CFP: The International Ralph Ellison Symposium (Oxford University)

For our Autumn 2016 Reading Group, the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (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. One question to take up then is whether the schoolroom in its various current incarnations—lecture hall, small group, tutorial, seminar—is worth defending. A second […]

Cambridge American History Seminar For further details, pre-circulated papers and other seminars see the CAHS webpage. Tuesday 4 October (Room G.04, English Faculty West Road), 4:30pm: Mark Greif, Associate Professor of Literary Studies, The New School, New York City Book Launch: Against Everything: Essays (Penguin Random House, 2016) Hosted by the Cambridge American Literature Research Seminar

Hybrid Republicanism: Italy and American Art, c. 1840-1918 Rome, October 6-7 2016 Sponsors:  American Academy in Rome, Centro Studi Americani, Rome, and Museo di Roma, Palazzo Braschi, Rome Italy has served as a key destination for American artists since the founding of the republic.  American painters, sculptors, and illustrators were enchanted with its mythic arcadian past, fascinated with its classical legacy, and impassioned by its political movement toward independence and unification, the Risorgimento.  This conference will consider the shared notions of republicanism and tyranny that animated American and Italian politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Although Italians eventually chose a constitutional monarchy as their governing structure, Americans understood the Italian state in republican terms—as a nation comprised of free, autonomous, and self-governing citizens.  The scope of the conference will take into account significant historical events that linked Italy and the United States, such as the Italian wars of […]

Black Abolitionists in 19th Century Britain Thu 6 Oct 2016, 19:00 - 21:00, The British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Rd http://www.bl.uk/events/black-abolitionists-in-19th-century-britain Presenting fascinating new research and a performance which brings Black anti-slavery campaigners back to life. An informative and entertaining evening of talks, performances and discussion with scholar Hannah-Rose Murray, actor and writer Joe Williams and actress Martelle Edinborough. A chance to learn about the unique research at the University of Nottingham which uses the British Library’s digital archives to uncover hidden voices and stories of the Black British abolitionists who campaigned to end slavery. Figures such as Ellen and William Craft, and the brilliant orator Frederick Douglass are brought ‘back to life’ in a London premiere performance which follows the talk.

Cambridge American History Seminar For further details, pre-circulated papers and other seminars see the CAHS website. 10 October: Thomas A. Foster, Professor of History, DePaul University Queering Enslaved Men's Experiences: Same-Gender Intimacy and Sexual Vulnerability

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 […]