While traditional disciplines such as social science and history continue to provide American Studies with methods and insights that have proved vital for its development, it is today much more dynamic and versatile than what one might have expected of a field that, as J. C. Rowe observes, has long suffered from an “embattled institutional situation.” Continue reading
One of the aims of the conference was to expand the time frame for Invasion Fiction, from pre-1914 fiction into the inter-war years, and to draw connections and comparisons to other parts of the world outside of Britain. Continue reading
The eleventh international Melville Society conference was a leviathan of an event, demonstrated by its need for two reviews. Spanning four days, it offered an intensive and diverse range of panels, seminars and activities, which allowed the participants to engage actively with an impressive range of various aspects of current Melvillean scholarship. Continue reading
Organised around the focus of ‘Melville’s crossings’, the event covered the breadth and depth of Melville studies and paid close attention to Melville’s dialogues with philosophy and aesthetic theory, his own travels across the globe, and the idea of borders and thresholds within his works. Echoing these crossings, the event itself traversed the boundary between the academic and the public, including panels, seminars, and plenaries but also public engagement in the form of an afternoon at the British Library. Continue reading
One aspect of this was in the arranging of one-to-one meetings between participating graduate students and senior scholars, providing an opportunity for the exchange of ideas and advice from persons they might not otherwise encounter. As one of the participating junior scholars, this was a particularly valuable element of the event. Continue reading