Heidelberg Center for American Studies 20th Annual Spring Academy Conference (20–24th March 2023)

Posted on by Jack Heeney

Heidelberg Center for American Studies 20th Annual Spring Academy Conference

Heidelberg, Germany, 20–24 March, 2023

*Call for Papers * 

The twentieth HCA Spring Academy on American Culture, Economics, Geography, History, Literature, Politics, and Religion will be held from March 20-24, 2023. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one-week conference that provides twenty international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and discuss their Ph.D. projects.

The HCA Spring Academy invites participants to work closely with experts in their respective fields of study and offers workshops held by visiting scholars.

We encourage applications that pursue an interdisciplinary approach and range broadly across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Papers can be presented on any subject relating to the study of the United States of America. Possible topics include American identity, issues of ethnicity, gender, transatlantic relations, U.S. domestic and foreign policy, economics, as well as various aspects of American history, literature, religion, geography, law, musicology, and culture. Proposals should include a preliminary title and run to no more than 300 words.

Participants are requested to prepare a 20-minute presentation of their research project, which will be followed by a 40-minute discussion. The presentations will be arranged into ten panel groups.

In addition to cross-disciplinary and international discussions during the panel sessions, the Spring Academy aims at creating a pleasant collegial atmosphere for further scholarly exchange and contact.

Accommodation will be provided by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies.

Thanks to a small travel fund, the Spring Academy is able to subsidize travel expenses for participants registered and residing in soft-currency countries. Scholarship applicants will need to document the necessity for financial aid and explain how they plan to cover any potentially remaining expenses. In addition, a letter of recommendation from their doctoral advisor is required.

 

START OF APPLICATION PROCESS:                                          August 15, 2022

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS:                                                November 15, 2022

SELECTIONS WILL BE MADE BY:                                                January 2023

PLEASE USE OUR ONLINE APPLICATION SYSTEM:             www.hca-springacademy.de

MORE INFORMATION:                                                                 www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de

FOR FURTHER QUESTIONS:                                                        springacademy@hca.uni-heidelberg.de

Recent Bursary Winner Report: Máiréad Casey, NUI Galway

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

 

The International Gothic Association annual conference is one of the largest and most prestigious dissemination opportunity for an early career researcher in the fields of Gothic and Horror studies. I attended this conference shortly after submitting my PhD thesis. As such, it presented a unique and timely opportunity to connect with an international selection of scholars in my field. As this was the first event of its kind that I was able to attend in person since the covid-19 pandemic, it was a cherished opportunity to see new research, network, and meet scholars and publishers in my field in person.

            The theme of “Gothic Interruptions” was particularly relevant to my research on horror representations of political and feminist consciousness after The Great Recession. With the CFP asking “How do these Gothic circumstances, terrifying as they may be, lead to change, looking toward new futures?” IGA2022 provided an exceptional intersection of my research interests and expertise. Participating in the conference permitted me to locate my own work on contemporary American horror cinema within that academic conversation.

My PhD research analysed American gender politics in the post-recession era as mobilised around the issue of sexual violence and as seen through selected demon-possession films produced in that time. My paper, “Demon Girls, Interrupted: Sexual Violence and Raised Feminist Consciousness in American Horror Cinema” used the case study of the 2011 film Lovely Molly (Sánchez) as an example of how contemporary demon-possession narratives relate to a reactionary, “popular” misogynist backlash to feminism’s fourth wave, particularly towards feminist theory and activism relating to sexual violence, harassment, and misconduct. I had a wonderful experience presenting my paper on a panel with researchers that were engaged in feminist and horror research and received thoughtful and supportive feedback and questions from the panel chair and attendees.

 

Dr Máiréad Casey is an early career researcher with a PhD in Film and Digital Media from Ollscoil na Gaillimhe/University of Galway (formerly NUI Galway) under the supervision of Dr Conn Holohan. She currently teaches at Trinity College Dublin and can be reached at caseym4@tcd.ie

 

PopMeC: Animals in the American Popular Imagination Conference 2022

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy
We’re glad to share the details for PopMeC’s Animals in the American Popular Imagination virtual keynote talks:

Brett Mills: Jaws, from the Shark’s Point of View
Wednesday, September 7, 2022 at 6PM CEST

Christy Tidwell: Prehistoric Futurism: Dinosaurs, Kids, and the Future in the Jurassic Park Franchise
Thursday, September 8, 2022 at 6PM CEST

The talks will be held on Zoom. Registration is free / pay what you want at 

https://popular-animals.com/index.php/registration/

You can find a brief description of the talks and speakers on our official website
______________________

Animals in the American Popular Imagination | Conference 2022
Organized by

PopMeC

 and AACCP
Follow on Twitter

@POPanimals_2022

Facebook

official website

The W.A. Emmerson Lecture 2022

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

 

The Irish Association for American Studies is delighted to announce that the esteemed Dr Dara Downey will be delivering our 2022 W. A. Emmerson lecture in person, in the Neill Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

Dr Downey will be presenting on her current research, the highly anticipated literary biography of Shirley Jackson. Her lecture is titled: ‘Mainstreaming Shirley Jackson: Resurrecting a Cold-War Author in the Post-Trump Age’.

Dr Downey will be introduced by Dr Bernice Murphy, Associate Professor in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, whose work on American horror and gothic narratives is widely acclaimed.

All are welcome to this event, although booking is required. Seating is limited, so please register for a seat at the lecture at your earliest convenience.

The IAAS code of conduct applies to this event and all IAAS events.

In the interests of public safety and in light of sharply rising COVID-19 numbers, the IAAS asks that all attendees wear masks to this event. To sign up for the event, click here. 

