CFP: Transatlantic Women 3: Women of the Green Atlantic

Posted on July 29, 2017 by Jennifer Daly

Transatlantic Women 3:

Women of the Green Atlantic

Dublin, Ireland

Royal Irish Academy

21-22 June 2018

Sponsored by the Catherine Maria Sedgwick Society and the Harriet Beecher Stowe Society

“Since every wind that blows brings to our shores a fresh swarm of these people, who are to form so potent an element in our future national character, it behooves us to study them well, and make the best we can of them.”

Catharine Sedgwick, “The Little Mendicants” (1846)

The third meeting of Transatlantic Women will take place in Dublin, Ireland, on 21-22 June 2018 at the Royal Irish Academy. It will focus on Irish/American crosscurrents of the long nineteenth century, on the transatlantic stream of writers, reformers, and immigrants crossing over the Green Atlantic who were engaged in refuting but also perpetuating stereotypes and racist beliefs that troubled Irish-American relations. Such authors as Catharine Sedgwick, for instance, wrestled with contradictory conceptions created of Irish immigrants who appear in many of her writings, including “Irish Girl” (1842) and “The Post Office: An Irish Story” (1843). In a different context, “An Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women” (1852) pointedly addressed American women as the “sisters” of women from both Great Britain and Ireland; although Harriet Beecher Stowe never traveled to Ireland, she met deputations from that country during her first visit to Europe (1853). In “What Is a Home?” (1864) and “Servants” (1865), she expressed concerns about the Irish in the United States similar to those of Sedgwick.

This transatlantic gathering will celebrate, and question, nineteenth-century women who crossed the Green Atlantic, wrote about it, or in other ways connected the United States with Ireland through networks, translations, transatlantic fame, or influence. As Peter D. O’Neill and David Lloyd demonstrate in The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (2009), people from Ireland, as well as from Africa and the United States, crossed the Atlantic as slaves and servants, as cultural and political exiles or activists. Many women, active in travel writing, pamphleteering, writing fiction, newspaper articles, speeches, fairy tales, and ghost stories, were promoters of women’s rights and the figure of the New Woman, and were engaged in philanthropy, temperance, abolitionism, social commentary—and simply just in sightseeing and enjoying themselves. Among the most prominent figures to build bridges between the United States and Ireland around activism are such well-known Americans as Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony (on the Irish Question), Frances Willard, Ellen Craft, Ida B. Wells, and the Irish Frances Power Cobbe; among those who have received less attention are, for example, the African American Sarah Parker Remond and the poet Frances Osgood. And the exchange went both ways: fiction by Irish writer Maria Edgeworth, for instance, influenced Sedgwick, among others.

The Transatlantic Women 3 conference brings together scholars representing various countries and disciplines to examine the ways in which these women and their ideas moved, how they resisted oppression and created new ways to conceptualize their identities and the reality surrounding them. We welcome presentations on any topic related to nineteenth-century transatlantic women but are especially interested in those dealing with women of the Irish-American nexus. Some of the key concepts include race, stereotypes, assimilation, immigrant reality; conceptualization of space, distance, and identity; movement, and memory—historical and personal.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

recovering voices of Irish-Americans, or American-Irish women
struggles of immigrant women
women pioneers, in professions, activism, innovation
female networks and sisterhoods—of writers, journalists, travelers
women activists (abolitionism, anti-lynching, temperance, women’s rights, peace, white slavery, reform, animal rights)
women travelers and their descriptive gaze
fictional and realistic descriptions of places, people, and societies
women’s articulations of transatlanticism and the Green Atlantic

Abstracts, which should be about 250 words, and a short bio, are due by 1 November 2017. They should be emailed to transatlanticwomen3@gmail.com.

We look forward to yet another stimulating transatlantic conversation with you!

Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact any of the organizers:

Beth L. Lueck (lueckb@uww.edu ), Sirpa Salenius (sirpa.salenius@uef.fi ), or Lucinda Damon-Bach (ldamonbach@salemstate.edu).

CFP: Single Lives: 200 Years of Independent Women in Literature & Popular Culture

Posted on March 22, 2017March 22, 2017 by Jennifer Daly

Single Lives: 200 Years of Independent Women in Literature & Popular Culture

University College Dublin, 13-14 October 2017

Proposal Deadline: 1 April 2017, midnight Dublin time.

