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Issue 96 Spring 2007

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Issue 96 Spring 2007

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Editorial

January’s state funeral of President Gerald R. Ford was one of those spectacular public occasions that Americans do so well. It was also a reminder of one of the most obvious differences between our two political systems. When former British prime ministers, Edward Heath and James Callaghan, died recently, there was little of the public veneration that surrounded the former football star from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Lampooned and criticized in his lifetime, Ford in death was treated with all the respect and awe appropriate to a former head of state, as well as head of government. And the public mood at his passing offers an object lesson in how historical reputations can change. If nothing else, Ford’s life offers a rare example of one of the central myths of the American Dream – that any man, however humble, can become president – turning out to be absolutely true. Growing up in Michigan in the 1920s in a cosy atmosphere of dusty baseball parks and boys fishing on lazy summer afternoons, he was like a hero from a Robert R. Tunis baseball story about the virtues of hard work and clean living. Dedication and sporting prowess took him first to the University of Michigan and then to Yale Law School, where he graduated in the top third of his class, something often ignored by the critics who cruelly mocked his intelligence.

Succeeding the unfortunate Dick Nixon as president in August 1974, Ford laboured under some pretty horrendous burdens. He had never won a national election, confronted the worst economic challenges since the 1930s, and, above all, had to make a crucial decision about his predecessor. In the end he chose to issue Nixon with a controversial presidential pardon. At the time, of course, the pardon caused outrage: Ford’s poll ratings took a hit from which they never recovered, and it may well have cost him the presidential election to Jimmy Carter two years later.

Even Ford’s fiercest adversaries later admitted that he had taken the right decision. The journalist Richard Reeves, perhaps his most savage critic, wrote in 1996 that Ford ‘had the guts to take the hit’ and that ‘I, for one, did not have the sense to calm down and get beyond the obvious and into what he might have been thinking’. And in 2001 the Kennedy family presented Ford with the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, the ultimate recognition, as Ted Kennedy finally admitted, that the man from Grand Rapids had done the right thing, even though it destroyed him politically.

Back in 1974, few would have guessed that history’s verdict would be so generous. But that is the beauty of history: however fiercely held, opinions evolve over time, allowing a more judicious perspective. No doubt history’s virtues will be on show at this year’s BAAS conference in Leicester, which promises to be the biggest and best yet, with dozens of panels covering everything from Civil Rights to modernist poetry to the intricacies of congressional politics. American Studies in Britain is booming, and thousands of pounds’ worth of prizes and awards will be distributed at the conference, rewarding the sterling efforts of our subject community’s teachers, researchers and students alike. As always, the conference promises to be both intellectually rewarding and wonderfully convivial, stimulating plenty of debate about subjects historical, political, cultural and literary.

As a great admirer of the Anglo-American cultural relationship, Ford would be pleased to know that American studies in Britain is thriving. The American people, he told the Queen during the Bicentennial of 1976, had never forgotten their debt to ‘British custom, British fortitude, British law, and British government’. And thirty-one years on, despite everything that has changed in Anglo-American relations, the success of BAAS suggests that the relationship is as fruitful as ever.

Catherine Morley
Department of English Studies
Institute for Historical and Cultural Research
Oxford Brookes University
Gipsy Lane Campus
Oxford
OX3 0BP
E-mail: catherinemorley@brookes.ac.uk

52nd Annual Conference

Hosted by the Centre for American Studies, University of Leicester, 19-22 April 2007

Please note that the programme is provisional at this stage. As circumstances dictate, sessions or single papers may have to be moved. All panellists will be notified by e-mail if there is a forced alteration to the time or date of their paper.

Thursday 19th April

2:00 – 4:00pm: Conference Registration
[Tea will be served 2:00 – 4:45pm]

3:00 – 4:00pm: Address by Professor Tony McEnery
Director of Research
Arts & Humanities Research Council

4:45pm: Official Welcome to BAAS

5:00 – 6:00pm: Opening plenary lecture:
Stephen J. Whitfield (Brandeis)
“How the Fifties Became the Sixties.”

6:00 – 7:00pm: Drinks reception kindly sponsored by University of Edinburgh, hosts for BAAS 2008

7:00 – 8:30pm: Dinner

8:30pm – 1:00am: Late Bars & Entertainment
Including “American Folk and Bluegrass Jam” with Will Kaufman, Scott Freer and William Van Vugt

Friday 20th April

7:45 – 8:45am Breakfast

9:00 – 10:30am SESSION 1

The Freedom Rides
Chair: TBC
Ray Arsenault (South Florida) “The Freedom Riders”
Derek Catsam (Texas), “The Kennedy Administration’s Response to the Freedom Rides”
Bernard Lafayette (Rhode Island), “A Personal Reflection on the Freedom Rides, Nonviolence, and the Beloved Community”

Redefining Conservatism: From Nixon to the Militias
Chair: TBC
David Sarias (Sheffield), “‘We must quit using our hearts’: The Conservative Movement and the Southernization of Richard Nixon”
Joe Merton (Oxford), “The Politics of Symbolism: Richard Nixon’s Appeal to White Ethnics and the Frustration of Realignment 1969-72”
Aaron Z. Winter (Brighton), “The White Man Has No Nation: Race, Nation and Christian Patriotism”

Developments in Pan-Africanism
Chair: TBC
Jarod Roll (Sussex), “Black Nationalism in the Rural South 1921-1936”
Kathryn Davies (Sussex), “The Decline of Pluralism: African Americans and the Notting Hill Riots, 1958”
Fabian Hilfrich (Edinburgh), “En Route to Hanoi: (National) Identities and the Difficulty of International Revolution”

Political Marketing in Contemporary Politics
Chair: James Stanyer (Loughborough)
Dennis Johnson (George Washington University), “Amateur Hour”
Peter Ubertaccio & Patrick O’Toole (Stonehill College), “Network Marketing in American Party Politics”
Darren Lilleker (Bournemouth), “The Politics of the Shrinking Marketplace: Marketing Voter Disengagement”

