• RESEARCH
  • #USSOBOOKHOUR
  • REVIEWS
  • EYES ON EVENTS
  • SPECIAL SERIES
  • EVENTS
  • #WRITEAMSTUDIES
  • USSOCAST

British Association for American Studies

×

UCL Special Collections Visiting Fellowship

The Digital Economy: Ubercapitalism or Postcapitalism (King’s College London)

Registration is now open for 'The Digital Economy: Ubercapitalism or Postcapitalism' conference, Friday 11 May 2018 .   The conference will explore what kind of economic system digital technologies are producing in the era of Facebook, Amazon and Uber. Keynote speakers: Melissa Gregg, Nick Srnicek and Athina Karatzogianni. Panels on digital labour, digital consumption, digital economy in a global perspective and theories of digital capitalism.   Please find the conference programme below.   Registration costs £5 and can be completed here   Register now: https://estore.kcl.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/academic-faculties/faculty-of-arts-humanities/arts-humanities-research-institute/the-digital-economy-ubercapitalism-or-postcapitalism

Cambridge American History Seminar: “Fear and Democracy: Responding to Carl Schmidt”

Cambridge American History Seminar 2017-2018  We are pleased to announce the schedule of seminars and events for the academic year 2017/18. Seminars will be held on Mondays at 5:00 PM in the Knox Shaw Room, Sidney Sussex College, unless otherwise indicated. Several of the seminars will be based on pre- circulated papers that will be made available two weeks prior to the seminar date. All inquiries should be directed to Jonathan Goodwin, jmg216@cam.ac.uk, 01223 335317. 14 May:  Ira Katznelson, 2017-18 Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions, University of Cambridge, and Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University Fear and Democracy: Responding to Carl Schmidt 

CFP: Sex and Celebrity PGR Workshop (University of Portsmouth)

Expressions of Interest & Call for Papers: Sex and Celebrity PGR Workshop Thursday 28th June 2018, University of Portsmouth   Keynote Speaker: Professor John Mercer, Birmingham City University     This one-day PGR Workshop seeks to interrogate the relationship between sex and celebrity – the role of sex in the construction, negotiation and perpetuation of celebrity identity. As well as academic papers and roundtable discussion, this event will also include PGR professionalization sessions.   This free PGR workshop asks how sex and sexuality form, create and change our relationship to celebrity: how do sex and celebrity intersect? What roles do sex stories, exposés and scandals have in the formation and/or devaluing of celebrity? Is desire an inherent part of celebrity culture? How do attitudes to sex and celebrity change across time, cultures and societies? What role does the media play in forging links between sex and celebrity? How do film and […]

CFP: Let the Sun Shine In: American Theatre, Protest and Censorship (British Library)

Let the Sun Shine In: American Theatre, Protest and Censorship An international conference co-sponsored by the American Theatre & Drama Society and the Eccles Centre for American Studies http://www.atds.org/ https://www.bl.uk/eccles-centre October 26-27, 2018 British Library, London (UK) Keynote speakers: Prof. Ramón Espejo Romero, Universidad de Sevilla (Spain) Dr. Marlis Schweitzer, York University (Canada) In 1968, the American musical Hair opened on Broadway, in London's West End, and in Munich, West Germany. Hailed by many for capturing the zeitgeist of the late 1960s, Hair also reflected changes in the writing and production of American theatre. Produced Off-Broadway at the Public Theater, it emerged from experimental theatre practice to achieve commercial success on Broadway and internationally. Staging contemporary protest and dissent, the musical was censored on tour in Boston but became the first production to open after the Theatres Act ended both censorship in British theatre and the power of the Lord Chamberlain. This conference investigates American theatre, […]

Media Journeys Symposium (University of East Anglia)

Animation in Transcultural Contexts, the inaugural Media Journeys Symposium at UEA, will be held in the Julian Study Centre, Room 3.02, on 24 May 2018. We wish to welcome all to an event that will investigate the diverse paths travelled by animated texts. This symposium brings together debates about animation from across media studies in order to investigate the transnational and transcultural connections between the global animation industries. This event includes a keynote address by Helen McCarthy on creating anime fandom here in the UK and the importance of transcultural texts, a book launch reception for PRINCESS MONONOKE: UNDERSTANDING STUDIO GHIBLI'S MONSTER PRINCESS (Bloomsbury, 2018) and an optional screening of PRINCESS MONONOKE at Cinema City, as well as an optional symposium dinner. Tickets for the PRINCESS MONONOKE screening are available at £5.00 for symposium attendees. Registration and further information here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/media-journeys-2018-animation-in-transnational-contexts-registration-44629673555?aff=es2

Transatlantic Literary Women Series: Women’s Partial Suffrage Centenary Celebration (People’s Palace Museum, Glasgow)

All are welcome to join us for a weekend of craft workshops, talks and readings, to celebrate 100 years since partial women’s suffrage. You’ll have the opportunity to create your own suffrage rosette or sash, learn about women’s activism through the museum collection, and drop in to talks on the history of women and the vote. Our main speaker, suffrage specialist and performer Naomi Paxton will be talking transatlantic suffrage theatre, with a Scottish twist. The event is being held in collaboration with the People’s Palace Museum, Glasgow, which you can learn about here. The event is funded by the US Embassy London, the British Association for American Studies, and the University of Glasgow College of Arts Collaborative Research Award. More details to follow… watch this space! Programme: Welcome Room 1-3pm 1-3pm Crafts: suffragette rosettes (Saturday) and sashes (Sunday) Run by Katrina Falco (freelance designer) and Laura Clark (Glasgow Life/Glasgow Museums) […]

