IAAS Postgraduate Symposium “The (Hi)stories We Create: Narratives of Exceptionalism, Ideology, and Resilience” (November 2021)

January 29th and 30th, 2021, online via Zoom With keynote addresses by: Dr Phillip Gordon (author of Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond ) and Dr Julie Beth Napolin (author of The Facts of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form ) William Faulkner (1897-1962) has long been considered one of the foremost modernist authors to emerge from the United States. Faulkner’s authorial obsessions have typically been described as including time, history, and the fraught definition of “Southernness” in the aftermath of the Civil War, emancipation, and the quest for Civil Rights. However, starting with the publication of the edited volume Faulkner and Postmodernism (1997), critics have sought to recontextualise Faulkner as a “postmodernist” and even “transgressive” author, whose work explores the darker side of humanity and sets a precedent for writers including William S. Burroughs and Cormac McCarthy to explore the nature of sexuality, racial identity, […]

Join Dr. Afua Cooper for a presentation on the Lord Dalhousie Scholarly Panel on Slavery and Race, followed by conversation with Danni Ebanks-Ingram and Dr. Asha Rogers. Dr. Michell Chresfield will chair. The Report on Lord Dalhousie’s History on Slavery and Race, headed by historian and artist Dr. Afua Cooper, was submitted in 2019 at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. The panel looked into Lord Dalhousie’s views on race and put forward recommendations for how campus might be accountable for past and present connections to anti-Black racism. The University of Birmingham’s Centre for the Study of North America is delighted that Dr. Afua Cooper has accepted our invitation to tell us about the work of the panel she chaired, and engage in dialogue about that panel’s report and its resonance for universities and wider communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Chaired by Dr. Michell Chresfield, this event will begin with a presentation by Dr. Cooper on the Report, followed […]

A fortnightly seminar series to explore methodologies and theory relating to cultural studies across a range of disciplines. The seminar is aimed at graduate students, ECRs, and interested faculty but all are welcome.   March 4th  at 2PM we welcome writer, film programmer, and PhD candidate in Communication and Culture, Ryerson and York Universities. 'On Anti-Black Visual Economies and Brutal Aesthetics.'   Please email sage.goodwin@history.ox.ac.uk for the zoom link and/or to be added to the seminar mailing list.

Antebellum New Orleans was the nation’s ‘necropolis,’ with yellow fever routinely killing about eight percent of the population. With little epidemiological understanding of mosquito-borne viruses, a person’s only protection against the scourge was falling sick with and surviving the disease. Over time, repeated epidemics generated a hierarchy of immunocapital whereby ‘acclimated’ survivors leveraged their immunity for social, economic, and political power, while ‘unacclimated’ individuals languished in social and professional purgatory. By drawing parallels between the story of yellow fever in antebellum New Orleans and the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, Kathryn Olivarius provides keen insights into the politics of our present moment, when immunoprivilege has become firmly embedded in discussions about easing lockdowns and reopening the economy. Speaker: Kathryn Olivarius is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford and is an affiliated member of the Stanford Center for Law and History. She is the author of the forthcoming “Necropolis: Disease, Power, and […]

An event part of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) North American History Seminar series