UCL Americas Research Network 2024 Conference – Historical Roots, Modern Realities: Nationalism Across the Americas

Transatlantic Studies Association 17th Annual Conference University of North Georgia, Dahlonega, Georgia, USA 9-11 July 2018 Call for Papers The TSA is coming to America. For the time since it was established in 2002, the TSA is holding its annual conference on the other side of the Atlantic. TSA is a broad network of scholars who use the ‘transatlantic’ as a frame of reference for their work in political, economic, cultural, historical, environmental, literary, and IR/security studies. All transatlantic-themed paper and panel proposals from these and related disciplines are welcome. This conference thus welcomes papers in the following areas: *History *International Relations and Security Studies *Literature, Film, and Culture *Planning and the Environment *Economics Proposals that investigate the ‘transatlantic’ and explore it through frames of reference such as ideology, empire, race, religion, migration, political mobilisation, or social movements *Proposals that incorporate perspectives that involve north-south and south-south transatlantic connections, as […]

Understanding and Examining the Digital Advocacy Pioneers Dates: Thursday, 6 September — Friday, 7 September 2018 Location: University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom Convenors: Dr James Dennis (University of Portsmouth) and Dr Nina Hall (Johns Hopkins University) Sponsored by the Transnational Civil Society Project at the University of Portsmouth and the Political Studies Association Media and Politics Group.   Description and Objective A new generation of digital advocacy organizations have emerged around the world including: 38 Degrees in the UK, MoveOn in the US; GetUp! in Australia and Amandla.Mobi in South Africa. These organizations all share the same basic organizational form: they are progressive, multi-issue, and membership-driven. These organizations are at the forefront of digital campaigning. They are pioneering the use of new technologies — be it WhatAapp, analytics, or Facebook — to rapidly mobilise people online and offline.  The activism fostered by these groups has fundamentally changed how groups mobilise […]

CFP - Transnationalism and Imperialism: New Perspectives on the Western A conference organized by EMMA (Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone), CAS (Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes) and CORPUS (Conflits, Représentations et Dialogues dans le Monde Anglo-Saxon) Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 Site Saint Charles November 15-16, 2018 Keynote speakers: Matthew Carter (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Andrew Patrick Nelson (Montana State University) This conference is a follow-up to a symposium entitled “Politics of the Western: a Revisionist Genre” organized by Hervé Mayer (EMMA EA741) at Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 on December 8, 2017. The aim of this conference is to question the film genre of the Western as being essentially American by focusing on the transnational dimension of Western narratives and images, as well as the circulation, reception, and production of Westerns outside the United States. The genre has been widely read within the confines of a national culture and cinema in the U.S. […]

Methods and Practice in American Studies: Postgraduate Symposium The Centre for American Studies at the University of Kent invites postgraduate students and early career researchers to submit proposals for papers discussing, interrogating, analysing and advocating for innovative and creative approaches to American Studies scholarship in 2018. Respondents are welcome to refer to the specifics of their own research projects, and indeed encouraged to do so where it will assist in elucidating their papers, but the object of this symposium is not the conventional sharing of scholarship in and of itself per se. Rather, this symposium is intended as a forum in which to share some of the many novel and original methodological, theoretical, and practical approaches (and problems) currently informing, motivating, and underpinning the multifaceted work of a new generation of American Studies scholars. Some potential areas for discussion are as follows, but this list is not intended to be exhaustive, and all relevant proposals […]

Conference of the Journal of Languages, Texts and Society Call for Papers: DEADLINE EXTENDED DUE TO STRIKE ACTION (3rd April) Thursday 14th and Friday 15th June 2018, University of Nottingham Keynote Speakers: Geraldine Horan (UCL) and Islam Issa (BCU) This conference, aimed at Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers and organised by the University of Nottingham’s Journal of Language, Texts and Society, seeks papers and posters on a wide range of topics related to the journal’s core themes. There will also be the opportunity to publish conference papers as articles in a special edition of the journal. We welcome abstracts of up to 250 words and biographies of up to 50 words for conference papers of no more than 20 minutes or A2 posters related to the topic of the conference. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Literary interventions: studying the ways in which literary texts intervene […]

Hollywood and the Production Code: Criticism and History. Friday, 6th July 2018: A one-day symposium held at King’s College London devoted to the style-based investigation of the influence of the Production Code on Hollywood cinema. The symposium will take in a range of issues concerning the impact of the Code on “golden age” Hollywood filmmaking. Part of the symposium will also be devoted to a close consideration of the style of “pre-Code” filmmaking (generally understood as 1930-1934). There is currently a strong consensus, grounded in the detailed archival work of major film historians, that 30-34 was not, after all, “pre” the Code but was a period in which the Code played an important role in shaping the content of movie fictions. Yet film festivals and TV channels (TCM, for example) continue to find an audience for early-30s productions by signalling, via the “pre-Code” moniker, their tonal, narrative and moral distinctiveness. Prior […]

