Nijmegen, the Netherlands, October 27-28

The intersection of contemporary debates about the future of American power and recent developments in the field of diplomatic history compel us to reconsider the foundations and contours of the American Century.
“Forging the American Century”, seeks to combine the current concern for America’s changing role in the world with new and developing insights into the nature of international relations to revisit the origins of the American Century: World War II and its aftermath. The conference is not about the high diplomacy of the war, nor is it necessarily about the start of the Cold War. Instead, it will address the ways in which the World War and America’s rise to global power drove Americans in different fields, both inside and outside the sphere of formal diplomacy, to forge new connections with the world. We will also address the many ways in which people around the world responded to the new or changing American presence.

By invoking the term “American Century”, we do not intend to link up to Henry Luce’s original arguments. With its confusing mix of jingoism, democratic idealisms, free market enthusiasm, nationalism, and naiveté, Luce’s “American Century” has rarely been taken seriously as a blueprint for American internationalism. However, the concept of an “American Century” has recently made a comeback in discussions about the United States’ relative decline. Can the United States maintain its international economic position in the face of Chinese competition? Have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq caused irreparable damage to its role as an international leader? Will rising powers, especially the much-discussed BRICS countries, challenge the liberal world order that the United States has built and sustained?

In a recent anthology that he described as a “dissenter’s guide to the American Century”, Andrew Bacevich argues that:
“the conditions that once lent plausibility to visions of an American Century [have] ceased to exist…Contemporary reality no longer accommodate[s] the notion of a single nation arrogating to itself the role of a Good Samaritan, especially a nation with dirty hands…The utility of Luce’s formulation as a description of the contemporary international order or as a guide to future U.S. policy has been exhausted.”

Others have been more optimistic, both about the nature of the American Century and its future. Joseph Nye defines it as “the extraordinary period of American preeminence in military, economic, and soft power resources that have made the United States central to the workings of the global balance of power, and to the provision of global public goods”. While the international environment will become more complicated in the future, he announces simply that “the American century is not over”.

The running debates over the future of American power make this an opportune moment to reconsider the foundations of U.S. internationalism, especially in the light of recent innovations in the field of diplomatic history. Over the past fifteen years, terms such as empire, soft power, and anti-Americanism have become commonplace in discussions of America’s role in the world. Foreign policy, power politics, and the work of statesmen and professional diplomats no longer dominate histories of U.S. foreign relations. Current scholarly interest in soft power, public diplomacy, and Americanization have opened the field to the study of culture. “New” diplomatic historians study the role of individuals, networks, musicians, athletes, transnational movements and a wide variety of other forms of “informal” diplomacy. A focus on American action has made room for the study of interaction: the ways in which peoples throughout the world have resisted, negotiated, or welcomed the American presence.

Disciplines and topics
We welcome scholars from all disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds to present fresh insights into the historical foundations of U.S. power and the international order it helped to create during and (immediately) after the Second World War. The following questions may be helpful in formulating contributions to this conference:

(1) How did the War and its aftermath change the practice of diplomacy? How did diplomats develop new strategies to reach out to the world? How did they coopt private initiatives or vice versa?

(2) How did individuals, companies, civic groups, and other “informal” diplomats shape America’s global presence during and after the war?

(3) How did the United States shape the international environment through its support for new diplomatic, financial, and economic institutions? To what extent did those new institutions shape U.S. actions?

(4) How did America’s new role in the world shape its domestic culture, politics, or society?

(5) How have Asians, Africans, Europeans, and Latin Americans resisted, negotiated, or welcomed the new American presence.

(6) How have processes of historical memory and (re)interpretations of World War II shaped U.S. internationalism in domestic and transnational contexts?

Paper Proposals
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers. Please send a 300 word abstract and brief biographical note to j.vandenberk@let.ru.nl by May 15, 2016

Date and location
The conference will take place at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, on October 27-28, 2016. This conference is an initiative of the North American Studies Program at the Radboud University. For more information about our program and our staff please visit www.ru.nl/nas.
Please note that a small fee may apply for participants in this conference.

