4th Annual Kent Americanist Symposium: The Spacial Americas (Online)

After a very successful pilot during the summer months, the organisers decided to continue BAAS PGR Work in Progress Session for the winter term. The sessions will run on the second Friday of each month during October-December between 15:00-17:00. (9th of October, 13th of November, and the 11th of December)   The organisers invite postgraduate students to present a work in progress on any topic and period related to the Americas – music, visual culture, art, literature, history, politics etc. Postgraduates are encouraged to circulate any piece of writing they see fit – it can be a dissertation chapter, book review or an essay in preparation for a peer review submission. Each session will consist of three presenters and five readers to provide in-depth feedback in a collegial and supportive atmosphere. Upon submission, the organisers will try as much as possible to curate the sessions based on some common ground – themes, period or genre […]

What Happened? Continuities and Discontinuities in American Culture The 27th Biennial Conference of NAAS & the 11th Biennial Conference of SAAS Uppsala, Sweden, May 20-22, 2021 While it appears to be perennially tempting to see one’s own time as exceptional and unprecedented, it is nevertheless safe to say that our present time is perceived by many as characterized by crises of different kinds (democratic, humanitarian, environmental, medical, and economic crisis) to an unusually high degree. As a result, the stakes are high when it comes to identifying causes and cures and the political, media and academic communities are all concerned in their different ways with constructing narratives that make sense of what is happening: Backlash, renewal, apocalypse? Whatever their political, ideological or theoretical underpinnings or agendas, all mobilize tropes of either continuity – understood for instance as progress, degeneration or intensification – or discontinuity – understood for instance as a break […]