25 November 2016, 5:30pm-7:30pm, Chadwick Building, B05 Lecture Theatre BETWEEN NEIGHBORHOODS: FILM SCREENING AND DISCUSSION Filmmaker Seth Fein will screen and discuss his new film, Between Neighborhoods, a history of Queens (New York City) as a transnational hub for people and commerce from the 1964 New York World’s Fair until today. More information.
My Dream or Yours: Make America ___ Again? University College Cork 26th November, 2016 The Irish Association for American Studies draws together scholars and researchers, new and experienced, on the island of Ireland, to bring fresh perspectives to the field of American Studies. The 2016 IAAS Postgraduate Symposium, “My Dream or Yours: Make America ___ Again?” encourages scholars to question cultural, political and social perspectives of the United States, historically, today, and tomorrow. The concept of American identity is one which has been continuously interrogated since the first colonies were established, and remains a pressing question in all facets of American life today. “My Dream or Yours: Make America ___ Again” is a one-day interdisciplinary symposium that seeks to provide an opportunity for Postgraduate Students and Early Career Scholars to share their ideas and add their individual voices to this melting pot of academic exploration. Contact postgrad@iaas.ie for more information.
The Eccles Centre for American Studies, The British Library, London Monday 16 January 2017 Cold War Geographies Keynote Speaker: Professor Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics, Royal Holloway The British Library’s next major exhibition will focus on ‘Maps and the Twentieth Century.’ The Cold War had a seismic impact on global geographies during the second half of the twentieth century. Not only did it physically impact lands from the barren Nevada desert to the jungles of South East Asia, but the ideological conflict of the Cold War also had a significant impact on national borders, global cities and imagined geographies. The legacy of the Cold war on global geographies has had a profound effect upon the way in which nations now think about their place in the world and their relationships with each other. From an American point of view, this has had a particular influence on how the U.S. is […]
Cambridge American History Seminar For further details, pre-circulated papers and other seminars see the CAHS webpage. 28 November: Loïc Wacquant, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, and 2016-17 Pitt Professor, University of Cambridge Peculiar Institutions: Four Centuries of Race-Making in the United States Discussion will be based on a pre-circulated paper
15 years after 9/11 there are many conspiracy theories related to the events that have been discussed in films, literature and social media. However, this is not the only conspiracy theory of such long endurance. Many more, like the Jewish world conspiracy, the survival of Nazi Germany on the dark side of the moon, Area 51, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and many more have led to a large production of films, literature and social media (blogs or vlogs). For the second volume of Entertainment we are interested in papers that analyze these conspiracy theories and in how far they are created, stimulated or re-defined by these media. Articles should range between 5000 and 8000 words and use footnotes (following the latest Chicago Manual of Style). For detailed information on the journal and the submission procedure, check: http://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/entertainment/about The deadline for an initial proposal (250 words and a short CV) […]
HISTORICAL FICTION IN THE UNITED STATES SINCE 2000: CONTEMPORARY LITERARY RESPONSES TO THE PAST Call for papers: One-day symposium on 21st-century American historical fiction Date of conference: Saturday 18 March 2017 Location: University of Nottingham, UK Call for papers deadline: 1 December 2016 Historical fiction in English constitutes its own enduring tradition but in recent years, it has enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and commercial popularity, as such scholars as Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons have argued. This one-day symposium at the University of Nottingham will explore how recent writers in the United States have engaged with the form. In what sense are American writers reinterpreting the past to produce what Elodie Rousselot has termed “neo-historical fiction”? Which periods are they examining? And why do US writers favor particular historical eras and episodes over others? Potential topics for papers (lasting no longer than 20 minutes) might include, but are […]
These one-year residential fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in Washington, DC, support full-time independent and dissertation research by scholars from abroad researching historical American art (circa 1550–1980) or by US scholars, particularly those investigating international contexts for American art. These awards are administered by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. For more information about deadlines, eligibility, application procedures, and funding, please visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum website: http://www.americanart.si.edu/research/opportunity/fellows/terra/
HISTORICAL FICTION IN THE UNITED STATES SINCE 2000: CONTEMPORARY RESPONSES TO THE PAST Call for papers: One-day symposium on 21st-century American historical fiction Date of conference: Saturday 18 March 2017 Location: University of Nottingham, UK Call for papers deadline: 1 December 2016 Historical fiction in English constitutes its own enduring tradition but in recent years, it has enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and commercial popularity, as such scholars as Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons have argued. This one-day symposium at the University of Nottingham will explore how recent writers in the United States have engaged with the form. In what sense are American writers reinterpreting the past to produce what Elodie Rousselot has termed “neo-historical fiction”? Which periods are they examining? And why do US writers favor particular historical eras and episodes over others? Potential topics for papers (lasting no longer than 20 minutes) might include, but are certainly […]
***DEADLINE EXTENDED Britain, Canada, and the Arts: Cultural Exchange as Post-war Renewal 15-17 June 2017 CALL FOR PAPERS Papers are invited for a major international, interdisciplinary conference to be held at Senate House, London, in collaboration with the School of English, Communication and Philosophy (Cardiff University) and the University of Westminster. Coinciding with and celebrating the 150th anniversary of Canadian Confederation, this conference will focus on the strong culture of artistic exchange, influence, and dialogue between Canada and Britain, with a particular but not exclusive emphasis on the decades after World War II. The immediate post-war decades saw both countries look to the arts and cultural institutions as a means to address and redress contemporary post-war realities. Central to the concerns of the moment was the increasing emergence of the United States as a dominant cultural as well as political power. In 1951, the Massey Commission gave formal voice in […]
Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World University of Montpellier, France, 1-2 December, 2016 Keynote Speakers Ana Lucia Araujo (Howard University) Christine Chivallon (Research Director, CNRS) In Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (2001), Ron Eyerman explores the formation of African American identity through the cultural trauma of slavery. While trauma directly affected individuals who experienced slavery, Eyerman argues that, as a cultural process, trauma is "mediated through various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective identity and the reworking of collective memory". This international conference seeks to examine the foundation, the mechanisms and the scope of these memorial processes. It endeavors to explore a reality of slavery that rests on human memory, on a (re)constructed memory of individual, collective or family trajectories and migrations transmitted from generation to generation. The Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World conference sets out to interrogate how descendants reconstruct the history of their ancestors […]
Retroviral Cultures: AIDS, Twenty Years On 1 December 2016, 2.00 PM - 6.00 PM Andrew Blades, Maria Vaccarella, Corinne Squire, MK Czerwiec Old Council Chamber, Wills Memorial Building 2016 marks the twentieth anniversary of the 11th International AIDS Conference in Vancouver, at which Taiwanese American researcher David Ho and his team revealed new antiretroviral combination therapies to the world. Before long, Andrew Sullivan was (in)famously writing in the New York Times of the 'end' of AIDS. Twenty years on, the global AIDS pandemic continues, and in the USA there are still 1.2 million people living with HIV. Cultural representations of HIV/AIDS in America – literature, film, television, art – no longer portray AIDS as a death sentence or as a ‘rupture in meaning’ (Edmund White); depending on access to healthcare and education, HIV is primarily a manageable long-term health condition. At the same time, Richard Canning has pondered that the […]
1 December 2016, 5:30pm-7:00pm BOOK LAUNCH FOR REAGAN: AMERICAN ICON Iwan Morgan will introduce and discuss his new biography of Ronald Reagan, published by IB Tauris in 2016.