Images of War
Chair: Dick Ellis (Birmingham)
Liam Kennedy (UCD), “Unknown Knowns: Photography and the War in Iraq”
Kathryn Nicol (Leicester), “Divided Loyalties: Race, Citizenship and the Writing of War in Minority American Literature”
Paul Williams (Plymouth), “Spectacles of Censorship: Starship Troopers and the Concealment and Revelation of Political Violence in the War on Terror”

Literature at the Turn of the C20th
Chair: TBC
Debbie Lelekis (Missouri-Columbia), “Mob Mentality”
Rebekah Scott (Cambridge), “‘Everywhere a Foreigner’: Aliens, strangers and other selves in the early American fiction of Henry James.”
Gerald Naughton (UCD), “Ages of Degradation”: Africa as a site of Family Trauma in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition”

9/11 and New York City
Chair: Catherine Morley (Oxford Brookes)
Susana Araujo (Sussex), “Images of Terror, Narratives of Captivity: Specimen and Other Days”
James Peacock (Edinburgh), “New York and yet not New York: Brooklyn in Contemporary American Fiction”
Aliki Varvogli (Dundee), “Falling Towers/ New York/ London/ Unreal: Apocalypse and Utopia in Jay McInerney and Ian McEwan”

Postwar Poetry
Chair: TBC
Jasmine Kitses (San Francisco State), “Allen Ginsberg: Clothed in Nakedness”
Brendan Cooper (Cambridge), “Poetic Canons, Avocados: John Berryman and Frank O’Hara”
Tim Woods (Aberystwyth), “Moving Among my Particulars: The ‘Negative Dialectics’ of Olson’s The Maximus Poems”

10:30 – 11:00 am Coffee

11:00am – 12:30pm SESSION 2

Memory and Race in the Civil Rights Movement
Chair: TBC
John A. Kirk (Royal Holloway), “‘Looking Back at Little Rock’: Understanding the 1957 School Crisis in the Context of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s”
Zoe Hyman (Sussex), “Selective Amnesia: Truth and Reconciliation in the American South”
Ken Bindas (Kent State), “Remembering the Past/Projecting the Future: Race and Memory”

Richard Nixon and Groups
Chair: Gareth Davies (Oxford)
Dean Kotlowski (Salisbury, MA), “Richard Nixon and Native Americans”
Robert Mason (Edinburgh), “Richard Nixon and the Republican Party, 1946-1974”
Ross Nicholson (Oxford), “Richard Nixon, the Silent Majority and Young Voters”

The “Criminal”, Heroes and Anti-Heroes
Chair: Elizabeth Clapp (Leicester)
Vivien Miller (Independent scholar) “Harry Sitamore, New York Jewel Thief, and the ‘Raffles’ of Miami: Crime and Celebrity in Depression Florida”
Campbell (Portsmouth), “The Death of Frank Wilson: Race & Murder in a 19th Century Northern US community”
Hope Howell Hodgkins (North Carolina), “‘Every Word True!’: Daniel Boone on the Margins of History”

Limits of US Interventionism? Perceptions and Reflections from the Cold War to the War on Terror.
Chair: TBC
Bevan Sewell (De Montfort), “Of Unrecognised Importance: The Impact of the Soviet Economic Offensive on US Policy in Latin America 1956-58”
Kaetan Mistry (Birmingham), “Political Warfare: The US, Italy, and the Origins of an American Approach to Wage a ‘Cold’ War, 1945-49”
Maria Ryan (Birmingham), “The need for judgement and prudence”: Neoconservatives Confront the Limits of Regime Change, 1992-2006”

Contiguous States: Race and Sexuality in ‘American’ Cinema
Chair: TBC
Rebecca Scherr (Oslo), “Intersections of Race and Queerness in Far from Heaven and Transamerica”
Julianne Pidduck (Université de Montréal), “Brokeback Mountain’s Queer Revisionism”
Michele Aaron (Birmingham), “Between the Fockers and the Fantastic Four: Jewishness and Gender in Recent American Cinema”

From Puritanism to Pragmatism
Chair: TBC
Peter Kuryla (Belmont), “‘Esthetic Sensitivity’: Reflections on Paul Conkin’s Puritans and Pragmatists”
Peter Rawlings (UWE), “Jonathan Edwards, William James, and the Grammar of Puritanism”
David Greenham (UWE), “(N)either / (N)or: Emerson, Puritanism, Pragmatism and Literary History”

Writing in the Wake of 9/11
Chair: Heidi Macpherson (Central Lancashire)
Catherine Morley (Oxford Brookes), “Infiltrating the Infidel: Some Thoughts on John Updike’s Terrorist”
Alison Kelly (Reading), “‘Words Fail Me’: 9/11 and its Aftermath in Stories by Lydia Davis, Jenefer Shute and Lorrie Moore”
David Brauner (Reading), “Fantasies of Flight and Flights of Fancy: the Retreat from Trauma in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

Confessional Poets
Chair: TBC
Jo Gill (Exeter), “The ‘grotesque house’ of the Body: Subjectivity and Self-surveillance in the poetry of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath”
Ann Walsh (Cork), “Translation: Lowell, Goethe and ‘Die Gold Orangen’”
Luke Ferretter (Baylor), “‘Just Like the Sort of Drug a Man Would Invent’: Sylvia Plath’s Feminist Critique of Psychiatry”

12:30 – 1:30pm: Lunch

1:30 – 3:00pm SESSION 3

Religion, Race and Realignment and Modern American Conservatism
Chair: Brian Ward (Manchester)
Joseph Crespino (Emory), “Desegregation, Church Schools & the Religious Right in the 1970s”
William A. Link (Florida), “Jesse Helms and the Religious Right, 1972-1990”
Tom Packer (Oxford), “Jesse Helms and North Carolina, the Rise and Nature of North Carolina Republicans, 1972-1986”

Concepts and Visions of Race
Chair: Tessa Roynon (Warwick)
Nicky Cashman (Aberystwyth), “‘Black and White’: Historical and Contemporary Visions of Colour in African American Drama of the 1960s”
James Miller (KCL), “James Baldwin’s Black Power: ‘No Name in the Street,’ Frantz Fanon and the Third World”
Andrew Fearnley (Cambridge), “‘A Sapling Bent Low’: Racial Formations in Modern American Psychiatry”

