Hybrid Republicanism: Italy and American Art, c. 1840-1918 Rome, October 6-7 2016 Sponsors:  American Academy in Rome, Centro Studi Americani, Rome, and Museo di Roma, Palazzo Braschi, Rome Italy has served as a key destination for American artists since the founding of the republic.  American painters, sculptors, and illustrators were enchanted with its mythic arcadian past, fascinated with its classical legacy, and impassioned by its political movement toward independence and unification, the Risorgimento.  This conference will consider the shared notions of republicanism and tyranny that animated American and Italian politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Although Italians eventually chose a constitutional monarchy as their governing structure, Americans understood the Italian state in republican terms—as a nation comprised of free, autonomous, and self-governing citizens.  The scope of the conference will take into account significant historical events that linked Italy and the United States, such as the Italian wars of […]

Cambridge American History Seminar For further details, pre-circulated papers and other seminars see the CAHS webpage. Tuesday 4 October (Room G.04, English Faculty West Road), 4:30pm: Mark Greif, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, The New School, New York City Book Launch: Against Everything: Essays (Penguin Random House, 2016) Hosted by the Cambridge American Literature Research Seminar

For our Autumn 2016 Reading Group, the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA) will address the role and representation of pedagogy in nineteenth-century American literature. The students who arrive at university do so after years of training in what were once called schoolrooms by people who were once known as schoolmasters. This set of readings takes up the question of how and why the nineteenth-century American schoolroom and its attendant schoolmasters reshaped notions of reading, personhood, and the relation of the school to the state, the domestic sphere, and religion. These readings also encourage a historical view of the origins of current humanities pedagogy, from early childhood through tertiary education, at a moment when institutional pressures have incited a defence of said pedagogy at all costs. One question to take up then is whether the schoolroom in its various current incarnations—lecture hall, small group, tutorial, seminar—is worth defending. A second […]