24th Annual Conference of the Scottish Association for the Study of America

CALL FOR PAPERS Royal Holloway, University of London In association with The British Association for American Studies (BAAS) and the United States Embassy, London   Faulkner Studies in the UK: A Colloquium   Senate House, London. May 31st, 2018.   KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Professor Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London (Author of The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology, and Pain in American Literature )   This colloquium is the first of a series of events intended to found a Faulkner Studies in the UK Research Network, hosted by the Department of English at Royal Holloway, and in association with the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) and the US Embassy, London. The Network serves as a key counterpoint to the abundant focus on American modernist author William Faulkner in the United States; it formalises an upsurge in critical material on Faulkner and the growing interest in Southern Studies in recent […]

Deadline for submissions: April 13, 2018 Full name / name of organization: De Montfort University Contact email: cath.postgrad@gmail.com Call for Papers ‘It Is True, We Shall Be Monsters’: New Perspectives on Horror, Science Fiction and the Monstrous Onscreen. Wednesday 13th of June 2018 Postgraduate Conference Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester. Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Dr Laura Mee and Dr Johnny Walker The Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre, De Montfort University, invites postgraduates and early career researchers to its seventh annual postgraduate conference. 2018 marks the 200-year anniversary of Mary Shelley’s seminal novel Frankenstein, sojoin us in celebrating all things monstrous as we re-consider, interrogate and offer new approaches to the genres of Horror and Science-Fiction on screen. In light of the recent burgeoning of these genres in mainstream film and television, such as the Duffer Brother’s Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-), Charlie Brooker’s Black […]

CONTENT STINKS!: THE FORMS, MATERIALS, AND INSTITUTIONS OF AMERICAN PERIODICALS   A one day symposium of the Network of American Periodical Studies University of Nottingham – Friday 21st September 2018   “Context stinks! It’s a way of stopping the description when you are too tired or lazy to go on,” Bruno Latour declares in Reassembling the Social (2005), a consciously polemical effort to counter the fixity of prevailing socio-political models of interpretation with the processual fluidity enabled by actor-network theory. Taken up as a mantra by various literary critics concerned with overturning the tendency to critique texts as ideological objects, the idea that “context stinks” particularly underpins a constellation of recent approaches to literature that take “description” as their guide, whether through a renewed attention to aesthetics, close reading, or genre.   Although primarily concerned to date with the traditional literary foci of novels, poems and plays, the rejection of […]

The second call for proposals of USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics, is now available at the following address: https://usabroad.unibo.it/announcement/view/278 For the year 2018, USAbroad invites potential contributors—from Italy, Europe, and around the world—to submit proposals that discuss the idea of “Rewinding Global America: Nationalism and Contested Power. The second issue of USAbroad aims to reassess and discuss the composite meaning of American nationalism from the early republic to contemporary developments, by looking at its historical making and re-making, often achieved through exclusionary processes that shifted the boundaries of citizenship and belonging. We particularly encourage proposals from Italian PhD students as well as early-career scholars. Applicants are asked to submit an abstract of approximately 500 words, along with a résumé including their main publications, by April 22. Please send your proposal by email to: usabroad@unibo.it By May 6, applicants will be notified about the status of the submission. Please note that […]

Thursday 27 and Friday 28 September 2018 International conference Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne (CELEC) The sixties and the seventies marked a turning-point in the evolution of family. Major sociocultural changes undermined certain patterns of gender roles around which traditional families, and the American society at large, were organized. When the Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral contraceptive back in 1960 and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of legal abortion in 1973 (Roe v. Wade), women were given the right to break free from the normative gendered imperatives of the traditional family. Because the cult of domesticity gradually declined, and the crisis imposed the necessity to move from single-income to dual-income families, an unprecedented number of women – wives and mothers included – joined the workforce in the seventies. This shift in social values combined with new legal developments in family law (California for instance adopted the no-fault […]

