The Irish Association for American Studies is calling for nominations for the following positions on the Executive Committee:

 

Secretary

Ordinary Member x2

Postgraduate caucus co-chair

 

Please note that in accordance with the ethos of the IAAS, the committee especially welcomes nominations for members from under-represented backgrounds and ethnicities.

 

Ideally, we are looking for executive committee members who have experience and familiarity with our activities, ideals, and membership. 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 or members of the IAAS
  • We accept self-nominations
  • All executive committee members, aside from fulfilling duties specific to their role, will be expected to attend all IAAS committee meetings throughout the year (January, April [AGM], June, September, November [PGR conference])
  • Information on the full requirements of the role(s) will be made available on request
  • The positions will be elected by members of the IAAS during the AGM (10th April 2021)
  • Please email your nominations to info@iaas.ie by 1st April 2021

We are currently making some changes to the WordPress theme to improve the site. The pages on the site might looks strange over the weekend and some features may change but while this update is taking place. Please bear with us.

U.S. Election Roundtable hosted by the Irish Association for American Studies
 
Monday 2nd November at 4pm Irish time

At this special roundtable event, happening the day before American Election Day, a range of experts discuss the current administration, the election campaign, and the implications of both another Trump-Pence win or a Biden-Harris victory.

Among discussion topics will be race and racial politics, law and order, the media, cultural responses to recent political events and agendas, foreign policy, election interference and campaign tactics, cyber security, and terrorism.

Our expert speakers are:

Daniel Geary, Mark Pigott Associate Professor of U.S. History at Trinity College Dublin

Jorie Lagerwey, Associate Professor in Television Studies in University College Dublin

Eugenio Lilli, Lecturer and Program Coordinator of the MA in American Politics and Foreign Policy at University College Dublin

Dolores Resano, Marie Curie Fellow at the Clinton Institute for American Studies at UCD and Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College in the United States

Kimberly Reyes, award-winning poet and essayist, and the 2019-2020 Fulbright fellow at University College Cork.

The event is moderated by Catherine Gander, Chair of the IAAS, and Associate Professor of American Literature at Maynooth University.

This event will take place over Zoom. Registered attendees will receive the secure link the day before the event.

Please find the link to the Eventbrite registration below:

The IAAS Postgraduate Symposium

“Parallel Lives in America”

Virtual Event via Zoom

13th-14th of November, 2020

Last year, the Irish Association for American Studies’ Postgraduate Symposium, titled “The Land of the Unfree”, sought to interrogate the legitimacy of democracy in America. One year on, in the midst of a global pandemic, this legitimacy has not only been interrogated, but put on trial.

In the U.S., the COVID-19 pandemic has both exacerbated and exposed already existent crises: social, political and economic, among others. Referred to by The New York Times as “The Pandemic Inequality Feedback Loop”, research has shown that individuals of lower economic strata and minority groups are both more likely to contract the virus, and to die from it. From bulk buying to wide-spread job losses, the concerns and priorities of American citizens have existed on a wide spectrum according to relative levels of privilege and oppression.

The 2020 postgraduate symposium, taking place in the IAAS’ 50th year, therefore endeavours to investigate “Parallel Lives” in America. In this context, “Parallel Lives” signify the juxtaposition of the wealthy with the poor, those with power to those who are oppressed, and those who discriminate to those who are discriminated against. As the #BlackLivesMatter movement has shown, exposing and resisting the discord between parallel ways of living is essential for social change, particularly in a world where our lives have become more interconnected than ever before.

While this conference takes inspiration from the present moment, we are particularly interested in historical roots, parallels and contemporary repetitions, and welcome transhistorical papers and panels.

To be conducted over the course of Friday and Saturday afternoon on the 13th-14th November, the interdisciplinary symposium will be run as a virtual event via Zoom. Participants will be invited to complete a webinar registration to be able to join the symposium.

300 word proposals for ten-minute papers, along with a short academic biography, are welcomed from PGRs and ECRs working in the field of American Studies across disciplines including literature, history, film, politics, music, art and media. The deadline for submissions is Friday, 9th October, 2020.

The IAAS is committed to the development of postgraduate and early career researchers. Therefore, the symposium will also feature workshops specifically designed for these scholars.

Paper topics may include but are not limited to:

  • Racial/gender/social/economic inequalities in the U.S.
  • The intersectionalities of equality and inequality
  • Widening socio-economic discrepancies in times of American crisis
  • Narratives of resistance, counternarratives
  • Protest literature and movements, particularly #BlackLivesMatter
  • Documenting Protest
  • The role of art and the artist in social change

For more information, or to submit a proposal, please email us at: postgrad@iaas.ie

 

The following Calls for Papers have been announced this month:

27th Biennial Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies

“What Happened? Continuities and Discontinuities in American Culture”

Uppsala, Sweden, May 20-22, 2021

Deadline – 15 September 2020.

https://naas2021.com/.

The 27th biennial conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS) will take place on May 20–22, 2021, in Uppsala, Sweden. The conference also serves as the 11th biennial conference of the Swedish Association for American Studies (SAAS).

