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British Association for American Studies

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Sarah Collier

Sarah Collier is a PhD candidate in English Literature at UCL. Her research explores representations of military masculinities in contemporary American war narratives.

Panel Review BAAS 2022: ‘Rethinking Identity and Place in the South: Cultural Production and Community Formations’

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: Cultural Production and Community Formations”. This roundtable featured scholars from a range of disciplines, enabling multiple perspectives on Southern identity to come into dialogue with one another. Rather than the more conventional format of panel presentations, this roundtable featured four short papers before opening up to an extended Q&A, which invited the audience to actively participate in the discussion. The roundtable began with four 5-10 minute papers from Simon Buck (Northumbria University), Robyn Shooter (Kings College London), Chris Lloyd (University of Hertfordshire) and Siân Round (University of Cambridge). Buck opened the presentations with a discussion of the Music Maker Relief […]


BAAS 2022 Panel Review: ‘Surveillance, Technology, and Discrimination in Literature and Culture Across the Americas’

‘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 potential overturning of Roe vs Wade; consequently concerns have sparked over how data companies might be obliged by law enforcement to monitor women accessing abortion services.[i] What’s more, a two-year investigation by Georgetown University has revealed the extent of ICE’s data monitoring, pointing to the organisation’s increasingly expansive systems of domestic surveillance.[ii]  It seems wholly fitting, then, that the BAAS 2022 conference hosted several panels exploring themes of surveillance. In particular, a rich and varied panel titled  ‘Surveillance, Technology, and Discrimination in Literature and Culture Across the Americas’ discussed the intersections of surveillance, capitalism, gender, racialisation and dystopia in contemporary […]


BAAS 2022 Panel Review: ‘Ecologies of Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Culture’

F3 Ecologies of Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (sponsored by BrANCA) Opening the final day of BAAS 2022 was a BrANCA-sponsored panel titled “Ecologies of Race and Gender in Nineteenth-Century American Culture”, chaired by Matthew Pethers (University of Nottingham). The panel brought together research in nineteenth-century American literature by Olivia Foster (Nottingham Trent University), and nineteenth century cultural history by Dr. Tom F. Wright (University of Sussex). Foster’s paper, “Cohabiting with the Environment: An Ecocritical Reassessment of Sarah Piatt and Emily Dickinson” sought to tease out the multifaceted relationships that these nineteenth century poets articulated with the natural environment in their works. On the other hand, Wright’s paper, “‘Orenda’ and the Indigenous Origins of Charisma”, looked to the Indigenous American concept of ‘Orenda’, which roughly means the collective spiritual power held in the energies of natural objects.  Wright takes up the concept of ‘Orenda’ to re-think the Western […]


Playing Paranoid in The Lighthouse

  If the 2000s were infested with zombie horror and alien invasions, what can we make of the recent resurgence of Lovecraftian tentacled monsters in film and television? In a blog post from October 2016, Roger Luckhurst traces the re-emergence of Lovecraftian themes to Netflix’s Stranger Things, arguing that the series conjures a ‘sense that humans have irreversibly broken the planet, and that Nature is coming back to exact a terrible revenge’.[i] Writing on the eve of Trump’s election, Luckhurst’s diagnosis seems at once prescient and premature: the years that followed would see more popular re-imaginings of the Lovecraft mythos such as Color out of Space (2019) and Lovecraft Country (2020). Yet in retrospect, such narratives seem to align less with impending climate disaster than they do with Trump’s election and presidency. These re-imaginings of Lovecraftian horror generate diverse responses to the Trumpian age; indeed the ‘Cthulhu for President’ parody’s […]