Category: News
Latest news
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.
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.
| Qualification type: | PhD |
| Location: | Hull |
| Funding for: | UK Students, EU Students, International Students |
| Funding amount: | £13,863 |
| Hours: | Full Time |
| Placed on: | 12th December 2014 |
| Closes: | 2nd February 2015 |
To celebrate the University’s research successes, the University of Hull is offering one full-time UK/EU PhD Scholarship or International Fees Bursary for candidates applying for the following project.
Studentships will start on 28th September 2015
Supervisor: Professor Joy Porter, joy.porter@hull.ac.uk, 01482 465464, Department of History
Co-supervisor: Professor John Oldfield (WISE)
Project Title:
Interest in the role and significance of Native American Indian slaveholding continues to grow significantly across disciplines. However specific Native American slaveholding connections to the early biracial communities that so deeply resisted Euro-American domination remain obscure. Thus this project sets out to investigate Native American Indian slaveholding and its specific relationship to the formation of biracial communities as well as their continued assertion of cultural and political sovereignty. The successful PhD applicant will have the opportunity to expand his/her knowledge of the history of coalition and biracial agency in North America through investigation of a number of themes including (but not restricted to): Slave rebellion and African and Indian coalition from the first slave rebellion (Hispianola, 1522) and the first on U.S. soil (North Carolina, 1526); Escaped Africans, Maroon or quilobo communities including the “Republic of Palmores” 1600-1694; Seminole resistance and the Second Seminole War; African American involvement in the Trail of Tears 1838/39; John Horse 1812-1882, African American Seminole leader. The project leader is a specialist in indigenous North American Indian history, and the co-supervisor is a specialist in the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world (1750-1850) and Director of the University’s Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE). The project will benefit from research synergies with WISE’s recent AHRC £1.5 million grant award under the “Care for the Future” research theme. This doctoral project also links directly with the University of Hull’s Ethics and Social Justice research theme.
To apply for this post please click on the Apply button below.
Full-time UK/EU PhD Scholarships will include fees at the ‘home/EU’ student rate and maintenance (£13,863 in 2014/15) for three years, depending on satisfactory progress, due to funding restrictions.
Full-time International Fee PhD Studentships will include full fees at the International student rate for three years, dependant on satisfactory progress, due to funding restrictions.
PhD students at the University of Hull follow modules for research and transferable skills development and gain a Masters level Certificate, or Diploma, in Research Training, in addition to their research degree.
Successful applicants will be informed of the award as soon as possible and by 17th April 2015 at the latest.
It is with immense sadness that we announce the death of Tony Emmerson after a short illness. A founder member of the Association, Tony was a dedicated servant to the Association in a number of committee roles over the last forty years and who, up to this sudden news, was our Treasurer and Membership Secretary. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, a lifelong Sunderland fan, and a graduate of Queen’s University Belfast, William Anthony Emmerson laid claim to a unique academic distinction: in 1967 he became the first and also the last graduate of the BA in Ancient and Medieval History, an achievement to which he referred with characteristic good humour.
After leaving Queen’s, Tony established himself as a keen historian of the United States of America and flew the flag for history, both within the IAAS and in the classroom. For forty-six years – and one month, he would regularly remind both himself and others – his academic home was the University of Ulster where successive generations of students were nurtured by his ardent commitment to the academy and to the education of Northern Ireland’s third level students in very difficult historic times. Tony’s academic career was defined by his promotion of the values of interdisciplinarity, and by his understanding of the importance of international contexts for a university education. With research and teaching interests in railroads and the West, the New Deal and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Tony was perfectly placed to contribute significantly to the pedagogical development of the history curriculum in the north of Ireland, whether in terms of teaching, policy-making and what now would be termed outreach activities.