Please see the CFP for more information on this years’s theme ”What happened? Continuities and Discontinuities in American Culture.” Although we encourage panel and paper proposals that engage with this theme, we welcome proposals on any topic related to American studies. The deadline for submission is September 15, 2020.

The conference will take place at Uppsala University, Sweden’s first university, located some 70 kms north of Stockholm, easily accessible by train or by flight to Stockholm-Arlanda airport. The conference is open to scholars and students from all countries, but we offer lower registration fees to members of NAAS (Nordic Association for American Studies), EAAS (European Association for American Studies), and ASA (American Studies Association in the U.S.)

 

Humboldt University in Berlin

“Doing Southern Studies Today”

Berlin, January 14-15, 2021

Deadline – 1st August 2020.

In the field of Southern Studies, the first twenty years of the 21st century were defined by attempts to formulate and visualize the future of Southern Studies, as evidenced by publications such as Suzanne W. Jones and Sharon Monteith’s South to a New Place: Region, LiteratureCulture (2002), Jon Smith’s Finding Purple America: The South and the Future of American Cultural Studies (2013), or Zackary Vernon’s Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies (2019) – to name only a few. The “future,” most publications propose, lies beyond traditional narratives of Southern exceptionalism and sectionalism that promote a specific “sense of place” that cannot be found outside the South. A more dynamic and global understanding of the South needs to be implemented if Southern Studies wants to contribute to a critical engagement with current and past cultural and social developments, in and outside the U.S. Despite the expansion of the scope of Southern Studies though, the ‘old’ questions remain: What and where is “the South”? What is “southern”? While “sense-of-place”-regionalism, a rather essentialist and nativist approach to being “southern,” is outdated, the concern with the “place of ‘place’” in Southern Studies remains.

This conference aims to bring together scholars who want to share their work on “the South” and “doing Southern Studies” in an uncommon place: Berlin – a place outside “the South.” We don’t expect definite answers to the ‘old’ questions (although we welcome them). We rather want to explore the trajectories of Southern Studies in and outside the U.S. We owe our title to Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson who claim that “[d]oing Southern Studies is unmasking and refusing the binary thinking – ‘North’/‘South,’ nation/South, First World/Third World, self/other,” it is “thinking geographically, thinking historically, thinking relationally, thinking about power, thinking about justice, thinking back” (2016: 4). We take their definitions as this conference’s objective and seek an exchange of these thoughts. We are particularly interested in papers that tackle the South as a “multiplicity of communities” (Gray 2002: xxiii), factoring in race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity; the role (or rather the problematic exclusivity) of whiteness in Southern Studies; imaginations of “the South” in popular media; the Global South and the possible transnational routes of Southern Studies. The first confirmed keynote speaker is Martyn Richard Bone (University of Copenhagen), author of The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (2005).

 

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short biographical info to conference organizers Evangelia Kindinger (Humboldt University in Berlin) and Greta Kaisen (Humboldt University in Berlin) at doingsouthernstudies@gmail.com. The deadline for paper proposals is 1 August 2020.

COVID-19 UPDATE: CONFERENCE POSTPONED
It is with no small amount of sadness that we can now confirm IAAS2020 will not run on 3-4 April.
Given the situation with COVID-19, we could not ethically or intellectually justify going ahead with the conference under the current circumstances.
We are hoping to reschedule the conference for November, to run in conjunction with the PG conference as a large, group effort of celebration and solidarity. We will let you know more about this in due course.
If you would still like to be a part of the conference, please bear with us.
If you require a refund, please get in touch via the conference gmail.

With heartfelt thanks for your understanding and your collegiality.

Catherine Gander and the IAAS2020 team.

COVID-19 UPDATE: 

I’m sure many of you are concerned about COVID-19 and its implications for international and domestic travel, and the impact it will have on the IAAS2020 conference, ‘Counter-narratives and Hidden Histories’, taking place 3-4 April at Maynooth University.

Maynooth University is following HSE guidelines, which can be found here: https://www2.hse.ie/conditions/coronavirus/coronavirus.html. The risk of catching the Coronavirus in Ireland is low, there is currently no restriction on travel into and out of Ireland, and there have been no reported cases or potential cases of the virus at Maynooth.

We will keep the conference page updated, but for now and the foreseeable future, the University is business as usual, and the conference is going ahead.

If circumstances change, and the University moves to cancel the conference, then refunds will be available on accommodation booked on campus, and on registration. If any delegate is travelling from a country that imposes a travel ban, then a refund will also be made.

We are currently looking into video link options for those delegates who cannot now travel to us, and hope to have more information on this shortly.

All the very best,

Catherine Gander and the IAAS2020 team.

Dr Nerys young

‘Captive City, Captive Audience: Film, Television and the Kefauver Crime Hearings’

The IAAS is delighted to announce that Dr Nerys Young will deliver this year’s W.A. Emmerson Lecture. Due to Covid-19, this lecture was postponed. We are now very happy to announce that it will take place online on September 9th at 6pm.

