Cambridge American History Seminar: ‘Throwing Away the Gods’

The editorial committee now invites submissions for inclusion in a Special Issue of the journal on the work of Marilynne Robinson. To be published in Spring 2017, this Special Issue will explore the literary, historical, political, and religious contexts of Robinson’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction. Considering her role as a cultural figure and public intellectual in American society, this issue welcomes proposals on all aspects of Robinson’s writing.   Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to the Editors atirishjournalofamericanstudies@gmail.com by 22 July 2016. Successful contributors will be notified by 5 August 2016. Completed drafts of essays will be expected by 1 December 2016.   All contributions will be subject to anonymous peer review. Submissions should follow the 8th edition of the MLA style guide. Writers are asked to maximise the use of parenthetical citations, include a Works Cited list, and footnotes/endnotes should be avoided where […]

The protests against racial profiling and racist police brutality in the U.S. and Britain, Donald Trump's alarming comments about Muslims, the Confederate flag controversy in South Carolina, the all-white Academy Award nominations, the organization "Operation Black Vote" feeling compelled to urge people of color not to leave the political field to white people in the wake of the UK General Elections, the reactions of the European Union to the masses of refugees and many Europeans' xenophobic reactions to those seeking refuge: the specters of whiteness are still urgently haunting the western world. According to France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, Critical Whiteness Studies is currently in its third stage, riding its third wave so to say, questioning "the tendency towards essentializing accounts of whiteness by locating race as one of many social relations that shape individual and group identity" (2011: 3). While the discipline has established itself as an anti-racist […]

Cultures of Conservatism in the United States and Western Europe between the 1970s and 1990s Anna von der Goltz (Georgetown University, Washington D.C.), Martina Steber (University of Konstanz), Tobias Becker (German Historical Institute London)   In recent research the decades between the 1970s and the 1990s are interpreted as a time of revolutionary change triggered by economic crises, in which the parameters and conditions for our present times were set. Conservatism looms large in this quite influential narrative; after all, the Reagan and Thatcher governments in the United States and in Britain implemented economic and social policies that fundamentally changed the welfare state economies of the boom years. Conservatism is therefore often interpreted as neoliberalism in conservative guise, as the defining political ideology of finance capitalism. However, conservatism was a much more diverse phenomenon than these interpretations suggest. While economics and politics were certainly crucial in the fashioning of a […]

Call for Papers The Global Pursuit of Equality: Women, Networks, and Networking 1800-2000 26-27th September 2016, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) Following the interdisciplinary graduate and early career researchers workshop held in May 2016 on the theme of ‘The global pursuit of equality: women, networks and networking 1800-2000’, the next event will be a two-day conference held on the same theme at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) from the 26-27th of September. This conference will bring together graduate and early career researchers alongside senior scholars to explore the ways in which women’s local, national and international networks helped to facilitate equality, drive political, economic, cultural and social change, and challenge overlapping systems of oppression over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the conference, there will be two keynote lectures by economist and writer Devaki Jain and the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia […]

Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies University of Southern Denmark, Odense, May 22-24, 2017 American Colors: Across the Disciplinary Spectrum Color defines America. First of all color defines America through ideas of slavery, race, and civil rights. W.E.B. Du Bois’ claim that ‘The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line’ is certainly hard to deny in an American context. Yet American Colors are far from all about race. The respective colors of the Democratic and the Republican Party, since 1976 partitioning the country into demographics of blue and red, are significant reminders of the power of American Colors to divide and contrast. On the other hand, American Colors are not necessarily divisive, even if they stay distinct. Whether it is in the color of the rainbow, as seen on the pride flag of the LGBT community, or in the idea of ethnic and racial […]