Society for the History of Women in the Americas Annual Conference Friday 6th July 2018 The Women’s Library, London School of Economics The Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW) welcomes proposals for its annual conference, co-organised with The Women’s Library at the London School of Economics. We invite 250 word abstracts for 20-minute presentations on any topic, geographical period, chronological time, or theme related to the history of women in the Americas. We also welcome comparative papers between two countries in the Americas or one in the Americas and a country outside the region. The conference welcomes papers from scholars at any stage of their career, especially graduate students. The keynote lecture will be delivered by Dr Kate Dossett (University of Leeds). Please submit abstracts along with a 100-word biography to shawsociety@gmail.com by the 5th April 2018. Papers chosen for the conference may be selected for […]

CALL FOR PAPERS Royal Holloway, University of London In association with The British Association for American Studies (BAAS) and the United States Embassy, London   Faulkner Studies in the UK: A Colloquium   Senate House, London. May 31st, 2018.   KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Professor Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London (Author of The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology, and Pain in American Literature )   This colloquium is the first of a series of events intended to found a Faulkner Studies in the UK Research Network, hosted by the Department of English at Royal Holloway, and in association with the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) and the US Embassy, London. The Network serves as a key counterpoint to the abundant focus on American modernist author William Faulkner in the United States; it formalises an upsurge in critical material on Faulkner and the growing interest in Southern Studies in recent […]

Deadline for submissions: April 13, 2018 Full name / name of organization: De Montfort University Contact email: cath.postgrad@gmail.com Call for Papers ‘It Is True, We Shall Be Monsters’: New Perspectives on Horror, Science Fiction and the Monstrous Onscreen. Wednesday 13th of June 2018 Postgraduate Conference Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester. Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Dr Laura Mee and Dr Johnny Walker The Cinema and Television History (CATH) Research Centre, De Montfort University, invites postgraduates and early career researchers to its seventh annual postgraduate conference. 2018 marks the 200-year anniversary of Mary Shelley’s seminal novel Frankenstein, sojoin us in celebrating all things monstrous as we re-consider, interrogate and offer new approaches to the genres of Horror and Science-Fiction on screen. In light of the recent burgeoning of these genres in mainstream film and television, such as the Duffer Brother’s Netflix series Stranger Things (2016-), Charlie Brooker’s Black […]

CONTENT STINKS!: THE FORMS, MATERIALS, AND INSTITUTIONS OF AMERICAN PERIODICALS   A one day symposium of the Network of American Periodical Studies University of Nottingham – Friday 21st September 2018   “Context stinks! It’s a way of stopping the description when you are too tired or lazy to go on,” Bruno Latour declares in Reassembling the Social (2005), a consciously polemical effort to counter the fixity of prevailing socio-political models of interpretation with the processual fluidity enabled by actor-network theory. Taken up as a mantra by various literary critics concerned with overturning the tendency to critique texts as ideological objects, the idea that “context stinks” particularly underpins a constellation of recent approaches to literature that take “description” as their guide, whether through a renewed attention to aesthetics, close reading, or genre.   Although primarily concerned to date with the traditional literary foci of novels, poems and plays, the rejection of […]

The second call for proposals of USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics, is now available at the following address: https://usabroad.unibo.it/announcement/view/278 For the year 2018, USAbroad invites potential contributors—from Italy, Europe, and around the world—to submit proposals that discuss the idea of “Rewinding Global America: Nationalism and Contested Power. The second issue of USAbroad aims to reassess and discuss the composite meaning of American nationalism from the early republic to contemporary developments, by looking at its historical making and re-making, often achieved through exclusionary processes that shifted the boundaries of citizenship and belonging. We particularly encourage proposals from Italian PhD students as well as early-career scholars. Applicants are asked to submit an abstract of approximately 500 words, along with a résumé including their main publications, by April 22. Please send your proposal by email to: usabroad@unibo.it By May 6, applicants will be notified about the status of the submission. Please note that […]

Thursday 27 and Friday 28 September 2018 International conference Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne (CELEC) The sixties and the seventies marked a turning-point in the evolution of family. Major sociocultural changes undermined certain patterns of gender roles around which traditional families, and the American society at large, were organized. When the Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral contraceptive back in 1960 and the Supreme Court ruled in favor of legal abortion in 1973 (Roe v. Wade), women were given the right to break free from the normative gendered imperatives of the traditional family. Because the cult of domesticity gradually declined, and the crisis imposed the necessity to move from single-income to dual-income families, an unprecedented number of women – wives and mothers included – joined the workforce in the seventies. This shift in social values combined with new legal developments in family law (California for instance adopted the no-fault […]

Hollywood and the Production Code: Criticism and History. Friday, 6th July 2018 @ King’s College London. (Symposium speaker and respondent: Professor Lea Jacobs, University of Wisconsin-Madison.) A one-day symposium devoted to the style-based investigation of the influence of the Production Code on Hollywood cinema. The symposium will take in a range of issues concerning the impact of the Code on “golden age” Hollywood filmmaking. Part of the symposium will also be devoted to a close consideration of the style of “pre-Code” filmmaking (generally understood as 1930-1934). There is currently a strong consensus, grounded in the detailed archival work of major film historians, that 30-34 was not, after all, “pre” the Code but was a period in which the Code played an important role in shaping the content of movie fictions. Yet film festivals and TV channels (TCM, for example) continue to find an audience for early-30s productions by signalling, via […]

