Zoom 16 - 17 November Those attending and participating in the conference will require a BISA membership, find out more about the benefits of BISA membership and become a member today. Registration for the conference will open on 24 September 2021. The call for papers is currently open. Theme: Shifts in US foreign policy This year is the 80th anniversary of the Atlantic Charter. This document, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, signified a new vision for American foreign policy and the wider world after the Second World War. This milestone committed the United States and the United Kingdom to tackling what they considered to be the most pressing threats on the international stage, making the defence of democracy, the strengthening of international institutions, the recognition of sovereignty and territorial integrity, supporting collective security, and reinforcing a rules-based economy the linchpin of American grand strategy. Yet in recent times, the […]

American Crisis/American Renewal? Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association Conference November 24-26, 2021 Hosted by Macquarie School of Social Sciences Online via Zoom Recognizing the multiple challenges confronting the United States, and the academy, during the early twenty-first century, we invite proposals that reflect on the theme of “American Crisis/American Renewal?” All scholars working in the field of American studies – or whose work considers the place of American history, literature, culture, politics, or foreign policy in global or transnational contexts – are invited to submit abstracts for panels or individual papers to Chris Dixon (chris.dixon@mq.edu.au) by 17 September 2021. As always, postgraduate students are particularly encouraged to attend, both by presenting their work to the conference and/or by participating in a postgraduate workshop that will be held on the first day of the conference. Individual presentations that are not part of a proposed panel will be allocated into […]

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 […]

The US Antimonopoly Tradition in Global Perspective The news media is currently awash with articles, op-eds, and think-pieces on monopoly, antitrust, and democracy’s fraught relationship with big corporations in general, and with Big Tech in particular. President Biden’s Executive Order Promoting Competition in the American Economy, issued on 9 July 2021, prompted a new wave of commentary on this topic. Writing in the New York Times, the distinguished labour historian Nelson Lichtenstein traced the lineage of Biden’s antitrust initiative all the way back to the Boston Tea Party and to abolitionists’ attacks on the slave power. “The nation’s antimonopoly tradition,” he wrote, “arises once more.” Much of this commentary, however, is resolutely national in its framing. It presents antimonopoly’s history almost as if it were hermetically sealed, and as such impervious to the global character of capitalism. Americans, of course, are not the only people around the world worried about […]

When the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in its 1954/1955 Brown v. Board of Education decision, segregationists across the South formed a resistance movement, known by its self-designation as Massive Resistance. A masculinist rhetoric and the concomitant ideal of white womanhood has often led to the assumption that white women played a passive part in the defence of white supremacy. In contrast, white women were self-conscious agents who were motivated by an everyday culture of white supremacy and status concerns that accentuated whiteness as property and what W.E.B. Du Bois has termed 'the public and psychological wage of whiteness.' This talk will analyse the social backgrounds, strategies, and actions of two working-class white supremacist women's groups in Little Rock and New Orleans in the late 1950s and early 1960s and show how they strategically employed gendered rhetoric to transgress social […]

Fri 14 Jan | 12.00-13.00 | Online | Free Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/.../tZYqf... When was the last time you read an academic book cover to cover? Is there a book you would love to discuss outside a course reading list, or have been meaning to find the time read? In 2022 WASN is launching a new book club for members. Over a lunch hour we will meet online to catch up and talk about a book we loved, found provocative, or prevented us from sleeping at night. Or all of the above. For our first session we have chosen Keisha Blain’s, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, (2021). Blain’s new biography of the civil rights activist offers a fascinating model for writing histories that connect and engage the needs of the present. So grab yourself a copy, or better still, put Until I am Free on […]

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 the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. They  are accepting applications for individual papers as well as panels, and they are opening the application for virtual poster presentations for doctoral students whose […]

Situating Black Feminist Thought in the Brazilian context brings insightful concepts about the importance of standpoints and knowledge production emerging from Latin America. ‘Our steps come from afar’ is a notion created by Jurema Werneck to explain how the Black Feminist epistemology is weaved through ancestral knowledge, Afro-Brazilian cosmovision and activism. Beyond resisting the racist colonial violence, the Brazilian Black feminism sheds light to counter narratives of coloniality, practices of refusing the place racism allocates to black people and daring to imagine-build a future other-wise.   Dr Katucha Bento Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies at University of Edinburgh

Come and join us for the Scottish Association for the Study of America's 23rd Annual Conference! About this event The Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA) was formed in 1999 to encourage the study of North America in Scotland. Due to ongoing Covid-19 restraints, our 23rd annual conference on Saturday 5 March 2022 will be a Virtual Conference (via Zoom). With two simultaneously running channels of panels and shorter 10-15-minute papers, we have put together a day of engaging and fascinating research covering the broadest range of topics relating to American history, studies and wider North American, Caribbean and Latin American subjects. Though we may be online, this year we have the widest programme and we look forward to hearing our speakers' discussions! The day will also include our annual AGM meeting where we will be announcing the election results for our committee. Registration for SASA 2022 is […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]