Writing History and Revisionism
Chair: TBC
James Humphreys (Wise College), “Challenging the Dunning Orthodoxy: The Reconstruction Revisionism of Francis Butler Simkins and Robert Hilliard Woody”
Keith Olsen (Maryland), “Eisenhower Revision should extend to Civil Rights”
Chris Dixon (University of Newcastle Callaghan), “Citizen Soldiers and Bands of Brothers: Stephen Ambrose’s Vision of American Victory in World War Two”

Nineteenth Century American Theatre
Chair: TBC
Lisa Merrill (Hofstra), “Mirror of Humanity: Women on the C19th American Stage”
Theresa Saxon (Manchester Metropolitan), “A variety of Mute Expression: Non-verbal Performance on the American stage”
Robert Vorlicky (NYU), “Performances of Democracy in C19th America”

Ways of Seeing
Chair: TBC
Jeffrey Geiger (Essex), “Ways of Seeing Empire: The White City, the Midway and the arrival of Documentary Film”
Jonathan Stubbs (UEA), “Under Western Eyes: Tourism and Imperialism in Around the World in 80 Days (1956)”
Guy Barefoot (Leicester), “Planet Mongo and Plug-Ugly Shows: Henry MacRae, the Serial and 1930s America”

Literary Masculinity and America
Chair: TBC
Clive Marsland (Canterbury Christ Church), “Availing maleness in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Wallace Stevens”
Paraic Finnerty (Portsmouth), “The Object of Their Affection: The Englishman in America”
Stefania Ciocia (Canterbury Christ Church), “‘Making the stomach believe: ‘story-truth and the problematization of gender in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried”

Contemporary Black Writing
Chair: TBC
Sinead Moynihan (Nottingham), “Passed Tense?: Racial Not Passing in Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January Series”
Elizabeth Boyle (Sheffield), “Liminal City: race, text and the urban environment in John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1990)”
Nicole King (Royal Holloway) “‘Soul is Soul all over the world’: Blackness, gender and the expatriate view of Americanness”

Contemporary Poetry
Chair: TBC
William Watkin (Brunel), “Spiritual Typography of Elegy: Susan Howe and the Limits of Elegy”
Emma Kimberley (Leicester), “Narrating nothing: Ekphrasis and Abstraction in Contemporary American Poetry”
Anthony Caleshu (Plymouth), “My Theory is Simple-Minded to be Sure: The Posture of ‘New Knowledge’ in Contemporary American Poetry”

3:00 – 3:30pm Tea

3:30pm – 4:30pm SESSION 4

Jewish-Americans: The Creation of a Specific Identity
Chair: Aubrey Newman (Leicester)
Marc Saperstein (Leo Baeck College), “American Jewish Preaching on the Great War”
Michael Berkowitz (UCL), “Emma’s America: from Kovno to Rochester”

Red Scare and Yellow Peril Politics
Chair: TBC
Alex Goodall (Edinburgh), “American Anticommunism at Home and Abroad, 1911-1920”
M.J. Heale (Lancaster & Rothermere American Institute), “From Red Scare to Yellow Peril in Reagan’s America”

Unintended Consequences: the US at War
Chair: TBC
Ian J. Bickerton (New South Wales), “Turning points”
Kenneth J. Hagan (US Naval War College, Monterey), “Unintended consequences”

Jonathan Franzen
Chair: TBC
Ben Williamson (UWE), “Dollar-sign-headed: American Economies of Meaning”
Jerry Varsava (Alberta), “Not Bowling at All: Jonathan Franzen and the Erosion of American Social Capital”

Djuna Barnes
Chair: TBC
Richard Espley (Birmingham), “Every Mother in exortion for her milk: Maternal Bonds in Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon.”
Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes), “Coney Island Baby: Gender, Technology and Djuna Barnes’s Journalism”

Roundtable: “Google Scholarship, Wikischolarship: Information and Knowledge in the Internet Age”
James Mackay (KCL)
Lynne Brindley (Chief Executive, British Library)
Graham Thompson (Nottingham)

Roundtable: US Mid-term Elections
Chair: David Waller (Northampton)
Philip Davies (DeMontfort)
James P. Pfiffner (George Mason)
Peter Ubertaccio (Stonehill College)

4:40 – 6:00pm BAAS Annual General Meeting

6:30 – 7:30pm Cambridge University Press / Journal of American Studies
sponsored plenary lecture:
Linda Kerber (Iowa) “Marriage on Trial: Historians’
Briefs for Same-Sex Marriage Cases in American Courts”

7:30 – 9:00pm: Dinner

9:00pm – 1:30am: Late bars and BAAS disco

Saturday 21st April

7:45 – 8:45am: Breakfast

9:00 – 10:30am: SESSION 5

Capital and the Civil Rights Movement
Chair: TBC
Helen Laville (Birmingham), “‘Solidly Part of the Community’: White Women, Social Capital and Civil Rights in Little Rock, Arkansas”
Lee Sartain (Nottingham), ‘Its accounts may have been slipshod…’: An initial appraisal of the accounts of the SCLC, 1957-1968.”
Peter J. Ling (Nottingham), “Testing the Ties that bind: African American ‘Social Capital’ within Protest Situations (Montgomery 1955-56 and Birmingham 1963)

Reading Against the Grain in the Age of Antebellum Slavery
Chair: TBC
Kerry Larson (Michigan), “Answering Uncle Tom: Southern Women Novelists and the Fictions of Paternalism”
Xiomara Santamarina (Michigan), “19th century African American Chroniclers of the ‘Higher Classes’”
Sandra Gunning (Michigan), “Imperial Subjectivity, Black Masculinity and the Possibilities of Antebellum Emigration to West Africa: The Case of Robert Campbell”

US in the Middle East
Chair: TBC
Mohammad Hassan Khani (Imam Sadiq University, Tehran), “America & its place in the Hearts and Minds of the Middle Eastern People”
Javad Alipoor (Tehran), “American Exceptionalism and Islamic Revolution Idealism: Reciprocity or Interaction”
Mira Duric (Leicester), “US Foreign Policy and the Middle East: A Comparative Analysis Between US and Russian Foreign Security Policy”

Limits of US Interventionism? Perceptions and Reflections from the Cold War to the War on Terror.
Chair: TBC
Bevan Sewell (De Montfort), “Of Unrecognised Importance: The Impact of the Soviet Economic Offensive on US Policy in Latin America 1956-58”
Kaetan Mistry (Birmingham), “Political Warfare: The US, Italy, and the Origins of an American Approach to Wage a ‘Cold’ War, 1945-49”
Maria Ryan (Birmingham), “The need for judgement and prudence”: Neoconservatives Confront the Limits of Regime Change, 1992-2006”

More than Time and Space: Critical Studies of Context in American Film
Chair: TBC
Damian Sutton (Glasgow School of Art), “Form Follows Fiction: Streamlining Fred and Ginger”
Karen Randell (Southampton Solent), “‘Something might have snapped’: Circulating notions of the Vietnam veteran in newspapers and on film”
Niamh Doheny (Galway), “Did the black press eradicate Black American Cinema?”