An international conference at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin

December 8-10, 2016

Deadline for proposals: June 15, 2016.

The theory and practice of modern business management arose in the late nineteenth century in the United States as a response to unstable markets, labor unrest, and organizational challenges in the new massive industrial corporations of the Gilded Age. As a system of efficiency and control, management soon became a generalized principle for dealing with everything from health, housework, and educational reform to imperial expansion, mass immigration, and related processes of racialization and naturalization. Taking a long view, management could also be regarded as integral to American society and culture from the beginning: from Puritan self-rationalization to the quantified self, from the management of slave plantations to technologies of social control, from the first national census in 1790 to the big data revolution, from the human relations movement to happiness engineers in the workplace today. Particularly since the crisis of Taylorism in the 1970s, the theory and practice of management has undergone significant changes, often replacing the hierarchical bureaucratic structures that emerged during the industrial revolution with more flexible and intimate forms of management that have challenged the separation of work and leisure. Against the backdrop of such changes, as well as in light of what some refer to as a ‘second gilded age’ of celebrated CEOs and technological solutionism, a critical reexamination of our managerial past and present is as urgent as ever.

This conference invites scholars to (re)think the relationship between American literature and culture and the various forms of management that have shaped the United States throughout its history. ‘Fictions of management’ both refers to the narratives underlying different management ideologies and to the cultural views and products that participate in their emergence and transformation. By using this term, the conference seeks to bring ‘fiction’ and ‘management’ broadly conceived into a productive dialogue. What are the fictions underlying corporate culture and managerial responses to society today and in the past? How have different management paradigms been promoted or challenged in American literature and culture? Do different management styles have their own aesthetics, and might we identify managerial aesthetics in cultural productions? Addressing such questions, we especially encourage interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship between fiction and management.

Possible topics for consideration include (but are not limited to):

• cultures of efficiency and waste management
• corporate culture and organizational storytelling
• the relationship between slavery and management
• race and labor management
• dis/ability, productivity, and labor
• social reform and uplift ideologies
• the probabilistic revolution and risk management
• the feminization of labor
• (post)industrial psychology and incentive systems
• management and problems of scale
• self-management, self-optimization, and self-help narratives
• the marginal revolution and the homo economicus
• biopolitics, necropolitics, eugenics, and population management
• ‘algorithmic governmentality’ (Rouvroy)
• processes of standardization
• cultures of bookkeeping and paperwork
• managing consumer behavior
• affect and emotional management

Please send proposals by June 15, 2016 to fictionsofmanagement@gmail.com. Proposals should consists of a 250 word abstract and a short bio (around 100 words).

Conference organizers: James Dorson (Freie Universität Berlin), Florian Gabriel (Freie Universität Berlin), and Jasper Verlinden (Freie Universität Berlin).

The conference is organized by the by the Dahlem International Network Junior Research Group “Fictions of Management: American Naturalism and Managerial Culture, 1875-1925.”

For more on the conference, including keynote speakers, please visit our conference website at www.fictionsofmanagement2016.com

