CFP: The International Ralph Ellison Symposium (Oxford University)

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 […]

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 […]