Creating Comics, Creative Comics Please Note: the deadline for this CFP has been extended until 25nd April 2018. University of South Wales: Cardiff (Friday 01.06.2018) USW Cardiff: Comics Symposium 2018, Call For Papers Key Note from Dr. Julia Round, Bournemouth University: ‘Anonymous Authors, Invisible Illustrators, and Collaborative Creation: Misty and British Girls’ Comics’ The First USW Cardiff: Comics Symposium is interested in creator’s perspectives. It will explore comics and creativity and papers are invited which examine the practice of creating comics, and the particulars of storytelling in comics. Does changing a panel, change the story? How might a medium’s materiality affect its construction and reception? Pudovkin stated that “In order to write a scenario suitable for filming, one must know the methods by which the spectator can be influenced from the screen.” (Pudovkin, 1949, p. 1), and referring to adaption Weaver suggests this is, “the act of translating a story […]

Scholar-Activism in the Twenty-first Century British Library, London, 22-23 June 2018  The topic of scholar-activism has seen a recent resurgence in our contemporary political moment. To explore this topic, a transatlantic, scholar-activist conference will be held at the British Library on Friday June 22 and Saturday June 23. The conference will put scholars into conversation with activists to discuss how scholars and activists can work together, put recent social movements such as The Black Lives Matter Movement into scholarly and historical perspective, and highlight some ways in which scholars and activists in the US and UK are currently working together and engaging in efforts for social justice. The keynote speaker for the conference will be Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who will speak on “The Black Lives Matter movement in the Age of Trump.” Professor Heather Thompson, the winner of the 2017 Pulitzer prize, will also speak at the conference. We welcome […]

SANAS Biennial Conference The Genres of Genre: A Conference on Form, Format, and Cultural Formations Nov. 2 and 3, 2018, Lausanne North American Studies have always had an intense but ambivalent relationship to genre, as these narrative patterns have participated in nationalist processes as well as in narratives of resistance. Emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century from concerns about naturalism and realism, American literary scholarship after WWII avoided the politicized post-war atmosphere by making the ‘romance’ the quintessential American novel genre, while cinematic genres such as the musical or the Western contributed to amplifying the mythic dimension of American self-definition. Since then, American Studies scholars have pioneered influential work on melodrama, the American Gothic, the jeremiad and other genres. Concurrently, Canadian literature’s prominent nation-building narratives were framed as documentary tales of regionalism, historical novels and social realism before evolving into dystopian and postmodern fiction, most famously by Margaret […]

Call for Papers: Death and Celebrity Wednesday 6th June 2018, University of Portsmouth   Keynote Speakers: Dr Ruth Penfold-Mounce, University of York Dr Samantha Matthews, University of Bristol   ‘Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil’ (John Milton)   ‘Fame is a food that dead men eat’ (Henry Austin Dobson)   This one-day symposium seeks to interrogate the role of death in the construction, negotiation and perpetuation of celebrity identity. For the ancients, true fame was necessarily posthumous, but in modernity, too, there remains an enduring fascination with what Andrew Bennett terms ‘the immortality effect’. Following the death of a celebrity, a variety of agents – friends, family, fans, professional associates, arts and heritage bodies – may interact to frame his/her legacy for posterity; moreover, celebrities themselves may take an active role in choreographing their cultural afterlives while still alive. Yet, while cementing, augmenting or rehabilitating the celebrity’s public […]

TRADITIONS AND TRANSITIONS 28-29 September 2018 SOFIA, BULGARIA   DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES SOFIA UNIVERSITY “ST. KLIMENT OHRIDSKI”   Second Call for Papers The Department of English and American Studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” invites scholars to submit proposals for the international conference Traditions and Transitions – to be held in Sofia, Bulgaria. The conference is dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the Department of English and American Studies at Sofia University and the 130th anniversary of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. People celebrate anniversaries in order to commemorate what has been achieved so far and to envision what should be achieved in the future. The event aims to look back at a distinguished past, and ahead to a challenging future. The conference seeks to bring together young and established scholars, and professors emeriti from academic institutions in Bulgaria and abroad, giving them a venue to debate and exchange views […]

Death & Culture II Conference 6-7 September 2018, University of York   Registration and abstract submission are now open for the second iteration of the Death and Culture conference taking place in September 2018. Registration fees include food and drink for the two days and a conference meal.   The human response to mortality is a research theme across the arts, humanities and social sciences. As a result, this conference seeks to provide a forum for networking and sharing interdisciplinary death scholarship. We welcome research rooted in empirical studies as well as conceptual and theoretical engagement which focus on cultural responses to death and the ways it has shaped understandings and perspectives on mortality. The conference, in its second iteration, seeks to continue engaging with the study of mortality as an academic enterprise, supported by evidence and framed by theoretical engagement. This truly interdisciplinary event brings together death scholars, including […]