Intersections of Whiteness

Ruhr-University Bochum and TU Dortmund 

January 11-13, 2017

Deadline: July 31, 2016

The protests against racial profiling and racist police brutality in the U.S. and Britain, Donald Trump’s alarming comments about Muslims, the Confederate flag controversy in South Carolina, the all-white Academy Award nominations, the organization “Operation Black Vote” feeling compelled to urge people of color not to leave the political field to white people in the wake of the UK General Elections, the reactions of the European Union to the masses of refugees and many Europeans’ xenophobic reactions to those seeking refuge: the specters of whiteness are still urgently haunting the western world. According to France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher, Critical Whiteness Studies is currently in its third stage, riding its third wave so to say, questioning “the tendency towards essentializing accounts of whiteness by locating race as one of many social relations that shape individual and group identity” (2011: 3). While the discipline has established itself as an anti-racist academic and activist practice or mode of intervention, it is still often object to scrutiny for spotlighting whiteness and thus possibly contributing to the continuing dominance of whiteness. In order to dismantle this dominance and to heed Steven Garner’s call for awareness of the “pitfalls” of whiteness studies (2007), we believe it is necessary to identify the intricacies of whiteness in western society and culture from a decidedly transnational/global perspective. The first waves of Critical Whiteness Studies established the discipline as an almost exclusively US-centered field of inquiry whose methodology and theory-building was consequently to a considerable degree focused on US-American particularities, yet whiteness has since the turn of the century become what Vron Ware calls an “interconnected global system”: “it may be produced in one place, but its effects are not containable by cultural or political borders” (2001: 184). This conference aims at making whiteness visible (following Richard Dyer and Valerie Babb). We will do so by discussing the current position of the field and concrete examples that negotiate whiteness with a regional, national and global focus. We are especially interested in the interplay of whiteness and other “social relations that shape individual and group identity” and invite presentations from cultural studies, gender studies, history, literary studies, sociology, anthropology, etc. Whiteness, while it is considered a system of privilege, is informed and created by its intersections with other categories of the self and society. Questions we wish to explore, are: Is whiteness intersectional? How is this intersectionality played out in different disciplines, in different cultures, in different media? While the obvious intersections between whiteness and class, gender, sexuality are very productive, we wish to include questions of region, nation, ability, the body, and religion.

Topics for presentations might include, yet are not limited to:

Whiteness and …
• critical theory
• popular culture (including television shows such as Fargo, Sons of Anarchy, True Detective, Girls, Misfits, Being Human, but also film, music, reality television, etc.)
• comedy (e.g. American standup comedian Louis CK’s deconstructions of white male identity, South African comedian Trevor Noah and others)
• the nation (comparative perspectives: e.g. U.S. <=> U.K., England <=> Wales)
• the region (e.g. the American South, Eastern Germany, the English countryside)
• feminism (e.g. first- and second-wave, post-feminism, cyberfeminism)
• fatness, dis/ability, healthism
• Marxism
• queer identities
• social networks

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short biographical info to the organizers Evangelia Kindinger (Ruhr-University Bochum, American Studies) and Mark Schmitt (TU Dortmund, British Cultural Studies) at intersectionsofwhiteness@gmx.de.
The deadline for paper proposals is July 31, 2016. Speakers will be notified of their acceptance by September 1, 2016.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Amanda D. Lotz, University of Michigan
Katharine Tyler, University of Exeter
Vron Ware, Kingston University
Matt Wray, Temple University

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

TO A THEMATIC ISSUE TO BE PUBLISHED IN E-REA (Spring 2017)

(Webjournal of Aix-Marseille University’s English and American Studies Unit, LERMA)

 “A Death of One’s Own”?

Narratives of the (Un)Self :

American Autothanatographers, 17-21st centuries

Since the 1980s-1990s, the terms “autopathography” and “autothanatography” have increasingly been used by the theorists of autobiography. Defined by Thomas Couser as “life writing that focuses on the single experience of critical illness” (“Introduction: The Embodied Self”, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol.6, no 1, Spring 1991, 1), autopathography often— but not always—envisions death. The aporic term autothanatography, the writing of one’s own death, has provided a useful framework for the theorists interested in the relationships between writing, the self and death. Much of the theoretical background of autothanatography can be attributed to French thinkers (Jacques Derrida who spoke about his “testamentary writing”, Louis Marin or again Maurice Blanchot, the very embodiement of the modern myth of the writer, according to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe who described Blanchot’s both existence and writing as “posthumous” …) but recent works on autothanatography have also drawn inspiration from other European or American writers such as Paul de Man, Jeremy Tambling, Laura Marcus, Linda Anderson, Susan Sontag, Judith Butler or Felicity Nussbaum. Still, a brief overview of recent autothanatographical studies seems to indicate that American writings have not been as thoroughly or systematically explored as European ones.

