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.

2016 W. A. Emmerson Lecture: Prof. Stephen Matterson on The Work of Mark Twain

Posted on February 7, 2016March 7, 2016 by James Hussey

Is he Dead? America’s Romance with Mark Twain

The 2016 W. A. Emmerson Lecture, named in honour of our former Treasurer Tony Emmerson, will be given by Prof. Stephen Matterson (Trinity College Dublin) at 7pm on Wednesday, 9th March, in TR6 at the Graduate School, Queen’s University Belfast. Wine reception to follow.

Attendance is free and open to all. Click here to register.

For more information about the W. A. Emmerson Lecture, and to listen to past lectures, click here.

2016 OASIS-Orientale American Studies International School

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Jennifer Daly

Announcing the third year of “OASIS-Orientale American Studies International School,” a one-week school that will take place at Università Orientale’s conference center on the island of Procida, off the coast of Naples, May 29-June 3, 2016.

School Directors:

Donatella Izzo (Università di Napoli “L’Orientale,” Italy)

Giorgio Mariani (Università di Roma “Sapienza,” Italy)

Confirmed speakers:

Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh, USA)

Cristina Bacchilega (University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA; Fulbright Lecturer, Napoli “Orientale”)

John Bryant (Hostra University, USA)

Elizabeth Dillon (Northeastern University, Boston, USA)

Jane Desmond (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA)

Brian T. Edwards (Northwestern University, USA)

Djelal Kadir (Pennsylvania State University, USA)

Donald E. Pease (Dartmouth College, USA)

John Rieder (University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA)

Mounira Soliman (American University in Cairo, Egypt)

The school will run from Sunday to Friday, included. Every day will feature 2 plenary 45-minutes lectures from distinguished scholars in the morning, each followed by discussion, and afternoon sessions, which will be devoted to presentations of participants’ individual research projects, followed by discussion. Participants will be divided in seminar groups of about 10, each led by a scholar. The last day will be devoted to plenary presentation and discussion of participants’ papers. Lunch will be catered and consumed on site, followed by a short break for rest and group conversation: we thus hope to build a friendly intellectual atmosphere and constructive dialogue among the participants.

We invite applications from doctoral students, recent Ph.D.s, and junior faculty in American Studies, English, Comparative Literature, and related fields.

The fee for the School (covering registration, tuition, housing, breakfast, and lunch) is € 595 for the whole week. Accommodation will be provided in residences and B&Bs in downtown Procida (in double rooms or shared apartments, depending on availability; the fee covers a maximum of 7 nights, starting May 28). Participants are responsible for their own travel arrangements and expenses. Fees will be due on arrival or payable by national or international money order to the school administration. Depending on financial resources, one fellowship covering tuition and accommodation will be awarded. Preference will be given to applicants outside of Italy who document their inability to get funding from their own institutions.

Applications will be accepted until March 1, 2016; successful applicants will be notified by March 15.

Applications should include:
-a current CV
-a two-page abstract of applicant’s dissertation or book project, including a description of the section to be presented and discussed during seminars
-the name and contact of a referee
-information about the candidate’s eligibility/non eligibility for funding from own institution

Please send all of the above materials (PDF or Word format) to oasis@unior.it . More info at: www.oasis.unior.it

Event: Blind spots: revisiting the American canon

Posted on September 28, 2015September 28, 2015 by Catherine Gander

Tate Liverpool, Auditorium

Friday 9 October 2015, 11.00 – 17.00

Free

Booking essential

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Tate’s collection and display of twentieth century art from the United States was its first move beyond the bounds of British and Western European art. As such it might now be understood as the inaugural step in an ongoing process of strategic internationalisation. Like many other modern and contemporary museums, Tate has in recent years expanded a North Atlantic–centred canon in order to produce a multi-centred global history of art, correcting past oversights and omissions. Despite these later geographical expansions to the art-historical reach of the museum, the art of the United States retains a distinct primacy. In line with its central position in post-war history, it both inherits the advantages of that stable foundation, and invites a process of revision in which the very idea of an American art is subjected to various spatial, linguistic and political expansions.

At a moment when the value of embracing a more diverse geographical and critical terrain has become widely accepted, this one-day event returns to the context of post-war American art with the aim of reconsidering its place within the museum and the academy.

Blind Spots is convened in the context of two parallel exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, each deploying a contrasting curatorial strategy in order to re-approach art and artists that might be considered to be canonical. Using artist Glenn Ligon’s perspective as its guide,Encounters and Collisions revisits the history of post-war American art in order to create a personal museum that emphasises queer and African-American experiences while acting as a subjective reading of major movements such as minimalism, abstract expressionism, and pop. Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots meanwhile acts to restore doubt, inconsistency and complexity to the trajectory of an artist widely taken to be the very personification of the geopolitical dominance of abstract expressionism in the Cold War era.