Notifications by 1 May 2017

This conference will explore the last 200 years of literature and popular media by, about, and for single women in relation to aesthetics and form, race, sexuality, class, space, reproduction and the family, political movements, and labor.

Independent women —singly blessed, new, surplus, or adrift— have remained a center around which anxieties and excitement coalesce. A range of historians, demographers, and literary scholars have focused on the social and political significance of diverse single women in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. Moving between the family home and domestic independence, between household and public labor, and between chastity and a range of sexual relations, the single woman remains a literary and cultural focus.

In recent years, especially in relation to UK and US elections, there has been an explosion of popular interest in contemporary singleness. Rebecca Traister’s Big Girls Don’t Cry and All the Single Ladies, comedian Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance, Eric Klinenberg’s Going Solo, the Washington Post’s “Solo-ish” column, as well as the work of psychologist and single-rights activist Bella DePaulo, author of Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored but Still Live Happily Ever After, all explore what it means to be a socially, politically, and sexually active single person in the 21^st century. News outlets, film, television, and a host of social and marketing media have demonstrated that people are fascinated by the changing status of singles.

Singleness Studies has emerged as an academic field over the last two decades but has rarely had its own forum for collaboration and exchange. This conference will bring together multiple disciplinary perspectives to uncover the social, political, economic, and cultural connections between the “singly blessed” women and “bachelor girls” of the 19^th and early-20^th century and “all the single ladies” of the contemporary moment. We seek proposals that analyze single lives within or across this time frame, from disciplines including literature, media studies, history, geography, sociology, architecture, political science, and more. Papers and full panels that create new perspectives by crossing boundaries and integrating multiple disciplines are especially welcome.

Keynote Speaker: Rebecca Traister

Rebecca Traister is the author of the best-selling All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, a New York Times Notable Book of 2016. Traister, a National Magazine Award finalist and winner of the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, is writer-at-large for New York Magazine, where she covers politics, media and culture from a feminist perspective. She has also written for The New Republic, Salon, Elle, The Nation, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her book Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and the winner of the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. She lives in New York City.

Possible topics include

Representation of singles in literature
Representation of singles in film, television, and other digital media
Narrative form
Space and architecture
Demographic change
Reproductive rights and family structures
Reproduction and temporality
Independent women’s labor and political work
“Women adrift” and crisis narratives
Singleness and race, class, or identity politics
Queer singleness
Familiar Figures: bachelor girls, spinsters, new women, and single ladies
The single and the state
Singleness and literary or media genre
Conservative and radical independence
Singleness in Trump’s America
Single activism
Comparative singleness
Singleness and disability

Scholars from all disciplines are encouraged to apply.

Full Panel Proposals: Panel coordinators should submit a 200-word rationale for the panel as whole. For each contributor, please submit a 250-word abstract, a short bio, and contact information. Panels
that include diverse panelists with a range of affiliations, career experiences, and disciplinary homes are strongly encouraged. Panels should include 4 papers. Submissions can be emailed as a Word document to singlelives2017@gmail.com.
Individual Papers: Individuals submitting paper proposals should provide an abstract of 250 words, a short bio, and contact information. Submissions can be emailed as a Word document to: singlelives2017@gmail.com.

Conference Statement: We hope to host a diverse, welcoming, open first Single Lives conference. We understand diversity to include attendees as well as academic subject, approach, and field. We welcome comparative projects, though because of its smaller scale, this conference will be conducted in English.
Please direct all questions about the conference and the submission process to: singlelives2017@gmail.com
For up to date conference details, see our website: https://singlelives2017.wordpress.com/

Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Single-Lives-2017-Conference-1262119710546609/

Conference Organizers:

Kate Fama

Jorie Lagerwey

School of English, Drama, and Film

University College Dublin

Conference Sponsors

College of Arts and Humanities, University College Dublin

Humanities Institute, University College Dublin

Hybrid Republicanism: Italy and American Art, 1840-1918

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Jennifer Daly

Hybrid Republicanism: Italy and American Art, 1840-1918 is an international conference that will consider the shared notions of republicanism and tyranny that animated American and Italian politics and visual culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The program will take into account significant historical events that linked Italy and the United States, such as the Italian wars of independence, the American Civil War, the founding of the Italian nation with Rome as its capital, the rise and decline of progressive reform in Italy and the United States, and Italian and American participation in World War I. The event will take place on October 6-7, 2016 and is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the American Academy in Rome, and the Centro Studi Americani, Rome with assistance from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, American Embassy in Rome, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Università di Macerata, Purchase College, the State University of New York, and Kenyon College. A sister conference, “The Course of Empire: American Fascination with Classical and Renaissance Italy, 1760-1970,” will occur at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC on October 20-21, 2017.

