We are delighted to announce our Summer Bursary Winners!
Our Early-Career Conference Bursary Winner was Dr. Alan Carmody, while our Postgraduate Conference Bursary Winners were Máiréad Casey and Bowen Wang.
Congratulations, all!
IAAS’ Annual Emmerson Lecture – ‘Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the lives of Irish emigrant women’
Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America were large numbers of women, many young and many travelling alone. Some prospered making new lives for themselves and sending money back home. Others quickly found themselves in trouble and on an astonishing scale. Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, creators of the celebrated ‘Bad Bridget’ podcast, and the bestselling, chart topping book, Bad Bridget: Crime, mayhem and the lives of Irish emigrant women have unearthed a world in which Irish women in America actually outnumbered Irish men in prison. A world in which you could get locked up for ‘stubbornness’, and in which a serial killer called Lizzie Halliday was described by the New York Times as ‘the worst woman on earth’. Join them to hear the stories of Irish women and girls which are brilliantly strange, sometimes funny and often moving. From sex workers and thieves to kidnappers and killers, these ‘Bad Bridgets’ are women who went from the frying pan of their impoverished homeland to the fire of vast North American cities.
The lecture will take place in-person at Ulster University Belfast Campus – Lecture Theatre 1 at 6.30pm on Thursday, October 10th. Please reserve your seats through Eventbrite.
About the speakers:
Elaine Farrell’s research focuses on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Irish gender and crime history. She has published on infanticide and concealment of birth, imprisonment and transportation, criminal tattoos, and women in WWI. She leads the AHRC-funded project, ‘“Bad Bridget”: Criminal and Deviant Irish Women in North America, 1838-1918’, with Dr Leanne McCormick (Ulster University). She is also currently working on a history of Irish female convicts in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Leanne McCormick is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI) at Ulster University. Her research interests include women’s history, history of sexuality and history of medicine in Ireland/Northern Ireland and the diaspora and she have published widely in these areas.
With Professor Elaine Farrell (QUB), she been working on the AHRC funded ‘Bad Bridget: Criminal and Deviant Irish Women in North America, 1838-1918’. They have produced a podcast series, an exhibition at the National Museums NI, Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh and an Irish Times #1 bestselling book, Bad Bridget: Crime, mayhem and the lives of Irish emigrant women.
About the IAAS W. A. Emmerson Lecture:
Beginning in 2014, the IAAS Lecture is an annual event, hosted at a third level institution on the island of Ireland, and presented by an invited member of the IAAS on a topic of their choosing. In 2015, the lecture was renamed the W. A. Emmerson Lecture, in honour of our much-loved late Treasurer. Broad in its remit, the IAAS Lecture appeals to both academic and non-academic communities, and promotes the long-standing interest in and connection to American culture in Ireland.
“Her life is controlled, possessed, by a shifting set of laws that make your garden-variety savage initiation rite look like milk time in the nursery school.”–Shirley Jackson, “On Girls of Thirteen”.
Shirley Jackson wrote extensively about the experiences of teenagers and young people across her considerable body of work. In her humorous domestic fiction, she, like many post-war adults, looked on in bemused wonder at the strange rites and rituals of the newly-formed teenage demographic. In her novels and short stories, she described young people navigating the often tumultuous, occasionally traumatic, passage from childhood to adulthood (The Road Through the Wall, Hangsaman, “Louisia, Please Come Home”). Her depictions of teenage girls, in particular, are often deeply complex and surprisingly nuanced, especially within the context of a culture that frequently dismissed female adolescents as greedy, frivolous, superficial and ridiculous. Multifaceted and possessed of a striking emotional and intellectual depth, her adolescent characters run the gamut from the clever, resourceful narrator who outwits the Devil himself in “The Smoking Room” to the murderous Merricat Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
The depth and variety of Jackson’s treatment of adolescence is perhaps all the more surprising when we consider that she was writing in age when the teenager was still a comparatively new cultural phenomenon, with the term “teenager” only emerging in the first half of the 1940s. In those years, teens became a flash point in a range of debates and discourses generated by everyone from parents and educators to manufacturers and advertisers. An increasingly powerful consumer base and an emblem of America’s post-war prosperity, adolescents were also a source of anxiety as various authorities fretted over their rebellious attitudes, peer-focused social lives and byzantine dating practices.
