UCL Americas Research Network 2024 Conference – Historical Roots, Modern Realities: Nationalism Across the Americas

‘Presidents and Place’ - Edited collection - Dr Thomas Cobb and Dr Olga Ackroyd From the frontier of Manifest Destiny ideology to the contest between industrialism and agrarianism implicit in the Civil War, ideals of place have both driven the United States’s economic development and accentuated its political divides. Appreciation of the United States today still often derives from how place differs for its citizens; from the strife of the ‘Rustbelt’ to the glamour of the ‘Sunbelt’, the US is remarked on, perhaps more than other Western country, for its cultural and climatological heterogeneity. The history of US presidents’ upbringings and home state affiliations, however, presents a comparative uniformity. Seven out of the fifteen presidents who preceded Lincoln were born in Virginia, a hegemony which outlasted the frontier ideology purveyed by presidents Andrew Jackson and James Polk. In the decades between Appomattox and the New Deal, it was Ohio’s turn […]

This edited collection seeks to explore the representation of the First Lady in a range of different texts and media. The collection aims to examine the President’s wife in a purely cultural context by investigating the ways in which she has been represented, embodied, characterised and commemorated in film, fiction, memoir, photography and portraiture, television, theatre, education, museum studies, fashion, and social media. Beyond the White House is an original work that makes use of cultural interpretation to reconfigure the figure of the First Lady as a culturally authoritative individual possessing the ability to sway, change, inspire, and manipulate public attention and opinion. Moving away from biographies and histories, this is the first volume of its kind to consider the representation of the First Lady figure through the prism of popular culture – and therefore consider her impact upon ‘cultural politics’ – and the first to regard her as a strategically important socio-cultural […]

Call for Papers 3rd Young Scholar Symposium: Sharing Critical Testimonies of Wellness in Times of Crisis February 2022 Various interpretations of what constitutes health and the normal functioning of human beings have been around even before the Hippocratic “break from divine notions of health” (Green). The most prevalent ones, like Christopher Boorse’sfamous theory of health, define health via negativa as the absence of disease and sub/dysfunction. However, an alternative, positive view of health, partially powered by interdisciplinary investigations of conditions in which people function for sustained periods of time under other than “normal circumstances” (Boorse 7–8), has claimed the spotlight in the past few decades. Moreover, a critical turning point along the millenia-long trajectory of health discourse in the West, the lack of value neutrality in dominant definitions of health, and of the practices these definitions underpin and legitimize, has been emphasized in recent years. On the broad tracks of […]

As we head into the 20s of the 21st century, we mark the centennials of key O’Neill plays that introduced his voice to a wider audience. Beyond the Horizon premiered on Broadway in 1920 and ushered in a uniquely American tragic form. The Emperor Jones also opened on Broadway in 1920 and was a work that both experimented with emerging expressionist theatrical techniques and broke the color line on Broadway. The Hairy Ape, staged by the Provincetown Players in 1922, criticized capitalist structures and pointed out the fragility and fallibility of the American Dream. Tapping into the zeitgeist of the early 1920s, a time when rapid changes in technology and industry, sudden shifts in workplace environments, and clashes between and among individuals based on differences of race, class, and gender swirled around the cultural and societal ether, O’Neill’s works reflected the longing and belonging that permeated the contemporary culture. A […]

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 […]

In November 1621 colonists in Massachusetts celebrated a year of survival and their first harvest with a feast that has since been called The First Thanksgiving. The feast was a supposed celebration of resilience after hardship. It was not until 1863, in the midst of the American Civil War and with the nation divided, that this feast was enshrined as a national holiday and a touchstone of American tradition and ideology: a story of togetherness projected over the realities of division, exceptionalism, genocide, and slavery. Now, four hundred years later, the story of the First Thanksgiving both provides comfort in another time of hardship while also revealing a depth of narrative ideology and mythology which obfuscates the ideological construction of modern day American nations. In the narrative of the US, in particular, at home and abroad, we see an increased awareness and attention to historical and contemporary situations that reveal […]

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 […]