Keynote Address and Reception: October 6, 2016, 6:00pm-8:30pm at the Centro Studi Americani, Palazzo Mattei, Rome.

Don H. Doyle, McCausland Professor of History, University of South Carolina, and Director of ARENA, the Association for Research on Ethnicity and Nationalisms in America, “The Republican Experiment: America, Italy, and the Perils of Self-Government”

Conference Schedule: October 7, 2016, 9:30am-1:00pm, 2:30pm-6:00pm, at the American Academy in Rome, Via Angelo Masina 5, Rome.

All events are free and open to the public. For entry to the AAR, please show ID; no backpacks allowed.

Speakers:

Daniele Fiorentino, Professor of U. S. History, Department of Political Science, Università degli Studi Roma Tre and conference co-organizer, Welcome and Introductions

Leonardo Buonomo, Professor of American Literature, Department of Humanities, Università degli Studi di Trieste, “Past Glories, Present Miseries: Reading Italy through Art in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home”

Melissa Dabakis, Professor and Chair of Art History, Kenyon College and conference co-organizer, “Thomas Nast, Garibaldi, and I Mille: The Making of an Icon in the American Press”

Paul Kaplan, Professor of Art History, Purchase College, State University of New York and conference co-organizer, “Monuments to Tyranny: Issues of Race and Power in Nineteenth-Century Responses to Italian Public Sculpture”

Adam M. Thomas, Curator of American Art, Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, “Racial Hybridity and National Prophecy in Elihu Vedder’s The Cumean Sibyl”

Adrienne Baxter Bell, Associate Professor of Art History, Marymount Manhattan College, “A Reluctant Revolutionary: Elihu Vedder in the Circle of the Macchiaioli”

Marina Camboni, Professor Emerita of American Literature and Honorary President, Center for Italian American Studies, Università di Macerata, “American Artists and Enrico Nencioni’s Role as Mediator, Interpreter, and Translator in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century”

Maria Saveria Ruga, Lecturer, Accademia di Belle Arti di Catanzaro, “The Progress of America (1880) by Andrea Cefaly: Social Reform in Italy and the United States”

Lindsay Harris, Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in-Charge, School of Classical Studies, American Academy in Rome, “Capital ‘Wastelands’: Photography in Rome and Washington, DC at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”

Andrea Mariani, Professor Emeritus, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Università G. D’Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara, “Statues in Rome: Political Allegories and Cultural Archetypes”

IBAAS16 Conference Report

Posted on April 16, 2016April 16, 2016 by Jennifer Daly

Philip McGowan takes a look back at IBAAS16

The last time BAAS and the IAAS held a joint conference, the vast majority of this year’s delegates at IBAAS16 were either undergraduates, schoolchildren or, quite probably, in day care. Stranmillis College had been the venue a quarter of a century ago: this time, Queen’s University Belfast stepped up to the plate to do the honours.

And what honours they would turn out to be. For three days and nights, the two associations cemented alliances and friendships forged over recent years of renewed co-operation between members, evidenced mainly in collaborations between our postgraduate and early career communities.

In the build-up to the conference, and for the days immediately following it, Twitter was ablaze with the #IBAAS16 hashtag as delegates documented their travels from across Ireland, Britain, Europe, the US, Asia and Australia. With the opening panels beginning at 11.00am on the Thursday, IBAAS16 rearranged the usual order of things at BAAS and IAAS conferences to fit in its 95 panels and 300 speakers. Sponsored by the Eccles Centre, Professor John Howard of King’s College London delivered his plenary on the American nuclear cover-up of the Palomares incident in Spain in 1966 ensuring the first day concluded with collective gasps and a general sense of disbelief that – who’d have believed it? – official branches of the American government had conspired with Franco’s administration to conceal the full extent of a B-52 refuelling accident above Spain’s Mediterranean coast.

