BAAS Conference Organisation Support

Slavery’s Untold Stories in the Era of Trump and M4BL University of Liverpool, Friday 27th October 2017 Please note: In order to ensure a healthy take-up of the postgraduate travel support we have extended the deadline for proposals to Thursday 10th August. We announce this call for papers at a profound and troubling moment in American life and politics. Persistent structural inequalities remain acute within healthcare, education, housing and the deeply discriminatory criminal justice system, while the M4BL has emphasized that the vulnerability of the black body remains at the very heart of the African-American experience. Historians now see the deep roots of these problems in slavery’s racialized discrimination and violent exploitation, and have recognised that the history of slavery cannot be told without taking into consideration the long and ongoing process of black emancipation. We invite researchers (postgraduate and established academics) from any discipline, as well as writers, artists and other […]

HOTCUS Annual Postgraduate Conference: ‘Contesting Power: Rights, Justice, and Dissent in America and Beyond’ Saturday, 21 October 2017, Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge Keynote Speaker: Dr Kerry Pimblott, University of Manchester The United States has recently witnessed dissent on a scale unprecedented in recent decades.  Mass protests like the Women’s March on Washington, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Standing Rock demonstrations, as well as the renegotiation of boundaries of free speech and minority representation on university campuses nationwide are testament to the increasingly visible forms of resistance and activism that have emerged.  As nationalist sentiment grows in the US and across western Europe, and with the prospect of major shifts in American policies in foreign relations, voting rights, immigration, labour, civil rights, education, healthcare and elsewhere, 2017 presents an important time to consider the contestation of power in modern American history, both domestically and internationally.  At present, efforts […]

The American Weird: Ecologies & Geographies (Call for Papers) “The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers.” —H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927) “This whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top.” —David Lynch, Wild at Heart (1990) For H.P. Lovecraft, the weird conveys “a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.” Taking its cue from Lovecraft’s enduringly influential conceptualization, this conference examines and broadens the notion of weirdness towards an ecology and geography of the weird as a new field of theoretical and practical resonances. What we call The American Weird comprises not only an aesthetics evoked by literary practices or films from the […]

Reinventing the Social: Movements and Narratives of Resistance, Dissension, and Reconciliation in the Americas (Coimbra/Portugal, 2018) The struggle over social issues and the resistance to ruling elites have a long history in the colonies and nations of the Americas. They range from wars of independence and slave uprisings to conventions for women’s rights, workers’ and peasants’ rebellions, indigenous movements, and protests against U.S. wars in Vietnam or in Iraq. Since World War II new forms of international and national inequalities and new dynamics in societies and in the media have increased our awareness of the many ways in which the social keeps being re-negotiated from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Recent decades have been characterized by new approaches to time- and space-binding and mediational and relational webs of the social; the invention, invocation, and narration of tradition, history, and heritage serve as key elements in the creation of new social […]

Call for papers: The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style Many of our current cultural practices are marked by a union of art and entertainment. Underlined by all-pervasive processes of globalization and digitalization, this union comes in all shapes and sizes, transforming culture so that it can no longer be comfortably classified as high or low, art or genre. Surprisingly, this ‘art of artertainment’ has not, as yet, attracted much scholarly interest. It is with the aim of overcoming this omission that we launch this call for papers. As editors of a collection titled The Art of Artertainment: Nobrow, American Style, we warmly invite articles that focus on all aspects of American culture, such as literature, television, cinema, music, painting, material culture, photography, theater, and all other that are influenced by the crossovers of highbrow with lowbrow. Of special interest are historical and/or analytical approaches illuminated by colorful studies of cases where […]