In this issue, we seek to explore Jackson’s interventions in the construction of the American teenager and how her work interrogates this nascent cultural icon. In doing so, we will investigate how Jackson employed the adolescent as an avatar through which to explore broader questions of gender, power and family dynamics. We are also interested in considering how Jackson’s fictional adolescents anticipated many later trends in the development of Gothic, horror and YA fiction through her engagement with archetypes such as teenage witches, juvenile delinquents and awkward, directionless young adults.
Possible article topics include, but are not limited to:
- The representation of teenagers in Jackson’s domestic stories
- Jackson’s teenagers and magazine market
- Jackson and young adult fiction, film and/or television
- The figure of the adolescent or youth as inflected by race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.
- Adolescents and family/community power dynamics
- Adolescence and the post-World War II American context (advertising, popular culture, music, media, moral panics)
- Gothic childhood/adolescence
Abstracts of 500 words plus short author bio should be sent to shirleyjacksonstudies@gmail.com by November 30, 2024. Upon acceptance, completed articles of 6,000-8,000 words will be due by May 30, 2025 with revisions to follow.
The Uncanny States of America: Encountering the Planetary (EJAS Special Issue)
Editors: Dominik Steinhilber (University of Konstanz), Florian Wagner (University of Jena)
Taking into consideration recent developments toward a Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies, this special issue of The European Journal of American Studies aims to rethink and recontextualize the American project not through the homogenizing impulses of the global sublime but through the decentered relationality of planetarity—the act of “making our home unheimlich or uncanny” (Spivak 74). Such a planetary approach to American Studies may be able to more adequately address the multilayered social, political, and ecological crises of the 21st century than previous cosmopolitanist, globalist, or post- as well as transnationalist approaches.
To this day, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass stands as the poetic bible of American democracy and its project of nationhood. Yet the voice that speaks “I am large. I contain multitudes” also connotes the sublime dream of an American national experiment that cannot be contained by the nation alone, “the manifest destiny redreamed” into “a spiritual and secular unity that will unite the globe as one organism” (Fuller 2022). Through the sublime experience of being able to contain multitudes beyond itself (Kant 109), the rational self transcends, sublimity figuring the world as little more than a resource to be absorbed and consumed. Applying the sublime’s inherently anthropocentric and logocentric logic to the national project reveals justifications of dominance over the Other that is ‘Not-Me’. The sublime greatness of the American experiment hence always already contained its deepest abysses, from the exploitation of the racialized other and the environment, excessive nationalism, to U.S. imperialism. Globalization, primarily driven by American capital and culture, and the subsequent crises of global climate change are only the last figuration of the sublime idea of America.
While (ecologically) regulative principles have remained largely inaccessible to the likes of post- and transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and globalism, the ecocritically informed discourse of planetarity may be better positioned to take on a sense of “stewardship” with fewer politically fraught connotations of paternalism, colonialism, and monopoly capital. In its orientation toward “the radical otherness of the planet” (Chakrabarty 25), planetary thought can leave behind all too narrow notions of nationness and think ethics and relationality beyond the human and beyond national borders and global structures. A form of stewardship based on the planet’s uncanny otherness may thus connote “both an ethics of care for both organic and inorganic planetary resources and a social stance mindful to conserve cultural legacies” (Elias&Moraru xxiv). In this vein, we propose the planetary uncanny as an alternative mode of thinking about our current planet-wide crises. In many ways an uncanny double of the sublime that, however, rescinds sublimity’s sense of closed-offness, mastery, elevation, and control—the uncanny may help construct horizontal ethics and imaginaries of intimacy and contact grounded in otherness. To think globally, is to think the sublime; to think the planetary, on the other hand, is to think uncannily.