Following John’s brilliant lecture, delegates made their way to Belfast City Hall where the opening reception (hosted by Belfast City Council) was addressed by the US Consul General in Belfast, Daniel Lawton, who recalled America’s particular relation with the city of Belfast and reminded those present that it was George Washington who had granted Consular status to the city 220 years ago in 1796.

Friday brought sunshine to BT7 and yet more international delegates who crowded the Whitla Hall as well as Queen’s recently refurbished Graduate School and the Peter Froggatt Centre for more coffee breaks, lauded lunches and the most diverse set of panels ever assembled at either an annual BAAS or IAAS conference. Before the launch reception for BAAS 2017 hosted by Canterbury Christchurch University in Queen’s Great Hall, Professor Deborah Willis of NYU Tisch School of the Arts amazed the assembled delegates with a photographic history of social movements in the US from Emancipation to Black Live Matter. The range of images shown during her Journal of American Studies talk was extraordinary and the conversation during that evening’s reception was dominated by what Professor Willis had managed to present to the conference in just about sixty minutes.

For those who attended on the Saturday, all four seasons made their appearance with bright morning sunlight giving way in the afternoon to rolls of thunder, coupled with falls of snow and hail. None of this deterred the IBAAS delegates intent on stocking up on their fix of American Studies panels and roundtables ahead of the closing events of this Belfast conference. In a slight alteration to the usual IAAS annual plenary, the Alan Graham Memorial Lecture, Richard Ford read from his work at Titanic Belfast: his hour-long reading and question-and-answer session was then followed by the Gala Dinner. Having attended Professor Willis’s talk, Richard elected to change his chosen reading: instead of presenting new material, he read the opening half of ‘Everything Could Be Worse’ from Let Me Be Frank With You to highlight the varied and nuanced issues alive in the discussion of race in the United States today, and to ask what is the novelist’s role within this hugely contentious matter and how they can deploy the valencies within language to be productively provocative. 200 people crowded into the Andrews Gallery at Titanic Belfast: on the walls around them the first exhibition in the UK or Ireland by Guggenheim Fellowship awardee Larry Fink (he shares this notable honour with both Deborah Willis and Richard Ford) was on display alongside photographs by Richard Wade and Jo Longhurst.

The Gala Dinner was served in the Titanic Suite, replete with authentic replica Titanic staircase, and venue for the awarding of the annual BAAS and IAAS awards by outgoing chairs Sue Currell and Philip McGowan. Of particular note here was Ian Bell’s receiving of the BAAS Fellowship to mark his decades’ long dedication to the American Studies community in the UK. The official proceedings concluded with a toast to the memory of long-standing IAAS stalwart, former Chair, Secretary and Treasurer as well as former EAAS Treasurer, Tony Emmerson, who passed away in December 2014 but who had been eagerly anticipating what he rightly predicted would be a momentous event in the history of both associations.

Philip McGowan, Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Queen’s University Belfast, was the main organiser of the IBAAS16 conference which also marked the end of his five-year term as Chair of the IAAS. His research examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century US poetry, fiction and film; he is also interested in America’s history with alcohol and addiction.

Civil Rights Documentary Cinema and the 1960s: Transatlantic Conversations on History, Race and Rights

Posted on April 11, 2016 by Jennifer Daly

Civil Rights Documentary Cinema and the 1960s: Transatlantic Conversations on History, Race and Rights
The British Academy, London
24-26 May 2016

This conference – held in memory of American social activist, politician and leader in the civil rights movement Julian Bond (1940-2015) – brings together documentary filmmakers, activists, and film, history and media scholars. Its focus is films based in civil rights history and inspired by it. It will promote a trans-Atlantic exchange of ideas around film production, activist subjects, and historical research in the making of civil rights cinema, civil rights history and cultural memory. It examines race and rights – activism, massive resistance, film and visual cultures – to intervene creatively in the history of the 1960s and in the historiography of the civil rights movement.