About the speaker:

Dr Dara Downey lectures in English in Trinity College Dublin and Dublin City University. She is the author of American Women’s Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (2014), editor of The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, and co-editor (with Ian Kinane and Elizabeth Parker) of Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (2016). She has published widely on American Gothic fiction and popular culture, on authors from Charles Brockden Brown to Tananarive Due, and is currently writing a literary biography of Shirley Jackson for Palgrave Macmillan’s Literary Lives series.

About the W. A. Emmerson Annual 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.

Writing Together

Posted on by rowanm

 

SHOULDN’T YOU BE WRITING?!

WRITE ALONG WITH OUR POSTGRADUATE MEMBERS!

Starting August 30th, the Postgraduate Caucus co-chairs of the IAAS, Janice Deitner and Andrew Clarke, will be hosting a write along session on Discord. 

Information on the poster opposite. You can drop us a line at our Facebook page or on Twitter too for more info! @TheIAAS

 

 

 

EAAS Scholars-at-Risk Programme

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

 

 

The European Association for American Studies announces a new 15,000 EUR Scholars-at-Risk grant program. We will be offering grants of up to 2,000 EUR to scholars working within the field of American Studies who find themselves in a situation of precarity. Given the life threatening nature of war, in the 2022 edition of the grant, priority will be given to scholars with Ukrainian citizenship.  

 

The grant is intended to cover expenses related to travel and research stay at a foreign institution or related to home-based digital access to archives and other scholarly materials.

 

To apply for the EAAS Scholars-at-Risk Grant, an applicant needs to fill in this application form, describing their proposed projects which can be related to their research, teaching at a university in one of European countries and aiming at establishing new academic initiatives between the grantee and their host institution in Europe. The application has to include an estimated budget. Applicants seeking travel grants to foreign institutions are expected to submit an invitation issued by the host institution; applicants seeking funds for a home-based digital access to archives and other materials, are expected to submit a recommendation letter from their home institution.

 

EAAS cannot help the applicants in arranging visas for the countries in which their host institution is. 

 

An applicant can apply for this scholarship once per year.

 

The grants will be awarded three times per year. The deadline for applications for 2022 are: June 30, September 1, November 15. 

 

Please send the application form (with all the necessary documents included) by email attachment to the address: aleksandra.izgarjan@ff.uns.ac.rs.

The Alan Graham Memorial Lecture 2022: Professor Joy Porter, “Wildness and Indigenous American Futures”

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

 

The IAAS was honoured to invite Professor Joy Porter to deliver the Alan Graham Memorial Lecture, 2022–the keynote talk for our annual conference. This is now available to watch on our Youtube channel.

 

“In wildness is the preservation of the world” said Henry David Thoreau, but was he right? Does the idea of the wild instead enshrine outdated thinking that works to prevent the West from addressing the wicked problems of a warming world? Is wildness better dispensed with? This lecture addresses these questions as the globe grapples with a series of profound and indeterminate risks created by humans themselves – war, unprecedented inequality and the extinction of the earth’s vital natural producers- the birds, amphibians, mammals, reptiles and fish that have declined 68% since 1970. It considers the role for wildness in the coming era of synthetic biology where nature will routinely be altered by humans at the genetic level and it explores the role that conservationists anticipate “wild” Indigenous peoples will play in helping to restore the biodiversity without which our species cannot survive.

 

The IAAS opened this event to the public, because of the generous sponsorship of the School of English at Dublin City University. No part of this talk may be reproduced without prior consent. Please contact info@iaas.ie.

 

Prof. Porter is PI of the Treatied Spaces Research Group at the University of Hull which co-ordinates a portfolio of externally funded research with the aim of making treaties and environmental concerns central to debates across disciplines, policy registers and public discourse. She is PI of the Brightening the Covenant Chain AHRC Standard Research Grant, is currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow, and is a Lead Editor of the Cambridge University Press Series : Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research. Her most recent books are Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Native American Environmentalism (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). You can catch the collaborative exhibition Joy and her Group organised, featuring the work of Anishinabeg artist and researcher Celeste Pedri-Spade until July 2022 at the American Museum & Gardens in Bath, UK and digitally via the Treatied Spaces website. Joy is also PI Host 2020-24 for British Academy Global Professor Gregory Smithers’ project “Native Ecologies: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Climate Change”.

IAAS Annual Conference Code of Conduct

Posted on by Sarah McCreedy

 

Conference Code of Conduct

 

The IAAS strives to ensure that all participants at our events, online or in person, feel safe and welcome.

 

As an academic association, we are strongly committed to diversity, equality, equity, inclusion, and interculturalism. We value the free expression of ideas and concepts through scholarly discourse, and strongly believe that such expression is underpinned by a fundamental respect for the rights, dignity, and value of all persons, regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, dis/ability, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, nationality, religion, or career stage. We recognise the shared responsibility of creating a mutually respectful environment.

 

We therefore remind all conference delegates, including keynote speakers, that behaviour and interaction breaching these standards is not acceptable, and may result in expulsion from the event.

 

Unacceptable behaviours include, but are not limited to: 

 

  • Undermining or belittling behaviour or words
  • Verbal or physical forms of aggression or intimidation
  • The use of derogatory language, such as racial and sexual slurs
  • Unwelcome comments on the appearance of others
  • Making audio and/or visual recordings without permission
  • Unwelcome solicitation of emotional or physical intimacy with any participant
  • Persistent interruption of talks, presentations, or other events
  • Failure to respond to relevant requests by moderators or conference organisers

 

Thank you for your cooperation, and for familiarising yourself with this code.

We appreciate your contribution to safeguarding our community.