The purpose of this volume is to address this void by questioning the evolution, the practices and the perspectives of American autothanatographers ever since the 17th century. While not systematically disconnecting death from disease, we will consider how one’s own death shapes the author’s writing project, turning it into a deathward project actually emerging “from beyond the grave”. The focus, therefore, will not necessarily be placed on the process of dying (as it is in autopathographies), but on death itself as at once the starting point and the result of the writing process. In a 1978 article entitled “The Shape of Death in American Autobiography,” Thomas Couser pointed out that “the form and content of the narratives are often significantly shaped by the writer’s preoccupation with death. A surprising number of our major autobiographers anticipate or offer a substitute for their own deaths; some even point beyond it, offering intimations of their own immortality” (“The Shape of Death in American Autobiography”, The Hudson Review, Vol.31, n.1, Spring 1978, 53). While such preoccupation with death is likely to be a common feature among autobiographers in general, this volume will seek to delineate and explore the cultural, religious, racial and gender parameters that could contribute to the specificities of American autothanatography. Because of this approach, the historical timeframe is deliberately broad, reaching back to the 17^thcentury, when religion pervaded autobiographical writings, up to the early 21^st century. Also, because the boundaries between reality and fiction are by no means clear-cut in the genre of autobiography (and perhaps even less so with autothanatography), contributions examining autofiction will be welcome. Finally, we wish to envision a large spectrum of autothanatographical expressions, including textual genres such as diaries, memoirs, and autofictional works but also iconographic or visual productions dealing with the author’s own death (comics, photography, self portraits, art works…).

While the essays are expected to explore American autothanatographical practices, they must also endeavor to anchor those practices in—or detach them from—the theoretical discourses shaping autothanatography. Ultimately, the volume will question whether the individual act of writing about/from/against one’s death has the power to (de)construct “a death of one’s own” (Rilke), and whether such writings can collectively constitute a specifically American literary phenomenon.

Articles may examine:

-Special historical moments liable to (dis)connect the individual from/to a sense of national/collective identity

-Issues of race/class/gender/religion inasmuch as they may impact the way in which death affects autobiographical practice

-How cultural and medical discourses on death shape individual representations of one’s own death

-The literary, poetic and/or pictorial devices that allow a writer or artist to represent his/her own dying or death

-Double-bottom texts in which the exploration and narrative of the death of the other (thanatography) hide an autothanatographical project

-The notion of mortiferous writing, its modes of existence and implications

Articles in English should be sent to claire.sorin@univ-amu.fr and sophie.vallas@univ-amu.fr for October 1, 2016.

Please use E-rea’s stylesheet (http://erea.revues.org/2153). If you decide to submit a contribution, please let us know by sending us a message with a brief description of your project byJune 30, 2016.

Convenors: Gilles Chamerois (Université de Brest) and Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd (Université de Poitiers)

The 2017 International Pynchon Week will be held on the French Atlantic coast in the old harbor of La Rochelle, from which a number of Europeans set sail for the New World. The conference will be hosted by the Musée du Nouveau Monde, among its collection of Allegories of America. The conveners hope this liminal space on the margins of Europe will inspire Pynchon scholars to sail out towards yet unexplored territories, following some of the leads below or picking up any related or unrelated Pynchonian line.

 Literary new worlds

Pynchon’s early fiction was published under the auspices of “new worlds:” “Low-Lands” was issued by New World Writing, a paperback magazine (volume 17, 1960); speculative fiction writer Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine ran “Entropy” in 1969. How “new” were and still are Pynchon’s fictional worlds? How do old and new interweave in the fabric of his texts – intertextuality, syntactic and lexical archaisms, variation and invention?  Is Pynchon a belated modernist, a post-modernist, or a post-post-modernist? Is he forever striding in-between worlds?

 A New World inhabited by the Old

Pynchon’s novels cast half-nostalgic, half-ironic glances back at America’s history – from the most remote to the most recent – and both conjure up and challenge visions of the New World as an earthly paradise. Is the new, revolutionary world of Mason & Dixon ‘the elder World turned Upside Down’ (M&D 263)? Or is it reclaimed by melancholy as its ‘Borderlands’ are gradually included into ‘the bare mortal World that is our home, and our despair’ (M&D 345)? And to what extent is the Puritan heritage of its founders, so pervasive in the earlier works, still at work in Pynchon’s most recent America, in Gordita Beach or post-9/11 Manhattan?