CFP: Living Well with Books (University of Bristol)

Living Well With Books Call for Papers Centre for Material Texts, Richmond Building, University of Bristol Wednesday 5 – Friday 7 September 2018   Since the invention of the codex, the lives (and afterlives) of books have been intertwined with the lives of people. This interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and transnational conference organized by the Centre for Material Texts, University of Bristol, aims to explore how books have affected and continue to affect our daily lives and well-being. How we have lived with books in the past, how do we live with them in the present, how we might live with them better in the future, and how might we help others do the same?   As readers, writers, creative practitioners, educators, researchers, curators, consumers and producers, how do books feature in our lives? How do they share our living and working spaces? How might books contribute to health and wellbeing? Do […]

CFP: Special Issue on “Making time in digital societies: Considering the interplay of media, data and temporalities” in New Media & Society

Special Issue on “Making time in digital societies: Considering the interplay of media, data and temporalities” in New Media & Society   Guest Editors: Christine Lohmeier (University of Bremen), Anne Kaun (Södertörn University), & Christian Pentzold (University of Bremen)   Studying media and communication processes through the lens of time and temporality enjoys a long history. Waves of technological innovation such as mechanization and electrification have come with a profound reconfiguration of social time. This holds true for datafication too. Datafication – referring to processes of quantification and the transformation of evermore objects into data, as well as the automation of judgements, evaluations, and decision-making – requires us to rethink, once again, the relationship between media, data, and temporality.   The special issue of New Media & Society will address the continuities and disruptions emerging in the nexus of time and media. It addresses the challenges of acting in the […]

CFP: Sea Change: Wavescapes in the Anthropocene (University of Split)

Sea Change: Wavescapes in the Anthropocene   Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Split & Island of Vis, 3-6 December 2018 Keynote addresses: Adeline Johns-Putra (University of Surrey), Rebecca Giggs (Macquarie University) & Joško Božanić (University of Split)   Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change, Into something rich and strange. — William Shakespeare     Ariel's song of the sea, from Shakespeare's The Tempest, describes the transformative force of water. A metamorphosis is worked at the depths of full fathom five – death remade into strange richness. Element of ancient cosmologies, water has long served myth and philosophy as a paradoxical mix of power and gentle transfiguration. As Lao Tzu observes, “Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.” Likewise, Ovid remarks, “Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.” This ceaseless persuasion is why Božanić […]

2001: Beyond 50 (Bangor University)

The Centre for Film, Television and Screen Studies at Bangor University is proud to present 2001: Beyond 50   A day of talks, music, and an exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), featuring experts and people who worked on the film.   Pontio, Bangor University, Deiniol Road, Bangor, LL57 2TQ, UK.   16th June 2018, 2 - 11 pm.   Provisional programme (timings are subject to change but speakers are confirmed):   2.00 Introduction by Piers Bizony, author of 2001: Filming the Future and 2001: A Space Odyssey.   2.30 Alternative perspectives: a panel featuring experts on 2001's legacy beyond film, including psychology, artificial intelligence, evolutionary biology, and philosophy and religion. Panellists: Prof. Robert Ward (Bangor), Prof. Guillaume Thierry (Bangor), Dr. Bill Teahan (Bangor), Mr. Eric Krasny (Bangor), and Prof. Peter Wheeler (Liverpool John Moores).   4.00 Coffee and opportunity to view […]

The Paranoid Style Revisited: Postwar American Cultural Politics and The Argosy Magazine (John Rylands Library, Manchester)

The Paranoid Style Revisited: Postwar American Cultural Politics and The Argosy Magazine John Rylands Library, Manchester, 28-29 June 2018 Half a century ago Richard Hofstadter published his influential essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics,’ in which he identified ‘heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy’ as a recurrent feature of the nation’s political life. Hofstadter’s thesis has in subsequent decades been at the centre of a rich and interdisciplinary scholarly discourse that has been attentive to the cultural politics of the Cold War period as read especially through the lens of gender, but also those of science and technology, mass media, and corporate capitalism, amongst others. In our current political moment Hofstadter’s call for critical reflection on the genesis, mechanisms and consequences of the paranoid style beckons with renewed urgency. The aim of this conference is to generate such reflection by engaging with and showcasing a rare research resource recently […]

Ninth BrANCA reading group: Voicing the Non-Human (University of Birmingham)

Ninth BrANCA reading group: Voicing the Non-Human University of Birmingham, 29th June 2018, 1-5pm The ninth British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA) reading group will be held at the University of Birmingham, 29th June 2018. Among America’s most potent myths and symbols are an array of animal and non-human presences: from its national animal, the bald eagle, to the elusive white whale, Br’er Rabbit, the birds, flies, and dogs of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and, more recently, King Kong, Mickey Mouse and a whole panoply of Muppets. But to what extent is America interested in the non-human as non-human? Are the non-humans of American literature always performing in ways that exceed their status as non-human? In what ways do the American writers of the nineteenth century approach, or exhibit a sympathy with, such animals on their own terms? Is such an approach possible? Questions like these have been explored in the flourishing field of animal studies, perhaps most famously by writers like Donna Haraway – in When Species Meet (2007) and Staying […]