Contemporary Writing and Aesthetics
Chair: TBC
Oliver Belas (Royal Holloway), “Genre, Trauma and the Politics of Representation in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling”
Louise Mousseau (Sheffield), “‘An Epic Tale Deserving to be Oft Told’: John Updike’s Reconstructed Abstract Expressionism”
Adam Kelly (UCD), “From Irony to Agency: David Foster Wallace’s Evolving Aesthetic”

Religion and American Culture
Chair: TBC
Monica Kjellman-Chapin (Emporia State), “Precious Americana: Capitalizing of Cuteness in Carthage”
James Russell (De Montfort), “Narnia’s Culture Wars: Christianity, America and National Purpose in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe (2005)”
Marisa Ronan (UCD), “Evangelising Postmodernism: Christian Fiction and the Pursuit of a New Evangelical Christianity”

Ethnicity in the 1920s and 30s
Chair: TBC
Anne-Marie Evans (Sheffield), “Money, Money, Money: Obsessive Working Women in Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life.”
Catherine Rottenberg (Ben-Gurion), “Begging to Differ: Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Anzia Yezierska’s Arrogant Beggar”
Jenni Lewis (Bath Spa), “The Insurgent Body in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men”

Short stories
Chair: TBC
Rachel Lister (Durham), “Terminal Uniqueness: The Postmodern American Short Story Cycle and the Female Self”
Ashley Chantler (Chester), “The American Short-Short Story”
Jesús González (Cantabria), “Words versus Images: Paul Auster as Filmmaker”

Workshop: Writing Exercises in the Study of American Literature
Nick Everett (Leicester)
Nicole King (Royal Holloway)

10:30 – 11:00am Coffee

11:00 am – 12:30pm SESSION 6

Actors, Activism and Conflict
Chair: Jenel Virden (Hull)
Patrick Flack (Cambridge), “Tensions in the Relationship Between Local and National NAACP Branches: The Example of Detroit, 1919-41”
Kevern Verney (Edgehill), “Doing the Right Thing: Harry Belafonte as a Political and Civil Rights Activist”
K. Kevyne Baar (New York), “All Performances Have Been Cancelled! Actors’ Equity Association Responds to Discrimination at the National Theatre, Washington, D.C.”

Dixie’s Catholics: Religion, Race, and Community in the American South
Chair: TBC
Maura Jane Farrelly (Brandeis), “The Americanist Crisis Rethought: Antebellum Catholicism in its Southern Context”
Justin D. Poché (Tulane), “Blessed Persistence: Catholic Leadership and Black Community in Jim Crow Louisiana”
Andrew S. Moore (St. Anselm College), “To Be Good Catholics and Good Citizens”: Religion and Race in the Post-World War II American South”

Native American Culture I
Chair: TBC
Helen May Dennis (Warwick), “Making Spaces: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes”
Joy Porter (Swansea), “Assimilation through Freemasonry: Native American Freemasons and the Settling of the United States”
Nick Monk (Warwick), “Hybridity and Resistance in Leslie Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes”

The Democratic Party Since WWII
Chair: TBC
Eddie Ashbee (Copenhagen Business School), “The Democrats and ‘Moral Values’”
Jonathan Bell (Reading), “A Virile and Meaningful Democratic left”?: Making sense of political ideology in California in the post-World War Two era.”
David Torstensson (Oxford), “The Politics of Failure – Community Action and the Great Society”

Film as Allegory
Chair: TBC
Emma Bell (UEA), “Alien–Nation – on not misreading Lars von Trier’s (Anti)American Films”
Hamilton Carroll (Leeds), “Irish Liberation: Ethnic Whiteness, Class Transcendence, and Million Dollar Baby”
Brian Jarvis (Loughborough), “Ghosts, gadgets and screen memories: reading The Ring (2002)”

W.E.B. DuBois
Chair: TBC
Jennifer Terry (Durham), “‘From black women of America […] this gauze has been withheld’: Gender and the Legacies of Slavery in the Work of DuBois”
Mark Ledwidge (Manchester), “The Dual Consciousness of W. E. B. DuBois”
Barbara Ryan (National University Singapore), “Souls of Black Folk: A Reception Study”

American Crime
Chair: TBC
Josephine Metcalf (Manchester), “‘My change from banger to revolutionary’; the evolution of Monster as a contemporary gang narrative”
Helen Oakley (Open University), “Cuban American Crime: Alex Abella’s The Killing of the Saints”
Alan Gibbs (Cork), “Listen to him, Mr Take-Charge: Gender, Race and Morality in Carl Hiaasen’s Crime Novels”

Into the 1930s
Chair: TBC
John Fagg (Nottingham), “Worker-Writer / Literary Sketcher: To ‘hammer against the minds of the workers’ in a Voice ‘unfitted … for any stipulated body of labor’”
Joanne Hall (Nottingham), “Deviance, Difference and Exception to the Rule: The Construction of the Female Hobo through Autobiography”
Doug Haynes (Sussex), “Laughing at the Laugh: Unhappy Consciousness in Nathanael West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell”