The convenors are:

Prof. Sharon Monteith, Co-Director of the Centre for Research in race and Rights, University of Nottingham; Dr George Lewis, University of Leicester; Prof Nahem Yousaf, Nottingham Trent University; Dr Helen Laville, University of Birmingham

Speakers and filmmakers include:

John Akomfrah OBE, Smoking Dogs Films
Dr Reece Auguiste, University of Colorado, US
Eduardo Montes-Bradley, writer and director with Heritage Films Project at the University of Virginia, US
Professor Clayborne Carson, Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, US
Professor Jon Else, documentary filmmaker and Professor of Journalism, UC Berkley, US
Professor Peter Ling, University of Nottingham, UK
Professor Allison Graham, documentary filmmaker and historian, University of Memphis, US
Matthew Graves, University of Mississippi, US
Ms Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, Freedom Rider and former member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
David Shulman, documentary filmmaker, US and UK
Professor Stephen Tuck, University of Oxford, UK
Professor Clive Webb, University of Sussex, UK

Films screened will include selections from the ground-breaking 14-hour documentary series Eyes on the Prize (1987) and full screenings of At the River I Stand, (1993), Rebels: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (2012), The March (2013), An Ordinary Hero: The True Story of Joan Trumpauer Mulholland (2013), Ballots and Bullets in Mississippi (aka Dirt and Deeds in Mississippi, 2015)

To view the programme and to register for the conference please visit the British Academy event page here.

In conjunction with the conference, there is will also be a free evening screening of Julian Bond: Reflections from the Frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement and a conversation with its director Eduardo Montes-Bradley on Tuesday 24th May. Please register for this separately at the British Academy event page here.

This conference is co-sponsored by the Centre for Research in Race and Rights, the University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University, the University of Leicester and the University of Birmingham.

CFP: Swedish Association for American Studies 2016 Conference

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Jennifer Daly

Ninth Biennial Conference of the
Swedish Association for American Studies (SAAS)

Gothenburg, September 30 – October 1, 2016

Call for Papers

The Swedish Association for American Studies (SAAS) will hold its 9^th conference in Gothenburg on September 30 – October 1, 2016. Confirmed plenary speakers are Dag Blanck, Birgit Spengler and Marita Sturken.

For the occasion of its 9^th conference, SAAS invites all scholars working in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies to submit proposals for papers. We especially encourage prospective presenters to submit papers for the following panels:

Understanding Supervillains
Comics in America: The Big Two and their Shadows
The Americans: Our Past and Present
Reproducing Differently: Representations of Reproduction and Reproductive Technologies in North American Speculative Fiction
The treatment of history in Canadian Literature
Preserving U.S. History, Memorializing Shame
The Neoliberal American Novel
Teaching American literature in Sweden

For a full description of the panels and the contact details of the panel conveners, see the conference website (http://sprak.gu.se/forskning/konferenser/saas-2016). If you wish to submit a paper for one of the panels, please contact the panel conveners directly.

If you want to submit a paper that does not fit into any of the panels above, please send your proposal to Chloé Avril (chloe.avril@eng.gu.se)

We welcome submissions from junior and senior scholars on any topic related to the study of the United States and North America from both a historical and contemporary perspective. Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

Anthropology
Art
Cultural Studies
Film and Media Studies
Gender Studies
Literature
Musicology
Popular Culture
Political Science
Religion
US or North American History
Visual Culture

Deadline for paper proposals: February 15, 2016.

To submit a paper proposal, please provide the panel convener or the conference convener with a title for the paper, your name, email address and brief bio, and an abstract (200-250 words).

You may still submit a panel proposal, provided you already have three presenters enrolled. For panel proposals, please send us a title for the panel, the name, email address and brief bio of the panel convener, a description of the topic (200-500 words) as well the name, email, abstract and bio of each presenter. Panel submissions should be sent to the conference convener Chloé Avril (chloe.avril@eng.gu.se) by February 15, 2016.

SAAS is an academic network that encourages scholarship in the multidisciplinary field of American Studies. SAAS seeks to develop a critical understanding of the role, position and meaning of the United States and North America. In Sweden, research about the US/America is conducted in many different disciplines; the biennial SAAS conference thus functions as an important forum for interdisciplinary exchange and provides American Studies scholars with an opportunity to meet and network. (More information about our association can be found on our website: www.saasinfo.se)

CFP: Joint IAAS and BAAS conference 2016

Posted on April 11, 2015April 11, 2015 by Catherine Gander

BAAS 61 & IAAS 46

7-9 April 2016

Queen’s University Belfast

The 61^st annual conference of the British Association for American Studies will be a joint event with the Irish Association for American Studies as it holds its own 46^th annual conference. For the first time in a generation both associations will come together for what promises to be an exciting and not-to-be-missed conference at The Queen’s University of Belfast.