One of Tony’s major achievements was as Head of American Studies in the University of Ulster (Jordanstown and Coleraine). For many years before his retirement, he developed a very successful interdisciplinary programme which attracted students from Britain, Ireland and the United States of America. In addition, he co-ordinated the International Student Exchange Programme for the university, and consistently arranged innovative USA-Ulster exchanges for students. To succeed as he did, Tony undertook an annual or bi-annual road-trip in the States. He drove remarkable distances to visit universities in order to build and maintain connections in the interests of his students. Such commitment to bring this international perspective to the University of Ulster must be set in the context of his crowded teaching and administration schedules in his home university. For those of us who came to know Tony well over the years, it was always his energy matched by the intelligence and enthusiasm he brought to all his roles that marked him as a special contributor to the academy.
To encourage an all-Ireland engagement with American issues and the study of the USA, the Irish Association for American Studies was founded in the 1970s to support and offer an academic forum for the work of Americanists in Ireland. Those involved at the beginning included Peggy O’Brien (Trinity College Dublin), Denis Donoghue (University College Dublin), Alan Graham (Queen’s University Belfast) and, of course, Tony Emmerson (Ulster College then; now Ulster University). Of that first committee, Tony continued to be an active member of the IAAS to this year, and has served its committee with distinction.
Tony always defined his work as being both within and beyond the classroom. For example, he, along with his brother Michael, was a key figure in developing the Belfast Arts Festival in 1964. Since its genesis, the Belfast Festival has arguably become the main arts and culture showcase in Northern Ireland. Stories from those formative years of the Festival are now legion: Anthony Burgess reading from a manuscript called A Clockwork Orange; Alex Haley arranging for Playboy to arrange his trip to the Festival and then travelling to Carrickmacross to track down presumed slaveholder ancestors buried there; or Tony having to ask the Queen’s bursar for money to pay an irate Patrick Kavanagh in the Elms Bar. His involvement with the Belfast Festival also lead to another lifelong commitment: his brother Michael’s secretary Mary Mills would become Tony’s wife in 1968.
In addition to his commitments to the University of Ulster and the IAAS, Tony was the long-time Treasurer of the influential British Universities Transatlantic Exchange Association. Tony was the IAAS’s representative on the Board of the European Association for American Studies for an extended period and was elected to the prestigious post of Treasurer of the EAAS during his time on the EAAS Board. Indeed, Tony’s presence and influence on the EAAS Board was an important factor in the decision to bring the biennial EAAS conference to Dublin in 2010.
For those of us in Ireland who had the pleasure to work alongside Tony, it was his assiduous commitment to the IAAS cause that always heartened the membership and kept the Association alive when otherwise it may well have folded. While the IAAS has continued its work without a break since its formation, it is fair to say that it experienced a crisis in the mid-1990s. With the sudden death of Alan Graham, and the departure of Peggy O’Brien and Denis Donoghue to the US, the IAAS was active in a number of ways (conferences and the Irish Journal of American Studies), but faced dwindling membership numbers. Tony was a very significant influence in its continuity and its recent renewal. He served as Secretary, as Treasurer, and as Chair at crucial moments in the development of the IAAS, and, since 2011, had taken on the combined role of Membership Secretary and Treasurer. The continuity and even-handedness that he brought to all our discussions were important elements in the recent expansion of the IAAS’s membership and activities. For Tony, no distance was too great to bridge, no journey too far to travel to ensure the success of the Association. Apocryphal road trips were not confined to the USA: for the annual IAAS conference in Cork in 2005, Tony set off from Coleraine having finished his teaching at 6pm that Friday evening, travelling the length of Ireland to arrive at UCC shortly before midnight. Stragglers from the reception that evening as well as delegates the next morning shared a general sense of awe at Tony’s willingness to drive through at times atrocious conditions to take his seat at the conference and also, as ever, to offer his unique knowledge of constitutional affairs at the AGM.
Tony’s work with the Association was defined consistently by his openness to new ideas, by his willingness to work closely with a number of committees and by his incisive, gentle, sensible, and good-humoured contributions to discussions. The IAAS is a relatively small association and has managed to achieve a great deal on, often, limited resources. If it were not for the intelligence, enthusiasm and selflessness evident in all Tony accomplished and sought to accomplish, the IAAS would not have survived to become the organisation that it is today. I know I speak for everyone that has come into contact with Tony when I say that it has been a privilege to know him and to work with him. On a personal note, as the current IAAS Chair, he offered me nothing but total support and wise counsel over the last four years. None of our committee or association business shall ever be the same again.
