Mon 11 April 2022 at 3pm Please join us on Mon 11 April 2022 (3pm to 4.30pm, UK time) for an international panel on “Fictional Maximalism and the Americas: New Voices, New Perspectives,” organised by Elisa Pesce. Details below. All welcome! Please email Elisa at e.pesce.1@research.gla.ac.uk for further information and the Zoom link. A transversal presence in Western literature, the maximalist, or encyclopaedic, novel is a multi- form and unusually long type of fiction. Although its ancestry might lie in Dante’s Commedia, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Joyce’s Ulysses, it evolved into a distinctive literary style from the 1970s onward, encompassing authors such as Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, and Wallace. Consequently, the maximalist novel came to be associated predominantly with white male writers from the United States, as well as with many of the features and purposes of the Great American Novel. After decades of little discussion on the reasons underlying the exclusion […]

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 recently hosted its first book club on Keisha N. Blain’s Until I am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America. We have further Book Clubs arranged for Friday 11 March and Thursday 5 May, details below:   March 11, 2022: For this month's book club, we will be discussing Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers' new book ' They Were Her Property'; White Women as Slaveowners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). We welcome scholars at every stage, so do come along and to share your thoughts!   Date: Friday 11th March 2022   Time: 12 noon- 1pm (UK time)   Register in advance for this meeting: https://mmu-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMqd-qoqzooG9fRM_iLhs1ctMQ0kV5eEtnZ   May 5, 2022: The 1619 Project isn't just an initiative or a subject of controversy, it is a confrontation with the truth. For many African American readers, it is a journey towards healing and reparation. For many other American readers, it is an acknowledgement of the wilful […]