2016 will mark a number of anniversaries in these islands, most notably the centenary of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. Americanists will mark the 240^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and Belfast is an ideal location for this collaboration between the IAAS and BAAS. The Belfast News Letter was the first English language newspaper in Europe to publish details of the Declaration of Independence in 1776; in 1796, George Washington established a US Consulate in Belfast, appointing Belfast-born James Holmes on 20 May (coincidentally, Holmes’ brother-in-law Henry Joy was owner of the News Letter) as the first US Consul to Belfast. Other notable anniversaries include the centenary of James Montgomery Flagg’s Uncle Sam recruitment image in July 1916, and also the bicentenary of Uncle Sam’s first appearance in literature.

The 2016 conference will be a three-day conference beginning on Thursday 7 April and concluding with the conference banquet at Titanic Belfast on the evening of Saturday 9 April.

We are delighted to announce our plenary speakers:

Richard Ford: award-winning author of major contemporary American novels including Independence Day, Canada, and Let Me Be Frank With You.

Deborah Willis: Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging, the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

John Howard: Professor of American Studies, King’s College London.

Paper and panel proposals are welcomed on any subject that falls under the remit of American Studies. We invite proposals from individuals and from other interest groups including associations linked to BAAS and IAAS, such as the APG, BGEAH, BrANCH, TSA and HOTCUS.

Usually, the IAAS runs a themed annual conference. Given the anniversaries of revolutions and independence with which this event coincides, we warmly welcome suggestions for related papers and panels on this particular conference sub-theme.

Proposals for 20-minute presentations should be a maximum of 250 words and include a provisional title. Proposals by two or more people sharing a common theme are warmly invited and we welcome panels that cross disciplinary boundaries. The conference organisers hope to continue the initiative shown at previous BAAS and IAAS Annual Conferences by scheduling roundtable discussions and innovative panel presentations, and we encourage such proposals as appropriate. All proposals should be submitted to baasiaas2016@qub.ac.uk by 1 November 2015.

CFP: Homeliness, Domesticity and Security in American Culture

Posted on March 27, 2015 by Catherine Gander

Polish Association for American Studies Annual Conference

Homeliness, Domesticity and Security in American Culture

organized by

Department of Anglophone Cultures and Literatures

University of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS)

Warsaw

September 23-25, 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS

Recent academic interests and explorations within the field of broadly understood American Studies have been largely concentrating on the unusual and exceptional aspects of American literature, art and life, such as wildness, transgression, excess, violence, sublimity, greatness, intemperance, extraordinariness. The questions which the conference is going to address will focus on the constructions and the place of the “ordinary” viewed from the perspective of various “home”-inspired discourses, from housing to domestic policy, through questions of family values, ethics of modesty, simplicity of living, unpretentiousness, individual and domestic security, American communities, localities and neighborhoods. The homely, unlike the sublime and the beautiful, seems to be a category which has slipped from the critical horizon of the humanities as unaesthetic and too obvious, which obviousness we hope to problematize during the conference. Perhaps Walt Whitman’s “twenty-ninth bather” from Song of Myself, the woman to whom the homeliest of the twenty eight young and friendly bathing men was beautiful (“Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her”) could be also inquired in this respect?

We invite papers coming from the possibly broadest range of academic perspectives (Literary Criticism, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Feminist and Gender Studies, Translation Studies, Queer Theory, Philosophy, Sociology, History of Ideas, Colonial and Postcolonial Studies …, fully realizing that a strictly single-disciplinary approach is nowadays hardly thinkable), so as to show the complexity of the seeming simplicity of “home” (along with the wide range of its metaphors and metonymies) and its safekeeping in the context of American culture at whose beginnings the New World was also the original promise of a new home.

We suggest the following, broad, thematic areas only as a topographically drafted chart of the conference:

– the homely and the natural

– homeliness and norm

– homeliness and beauty

– dialects of the private and the homely

– homely homes

– domicile, abode, dwelling

– at home and abroad

– domestic spaces

– domesticity and domestication

– domestic peace

– cult(s) and cultivation of domesticity

– foreignizing and domesticating practices

– the vernacular and the foreign

– ideologies of domesticity

– home economies

– imagining home

– home and community

– native sons and daughters

– the other(s) of home

– the tamed and the rebellious

– home and mobility

– the bonds of home

– mistresses and masters of home

– privacy and hospitality

– sweet homey homes

– home as state/state as home

– exiles and cosmopolitans

– from wigwam to casino

– from cabin to the cabinet

– domestic securities

– home/stability/security

– tiny houses, tiny living

– hospitality: neighbors, visitors, strangers

– homelessness: hobos, bums and tramps

– urbanites, suburbanites, villagers

– visible and invisible unshelteredness

– sleeping in Central Park

– homes and shelters

– homes (away) from home

Keynote speakers confirmed to date include:

