• RESEARCH
  • #USSOBOOKHOUR
  • REVIEWS
  • EYES ON EVENTS
  • SPECIAL SERIES
  • EVENTS
  • #WRITEAMSTUDIES
  • USSOCAST

British Association for American Studies

×

Samson Thozer

Samson Thozer is a first-year PhD student in American Studies at the University of Manchester. His research concerns the formation of Black identity in interwar Detroit. He has a BA in English Literature and American Studies, and an MA in English, both from the University of Manchester. Between 2017 and 2021, he lived in the USA, teaching at Pennsylvania Highlands Community College and working with kids at the YMCA. He recently self-published a book called Halfway to Everywhere.

BAAS 2023 Conference Panel Review: Race and Reassessment in the Recent Past

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 […]


Book Review: Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird, by Gene Andrew Jarrett

A comprehensive biography of Dunbar was long overdue. His brief life was influenced by most of the major forces affecting Black life after emancipation: the legacy of slavery, Reconstruction, civil rights, migration from South to North, city life and the limited integration it brought. His remarkable and swift ascent to fame showed the possibilities and the limitations of Black art for a population that sorely needed public voices. I understand Dunbar’s central place in the story of the late nineteenth-century better now than I did, and for that reason I am glad I read Jarrett’s biography. Still, I hope that those who seek this story in the future will have the opportunity to read a revised edition.


Of the History of Pennsylvania, Part. 2: Pennsylvania Now

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies I came to Clearfield by a rare route, though in truth no route is common. […]


Of the History of Pennsylvania, Part. 1: Pennsylvania Past

This article is part of the USSO special series Resilience/Renewal: Shifting Landscapes in American Studies Whatever discoveries are made in the future that complicate what we know of human antiquity, […]


The People v. Ossian Sweet

In the first decades of the twentieth century, no northern city drew more southern migrants than Detroit, ‘City of Tomorrow’.[i] As one Free Press reporter noted in 1917, ‘Detroit’s unexampled […]


Review: ‘Visibility/Invisibility: Representation and Community Formation in American Studies’, British Association of American Studies Postgraduate Symposium, Online, 4 December 2021.

One distinct advantage of the breadth of a field like American Studies is that the same prompt may be honestly engaged by a host of scholars without fear of repetition, […]