CFP: The International Ralph Ellison Symposium (Oxford University)

'Populism in historical perspective'   Symposium  2nd November 2016, European Institute, University College London   The last decade has seen the rise of politicians, parties and governments to whom the label 'populist' can usefully be applied. This is true not only in Europe, but also in North and South America, Turkey, India and elsewhere. British media responses to this global shift have focused on the 'Brexit' referendum result and the short term consequences of the 2008 financial crash. There has been less interest in historicising these phenomena or locating them in an analysis of twentieth and twenty first century democracy. Yet this would be a useful endeavour, involving study not only of twentieth century populists like Pierre Poujade or Juan Perón, but also a wider project investigating the development of modern mass society since the late nineteenth century.   The UCL European Institute and UCL Centre for Transnational History therefore […]

Violence interpreted: Connections between the Violent Past of the United States and Conflict Today. Violent confrontations and racial discrimination have influenced the United States on multiple levels. At the beginning of the twentieth century the country confronted a wave of violent unrests that molded American society and prepared the ground for massive changes in political, social and financial realms. After a century, the country seems to still be affected by racial discrimination and police violence; the current global upheavals and the political rhetoric for the 2016 presidential election intensify the polarisation within American society. Scholarly interpretation of violence will lead to a better understanding of both past and present of conflict in the United States. We seek submissions for a forthcoming special issue of the European Journal of American Culture focusing on interpretations of violence in American society and the examination of possible historic recurrences. We are particularly interested in […]

 Organized by: ATSU Foreign Affairs and Development Office, Prof. Vakhtang  Amaglobeli Center for American Studies & John Dos Passos Association of Georgia.  Supporters: US Embassy in Georgia & Akaki Tsereteli State University We invite a variety of contributions that address any of the following topics: U.S. Literature U.S. Education System U.S. Culture Art Philosophy Mass Media Social and Women’s Issues U.S. History U.S. Politics Religion Law Economics Healthcare Ecology Georgian-American Relations Working Languages: Georgian and English  Style guides for papers: Conference proceedings will be published as a journal. Manuscripts should not ordinarily exceed fifteen standard pages (A4) including the abstract and the contributor’s short bio. All papers must conform to The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition in all matters of form and should be typewritten in MS Word 2003. Use Times New Roman: 12 pts fonts for the main text and all additional parts except endnotes and index (where you […]

CFP: Writing Shared Futures: African American Literature and Racialisation BAAS Panel at 'English: Shared Futures,' 5-7 July 2017, Newcastle, UK Contributions are invited for a BAAS panel at 'English: Shared Futures,' a large-scale conference spanning across the discipline. The panel 'Writing Shared Futures: African American Literature and Racialisation' will explore the significances of, and engagements with, racialisation in post-Civil Rights writing by African Americans. It will seek to ask how understandings of racialisation are connected with understandings of the future, and to examine the ways in which literary texts have questioned categories and binaries of race and have complicated views of the processes by which racial identity comes into being. Such processes might be made visible in contexts such as: migration and immigration multi-ethnic coalitions intersectional politics future worlds internationalism coming of age narratives popular culture/music/sport contemporary politics, especially the Obama years new technologies and social media Possible writers include […]

International Symposium October 19-20, 2017 École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon (France)  Thoreau from across the pond   Organized by Julien Nègre (ENS de Lyon) François Specq (ENS de Lyon) and Laura Dassow Walls (University of Notre Dame) Guest speakers (confirmed): -        Professor Branka Arsić (Columbia University) -        Professor William Rossi (University of Oregon)   In honor of Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday in 2017, this conference would like to interrogate the multiplicity of viewpoints from which he is read today. In recent years, Thoreau’s writings have been approached from a variety of perspectives: he has been envisioned as a poet and a philosopher, but also as a political thinker, a scientist of sorts, a surveyor, a lover of nature and an environmentalist. While these different perspectives complement each other to a certain extent, they also reveal how multifaceted his writings are, and how elusive his figure remains. Something resists in his texts, […]