Professor Bridget Bennett, University of Leeds, UK

Professor Nancy Cott, Harvard University, USA

The conference venue will be located in the main building of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, ul. Chodakowska 19/31, Warsaw.

Abstracts (250 words) should be sent to PAAS2015@swps.edu.pl by June 15, 2015

Notification of acceptance will be sent by June 30, 2015

The deadline for registration and payment of the conference fee: July 30, 2015

The conference fee of 450 PLN (appr. 110 €) includes conference materials, coffee breaks and conference dinner. Costs of accommodation are not included in the conference fee and must be arranged separately.

Conference organizers:

Prof. Tadeusz Rachwał

Prof. Piotr Skurowski

Dr. Agnieszka Pantuchowicz

Dr. Anna Warso

Dr. Mikołaj Wiśniewski

Conference website: http://swps.pl/paas2015

CFP: ‘Power and Change in the Americas in the Modern Era’, an international PG conference

Posted on October 17, 2014October 17, 2014 by Catherine Gander

University College London from April 30 – May 1, 2015

The UCL Americas Research Network is pleased to invite scholars to participate in its first International Postgraduate Conference.

This two-day conference seeks to cater to an international community of postgraduate and early-career researchers of the Americas from across the humanities and the social sciences. We welcome paper proposals that address the overarching theme of the conference:

Power and Change in the Americas in the Modern Era

Geographically, this includes the whole Western Hemisphere (Central, South, and North America, as well as the Caribbean). By adopting a broad, hemispheric perspective, we hope to encourage debates that extend beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, and to question the validity of cultural divides that often limit research agendas and enclose perceptions of complex problems and communalities.

The conference, organized by UCL Americas Research Network, especially invites doctoral students and early career researchers whose work ranges both geographically and temporally, and will encourage interdisciplinary conversations on national, regional and local topics and those whose focus is comparative, transnational and global. By facilitating a space to have these discussions, this conference aims to create an ongoing platform and network for collaborative exchange.

The structure of the conference consists of three thematic approaches:

1. Representations, Ideology, and Ideas of Change:

Evolutionary and revolutionary concepts in post-independence Americas have brought about significant changes to the ways in which actors and groups think, represent, and position themselves and their demands vis-à-vis the formal structures of power. This stream invites papers that address the topics of “change” and “power” in the Americas in its multiple forms of representations, ideas, and ideologies. The underlying tensions and contestations of certain ideas that have a direct impact on our understanding of what power and change means form the major rationale of this inquiry. Developing new modes of thinking continues to be fundamental in the attempt to understand the political in terms of the modern nation and the major forces shaping the lives of subjects in the Americas.

2. Institutions, The State, and Governments:

This second thematic approach focuses on political institutions and the state in the Americas, and addresses the changing parameters of power and the political in modern times. This includes the ways in which the state and its associated institutions (both non-state and governmental) have evolved over time and geographical space; the modes of interaction between states and institutions, both within and across countries; as well as domestic, regional, and transnational actors. This stream invites papers that address themes from across the spectrum of political interactions, encompassing debates around sovereignty and global governance, regional integration and subnational decentralization, and institutional design and practice. We particularly welcome papers that take an explicit comparative and interdisciplinary approach, and that can appeal to students and scholars of the Americas from diverse disciplinary backgrounds.

3. Contesting Power and Social Practices:

This thematic approach is interested in accounting for how different actors, communities, and movements in the Americas engage and interact with multiple-layered power structures, the state and its institutions and wider social systems. Social, economic, and political changes in the Americas are processes in which social actors are both objects and subjects. Confronted with these changes, historical and contemporary subjects have followed distinctive paths, from support and passive acceptance, to engagement in active contestation. This stream invites papers that address both the processes of resistance and the emergence of ‘from-below’ alternatives driven by non-hegemonic subjects, including, but not limited to, resistance to economic and productive models and to political and governance regimes; the contestation of hegemonic knowledge; the bottom-up emergence of social and material alternatives in the everyday life of social subjects and movements.

