning. This pencil and these scraps of paper aren't enough. I need colours, sounds – oils and orchestras. I need something more than words.” -Martin Amis, The Zone of Information (2014) “Postmemory is a powerful form of Memory precisely because its connection to its object source is not mediated through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. Postmemory characterizes the experiences of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created.” –Marianne Hirsch, Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile (1996) This symposium proposes a critical insight into contemporary representations of the Holocaust in Fiction, Poetry, Film, Historical and artistic interpretations. An intention to showcase research […]

Bluecoat 300: Charity, Philanthropy and the Black Atlantic A weekend conference and public participation event Liverpool 24-25 November 2017 Conference 24 Nov: Dr Martin Luther King Building Public Participation 25 Nov: Bluecoat Arts Centre Keynote Speaker: Prof. Catherine Hall (UCL) The weekend is set against the backdrop of two anniversaries in Liverpool: the tercentenary of the Bluecoat building, which was built in 1717 as a charity school for the poor, and has been a centre for the arts since 1907; and it is ten years since the International Slavery Museum opened. As part of the Bluecoat’s year-long anniversary programme, one strand aims to reveal and evaluate the presence of slavery and the black Atlantic in the history of Bluecoat. Like many Liverpool institutions founded in the 18th century, Bluecoat was built to a large degree with funds derived from the expanding port. Initial findings from recent research by Sophie Jones into […]

Since its publication in 2014, Canadian author Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven has attracted enthusiastic critical responses. This post-apocalyptic novel won an Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction in 2015 and was shortlisted for many other awards, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. In this OLH Special Collection, we seek to explore Station Eleven’s position within twenty-first-century writing. Station Eleven intersects with various debates in contemporary literary studies, opening up questions about genre, politics, national literary traditions, literary form and intermediality, popular culture and prize culture. The novel partakes in what James Berger describes as the “pervasive post-apocalyptic sensibility in recent American culture”. This sensibility is no longer the sole province of science fiction, as canonical literary authors like Cormac McCarthy and Jim Crace have written novels imagining post-catastrophic futures. Indeed Veronica Hollinger speaks of the “'disappearance’ of science […]

CALL FOR PAPERS – HELAAS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE The Politics of Space and the Humanities 15-17 December 2017 Deadline: May 1st, 2017 Venue: Aristotle University, Thessaloniki The Department of American Literature of the School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in collaboration with the Hellenic Association for American Studies (HELAAS), invite scholars to submit proposals for the international conference ―The Politics of Space and the Humanities‖ to be held in Thessaloniki. The latest socio-cultural and political developments on both sides of the Atlantic have again placed space at the center of attention of current scholarship in the Humanities. The relation between places, people, and geographies as caused by immigration, migration and refugee flows, demographic changes, war tensions and conflicts, environmental disasters, urban expansion, and mapping technologies has always been dynamic. Nowadays, finding ourselves in the midst of change, we need to reconsider the politicized nature of space, its impact […]

Call for Papers for a special issue of Comparative American Studies: American Networks: Radicals Under the Radar (1868-1968) Networks are the life-blood of many collaborative artistic and political movements. The aim of this special issue is to explore the confluence of American art and radicalism transnationally in the hundred-year lead up to 1968, a high-point in radical artistic and political expression. In focusing on the precursors to this watershed, its editors seek essays that investigate American networks and challenge conventional scholarship about the makeup, shape and associations of such artistic and political collaboration. Affiliations between American artists and radical thinkers have led to paradigm shifts that have changed world history. Communists, Wobblies, revolutionaries, socialists, Fabianists, Pan-Africanists, Pan-Americanists, revolutionaries, anarchists, political exiles and Garveyites all played their role in shaping American literature, art and politics. Whether such networks existed in tangible social enclaves—homes, bars, cafés, offices and neighbourhoods—or virtually in an […]