It is for men like Tony Emmerson that the phrase a gentleman and a scholar was invented. He was an academics’ academic: dedicated to the study and teaching of his specialist subjects, to connecting through a community of scholars to the wider world, and to supporting the coming generations to realise their potential, the true measures of impact to which every academic should ever wish to aspire.
Tony is survived by his wife Mary, his sons Alan and Christopher, his daughter-in-law Miranda, and grandchildren Alice and Rosalind. His family has asked us to make well-wishers aware that donations to the Macular Society are gratefully received.
Philip McGowan
Two awards bestowed by the Organization of American Historians are open for submissions. Please see below for links and more information.
http://www.oah.org/programs/awards/david-thelen-award/
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MAY 1, 2015
The David Thelen Award (formerly the Foreign Language Article Prize) is given biennially by the Organization of American Historians to the author of the best article on American history published in a foreign language. The winning article will be published in the Journal of American History. David Thelen was editor of the Journal of American History (1985–1999).
http://www.oah.org/programs/awards/willi-paul-adams-award/
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MAY 2, 2016
The Willi Paul Adams Award is given biennially by the Organization of American Historians to the author of the best book on American history published in a foreign language. The award (formerly the Foreign Language Book Prize) is named for Willi Paul Adams, who was an active member of OAH in Germany and a tireless advocate of the internationalization of American history.
The State of the Nation: American Women in the Twenty-First Century
Marie Curie Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland
Friday, March 27, 2015
As American women have obtained positions of world power, leader, and strength they are still facing continual struggles to maintain and shape their place within the public and private spheres. Legislation attempting to dismantle the 1973 Roe v Wade decision, the 2014 Supreme Court ruling in favor of an employer’s right to choose a woman’s contraception, and continual battles for equal pay are just some of the obstacles women still face. This one-day symposium seeks to discuss contemporary issues facing American women by examining their position in the United States and by assessing the “state of the nation” in terms of gender equality. The European Association for American Studies Women’s Network invites proposals that consider American Women in the Twenty-First Century broadly conceived. We particularly encourage individual abstracts and panels which incorporate transdisciplinary explorations of the subject, and welcome submissions from any branch of American Studies. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
Comparative approaches that include the United States
Proposals should be sent to the EAAS Women’s Network (eaaswomensnetwork@gmail.com) and should consist of a 500 word abstract in English, as well as a one-paragraph biography for each participant. The time allowance for all presentations is 20 minutes. An additional 10 minutes will be provided for discussion.
Deadline for proposal submission: December 15, 2014.
Notification of proposal acceptance: January 15, 2015.
More information will be posted on our website as it becomes available: http://www.women.eaas.eu/
The Call for Papers for the 2014 IAAS Postgraduate Conference is out now.
For all information on the symposium, or to submit an abstract, please visit http://iaas.ie/iaas-postgraduate-conference/
An international conference on Elizabeth Bishop’s writing hosted by the University of Sheffield
Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel: Fifty Years After
25-27 June 2015, Sheffield, UK
Confirmed plenary speakers: Professor Stephen Burt (Harvard University), Professor Deryn Rees-Jones (University of Liverpool) and Professor Linda Anderson (Newcastle University)
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Elizabeth Bishop’s third collection of poems, Questions of Travel (1965), and the importance of Bishop as a major influence on British and Irish contemporary poets, the University of Sheffield is pleased to host this international conference on her work in June 2015.
The aim of the conference is to look at Bishop as an international writer with allegiances to various countries and national traditions, including but not limited to the countries she lived in and felt at home. How does Bishop move between literal geographies like Brazil and Canada but also more slippery categories like home and elsewhere, human and animal, insider and outsider. While the focus of the conference will naturally fall on Questions of Travel, we welcome papers on all aspects and periods of Bishop’s career, from her early writing in the 1930s to the late poems finished after Geography III in the late 1970s and those works published after her death.