Questioning Domesticity
Chair: TBC
Tara Deshpande (Leeds), “History, Domesticity and the ‘Vanishing Indian’ in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok”
Louis Kern (Hofstra), “There is no Wholly Masculine man, No Purely Feminine Woman’: Passion and Domestication—Rituals of Courtship and Marriage in Frontier and Dialect Humor”
Elizabeth Nolan (Manchester Metropolitan), “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Early Twentieth Century Women’s Magazine Culture”

12:30 – 1:30pm Lunch

Teachers’ Lunch and Q&A Session

1:30 – 3:00pm SESSION 7

Black Community Activism in the Late Civil Rights Movement
Chair: TBC
Nick Sharman (Melbourne), “‘Lawyers jailed!’ The New York Times’ coverage of the arrest of four defence lawyers in the ‘Chicago 8’ trial”
Simon Cuthbert-Kerr (Glasgow), “‘Back here to the same old, same old’: The black community of Quitman County, Mississippi, the Mule Train and the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference’s Poor People’s Campaign, 1968”
Andrew Witt (Edgewood College), “Picking up the hammer’: The community programs and services of the Black Panther party with emphasis on the
Milwaukee branch 1966-1977”

Trapped in Slavery: Exploitation and Values in the Antebellum South
Chair: David Brown (Manchester)
Emily West (Reading), “She is dissatisfied with her present condition:” requests for voluntary enslavement in the antebellum American South.”
Michael Tadman (Liverpool), “The reputation of the slave trader: white antebellum mindsets and the commodification of black people.”
Stephen Kenny (Liverpool) “All the advantage of demonstration over conjecture:” Anatomy autopsy, and penal dissection of the enslaved in the Old South”

Masculinities
Chair: TBC
Alex Hobbs (Anglia Ruskin), “Strength and Physicality as the Masculine Ideal in John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire”
Emma Ruckley (Oxford), “The American Male: Stud or Dud? Representations of Masculinity in 1950s Popular Culture?”
James Reibman (Lafayette College), “Wertham and Masculinity”

Defining US Foreign Policy
Chair: TBC
Sandra Scanlon (UCD), “Snatching Victory: Building a conservative foreign policy consensus after Vietnam”
Alex Miles (Salford), “From Pygmies and Pariahs to the Axis of Evil: The US approach to Rogue States”
Lane Crothers (Illinois State), “The Essential Nation: Explaining American Public Support for US Foreign Policy”

American Film Representation / Representing America on Film
Chair: TBC
Anna Claydon (Leicester), “When did Mr Collins become the Ugly American? Representing America in the films of Gurinder Chadha”
Melissa Anyiwo (Tennessee), “New Women in Old Shoes – Mammy as Hero in the Matrix Trilogy”
Sebastiano Marco Ciccio (Messina), “The Representation Of Italian Immigrants In American Silent Films: 1896-1930”

The Beat Generation
Chair: Polina Mackay (University of Cyprus)
Oliver Harris (Keele) “Cutting Up the Beat Hotel”
Franca Bellarsi (Universite Libre de Bruxelles), “From Blake to Buddha: Allen Ginsberg Journey ‘Through the Grapes of Wrath’”
Bent Sorensen (Aalborg) “The Beats as Cultural Others / Exotics in Recent Memoirs by Exile Poets”

Literature and the West
Chair: TBC
Sarah Barnsely (Goldsmiths) “Sawmills and sand: Mary Barnard’s northwestern poetics”
Luigi Fidanza (Manchester Metropolitan), “Resisting the New West?: Nostalgia, Displacement and the Domestic in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.”
Ben Moderate (Independent Scholar), “Logos and Low Ghost: Jack Spicer’s Western Language”

Modernist Aesthetics
Chair: Martin Halliwell (Leicester)
Sarah Davison (Oxford), “The Spectra Hoax: Parody and American Modernism”
Mark Whalan (Exeter), “The Majesty of the Moment: Photography and Subjectivity in Paul Strand and Sherwood Anderson”
Catherine O’Hara (Ulster), “Reading Harlem’s Women: Graphic Design and the Imaging of Black Women during the Harlem Renaissance”

Ann Tyler
Chair: TBC
Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson (Central Lancashire), “Revisiting the Family: Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist
Janet Beer (Manchester Metropolitan), “Anne Tyler: Families, Food and Ritual”
Ann Hurford (Nottingham), “‘Finger exercises for your novels”: the uncollected short stories of Ann Tyler”

3:00 – 3:30pm Tea

3:30 – 5:00pm SESSION 8

Church and Social Change in the Twentieth Century
Chair: TBC
Emma Long (Kent), “Religious Neutrality or Religious Favouritism? The 1984 Equal Access Act”
Mark Newman (Edinburgh), “The North Carolina Catholic Church and Desegregation, 1951-1974”
Randall Stephens (Eastern Nazarene College), “Same as It Ever Was?: Southern Pentecostalism at 100.”

Distortions in the Representation of Slavery
Chair: TBC
Becky Fraser (UEA), “Dere wuzn nothin’ she didn’ know ‘bout dyein: Memories of Enslaved Female Work as Recollected in the W.P.A. Narratives”
Phyllis Thompson Reid (Harvard), “The Open Sesame to Every Soul: Slavery and the Idea of Romance in Nineteenth-Century America”
Lisa Nanney (Georgetown), “(Re)writing the American South: Race, Representation, and Politics in the Federal Writers’ Project Guides to the Southern States”

Roots Music
Chair: TBC
Scott Freer (Leicester), “Woody Guthrie and the Great Historical Bum”
Will Kaufman (Central Lancashire), “Remembrance and Resurrection: Ry Cooder’s Chavez Ravine”
Kevin Yuill (Sunderland), “Inventing Country Music: Defining America by its Music”

The Role of Ideas in US Foreign Policy
Chair: TBC
David Ryan (University College Cork), “The Intellectual and US Foreign Policy: On
the Perpetual End of History, the Clash of Civilizations, and the Ends of US Foreign Policy”
David Hastings Dunn (Birmingham), “The idea of Transatlanticism and post-Cold War American political debate”
Richard Lock-Pullan (Birmingham), “Religious Ideas in US Foreign Policy”

Utopian Experiments
Chair: TBC
Sue Currell (Sussex), “‘Breeding Better Babies’: The Eugenic Garden City in Europe and America”
Maria Jose Canelo (Coimbra), “Carey McWilliams: inventing cultural citizenship in the 1940s”
Maeve Pearson (Goldsmiths), “Children of Utopia: Memoirs of childhood in the Oneida Community”

