CFP: New Perspectives in English and American Studies (Jagiellonian University)

Erica McAlpine on Elizabeth Bishop at the American Literature Research Seminar at Oxford, 13 October Thursday, 13th October, 5 PM: Erica McAlpine (Keble College, Oxford) ‘Fact-checking Elizabeth Bishop’ Abstract: Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” bears the markers of a particular place and time—“Worcester, Massachusetts” and “February 5th, 1918.” Specificity is Bishop’s specialty, and this poem, which refers to real stories in that month’s National Geographic magazine, seems to combine specificity with truth. But Bishop’s facts are actually muddled: "My memory had confused two 1918 issues of the Geographic,” she explains in an interview after several critics notice that the stories she refers to in the poem do not appear in the same magazine. Does her memory’s confusion matter? Elsewhere Bishop insists upon accuracy—“I always tell the truth in my poems.” But can poetry make its own sense of what happened? Focusing on Bishop’s use and misuse of historical detail in […]

Sixth BrANCA Reading Group: “The Ignorant Schoolroom” North Lecture Room St John’s College, University of Oxford 14 October 2016, 1-5 pm For our Autumn 2016 Reading Group, BrANCA will address the role and representation of pedagogy in nineteenth-century American literature. The students who arrive at university do so after years of training in what were once called schoolrooms by people who were once known as schoolmasters. This set of readings takes up the question of how and why the nineteenth-century American schoolroom and its attendant schoolmasters reshaped notions of reading, personhood, and the relation of the school to the state, the domestic sphere, and religion. These readings also encourage a historical view of the origins of current humanities pedagogy, from early childhood through tertiary education, at a moment when institutional pressures have incited a defence of said pedagogy at all costs. Readings: ·  Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) (Lessons 1-3): http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=3009 ·  Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Record of a School (1835): https://archive.org/details/recordofschoolex00peab ·  Patricia Crain, Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the […]

Cambridge American History Seminar For further details, pre-circulated papers and other seminars see the CAHS webpage. 14 November:  Darren Dochuk, Professor of History, University of Notre Dame Blood on the Earth: Wildcat Religion and Oil in America’s Age of Civil War Discussion will be based on a pre-circulated paper

A New History of Abolition Fri 14 Oct 2016, 18:30 - 20:00, The British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Rd http://www.bl.uk/events/a-new-history-of-abolition Manisha Sinha discusses her new book The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition which is a ‘movement history’ that expands the chronology of Anglo-American abolition and situates it transnationally. Sinha offers a wide-ranging reconsideration of abolition as a radical social movement. She challenges much of the received historical wisdom of abolitionists as bourgeois reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Sinha explores the impact of the Haitian Revolution, the European Revolutions of the 1830s and 1848, British Chartism, Irish Repeal, and the international peace movement on the politics and ideology of abolition. She’ll uncover the political significance of slave resistance in the growing radicalisation of the abolition movement that rejects conventional historical divisions between slave resistance and antislavery activism. More broadly, this talk interrogates how radical social movements like abolition […]

Cambridge American History Seminar For further details, pre-circulated papers and other seminars see the CAHS webpage. 17 October: Pekka Hämäläinen, Rhodes Professor of American History, University of Oxford Iktómi’s Children: The Rise and Fall of the Lakota Empire Discussion will be based on a pre-circulated paper

Marisa Futernick - In the run-up to the U.S. Presidential election, Professor Iwan Morgan and artist Marisa J. Futernick discuss the role of personal narrative, biography, and place in the American Presidency. This event coincides with the publication of Futernick’s new book of short stories and photographs, 13 Presidents, which features each President from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush as a protagonist. Weaving together fact and fiction, Futernick forms a vision of America that is both invented and true. Futernick is a London-based American artist who recently drove across the U.S. to visit all thirteen of the nation’s Presidential libraries as research for 13 Presidents. A screening of photographs from the publication will accompany the talk. 13 Presidents is published in September 2016 by Slimvolume, London.www.slimvolume.org Attendance is free of charge but registration is required. IMPORTANT NOTE on access to 51 Gordon Square: in order to secure the smooth […]

20 October 2016, 5:30pm-7:00pm ON THE ROAD WITH THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTS Marissa Futernick, a London-based American artist will be in conversation with Iwan Morgan about her book 13 Presidents. More information.

Jacob Rees-Mogg to deliver the Sir Winston Churchill Memorial Lecture at the American Museum in Britain Thursday 20 October, 2016 6 – 8pm (drinks at 6pm, lecture starts at 6.45pm) £7 The fourth Churchill Memorial Lecture at the American Museum in Britain is entitled ‘The UK’s Role in the World post-Brexit’ and will be delivered by local MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. In his lecture, pro-Brexit Jacob Rees-Mogg will explore the advantages and challenges of Great Britain being independent from the bureaucracy of the European Union. He will cover the various implications leaving the European Union will have on Great Britain’s economy and governance, and its relationships with countries still in the European Union, as well as America and the rest of the world. Director Richard Wendorf says: ‘This lecture offers the American Museum in Britain the opportunity to host a stimulating speaker whose financial and political experience promise a lively talk […]

Cambridge American History Seminar For further details, pre-circulated papers and other seminars see the CAHS webpage. Thursday 20 October (Trinity Hall, Room TBC), 6:00pm: Manisha Sinha, Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut Book Launch: The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016) Hosted by the Trinity Hall History Society

Homeland Insecurities 2016 Canadian Association for American Studies Conference Fredericton, New Brunswick, October 21-23 2016 Neoliberalism has ushered in new forms of global insecurity, which instill in American citizens the desire for enforced security. Through tightened border controls, antiterrorism laws, the expansion of the prison system, the war on drugs, and other measures, the U.S. government both provokes and assuages American insecurities about imagined and real terrors, both foreign and domestic. Often, these measures erode welfare institutions that actually provide a degree of safety against economic and social uncertainty, thereby perpetuating a vicious cycle intrinsic to neoliberalism’s creative destruction. What are the origins of the insecurity state, and how has it shaped American culture? More broadly, what does it mean to imagine the United States as a secure homeland? Can non-indigenous Americans ever feel at home in North America without inventing abject social categories meant to contain their insecurities? Further […]