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British Association for American Studies

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Sex in Contemporary Media: An Interdisciplinary Conference

CfP: DCfA: Labor and Capital in U.S. History (February 2022)

Reissued Call for Papers: Labor and Capital in U.S. History. Annual Meeting of the Historians in the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), February 11–12, 2022, Mainz. Deadline: November 30, 2021. 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 […]

PG BAAS 2021: Visibility/Invisibility: Representation & Community Formation in American Studies

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 (December 2021)

Rothermere American Institute University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

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 […]

‘Where’s Your Manhood’? White Women, White Supremacy, and Gender Essentialism in 20th Century US History

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 […]

CfP: HOTCUS 2022 Winter Symposium: The Manhattan Project Turns 80: Reflections on the Nuclear Age

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 Panel: Call for Expressions of Interest at BAAS 2022 Annual Conference

WASN Panel: Call for Expressions of Interest The challenges of working in Higher Education have been particularly acute over the last two years. From the pandemic, to continuing industrial disputes over pensions, precarity and the race and gender pay gaps, as well as media exposure of some of the many instances of sexual harassment in Higher Education, gender continues to shape the practice of British American studies in profound ways. This WASN sponsored panel offers a space for dialogue about the challenges and opportunities faced by all who identify women and all those marginalized along the gender spectrum. We are looking for expressions of interest on a particular theme for up to 5 minutes from WAAS members. We are looking for speakers who represent different parts of the sector (including independent scholars) and career stages (from postgraduate researchers to Professors). Panellists can speak to any theme, but WASN especially welcomes […]

Women in American Studies Network Book Club (Online)

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 […]

CfP: Sacred Spaces in the Americas, RIAS

2022-01-03 Next issue: Sacred Spaces in the Americas—RIAS Vol. 17, Spring–Summer (1/2023) Edited by Lucie Kýrová and Nathaniel R. Racine “Human societies come and go on this earth and any prolonged occupation of a geographical region will produce shrines and sacred sites discerned by the occupying people, but there will always be a few sites at which the highest spirits dwell.” Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 279. The connections between the spiritual and natural world and the temporality and permanence of sacred places, as articulated by Vine Deloria, Jr., have found constant expression throughout the colonial history of the Americas. As European settlement advanced, many sites sacred to the Indigenous peoples were abandoned, destroyed, forcibly transformed, or left in obscurity for their own protection, only to gain new meanings within the conquering or enslaved cultures taking root. Thus we see modern Mexico City built […]

BAAS Early Career Academic Work in Progress Workshops

In Spring 2022, the British Association of American Studies will be hosting a series of Work In Progress Sessions within which Early Career Academics (ECAs) share their work. This will take on the format of 5-5-5 WIP Sessions:   5 ECAs will be selected and invited into a workshop group. Each ECA will write 5,000 words and share it with the other ECAs. The other ECAs will provide 5 key pieces of feedback on this piece.   The exact format of these workshops will be decided with the selected ECAs, but are likely to take the form of a one hour discussion once a week for 5 weeks. These workshops are intended to be collaborative, rather than prescriptive.   Whilst there is no specific theme to these works beyond this organisation’s focus on American Studies, an effort will be made to group ECAs according to discipline. We recognise that a […]

CfP: HOTCUS 2022 Annual Conference

Conference dates: 22-25 June, 2022* Location: University of Edinburgh Plenary Speaker: Professor Melani McAlister (George Washington University ) Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS) is delighted to invite paper and panel proposals for our 2022 annual conference. Following the success of our first online conference in 2021, we are developing a hybrid format for 2022, with a range of both in-person and online events. We hope that this will accommodate those who want to meet in person in the beautiful city of Edinburgh, while also ensuring accessible offerings for all who wish to join us digitally. We will, of course, be keeping a close eye on government advice, and can pivot to an online-only event if necessary. Please consider your availability and preferences if submitting a paper or panel (see below for more information on submissions and the format of the conference). Call for Papers We welcome panels […]

Annual Meeting of the Historians in the German Association for American Studies (DGfA): Labor and Capital in U.S. History (February 2022)

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 […]

Our Steps Come from Afar: Afro-Diasporas in Brazil and the Voices and (Re)existence of Black Women

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