The Eccles Centre for American Studies, The British Library, London

Monday 16 January 2017

Cold War Geographies

Keynote Speaker: Professor Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics, Royal Holloway

The British Library’s next major exhibition will focus on ‘Maps and the Twentieth Century.’ The Cold War had a seismic impact on global geographies during the second half of the twentieth century. Not only did it physically impact lands from the barren Nevada desert to the jungles of South East Asia, but the ideological conflict of the Cold War also had a significant impact on national borders, global cities and imagined geographies. The legacy of the Cold war on global geographies has had a profound effect upon the way in which nations now think about their place in the world and their relationships with each other. From an American point of view, this has had a particular influence on how the U.S. is viewed and engaged with on an international level.

This one-day symposium seeks to explore and assess how the Cold War changed boundaries, restructured terrain and redefined concepts of space and place. In doing so it seeks to prompt discussion and assessment of the geopolitical impact this had, particularly on the United States.

This is an interdisciplinary symposium, both panel and paper proposals are welcomed from across the disciplines, including, but not limited to, geography, politics, history, visual culture and American Studies. Papers which make use of the Library’s collections are particularly encouraged.

Possible topics could include:

    The politics of space and place

    Geographical imaginaries

    Legacies of Cold War conflict

    Dark geographies and covert spaces

    The evolution of Cold War cities

    Cold War cartographies

    Borders and borderlands

    Changing global narratives

    Aesthetic and cultural responses to contested geographies

    The impact and legacy of nuclear testing

    Issues of decolonisation and western-centrism

    Technologies of mapping and surveillance

Proposals of no more than 250 words should be sent to Mark Eastwood (mark.eastwood@bl.uk) by the deadline of midnight on Sunday 27th November 2016. All submissions should include the name of the presenter, their institution, email address, a short profile, and the title of the proposed presentation. Proposals from PGs and ECRs are warmly welcomed.

Symposium registration will open in October 2016.

Heidelberg Center for American Studies

14th Annual Spring Academy Conference

Heidelberg, Germany, March 20-24, 2017

The 14th annual Spring Academy on American History, Culture and Politics will be held from March 20-24, 2017. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one week conference that provides twenty international PhD students with the opportunity to present and discuss their PhD projects.

Papers can be presented on any subject relating to the study of the United States of America. Possible topics for discussion are American literature and culture, U.S. history, domestic and foreign policy, geography, religion, and musicology as well as economic and sociological issues, and aspects of jurisprudence. Race, class, and gender are frequently employed analytical categories.

Participants are requested to prepare a twenty-minute presentation of their research projects. Each presentation is followed by a forty-minute discussion session. Proposals should include a preliminary title and run no more than 300 words. These will be arranged into ten panel groups.

Accommodation will be provided by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies

Application deadline: 15 November 2016

Please use our online application system: www.hca-springacademy.de

More information: www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de

For futher questions: springacademy@hca.uni-heidelberg.de

NeMLA Annual Convention – Baltimore, MD 23-26 March 2017

Depression-era literature is often regarded in stark contrast to the periods that frame it—the 1920s and the postwar—which have been deemed altogether more compatible with each other both thematically and stylistically. American writers of the Thirties, as the story goes, tended to immerse themselves in the political culture of the period, eschewing modernist concerns in favor of deterministic narratives that offered scathing social criticism and echoed a leftist agenda. Indeed, the period has been critically defined by the work of writers like John Steinbeck, Jack Conroy, James Agee, Michael Gold, and Richard Wright and more generally by the mode of the proletarian genre.

Critics such as Michael Denning and Michael Szalay have in recent years done much to showcase the Thirties as a dynamic period of literary invention that would anticipate the personal, surreal, and darkly comic narratives of the postwar writers. Yet more work can be done to challenge the literary-historical paradigm of Depression-era literature as deeply and necessarily entwined with political discourse and the proletarian genre.

Proposals are invited that address the other side of writers and writing from the 1930s.

Themes to consider include but are not limited to:

Humorous and satirical fiction and poetry of the 1930s

Fantasy and horror texts from the 1930s

Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1930s

Work from the 1930s of notable postwar writers (eg: Ralph Ellison and John Cheever)

Modernist writing in the 1930s

Lesser known or forgotten Thirties writers

Expatriate writers (eg: Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller)

The Detective form

Autobiography

Please submit 300 word abstracts alongside a short bio before September 30th (confirmation will be sent by October 15th) through the NeMLA submission page: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16138

Applicants are not required to be NeMLA members at the time of submission but accepted speakers will have to become members by December 1st, 2016.

For further information contact Sara Rutkowski at sararutkowski@gmail.com or consult http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2016

This panel addresses the American romance in light of recent developments in early American studies. While many Britishists accepted the ascendancy of the anglophone novel, others challenged this teleology, and the transatlantic turn has invited us to consider whether the romance genre survived the New World. The existence of a colonial romance would challenge the “birth” of the American genre in the wake of Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), and revising that literary history could in turn broaden American romance beyond a hoary pro-slavery ideology. Post-WWII critics arguing for an American romance tradition often cite Hawthorne’s own christening of his novels as “romances” as a key piece of evidence. Nina Baym, on the other hand, has argued that the novel/romance distinction was one that mid-twentieth century critics invented retroactively to privilege certain (white, male) authors and reproduce the ideology of American exceptionalism. These trends and controversies (with the exception of Gretchen Woertendyke) ignore the hemispheric turn in American studies and the potential to locate an American romance formation borne of cross-lingual literary exchanges. They also ignore publications by David Quint, David Heller-Roazen, Victora Kahn, and others that redefine romance in formal, not thematic, terms. Finally, American romance scholarship has an opportunity to address emergent theoretical paradigms: posthumanism, the anthropocene, and object-oriented ontology, just to name a few . The time is ripe to revisit the American romance, and I welcome papers that offer a theory of genre, case study, or critique of methodology. Please submit a 250-word abstract and CV to express interest. For the sake of simplicity, I am requesting traditionally formatted papers without audiovisual elements.

Full name /name of organization: Society of Early Americanists (SEA)

Deadline for submissions: August 30, 2016

Contact email: amanda.l.johnson@rice.edu