Against this background, we seek to mobilize the uncanny as a mode or method of a literary and cultural examination of (a not-yet-realized) planetarity. The special issue invites contributors to think through different modes of the uncanny in order to investigate its potential for subversion, destabilization, and defamiliarization, but also for contact, affect, and jouissance. We want to encourage American Studies scholars from various fields and disciplines to rethink the American project through the planetary uncanny to explore modes of imagining coexistence and contact not through increasing familiarity—meaning an absorption of the other into the self that may only serve homogenization and control—but rather through a profound and indelible, radical alterity. How can American Studies (re)think the sublimity of the American experiment, egalitarianism, democracy, humanism, yet also ecology at large, in terms of the uncanny? How may a closer look at the uncanny states of America, from its beginnings until now, destabilize our traditional perspectives on U.S. ideology, imperialism, and globalism, and allow for the return of a repressed planetary thought and imaginaries that deal in coexistence and uncertainty?
Potential contributors should send a 500 word abstract and a short biographical note to dominik.steinhilber@uni-konstanz.de and florian.wagner@uni-jena.de by December 31, 2024. Contributors will be notified of their acceptance by January 19, 2025 Finished articles (5,000-7,500 words; newest MLA style) should be submitted by May 31, 2025. All disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, and topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Critical (re)readings of American canonical and non-canonical texts through a planetary lens
• Theoretical and historical reflections on the sublime and the uncanny in the context of globalism, imperialism, and the planetary.
• Indigenous methodologies and literatures in relation to planetarity.
• Issues of planetarity and eco-cosmopolitanism, environmental responsibility.
• Critiques of the Anthropocene and related concepts (e.g., Capitalocene, Cthulucene etc)
• Human and non-human agencies in the Anthropocene in relation to notions of the uncanny, the eerie, and the weird.
• Issues relating to material ecocriticism (e.g. questions of materiality and ‘storied’ matter)
• Multi-species ethnography, plant life (writing)
• Engagement with petrocultures, petrochemical landscapes
• Religion and the supernatural in American literature and thought
The special issue is planned to be published in late 2026. Please feel free to contact dominik.steinhilber@uni-konstanz.de and florian.wagner@uni-jena if you need further information.
Works Cited:
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 46, no. 1, 2019, pp. 167–92.
Elias, Amy J and Christian Moraru, eds. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Northwestern UP, 2015.
Fuller, William R. “Love and Imperialism: Reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Through Edward Carpenter and Maurice Bucke.” Inquiries Journal vol. 14, no. 03, 2022.
Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford UP, 2008.
Horn, Eva and Hannes Bergthaller. The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities. Routledge, 2020.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. Columbia University Press, 2003.
27-29 November 2024
The Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS) is a leading research center and graduate
school, partnered with Leiden University, dedicated to the study of American history, politics,
and society. Since 2003, the Institute has organized regular seminars for doctoral students
pursuing research in its areas of interest.
The RIAS will host its next in-person research seminar in Middelburg on 27-29 November 2024.
We kindly invite applications from current doctoral candidates whose research covers any
aspect of American culture, media, society, politics, or foreign relations, recent or historical.
We are particularly interested in studies in the following research areas:
– U.S. in the world
– Culture and ideology
– Environmental issues
– Race and gender studies
– Social justice movements, civil and political rights
We welcome proposals for research papers (e.g., a dissertation chapter) or papers that give an
overview of the PhD project. Participants will present their paper and contextualize it within
their research project in 15 minutes. Each presentation is followed by a group discussion of
approximately 45 minutes, providing extensive opportunities for feedback.
Applicants are invited to submit their proposals, consisting of a 300-word abstract and a CV,
both in pdf, no later than Sunday, 15 September 2024. These should be addressed to the
seminar coordinator, Jeanine Quené, and sent to info@roosevelt.nl.