Native American Culture II
Chair: TBC
Andrew Dix (Loughborough), “Red, White and Black: Racial Exchanges in Fiction by Sherman Alexie”
Annie Kirby (Independent Scholar) “It is through the story that we survive”: Witnessing the Pequots on the Mashantucket Reservation ”
William E Van Vugt (Calvin College), “English Eyes: American Indian paintings of George Winter”

Anglo-American Exchanges
Chair: TBC
Marta Miquel Baldellou (Lleida), “A Nineteenth Century Transatlantic Encounter: Towards the Anglo-American Victorian Ethics of the Coming of age in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Caxtons and Edgar Allan Poe’s Early Tales”
Peter Messent (Nottingham), “Mark Twain and London”
Emma Louise Kilkelly (Exeter), “Double Consciousness as Social Schizophrenia in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four.”

Mid-Twentieth Century Literature
Chair: TBC
Kevin Power (UCD), “The Metaphor Delivered: Foregrounding the Political Self in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night”
James Fountain (Glasgow), “‘Fighting the enemy of the arts’: British and American Literary reactions to the Spanish Civil War”
Madeleine Lyes (UCD), “‘Grace, Charm and Sophistication’ – The Dream of Urbanity and the Commodification of the Urban in the Fiction and Journalism
of the New Yorker Magazine in 1960’s America.”

Sexual Politics
Chair: TBC
Beverly Haviland (Brown), “Shame and Silence: The Untold Tales”
Sarah Farrell (Florida State), “Fragmented Bunny Ears: Escapism and Utopianism found in America’s Sex Industry”
Michael Bibler (Mary Washington), “In Love with the Night Mysterious: Queer Myths of the Southern Plantation in Contemporary American Culture”

5:30pm Transport to banquet at “Athena” departs

6:00 – 7:00pm Plenary lecture sponsored by the Eccles Centre:
Richard H. King (Nottingham)
“A Dream Deferred or a Nightmare Prevented? The Post-1960s and the Triumph of American Conservatism”

7:00 – 7:30pm Publisher’s Reception hosted by Edinburgh University Press for the launch of the Twentieth-Century American Culture series

7:30pm Banquet

Late Bars

Shuttle buses will run from the banquet venue back to the conference accommodation

Sunday 22nd April

7:45 – 8:45 am: Breakfast

9:00 – 10:30am: SESSION 9

Idealism and Cold War Foreign Policy
Chair: TBC
Andrew Johnstone (Leicester), “The realism of idealism: Thomas Finletter and Multilateralism in US foreign policy”
Andrew Priest (Aberystwyth), “The pragmatic idealist: George W. Ball and US foreign policy”

Maxine Hong Kingston
Chair: TBC
Fiona Wong (Warwick), “Tale-(re)telling and (re)writing in the Literary works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan”
Ying Kong (Manitoba), “Mediating Between American Culture and Chinese Culture”

Language, History and Nationhood
Chair: TBC
Sarah MacLachlan (Manchester Metropolitan), “Translation, Nostalgia and Chicano Culture: El Vez and Ry Cooder”
Maria Roth-Lauret (Sussex), “Multilingual America: division or diversty?”

Contemporary US Violence
Chair: TBC
Claire Stocks (Oxford), “Lessons in Trauma: Representations of High School Violence after Columbine”
Stuart Price (De Montfort), “The Rhetoric of Security; Representations of the ‘long war’ in US public culture”
I.Q. Hunter (De Montfort), “Hostel: the politics of gore”

Gender, Politics, and Representation in Women’s Writing
Chair: TBC
Jude Davies (Winchester), “Mothering and Cleaning Up: Gender, Class, “Race” and Social Change in Ev’ry Month and The Delineator 1895-1910”
Carol Smith (Winchester), Next to Power: “‘Influence,’ Political Agency and Gender Culture in Women’s Magazines 1896-1910 and in the Figure of the First Lady”
Holly Kent (Lehigh), “‘Promised Relief from Her Thralldom’: (Re)Writing Feminism and Femininity in the Nineteenth Century Woman’s Rights Literature”

10:30 – 10:45 Coffee

10:45am – 12:30pm SESSION 10

US Foreign Policy in Africa and the Pacific
Chair: TBC
David M. Walton (Eastern Michigan), “The U.S. and the End of Apartheid in South Africa: The Militant Phase 1970-1990”
Donna Jackson (Nottingham), “The Ogaden War and the Demise of Détente”
Joshua Wu (American University), “Flying the Flag: The US 7th Fleet and American power projection in the Pacific”
David Mosler (Adelaide), “The Future of US Power in the Western Pacific and the US- Australia Alliance”

Immigration and Identity
Chair: TBC
John Killick (Leeds), “Missives from America: Travel Advice on the Cope Line Pre-Paid Passenger Ticket Stubs”
Shiori Nomura (Birmingham), “Voices about romantic love and marriage: Ethnic, racial and gender identity of Japanese immigrant women in the U.S.A., 1914-1924”
Heike Bungert (Bremen), “Festivals of Migrants to the United States as a Medium of Ethnic Memory”
Tara Stubbs (Oxford), “‘Irish Magic’ in America: Marianne Moore at the Dial Magazine, 1925-1929”

Contemporary Cultural Industries: On Entertainment Experience and Mutable Media
Chair: TBC
Gianluca Sergi (Nottingham), “Entertaining Cinema Audiences”
Paul Grainge (Nottingham), ““Total Entertainment”’: The Affective Economics of Contemporary Hollywood”
Roberta Pearson (Nottingham), “Interfacing the Expanded Narrative: Video Games and Character Construction”
Mark Gallagher (Nottingham), “Steven Soderbergh, Authorship and Contemporary Media Industries”

Post 9/11 Cultural Dispatches
Chair: Catherine Morley (Oxford Brookes)
Nicholas Lawrence (Warwick), “What I Heard: Testimony in Post 9/11 America”
Richard Godden (Sussex), “Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park and Neoliberal Ashes”
Rowland Hughes (Hertfordshire), “‘Staying home, going home, being home and errors of leaving home’: Environment, Place and Identity in Annie Proulx’s The Old Ace in the Hole.”
Stephen Shapiro (Warwick), “Biopsies: The Etiology of Resentment in the Era of US Middle-class Collapse”