We are also interested in how Bishop’s writing has itself travelled elsewhere and what Bishop sounds like in other cultures, languages and traditions. John Ashbery famously called Bishop “a writer’s writer’s writer.” This conference will consider which writers mattered to Bishop and which contemporary writers have taken Bishop home with them.
Topics may include but are not limited to the following:
We encourage proposals from anyone with an interest in Bishop’s art and life, including established scholars, graduate students and creative writers.
Proposals for 20-minute papers (maximum 300 word abstracts, plus a short biographical note of no more than 50 words) are due by 15 December 2014, and should be sent to EB50@sheffield.ac.uk. Panel proposals (comprised of 3 paper proposals, plus an additional 250 words explaining how the papers are linked in addressing the theme) are also welcome.
In addition to academic papers, the conference will include at least two poetry readings, a wine tasting and a conference dinner.
For more details, please visit the official website.
It is the great pleasure of the IAAS to report on the inaugural IAAS Lecture, delivered by the esteemed Ron Callan.
The annual IAAS Lecture will become an annual event in which a member of the Association takes to a stage in one of our third-level institutions, either north or south of the border, to deliver a talk on a topic of their own choosing. The idea is a simple one: to bring the work of the IAAS to new audiences across Ireland, to attract new members and, in turn, to help finance our support for the work of postgraduate and early career researchers.
This March 14th, IAAS Chair Philip McGowan (QUB) extended thanks to Lee Jenkins and Alan Gibbs and the School of English at UCC as he introduced Dr Callan. He continued:
‘Who better to start this new chapter in the IAAS’s history than this evening’s speaker. Lecturer here in the School of English in 1994-95, before moving to UCD for the remainder of his teaching career, Dr Ron Callan is known to many well beyond these shores, is loved by all and – and this is no exaggeration – is the reason why we can be here at all tonight. Without Ron Callan, it’s fair to say there would be no IAAS. Ron chaired the Association through some dark and difficult times between 1997 and 2003, combining that role with his editorship of our Association’s journal over twelve years, between 1995 and 2007. Ron Callan has inspired uncountable numbers of students with his teaching appointments at UCD, here at UCC, and also at Trinity as well as in the US at Dickinson College in PA and during a Fulbright Visiting scholarship posting at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1986.
It is fitting that Ron’s talk tonight deals with the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In ‘The American Scholar’, Emerson noted that “[t]he office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. He is the world’s eye.”
How true this observation has been for the career of tonight’s speaker.’
The John Morton Center for North American Studies, established at the University of Turku in 2014, invites proposals for previously unpublished papers for its inaugural conference, “Bridging North America: Connections and Divides,” to be held on August 28-30, 2014. The conference seeks to bring together junior and senior scholars from inter/disciplinary backgrounds from the social sciences and the humanities to explore various cultural, socioeconomic, geographic, and political connections and divides between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and their global ramifications. The papers may deal with either historical perspectives or contemporary issues, and they may include both empirical and theoretical considerations. We particularly encourage submissions that engage in interdisciplinary and multi-methodological discussions on the study of North America.
Topics for paper presentations may include:
• bridges, borders and boundaries
• the movement of people, goods, and services
• information flows, leaks, and security
• continental economies, policies, and politics
• transnational relationships
• identity formations, identity transformations, identity politics
• cultural expressions, sporting practices, and visual representations
• interdisciplinary theories and practices
Please email abstracts of 250 words for 20-minute paper presentations, together with a max. 150-word bio, including name, institutional affiliation and position, phone number and email address, to Research Coordinator Johanna Leinonen, email johlei@utu.fi. Abstract Deadline: May 31, 2014. Participants will receive notifications of acceptance by June 15, 2014. Selected papers will be published in a textbook designed for the transnational North American Studies classroom context, to be published in 2015. The book will follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Ed.
For further information, please visit the conference website at www.utu.fi/en/units/jmc/bridging2014/.
For general inquiries, please contact us at jmc@utu.fi
Click here for a pdf of the CFP.