Phantoms from the old world haunt America, just as its songs and music haunt Pynchon’s texts; to wit, the resilience in America’s most native expressions of the oldest European musical modes, the songs of Europe carried across to the bars and stages of the New World and the modern avatars of the ancient mixolydian mode – the most bluesy / jazzy /funky mode, a sound made flesh in the person of Fergus Mixolydian in chapter 2 of V. What distant echoes from the old world can still be heard through the “surf music” beating in Mason & Dixon or in the Californian trilogy?

America Revisiting the Old World

Pynchon’s fictions also foray with characteristic ubiquity – bilocation applying both to characters and texts – into European history, from the Mediterranean’s most ancient shores (V.) to the waste lands of WWII (Gravity’s Rainbow). The Old World is an archival trove for American figures wandering in search of elusive roots, roaming free regardless of historical and geographical boundaries (Benny Profane, Tyrone Slothrop, but also Against the Day’s Chums of Chance). Can it be argued that Pynchon’s writings, from the very beginning (starting with “Under the Rose”), have been composing an alternative, de-centered narrative of European history, a series of Baedeker guides gone rogue?

Fantasized new worlds

At their most utopian or dystopian, balancing as they do between social, revolutionary or anarchist forms of idealism and post-modern nihilism, the novels of Thomas Pynchon offer pictures of “America as it might be in visions America’s wardens could not tolerate” (ATD, 51). Do parallel worlds – other worlds ‘humming along out there’ (Slow Learner) – underworlds, the ghostly presence of Thanatoids and other Preterites offer alternatives, if but fleetingly, to an impossible “New” World? Under the cover of novelty, is scientific and technological progress the mere re-combination of the old?  Is the virtual Deep Web of Bleeding Edge a new world, or the continuation of the old by other means?

Following the democratic tradition of IPW, the whole conference will be held in plenary mode. Individual contributions as well as full-panel proposals will be welcome. For individual papers, please send 500-word abstracts for twenty-minute presentations; for full panels bringing three or more papers under one common heading, please provide an overall statement of the panel’s aims as well as the contributors’ abstracts (1000 to 1500 words in all). The notification of acceptance for both individual paper submissions and panel/roundtable submissions will go out by mid to late November.

Please send your proposals to ipw2017larochelle@gmail.com by September 30, 2016.

Call for Chapters: Edited Collection on the writing of Richard Yates

** This is the second call for chapters to be included in a collection on the writing of Richard Yates **

Richard Yates, author of the cult classic Revolutionary Road, has been described as America’s least-known great writer. Spoken of in revered terms by other writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Ford, Yates has a reputation as a writer’s writer. However, during his lifetime his books went in and out of print with alarming regularity, and he never experienced sustained success. The recent reissue of all of his books by Vintage and the release of a major movie adaptation of Revolutionary Road has sparked a resurgence of interest in Yates’s work both with the general public and within academia. With the approach of the 90^th anniversary of his birth in 2016 the need for a new volume of essays on this particular writer is pressing. Proposals for chapters to be included in this collection are now requested. Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

• Houses and homes; material culture and objects
• Autobiography in fiction
• Yates as a realist
• Gender; masculinity; attitudes to feminism; representations of women
• The nature of work
• Yates’s short stories
• Literary influences on Yates
• Yates as teacher; his work on creative writing courses
• Legacy; the influence of Yates on other writers
• Yates as speechwriter/screenwriter

NOTE: Proposals on Yates’s short stories in particular, and his lesser-known longer fiction, will be given preference.

Submission guidelines:

Proposals of no more than 350 words should be submitted by 15^th April 2016. Please also include a short biography (maximum of 300 words). This collection has attracted firm interest from a publisher and it is expected that the full manuscript will be submitted in late 2016. All chapters will be subject to a blind peer review process. Contributors may also be asked to act as reviewers for this collection. Please submit proposals as word documents to dalyj5@tcd.ie using the subject line ‘Richard Yates Collection’. Full details and submission guidelines will be provided to contributors on acceptance of proposals. Any queries can be sent to the editor, Jennifer Daly: dalyj5@tcd.ie

Gender, Activism, and Religion

Society for the History of Women in the Americas Annual Conference

Wednesday 29th June 2016

Royal Holloway, University of London

The Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW) welcomes proposals for its ninth annual conference, co-organised with The Bedford Centre for the History of Women, Royal Holloway, University of London.