To support a culture of diversity and inclusion, we strongly encourage proposals from students
that reflect the diversity of our field in terms of gender, ethnicity, and disability.
Participants will be expected to have a paper (approximately 6,000 words) ready for precirculation
by Friday, 8 November 2024.
The RIAS will provide accommodation and meals in Middelburg.
For further information, please consult our website at www.roosevelt.nl or contact the
seminar coordinator at j.quene@roosevelt.nl
When considering the evolution of the African American Civil Rights movement, 1963 looms large in
historical study and memory. In 1963, the Birmingham campaign (and the state violence wrought
upon it) captured national and international attention, and a quarter of a million people marched on
Washington D.C. and listened to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. The wider
struggle for civil liberties extended beyond the Civil Rights Movement, even while it remained
inspired by and crucially intertwined with it. From housewives inspired by the publication of Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to white evangelicals protesting the secularization of public
education, 1963 was a year in which the struggle for civil liberties manifested in new forms and
adopted new rhetorics. As such, the year of 1963 demonstrates how broader changes in the
political, intellectual, media, and cinematic landscape provided a variety of societal groups with new
ways to interact with the civil rights story and to reimagine themselves as part of it.
This edited volume engages with and interrogates the historical concept of the calendar year,
capturing the breadth of diverse historical actors whose ideals and actions were inspired by and
interwoven with the Civil Rights Movement. The kaleidoscopic nature of 1963 – with interconnected
shifts at a micro and macro level – indicates the distorting and transforming impact of the year on
American life. This strict chronological focus, combined with a thematic breadth of papers, offers a
range of new perspectives on a crucial year for the Civil Rights Movement. However, it also
encourages students and scholars to reflect on the purpose, significance, and potential limitations of
the calendar year as a category of analysis in history.
We are seeking chapter proposals that interact with the concept of 1963 as a ‘watershed year’ in
the struggle for civil liberties. Whilst we will consider papers from a broad spectrum of topics, we
particularly encourage papers that address gaps in the current plan for the volume. These include,
but are not limited to:
• Students and student activism
• Women’s history and the history of feminism
• Cultural forms and their relationships to civil rights, including literature and literary figures
Chapter proposal submission:
Please contact the volume editors, Uta Balbier (uta.balbier@history.ox.ac.uk), Emily Brady
(emily.brady@rai.ox.ac.uk), and Megan Hunt (megan.hunt@ed.ac.uk) by March 1, 2024, if you are
interested in submitting a proposal for the volume.
Please include a proposal of 300-500 words, alongside a short biography (max. 300 words).
Deadline for abstract submission: March 15, 2024
Further information: We intend to conduct a workshop for authors which will take place in
September 2024 (in person or online depending on funding) to workshop draft chapters and to work
jointly towards a cohesive volume.
Subject Fields
History, American History, American Studies, Film and Film History, Literature, Black Studies, Gender
Studies.
Call for Nominations/Expressions of Interest:
IAAS Executive Committee Vacancies
The Irish Association for American Studies is calling for nominations for the following positions on the Executive Committee by 22nd April 2024.
Chair
Secretary
Please note that in accordance with the ethos of the IAAS, the committee especially welcomes nominations for members from under-represented groups, backgrounds, and ethnicities.
We are looking for executive committee members who have experience and familiarity with our activities, ideals, and membership, and who have some experience in committee participation and organisation. There are many ways to get involved with the IAAS, and new members are very welcome at Association events.
- Nominations must be made by a member of the IAAS
- Nominees must be members of the IAAS
- We accept self-nominations
- All nominations will need to be seconded by an IAAS member
- All executive committee members, aside from fulfilling duties specific to their role, will be expected to attend all IAAS committee meetings throughout the year (there are usually 5 meetings per annum)
- The positions will be elected by members of the IAAS during the AGM (3rd May 2024, University College Dublin). Attendance at the AGM is required. The roles commence on same.
