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British Association for American Studies

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BrANCH Annual Conference 2022

Roosevelt Institute for American Studies Conference: Public Health and Disease in the American Century (Online)

We invite applications to a conference dedicated to situating the COVID-19 pandemic in American and global history. The COVID-19 pandemic has confronted historians with the disruptive power of infectious disease. The impact of the crisis has been multifaceted, global, and immense in its scale and ramifications. For the United States, the experience has been especially confrontational. As of the time of writing, the US has among the highest rates of infection and the highest number of deaths of any country on the planet. The virus (and the measures taken to contain it) has disrupted almost every aspect of American life, revealed and exacerbated social, economic, racial and political fault lines, and raised major constitutional issues concerning the role of federal and state authorities in maintaining social well-being. This public health emergency has also set in motion an as yet uncertain set of consequences for the US’s position in the world.  President […]

IAAS Postgraduate Symposium “The (Hi)stories We Create: Narratives of Exceptionalism, Ideology, and Resilience” (November 2021)

Virtual Event Via Zoom 5th/6th November 2021 In November 1621 colonists in Massachusetts celebrated a year of survival and their first harvest with a feast that has since been called The First Thanksgiving. The feast was a supposed celebration of resilience after hardship. It was not until 1863, in the midst of the American Civil War and with the nation divided, that this feast was enshrined as a national holiday and a touchstone of American tradition and ideology: a story of togetherness projected over the realities of division, exceptionalism, genocide, and slavery. Now, four hundred years later, the story of the First Thanksgiving both provides comfort in another time of hardship while also revealing a depth of narrative ideology and mythology which obfuscates the ideological construction of modern day American nations. In the narrative of the US, in particular, at home and abroad, we see an increased awareness and attention […]

CfP PG BAAS 2021: Visibility/Invisibility: Representation & Community Formation in American Studies

For the 2021 BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, we invite proposals from postgraduates and early career researchers across all disciplines and time periods that reflect aspects of the theme, Visibility/Invisibility: Representation & Community Formation in American Studies. The past two years have seen a renewed visibility of global activist movements, and we aim to both analyse how we as a community unearth narratives historically excluded from mainstream understanding, including how our work has been informed by recent sociopolitical, cultural, and economic movements working to amplify marginalised voices and perspectives. We seek to answer the following questions: what do we understand by the terms  ‘visibility/invisibility? How might gatekeeping and canonical understanding affect communities, representation, and our understanding of these terms? How does this impact the content of our research and our methodologies? How do we ensure the visibility of systematically minoritised voices? Is visibility/invisibility truly binary, and if so, how does this duality […]

US Foreign Policy Working Group PGR/ECR Online Conference 2021

Zoom 16 - 17 November Those attending and participating in the conference will require a BISA membership, find out more about the benefits of BISA membership and become a member today. Registration for the conference will open on 24 September 2021. The call for papers is currently open. Theme: Shifts in US foreign policy This year is the 80th anniversary of the Atlantic Charter. This document, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, signified a new vision for American foreign policy and the wider world after the Second World War. This milestone committed the United States and the United Kingdom to tackling what they considered to be the most pressing threats on the international stage, making the defence of democracy, the strengthening of international institutions, the recognition of sovereignty and territorial integrity, supporting collective security, and reinforcing a rules-based economy the linchpin of American grand strategy. Yet in recent times, the […]

Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association Conference: “American Crisis/American Renewal?” (November 2021)

American Crisis/American Renewal? Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association Conference November 24-26, 2021 Hosted by Macquarie School of Social Sciences Online via Zoom Recognizing the multiple challenges confronting the United States, and the academy, during the early twenty-first century, we invite proposals that reflect on the theme of “American Crisis/American Renewal?” All scholars working in the field of American studies – or whose work considers the place of American history, literature, culture, politics, or foreign policy in global or transnational contexts – are invited to submit abstracts for panels or individual papers to Chris Dixon (chris.dixon@mq.edu.au) by 17 September 2021. As always, postgraduate students are particularly encouraged to attend, both by presenting their work to the conference and/or by participating in a postgraduate workshop that will be held on the first day of the conference. Individual presentations that are not part of a proposed panel will be allocated into […]

CfP: DCfA: Labor and Capital in U.S. History (February 2022)

Reissued Call for Papers: Labor and Capital in U.S. History. Annual Meeting of the Historians in the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), February 11–12, 2022, Mainz. Deadline: November 30, 2021. The organisers note that planning for the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Historians in the German Association of American Studies (DGfA) has been difficult because of the ongoing pandemic. To provide the best possible experience under the circumstances, they have decided to move the conference “Labor and Capital in U.S. History” to a “digital plus” format. This means that all panels will take place online, with an option for those wanting to come to Mainz to attend in-person if the pandemic situation improves. Accordingly, they are also reissuing the call for papers with these changed conditions in mind. The DGfA conference will take place February 11–12, 2022, virtually via Zoom and Gather and, hopefully, with an in-person option at […]