The theme for this year’s conference is ‘Gender, Activism, and Religion.’ We welcome 250 word abstracts for 20-minute presentations on the intersecting relationship between gender, activism, and religion in the Americas across any geographical period or chronological time. We welcome comparative papers between two countries in the Americas or one in the Americas and a country outside the region. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Reproductive rights
• Political mobilisation
• Social movements
• Missionary networks
• The civil rights movement

Please submit abstracts and 100-word biography toshawconference2016@gmail.com by the 4^th April 2016. You will be notified of the outcome by 22nd April 2016. Papers chosen for the conference may be selected for inclusion in a special issue of History of Women in the Americas Journalsubject to peer-review.

Conference co-organisers:

Dawn-Marie Gibson (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Imaobong Umoren (University of Oxford)

Emerging Perspectives Graduate Conference


19^th May 2016

University College Dublin in association with the UCD English Graduate Society and Humanities Institute.

The UCD English Graduate Society warmly invites MA and PhD students of all levels to submit abstracts of no more than 300 words that engage with the theme ‘Emerging Perspectives’ for the 2016 EGS Graduate Conference.

Since 2010 the UCD English Graduate Society has provided early-stage scholars in universities across Ireland with the opportunity to share their research in a supportive environment. The fruits of their labour have been published annually in the postgraduate journal Emerging Perspectives. Both the conference and journal are kindly supported by the UCD School of English, Drama and Film.

The aim of the society’s 2016 conference is to continue fostering interdisciplinary dialogue amongst the greater Irish postgraduate community; early career scholars and MA students are strongly encouraged to apply. Submissions from international institutions are also welcome.

We encourage submissions from a broad range of areas surrounding the below disciplines including but by no means limited to:

• American, British, Irish Literature: New approaches to literature, multiculturalism, devolution, globalisation, ecocriticism, migration, diasporas, historical materialism;
• Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Victorian, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, Beats, Postmodernism, Digital Age/ Post-postmodernism;
• Theory: materialism, structuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism, gender & queer theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, world literature, digital humanities;
•  the novel; poetry, film, drama.

This event will be held in the UCD Humanities Institute on the UCD Belfield campus. A selection of the proceedings of the conference will be published in the fifth volume of Emerging Perspectives.

We invite abstracts of 200-300 words by 15 March 2016, for 20-minute presentations. Submissions for panels are also invited.

Please email submissions as well as any queries regarding the event to englishgradsoc@ucd.ie

Irish Caribbean Connections: An Interdisciplinary Conference

University College Cork, 22-23 July 2016

Call For Papers

Irish Caribbean Connections is an interdisciplinary conference that seeks to explore synergies between Ireland and the Caribbean islands. This event follows the vibrant Caribbean Irish Connections conference held at the University of the West Indies, Barbados, in 2012.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: LORNA GOODISON

INTRODUCED BY JAHAN RAMAZANI

Proposals are welcomed for papers across the range of disciplines, including but not confined to the following areas:

• the performing arts, drama, music, literature, and the visual arts
• cultural studies, postcolonial and transnational studies
• the Black and Green Atlantic
• diaspora, exile, migration, slavery, colonialism
• antislavery movements, revolution
• the Irish in the Caribbean
• travel writing
• Ireland and the Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean
• history, geography, politics, archaeology, sociology, sociolinguistics, religion
• digital humanities, international digitization projects

Organisers: Lee Jenkins (University College Cork), Melanie Otto (Trinity College Dublin)

Abstracts (250 words) for 20 minute papers should be emailed to Lee Jenkins at l.jenkins@ucc.ie by 31st March 2016. Irish Caribbean Connections takes place just before the 2016 conference of IASIL (International Association for the Study of Irish Literature), to be held at University College Cork on 25-29 July

Irish Caribbean Connections is supported by the University College Cork Strategic Research Fund