Reviewed by: Valentina López Liendo Chaired by Dr James Baxter, a postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin, the panel ‘The Clinging of Lot 49: Perspectives on Pynchon’s Persistance’ explored the many ways in which Pynchon’s now hyper-canonical novel of 1966 resonates with contemporary American culture. The Crying of Lot 49… Continue reading
BAAS 2023 Panel Review: 7C – Making Sense of the South Of all the regions in the United States, perhaps none has captured the critical imagination as lastingly and powerfully as the American South. This came through at BAAS 2023, with three different sessions addressing the region at this year’s… Continue reading
Chaired by Keele University’s own Kristen Brill, the panel ‘Race and Reassessment in the Recent Past’ featured only two speakers, but the range of material presented was nonetheless extensive. Addressing thorny developments in the recent histories of American lineage societies and the poet Walt Whitman, the two presenters asked their… Continue reading
BAAS 2023 Panel Review: 8H- GreenBAAS Panel ‘“Our House is Still on Fire”: New Research in Environmental American Studies’ Since debuting at 2021’s BAAS Annual Conference, GreenBAAS’s panels have become something of an annual fixture, acquiring a reputation for interdisciplinarity, provocativeness, and contemporary relevance. These features were again apparent as… Continue reading
BAAS Panel Review: 5E- Negotiating American Spaces From the musings of the Transcendentalists to Turner’s frontier thesis, Chicano Aztlán, and the intercommunal visions of the Black Panthers, space has long been critical to American Studies. On April 13th, an all-star interdisciplinary team of PhD students from the University of Manchester… Continue reading
‘Panel 2B: Race, Rhetoric, and Visibility’, HOTCUS 2022 Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh, 22-24 June 2022 On the second day of the Historians of Twentieth-Century United States (HOTCUS) Annual Conference, three researchers presented their current works-in-progress under the topic of ‘Race, Rhetoric, and Visibility.’ To begin, Dr. Emily Brady (Teaching… Continue reading
‘Cultures of Surveillance and Counterinsurgency’, British Association for American Studies Conference 2022, University of Hull, 21-23 April 2022 Cultures of Surveillance and Counterinsurgency was a panel held online for the BAAS 2022 conference on April 23rd 2022. Chaired by Molly Geidel, University of Manchester, the two speakers were Heena Hussain,… Continue reading
One of the advantages of returning to an in-person conference format is the opportunity to benefit from all the modes of knowledge exchange on offer over the three-day period—from panels, to keynotes, to workshops. One such example was the BAAS 2022 roundtable titled “Rethinking Identity and Place in the South:… Continue reading
‘Surveillance, Technology, and Discrimination in Literature and Culture Across the Americas’, British Association for American Studies Conference 2022, University of Hull, 21-23 April 2022 Surveillance and dystopian futures are increasingly urgent and generative areas of research for scholars of the contemporary Americas. Just recently, headlines have been dominated by the… Continue reading
In the last thirty-five years, there has been a good deal of study of the relationship between language and multiculturalism, and between multiculturalism and contemporary literature. In ‘Language, Multiculturalism, and Identity: A Canadian Study’, a survey conducted by John Edwards and Joan Chisholm, the authors raise the probability of a… Continue reading