PG BAAS 2021: Visibility/Invisibility: Representation & Community Formation in American Studies

For the 2021 BAAS Postgraduate Symposium, we invite proposals from postgraduates and early career researchers across all disciplines and time periods that reflect aspects of the theme, Visibility/Invisibility: Representation & Community Formation in American Studies. The past two years have seen a renewed visibility of global activist movements, and we aim to both analyse how we as a community unearth narratives historically excluded from mainstream understanding, including how our work has been informed by recent sociopolitical, cultural, and economic movements working to amplify marginalised voices and perspectives. We seek to answer the following questions: what do we understand by the terms  ‘visibility/invisibility? How might gatekeeping and canonical understanding affect communities, representation, and our understanding of these terms? How does this impact the content of our research and our methodologies? How do we ensure the visibility of systematically minoritised voices? Is visibility/invisibility truly binary, and if so, how does this duality […]

The US Antimonopoly Tradition in Global Perspective (December 2021)

Rothermere American Institute University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

The US Antimonopoly Tradition in Global Perspective The news media is currently awash with articles, op-eds, and think-pieces on monopoly, antitrust, and democracy’s fraught relationship with big corporations in general, and with Big Tech in particular. President Biden’s Executive Order Promoting Competition in the American Economy, issued on 9 July 2021, prompted a new wave of commentary on this topic. Writing in the New York Times, the distinguished labour historian Nelson Lichtenstein traced the lineage of Biden’s antitrust initiative all the way back to the Boston Tea Party and to abolitionists’ attacks on the slave power. “The nation’s antimonopoly tradition,” he wrote, “arises once more.” Much of this commentary, however, is resolutely national in its framing. It presents antimonopoly’s history almost as if it were hermetically sealed, and as such impervious to the global character of capitalism. Americans, of course, are not the only people around the world worried about […]

‘Where’s Your Manhood’? White Women, White Supremacy, and Gender Essentialism in 20th Century US History

When the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in its 1954/1955 Brown v. Board of Education decision, segregationists across the South formed a resistance movement, known by its self-designation as Massive Resistance. A masculinist rhetoric and the concomitant ideal of white womanhood has often led to the assumption that white women played a passive part in the defence of white supremacy. In contrast, white women were self-conscious agents who were motivated by an everyday culture of white supremacy and status concerns that accentuated whiteness as property and what W.E.B. Du Bois has termed 'the public and psychological wage of whiteness.' This talk will analyse the social backgrounds, strategies, and actions of two working-class white supremacist women's groups in Little Rock and New Orleans in the late 1950s and early 1960s and show how they strategically employed gendered rhetoric to transgress social […]

CfP: HOTCUS 2022 Winter Symposium: The Manhattan Project Turns 80: Reflections on the Nuclear Age

The Manhattan Project Turns 80: Reflections on the Nuclear Age March 12, 2022, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK 2022 sees the 80th anniversary of the official commencement of the Manhattan Project, the vast programme to build the atomic bomb. An undertaking of unparalleled scale and scope, the project’s ultimate success ushered in an era of atomic fear, fantastical atomic utopias, radioactive human and environmental carnage, and legacies up to the present day and into the distant future. The 2022 Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS) Winter Symposium takes the Manhattan Project as its starting point in the hope that this will provoke a wide-ranging discussion of the nuclear age and its histories. The symposium will feature an opening keynote by Dr Jonathan Hogg (University of Liverpool) and a closing keynote from Dr Linda Ross (University of Glasgow). There will also be a round table discussion reflecting on […]

WASN Panel: Call for Expressions of Interest at BAAS 2022 Annual Conference

WASN Panel: Call for Expressions of Interest The challenges of working in Higher Education have been particularly acute over the last two years. From the pandemic, to continuing industrial disputes over pensions, precarity and the race and gender pay gaps, as well as media exposure of some of the many instances of sexual harassment in Higher Education, gender continues to shape the practice of British American studies in profound ways. This WASN sponsored panel offers a space for dialogue about the challenges and opportunities faced by all who identify women and all those marginalized along the gender spectrum. We are looking for expressions of interest on a particular theme for up to 5 minutes from WAAS members. We are looking for speakers who represent different parts of the sector (including independent scholars) and career stages (from postgraduate researchers to Professors). Panellists can speak to any theme, but WASN especially welcomes […]

Women in American Studies Network Book Club (Online)

Fri 14 Jan | 12.00-13.00 | Online | Free Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/.../tZYqf... When was the last time you read an academic book cover to cover? Is there a book you would love to discuss outside a course reading list, or have been meaning to find the time read? In 2022 WASN is launching a new book club for members. Over a lunch hour we will meet online to catch up and talk about a book we loved, found provocative, or prevented us from sleeping at night. Or all of the above. For our first session we have chosen Keisha Blain’s, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America, (2021). Blain’s new biography of the civil rights activist offers a fascinating model for writing histories that connect and engage the needs of the present. So grab yourself a copy, or better still, put Until I am Free on […]