- Please email your nominations, expressions of interest, or any queries to our Secretary Dr Sarah McCreedy at info@iaas.ie.
For a full description of role responsibilities, click here.
After Words: Reconsidering Narratives of Trauma and Violence in the Humanities
School of English Postgraduate Conference
Trinity College Dublin – Trinity Long Room Hub
In-person event
9th February 2024
Organizers: Ginevra Bianchini and Elena Valli, PhD Researchers TCD English
Final Programme here
The way violence is represented always influences its reception and integration within the cultural imaginary. The narration of violence is ingrained in our perception of ourselves and our communities, and those who report traumatic events then carry the responsibility of how they are received and memorialised.
Just as the world emerged from the COVID-19 crisis, the Russian invasion of Ukraine turned the general atmosphere of hope for a new beginning into an even darker and more oppressive state of uncertainty, fear, and sorrow. As scholar Judith Lewis Herman has observed, “[t]he conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.” How do newspapers and media reports choose which pieces of information are to be shared with the public? Why are certain stories considered more important than others? On which premises are specific pieces of news discarded? How geographically, culturally, and socially inclusive are these narratives? And, most importantly, when it comes to trauma, how ethical and accurate can its depiction be when told by someone else?
These questions are more and more relevant in the present age, when it has become extremely easy to both share information and instrumentalise or sensationalise it against its original purposes. This topic of discussion, however, has been central to literature and the arts for much longer. As Michel Foucault observed in “What is an Author?” (1969), any writer or artist is the creator of a reality which is at least partly influenced by their choices, a god-like creature who directs the life of its characters. This becomes especially problematic when suffering and trauma are retold by those who did not experience them. The possibility to ‘become someone else’ through a work of art is one of the great gifts of literary and creative expression, encouraging empathy and mutual understanding while helping elaborate trauma. At the same time, can one truly and faithfully narrate someone else’s most tragic memory?
Moving from these premises, this conference wishes to bring together a wide community of young scholars from all backgrounds working on literary and cultural representations of trauma and violence across historical periods, genres, and contexts. What are the methods, difficulties, and limitations of representing and memorialising violence, and its traumas? How does violence impact our perception of others, ourselves, and interpersonal relationships? How do we, as young scholars, deal with a world constantly rifled by conflicts, and how can we incorporate these topics effectively and ethically into our work?
The Virginia Museum of History & Culture (VMHC) offers research fellowships of up to three weeks a year to promote the interpretation of Virginia and access to its collections. Thanks to a matching grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and generous gifts from individuals, fellowships carry a weekly stipend of $1,000 and $500 for local mileage. A week is defined as five days in the E. Claiborne Robins, Jr. Research Library, which is open 10am to 5pm, Monday through Saturday. The deadline for applications is Friday, January 26, 2024. For information about the research fellowships and how to apply for 2024, please visit the following page on the VMHC website: https://
AfterWords: Reconsidering Narratives of Trauma and Violence in the Humanities
School of English Postgraduate Conference – Trinity College Dublin & Trinity Long Room Hub
We are delighted to annoAfterWords final poster hybrid versionunce that a postgraduate conference on the representation of trauma and violence in the humanities will be organised by Elena Valli and Ginevra Bianchini, two PhD researchers from the School of English in Trinity College Dublin, on the 9th February 2024 in person and online at the Trinity Long Room Hub.
We welcome abstracts of 300 words and a short bio of about 100 words to pgengconference20
The organisers can be reached at the above email address with any questions.