Hollywood and the Production Code: Criticism and History. Friday, 6th July 2018 @ King’s College London. (Symposium speaker and respondent: Professor Lea Jacobs, University of Wisconsin-Madison.) A one-day symposium devoted to the style-based investigation of the influence of the Production Code on Hollywood cinema. The symposium will take in a range of issues concerning the impact of the Code on “golden age” Hollywood filmmaking. Part of the symposium will also be devoted to a close consideration of the style of “pre-Code” filmmaking (generally understood as 1930-1934). There is currently a strong consensus, grounded in the detailed archival work of major film historians, that 30-34 was not, after all, “pre” the Code but was a period in which the Code played an important role in shaping the content of movie fictions. Yet film festivals and TV channels (TCM, for example) continue to find an audience for early-30s productions by signalling, via […]

Scholar-Activism in the Twenty-first Century British Library, London, 22-23 June 2018  The topic of scholar-activism has seen a recent resurgence in our contemporary political moment. To explore this topic, a transatlantic, scholar-activist conference will be held at the British Library on Friday June 22 and Saturday June 23. The conference will put scholars into conversation with activists to discuss how scholars and activists can work together, put recent social movements such as The Black Lives Matter Movement into scholarly and historical perspective, and highlight some ways in which scholars and activists in the US and UK are currently working together and engaging in efforts for social justice. The keynote speaker for the conference will be Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who will speak on “The Black Lives Matter movement in the Age of Trump.” Professor Heather Thompson, the winner of the 2017 Pulitzer prize, will also speak at the conference. We welcome […]

Creating Comics, Creative Comics Please Note: the deadline for this CFP has been extended until 25nd April 2018. University of South Wales: Cardiff (Friday 01.06.2018) USW Cardiff: Comics Symposium 2018, Call For Papers Key Note from Dr. Julia Round, Bournemouth University: ‘Anonymous Authors, Invisible Illustrators, and Collaborative Creation: Misty and British Girls’ Comics’ The First USW Cardiff: Comics Symposium is interested in creator’s perspectives. It will explore comics and creativity and papers are invited which examine the practice of creating comics, and the particulars of storytelling in comics. Does changing a panel, change the story? How might a medium’s materiality affect its construction and reception? Pudovkin stated that “In order to write a scenario suitable for filming, one must know the methods by which the spectator can be influenced from the screen.” (Pudovkin, 1949, p. 1), and referring to adaption Weaver suggests this is, “the act of translating a story […]

Call for Papers: Death and Celebrity Wednesday 6th June 2018, University of Portsmouth   Keynote Speakers: Dr Ruth Penfold-Mounce, University of York Dr Samantha Matthews, University of Bristol   ‘Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil’ (John Milton)   ‘Fame is a food that dead men eat’ (Henry Austin Dobson)   This one-day symposium seeks to interrogate the role of death in the construction, negotiation and perpetuation of celebrity identity. For the ancients, true fame was necessarily posthumous, but in modernity, too, there remains an enduring fascination with what Andrew Bennett terms ‘the immortality effect’. Following the death of a celebrity, a variety of agents – friends, family, fans, professional associates, arts and heritage bodies – may interact to frame his/her legacy for posterity; moreover, celebrities themselves may take an active role in choreographing their cultural afterlives while still alive. Yet, while cementing, augmenting or rehabilitating the celebrity’s public […]

SANAS Biennial Conference The Genres of Genre: A Conference on Form, Format, and Cultural Formations Nov. 2 and 3, 2018, Lausanne North American Studies have always had an intense but ambivalent relationship to genre, as these narrative patterns have participated in nationalist processes as well as in narratives of resistance. Emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century from concerns about naturalism and realism, American literary scholarship after WWII avoided the politicized post-war atmosphere by making the ‘romance’ the quintessential American novel genre, while cinematic genres such as the musical or the Western contributed to amplifying the mythic dimension of American self-definition. Since then, American Studies scholars have pioneered influential work on melodrama, the American Gothic, the jeremiad and other genres. Concurrently, Canadian literature’s prominent nation-building narratives were framed as documentary tales of regionalism, historical novels and social realism before evolving into dystopian and postmodern fiction, most famously by Margaret […]