For more information, please visit our conference homepage on http://www.ucl.ac.uk/americas/research-fields/uclia-resnet/cfp

The organizing committee invites all interested doctoral students and early-career researchers to submit abstracts, which should not exceed 300 words, as well as a brief biography of no more than 50 words, which should include your name, email, and institutional affiliation. The deadline for abstracts and paper proposals is November 15^th 2014.

Please submit your abstracts to: uclamericasresearchnetwork@gmail.com

NB: This conference will be free to attend, both for speakers and for the general public, though prior registration for attendance without presenting a paper is essential. Details on how to register will follow shortly. Keynote speakers will be confirmed soon.

Key dates:

Deadline for paper-proposal submission: November 15^th 2014

Deadline for paper submission: March 20^th 2015

Conference: April 30^th to May 1^st 2015

Early EAAS Biennial Conference Announcement

Posted on October 17, 2014October 17, 2014 by Catherine Gander

Dates and Details for your diary!

The European Association for American Studies is pleased to announce that its next biennial conference will take place in Constanta, Romania from 22^nd to 25^th April, 2016.

The EAAS conference will be hosted by our colleagues at Ovidius University in Constanta, with the local support of the Romanian Association for American Studies. Constanta is an ancient and beautiful resort city on the Black Sea coast. The easiest entry point for international visitors is likely to be Bucharest airport, and this location provides a great opportunity to add days for vacation and exploration. The conference website currently being designed will give full details of travel and accommodation options.

Open Call for Presentations	To highlight the range and diversity of American Studies in Europe the EAAS is issuing an open call for proposals for the 2016 conference. Proposers may wish to identify and explore long-standing, current and emerging intellectual debates in American Studies; to explore critically the varying practices and methodologies in American Studies; to bring to life current discussions and to posit potential paradigms in American Studies. The various anniversaries of 2016 provide a variety of potential foundations for proposals. It will be 150 years since the start of the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction. That was also the era of the dime novel, and Seeley Regester’s The Dead Letter, credited by some as the first full-length American crime novel, appeared in 1866. 125 years will have passed since Thomas Edison patented the motion camera and 100 since the creation of the US National Parks Service. 1916 also saw the opening of the nation’s first birth control clinic, the election from Montana of Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to sit in the US House of Representatives, the release of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and the publication of Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems. It was also the birth year of Shirley Jackson, Walker Percy, and Walter Cronkite. The National Organization for Women celebrates its 50^th anniversary in 2016, as does Star Trek.
	Contemporary American Studies topics could include, for example, discussion of the USA’s strong, diverse and expanding literary canon; the multi-dimensional character and seemingly endless inventiveness of America’s cultural output; the inventiveness of American culture in an age of new social media; the heritage that might be left after the nation’s first African-American presidency. The EAAS conference encompasses topics across the disciplinary spectrum in American Studies, as well as interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches to the subject. The themes mentioned here are not intended to be a definitive list, and the conference committee looks forward to receiving many different and stimulating proposals.
Format	The EAAS is moving away from its former Workshop format. Proposals are now invited that may use a variety of presentation styles. The conference structure is expected mainly to consist of traditional panels sessions with papers, and proposals targeted at this format are very welcome indeed, but submissions may also be proposed as roundtables, workshops, shop-talks, dialogues, interviews, performances, individual lecture presentations, readings or in other innovative formats. All proposals are expected to include the opportunity for discussion.

Session chairs	Volunteers are invited to fill the role of chairs or facilitators for sessions where these positions are vacant. Volunteers to chair sessions should include their name and affiliation, and a brief statement of their areas of expertise. The conference committee will gratefully call on volunteers to add them to appropriate sessions where possible.
Selection	The EAAS is committed to a conference that reflects the broadest disciplinary range within American Studies, the multinational membership of the EAAS, and the international participation that its biennial meetings attract. The conference committee will take these aims into account in reviewing proposals and in constructing the conference programme.
Deadline	The deadline for Proposals will be 15 June 2015. The Proposals process will be managed by the Secretary General of the EAAS and full details of the submission process will appear soon on the EAAS website. Meanwhile – note the dates in your diary, and take this opportunity to begin drafting your proposal for the 2016 conference.