The symposium will conclude with a drinks reception and entry to the exhibitions.
Keynote: Professor Darby English (University of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art)
Speakers: Jo Applin (University of York); Jonah Westerman (Tate Research); Nadja Millner-Larsen (Goldsmiths, University of London); Zoe Whitley (Tate/University of Central Lancashire); Amy Tobin (University of York); Stefanie Kogler (University of Essex)
Convened by Isobel Whitelegg, Research Curator, Tate Liverpool/LJMU; Alex Taylor, Terra Foundation Research Fellow in American Art, Tate Research; Sonya Dyer, Curator, Public Programmes, Tate Britain/Modern; and Stephanie Straine, Assistant Curator, Tate Liverpool. This symposium is supported by Liverpool John Moores University and forms part of Tate’s Refiguring American Art 1945–80 research project, supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

This event is related to the exhibition Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots and Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions

CFP: Black Lives Matter

Posted on July 27, 2015 by Catherine Gander

The October Dialogues 2015: Black Lives Matter

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the American Civil Rights Movement and the 50th anniversary of the UK Race Relations Act, during Black History Month, please join the Centre for Research in Race and Rights (University of Nottingham), Bright Ideas Nottingham, the Monitoring Group and Nottingham Contemporary for The October Dialogues 2015:

Black Lives Matter: The Past, Present and Future of an International Movement for Rights and Justice

Nottingham Contemporary, The Space
October 28, 2015
9.30am-5pm

Plus an evening of Hip Hop performance and dialogues featuring Akala and activist-scholars Dr. Monica Miller and Dr. James Peterson (Lehigh University) (6.30-9pm).

Stephen Lawrence. Eric Garner. Mark Duggan. Michael Brown. Sean Rigg. Trayvon Martin. Olaseni Lewis. Freddie Gray. Kingsley Burrell. Oscar Grant. Smiley Culture. Mya Hall. Cynthia Jarrett. Tamir Rice. Julian Cole. Tony Robinson. Cherry Groce. Walter Scott. Colin Roach. Rodney King. Demetre Fraser. Sandra Bland. Azelle Rodney. #SayTheirNames #ICantBreathe #HandsUpDontShoot #BlackLivesMatter

The rallying calls of a new movement have spread across the US and the UK. There have been around 1000 Black Lives Matter protests worldwide in the last two years, including in at least 10 UK cities. There are now 30 Black Lives Matter chapters across the United States. The movement responds to the oppression, violence and exclusion that shapes black lives: in the US, 42% of black children are educated in high-poverty schools, black Americans are 37% of the country’s homeless population, constitute nearly half of the 2 million jail population, and are 26% of those killed by police (though are 13% of the population). In the UK, black children are more than twice as likely as white children to be living in poverty, black people are six times as likely as whites to be stopped and searched, are more likely to go to jail when convicted of similar crimes and will serve longer sentences, are twice as likely to be not in employment, education or training, and are more likely to be forcibly restrained when held under mental health legislation. “I Can’t Breathe” evokes the suffocating daily reality of all these statistics.

A series of panels featuring activists and researchers will explore the roots, dynamics and possible futures of #BlackLivesMatter. Is it a movement or a moment? A transatlantic or an American phenomenon? How does it operate on local, regional, national or international levels? Does it have a leader? What characterises its rhetoric, visual culture and philosophies? Is it a new civil rights movement, a new Black Power movement or a new black feminism? Did Black Lives Matter bring down the Confederate flag? Push President Obama to speak with a new voice? What is its protest heritage—does it draw from the lessons, tactics and legacies of anti-slavery, anti-lynching, the Black Panthers, Anti-Apartheid, or other movements? Is there a usable past for Black Lives Matter and what is that protest memory in the U.S. and UK? What should #BlackLivesMatterUK be about? What is the history of Black Lives Matter since the UK Race Relations Act and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of 50 years ago, and where is Black Lives Matter going next?

Please send a 200-word abstract on these or related topics and a short biographical note to C3R@nottingham.ac.uk by August 24. Panels will be announced by the end of August. In particular we welcome presentations by postgraduate and early-career researchers (within 5 years of the PhD). Funding will cover UK travel and accommodation for presenters, and registration is free.

Supported by the British Academy

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.

2015 W. A. Emmerson Lecture: ‘Art and War in the Pacific World’ by JoAnne Mancini

Posted on January 29, 2015April 18, 2016 by Catherine Gander

‘Art and War in the Pacific World’

The first W.A. Emmerson Lecture, named in honour of our former Treasurer Tony Emmerson, will be given by Dr JoAnne Mancini (NUI Maynooth) at 5pm on Friday 27th March, in the Harry Clarke Lecture Theatre, NCAD, Dublin. Wine reception to follow.

Donald Pease talk at University College Cork

Posted on January 29, 2015January 29, 2015 by Catherine Gander

**Donald E. Pease, ‘Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland’**

School of English Research Seminar

Wednesday 18 February, 3-4pm, 2.12 O’Rahilly Building UCC

Donald E. Pease is the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program at Dartmouth College. He is an authority on 19th- and 20th-century American literature and literary theory and founder/director of the Futures of American Studies Institute. Editor of The New Americanist series, which has transformed the field of American studies, Pease has written numerous books, including The New American Exceptionalism (2009) and, most recently, Theodor Seuss Geisel (2010).

All welcome.

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.