Irish Association for American Studies Annual Conference
University College Dublin
1-3 May 2024
Conference Theme: “Dis/Trust”
Keynote Speakers: Dr Imaobong Umoren (London School of Economics) Prof. Johannes Voelz (Goethe-University Frankfurt)
“In God We Trust.” While these words, printed on every coin and banknote issued by the Federal Reserve, evidently speak to the importance of religion in the United States, they also acknowledge the centrality of trust to America’s self-image. Even for those thinkers whose interests have been more secular than religious, the special status and nature of social trust in the US has been a subject of comment and debate. In Democracy in America (1835/1840), Alexis de Tocqueville praised the American culture of voluntary association as an antidote to the loss of trust that came with the decaying of the old regimes and rising class conflict in Europe. In the late twentieth century, neo-Tocquevilleans including Francis Fukuyama (Trust, 1995) and Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone, 2000) argued that the high-trust character of communal life was crucial to American success but that it was coming under renewed threat in an age of economic globalisation. Today, the increasingly polarised quality of American cultural and political life, fuelled by bitterly contrasting media narratives, seems to indicate that social trust is indeed breaking down.
Yet to view the US as a high-trust society in present-day decline also involves overlooking those who have historically been excluded from its networks of social trust. While the American dream has traditionally offered immigrants a reason to trust in the possibilities of their new lives, American reality has often inculcated distrust more than trust. For marginalised and racialised groups – including but not limited to Native Americans and African Americans – it has been particularly difficult to trust in the benevolence of an American state founded on their destruction and enslavement, and to feel part of a shared history in which promises have been broken and treaties disregarded. The expansion of American Studies into a transnational and hemispheric discipline over recent decades has also drawn attention to trust and distrust of American power, particularly in the history and cultural production of peoples who have fallen within the ambit of that power.
Trust can be described as a feeling, an attitude, an atmosphere, or a relationship (Baier 1986, Hosking 2014). It has been considered a means to reduce modern complexity (Luhmann 1973), a cognitive-emotional coping mechanism that facilitates action in situations of uncertain outcome (Schloss 2021). Although a regular subject for social scientists, the fact that trust tends to be invisible and unconscious (especially when functioning well) makes it an equally appropriate subject for the humanities. Social trust provides “the ethical substance of everyday life” (Bernstein 2015) and becomes most evident only in its absence, when what was previously trusted becomes open to question. The present moment in the United States is arguably defined by a heightened consciousness of issues of trust and distrust: we invite papers that address this moment, but we are equally interested in papers that consider dis/trust at other moments in American history and culture.
We welcome papers on the general theme of “Dis/trust” from all disciplines in American Studies, broadly defined. Possible paper and panel topics may include but are not limited to: – American histories of dis/trust
– Literary histories of dis/trust
– Dis/trust and American politics
– Dis/trust and the visual arts
– Dis/trust and disinformation
– Interpersonal, institutional, and distributed trust in the US
– Digital ecologies of dis/trust
– American experiments in trust
– Paranoia and dis/trust
– Dis/trust, economy, finance
– Dis/trusting American power
– Dis/trust and the racial imaginary
– Dis/trust in/of the American academy
– Gendered histories of dis/trust
– Queer(ing) American dis/trust
Abstracts of 200-300 words for 20-minute papers, along with an author bio of c.100 words, should be submitted by attachment to trust.ucd@gmail.com by 1st February 2024. We also welcome joint proposals for panels of three papers, or panels with innovative formats. Applicants will be informed by the end of February as to their acceptance for the conference.
The IAAS is an all-island scholarly association dedicated to promoting interdisciplinary American Studies in Ireland. We are dedicated to equality, diversity, and inclusion, and we welcome proposals from under-represented groups. We also encourage proposals from researchers who are based at institutions around the world, whose research stems from a variety of disciplines and languages, and who are at any career stage. Some IAAS bursaries are available to support the participation of early career and precariously employed researchers. You can apply for these at the IAAS website: https://iaas.ie/bursaries/
All presenters must be members of the IAAS to register for and attend the conference. More information is available here: https://iaas.ie/memberships/.
This conference is held in association with the Irish Research Council-funded project “Imaginative Literature and Social Trust, 1990-2025.” The website is: www.trustlit.org.