Dr Nerys Young is a Lecturer in American History at Ulster University. Her research interests include screen politics, mass communication, journalism, American Politics and public affairs. She is the current Treasurer of the Irish Association for American Studies.

The W.A. Emmerson Lecture is named in honour of Tony Emmerson, one of the IAAS’s founding members, and is a highlight of the association’s annual events. Information on previous lectures can be found here.

WATCH THE LECTURE

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Department of English Language and Literature

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

in collaboration with the Hellenic Association of American Studies (HELAAS)

invites you to participate in the international conference:

AFTER POSTMODERNISM: AMERICAN STUDIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY

December 17-19, 2020

EXTENDED DEADLINE FOR PROPOSAL SUBMISSION: 06 MARCH 2020

There is a shared sense among a large majority of historians, philosophers, critics and artists that we are now living in a new global moment:  our contemporary era may or may not have started with the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989; may or may not have established itself in the wake of the 9/11 attacks; but it is painfully clear that, in the new millennium, a new debate on the “post-postmodern” has opened up. If the Jamesonian taxonomy no longer has the same explanatory power, what is the new dominant cultural logic of post-postmodernism? If, to quote Jameson again, postmodernism was a “radical break or coupure” with modernism, which is post-postmodernism’s cultural imaginary, its strategies and features? However early it may be to describe the nature of post-postmodernism, we can discern three loosely bounded interpenetrating strands: some scholars recognize a heightened degree of intensity and mutation of tendencies and techniques already present in postmodernism, others see a renewed engagement with history and a return to realism. Still, there are those thinkers who have observed a decisive break with the postmodern period and have struggled to mark its contours in the new socioeconomic order, a notable feature of which is the shift or questioning of the paradigm of the American global hegemony. Nevertheless, complicating the study of the cultural shifts that are underway in our current condition is the abundance of terms and tendencies that proclaim to be postmodernism’s successors.

The conference “After post-modernism: American Studies in the 21st century” takes as a point of departure the words of Ben Lerner’s narrator, that “the world [is] rearranging itself” (10.04) and invites both panels and papers that address fresh and original questions relevant to studying the post-postmodern condition. It seeks to investigate questions about changing literary patterns, innovative/shifting cultural practices, and new trends that have risen in the first two decades of the twenty-first century or, to put it simply, what comes after postmodernism. 

Possible topics could cover

  • The post-nationalist turn in American Studies
  • American Literature and the posthuman turn
  • Aspects of autofiction in contemporary art, literature and popular culture
  • New literacies and American fiction
  • New Media literacy and authorial practices
  • Post-exceptionalist American fiction
  • Deterritorialization and American migrant literature
  • American literature and Ecoglobalist presences
  • Post theory and the ‘novelizations’ of literary theory
  • Writership/readership in the post-postmodern

Please send 300-word abstracts to Dr. Dora Tsimpouki (tsimpouki@enl.uoa.gr), along with a short (150-word) biographical note by our NEW deadline for abstracts: March 06, 2020.

The Cormac McCarthy Society’s Eighth International Conference

Cormac McCarthy’s Irish Roots and Influences: Yeats-Joyce-Beckett-O’Brien-Celtic Myth and Lore

Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland – June 16-18, 2020

Call for papers

The Cormac McCarthy Society and the Department of English of Trinity College Dublin announce an international conference on Cormac McCarthy’s Irish literary influences to be held in the Long Room Hub at Trinity College in Dublin on June 16, 17 and 18th, 2020. Our hosts will be Stephen Matterson of the Department of English, Trinity College, and Steven Frye, President of the Cormac McCarthy Society.

We welcome submissions for papers for this conference. Our special areas of concern will be Cormac McCarthy’s roots in, allusions and indebtedness to Irish literature, religious practices, folklore and mythology as represented in his novels and screenplays, as well as in films of his work. We invite particular focus on McCarthy and William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Discussions of the current political issues occasioned by the United Kingdom’s de facto Brexit revision of the Good Friday Agreement and possible rekindling of “the troubles” are invited as long as some organic connection with literary issues is maintained.

We also invite papers on all other areas of McCarthy’s work, especially with regard to Irish and Catholic literature worldwide.

For those of you who are submitting conference proposals for the first time, please check the existing critical literature to be sure that you are breaking new ground or, at least, looking at the existing texts or criticism in some new or novel way.

Please submit your one to one and a half page precis for papers with an approximately 20-minute reading time, or for three to four paper complete panel proposals. Submissions should be accompanied by brief one-paragraph author’s biography or CV. Full session times for panels will run about 90 minutes. All proposals must be submitted by no later than March 30, 2020. Proposals should be submitted to Stephen Matterson and Rick Wallach, conference co-directors, as Word.doc or PDF attachments at info@cormacmccarthy.com. We will make every effort to qualify your submissions within a short period of time so you can make your travel arrangements as early as possible.

We will be posting more information on accommodations at and near Trinity College, and the costs of conference registration fees, in the near future on our web site, www.cormacmccarthy.com,  and will contact all who submit proposals immediately by email as we firm up our plans. Please also direct any questions you have about the conference to info@cormacmccarthy.com.  Check our web site periodically for regular updates.