Literary Exile and Expatriation
Chair: TBC
Jeffrey Herlihy (Pompeu Fabra), “In Paris or Paname: Hemingway’s Expatriate Americans”
Katy Masuga (Washington), “Henry Miller’s visions of Paris”
Emma Staniland (Leicester), “Exile, gender and sexuality in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Sylvia Molloy’s Certificate of Absence”
Otared Haidar (Oxford), “The Expatriates: Arab American Poets and their Legacy”

American Romantics
Chair: TBC
Daniel Koch (Oxford), “Emerson on Three Revolutions: American Independence, 1848, and the Civil War”
Clare Elliott (Glasgow), “‘Mystics, Extatics’ and Godly Visions: Blake’s Influence on Whitman’s ‘Passage to India’”
Tony Hutchison (Nottingham), “‘Deeper than Ishmael Can Go’: Moby Dick and the Form of American Political Fiction”
Ryan Schneider (Purdue), “Transcendentalism and Irish-American Ethnicity in Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod”

Globalization and Citizenship
Chair: TBC
Faith Pullin (Edinburgh), “Xicanisma, feminism and literary experimentation in the work of Ana Castillo”
Victoria Bizzell (Nottingham), “Transnational Neo-Tribalism: Goa Gil and Global Rave Culture”
Benita Heiskanen (UCD), “The International Turn in American Studies”
Anouk Lang (Birmingham), “The Rhetoric of Reading: Citizenship, Community and the Nation in US One Book Programs”

12:30 – 1:30pm Lunch

50 Years in Space: Commemoration of the Launch of Sputnik
Hosted by the National Space Centre
and held in conjunction with
the University of Leicester’s Centre for American Studies and Space Research Centre

[NB Because the capacity of the planetarium is capped, please e-mail the conference secretary in advance if you plan to attend this final section of the BAAS conference]

2:00pm Transport to National Space Centre

3:00 – 5:00pm Roundtable: “50 Years in Space”

Discussants include:
Michael Neufeld (Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, Washington DC)
Alan Wells (University of Leicester)
David Pascoe (University of Glasgow)

5:00 – 5:30pm Planetarium screening

5:30 – 7:00pm Exhibition launch and buffet

7:00pm Conference close

Robert C. (Bob) Reinders

(born July 11, 1926; died October 19, 2006)

Bob Reinders retired from the American Studies department at Nottingham in 1990 and returned to his native Wisconsin to live. But his recent death brought back numerous fond memories among those in the (now)School of American and Canadian Studies who remember Bob. Having taught at Tulane between 1957 and 1965, Bob came to Sheffield in 1965 as a Fulbright lecturer and the next year took a position in History at Nottingham. In 1977, the American Studies group, head up by Brian Lee and including Bob, Dave Murray, Pete Messent, Jennifer Bailey and Peter Boyle became a separate department at Nottingham. That core of the department was in place when Bob retired, though Richard King had replaced Jennie Bailey in 1983 and Douglas Tallack and Peter Ling, were hired in 1978 and 1989 respectively

Bob was a tall man with a certain Lincolnesque quality about him. He was always approachable, definite in his political opinions but kind and generous in his appraisals of others. There was a winning sort of humility and self-deprecation about him. Brian Lee, the founder of the American Studies department and its first Chair, remembers that after the interviews for the Nottingham job, the interview panel offered Bob the job. But when they informed Bob of the good news, he apparently tried to convince them that one of the other candidates was much his superior and should be offered the job!

It has been fascinating to canvass my colleagues for their memories of Bob. The best remembered of Bob’s qualities were his great personal friendliness and helpfulness. Both Pete Messent and Douglas Tallack remember Bob’s acts of kindness to them as young academics when departmental duties got to be too much for them. Another thing that everyone mentioned was Bob’s consuming interest in American history, especially America as a place. Though politically on the left—he was involved in civil rights activities in New Orleans while at Tulane and his former student there, Steve Whitfield of Brandeis University, assumes that he left for political reasons—America was no capitalist Moloch for Bob. For him it was a country filled with fascinating places, particularly his native Wisconsin; moreover, Bob seemed to know about everyone of any note who came from any and all of these places. Name a politician or labor leader, an obscure mid-Western anarchist or a socialist mayor—Bob could tell you where he came from. For Bob culture and politics were local, before they were anything else. Dave Murray particularly remembered Bob’s patience with his younger, British colleagues’ “ill-founded opinions” and “mispronunciations of American place names.” Finally, there was Bob’s concern for his friends and former students. In the last months of his life, numerous of them from Nottingham, Tulane and Wisconsin shared their memories of Bob via email, while being kept appraised of Bob’s condition by his cousin, Bea Reinders, who cared for Bob with love and devotion in his last days. Nor was there anything or anyone that Bob was prouder of than he was of his three sons, Karl, Matthew and Eric.

In general, Bob’s historical interests focused on the years roughly between 1850 and the 1950s. Maggie Walsh remembers going to meetings of the Society for the Study of Labor History with him, while the 1970s saw Bob and his friend, Fred Basler, touring universities and schools in Britain with a “sound and light show” on the American West. He also wrote articles and reviewed books on African American history and writers such as Claude McKay. Indeed, Bob helped establish the strong concentration that American Studies at Nottingham has always had in civil rights, race and southern history. His one monograph was End of an Era: New Orleans, 1850-1860 (1964). Murray also remembers that Bob was active in local race relations organizations in Nottingham during the 1970s and taught at the WEA (Workers Education Association) in those same years.

Fundamentally, Bob lived out his political and moral convictions in his personal dealings with others, in his teaching, and his writing. A democrat by temperament, his politics were a product of the great Progressive-Populist traditions of the upper Middle West. Having just seen Robert Altman’s last film “A Prairie Home Companion”, I can’t help feeling that Bob Reinders would have been a natural for Garrison Keillor’s radio show. Too bad Bob was never on it. He should have been.

Richard H. King (with the help of Brian Lee, Margaret Walsh, Douglas Tallack, Pete Messent, Dave Murray, Steve Whitfield, Susan Atkinson and Liam Kennedy)

BAAS Requests

BAAS Database of External Examiners

The Secretary of BAAS, Heidi Macpherson, holds a list of potential external examiners. If individuals would like to put their names forward for this list, please email her on hrsmacpherson@uclan.ac.uk. Include the following information, in list form if possible:

Name and title
Affiliation with complete contact details including address, telephone, fax, and email Externalling experience (with dates if appropriate)
Current externalling positions (with end dates)
Research interests (short descriptions only)

By providing this information, you agree to it being passed on to universities who are seeking an external for American Studies or a related discipline. Should you wish your name to be removed in the future, please contact the Secretary.

Any university representative interested in receiving the list should also contact the Secretary. BAAS only acts as a holder of the list; it does not “matchmake”.

Paper copies can also be requested by sending a letter to:

Dr. Heidi Macpherson
BAAS Secretary
Department of Humanities (Fylde 425)
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE

EUP/BAAS Series

The Edinburgh University Press /BASS book series continues to be a vibrant success in publishing books in all areas of American Studies in Britain with co-publishing deals in America. Recent publications are The Civil Rights Movement, Mark Newman and The Vietnam War in History, Literature and Film, Mark Taylor. Forthcoming are The Twenties in America, Niall Palmer, The Civil War in American Culture, Will Kaufman and Contemporary Native American Literature, Rebecca Tillett.

The series editors (Simon Newman – S.Newman@history.glas.ac.uk and Carol Smith – Carol.Smith@winchester.ac.uk ) welcome new proposals at any time. They will be happy to advise and shape proposals and are particularly seeking books on the American short story, American music (all types) and the American city and its representations.

US Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

US Studies Online is seeking articles on American literature, culture, history or politics for upcoming issues. US Studies is a refereed journal and submission guidelines can be found at our website:

http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/resources/usstudiesonline/enotes.asp

American Studies News

American Studies Network

The American Studies Network (ASN) is an organization of 18 leading European centers involved in the study of the United States. Founded in 1990 in Berlin and closely affiliated with the European Association of American Studies (EAAS), the ASN promotes the cause of American Studies research and exchange in Europe. All members take an interdisciplinary approach to American Studies; are independent organizations with some of their own sources of funding, not exclusively linked to a university; have some research facilities; and are committed to a role of public service to the community at large. Among the main ASN projects is the American Studies Network Book Prize, a prize of €1,000 for a remarkable book published in English by a European scholar on any aspect of American Studies. ASN also provides dedicated funding for a Visiting European Fellowship, which allows a member of a center to stay for a week at another center and to participate in its activities. In addition, a student exchange program allows Ph.D. students at ASN centers to spend up to two months at another member center. In order to become a member, an institution should write and apply to the current ASN president. Contact details and application criteria can be found at: http://www.eaas.eu/asn.html

University of Edinburgh: Recent Developments in the Study of America University of Edinburgh: Recent Developments in the Study of America

Some years have elapsed since ASIB received a report from Edinburgh. In that time, the university has undergone an administrative revolution, with financially autonomous Schools replacing the former Departments. The concomitant upsurge in transparency has made it evident that the study of America pays for itself, and the field has become stronger than ever. For example, the course American History 2, a year-long survey of the entire period since 1607, combines the traditional Scottish foundation-course principle with a marked degree of didactic innovation. With its intake of well over 200 annually, it is one of the most popular courses in Europe devoted to the study of America.

The four-year duration of the Scottish MA degree means that two years can be devoted to post-foundation honours teaching, and this yields a rich diversity of courses. In the field of American History, 8 full-time members of staff teach 24 courses. On the postgraduate level, the Scottish masters degree is called an MSc to differentiate it from the MA undergraduate degree. MSc and PhD enrolment in American History is stronger than in any other historical field within the School of History and Classics — details may be gleaned from our website: www.shc.ed.ac.uk/americanhistory.

Equally, a considerable number of PhDs on American foreign policy, politics, and society are being supervised in the School of Social and Political Studies, and its largest taught MSc degree – in International and European politics – offers a popular postgraduate seminar in US Foreign Policy, to be taught in 2007 by Seán Molloy.

Within the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, the study of American literature flourishes even more strongly than before the university’s reorganisation. An indicative example of an honours course is “The Black Atlantic.” For Atlantic studies is a flourishing field at the University of Edinburgh. The School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures offers a new MSc programme, “Literature and Transatlanticism”: www.llc.ed.ac.uk/graduateschool/index.html.

The School’s Susan Manning is responsible for the STAR (Scotland’s Transatlantic Relations) Project, a seminar programme run from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the National Library of Scotland: http://www.star.ac.uk/. In the School of Social and Political Studies, the recently appointed Professor of International Politics, John Peterson, has set up a complementary Transatlantic seminar series: http://www.pol.ed.ac.uk/transatlantic.html. (John’s recent inaugural lecture, “US Democrats = the True Europeans? Public Opinion and Foreign Policy” is available as a podcast at http://www.podcasts.ed.ac.uk/politics/2006/). The School of History and Classics chimes in on this theme, too. Fabian Hilfrich, a new arrival this year, has a masters degree from Washington University, a summa cum laude PhD from the Free University of Berlin, and a research interest in European Union-USA relations in the 1970s.

A further, innovative meeting of postgraduate minds occurs fortnightly in the American History Workshop. Under the leadership of Robert Mason, from whom current programme details may be obtained (Robert.Mason@ed.ac.uk), speakers address issues affecting American historians, such as how to pitch an article for general readership. This year, Alex Goodall has organised a lively subgroup within the workshop to discuss abstract issues such as the introduction of the self into historical writing about America.

More traditionally, School of History and Classics formal seminars or lectures allow for contributions from distinguished Americanists, recently, for example, Kevin Kenny (Boston College) and Christopher Waldrep (San Francisco State). In the Autumn of 2007, an event to look forward to will be the British Academy Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture in American Literature and History, to be given by Susan-Mary Grant of the University of Newcastle.

Although the chief support for the study of America comes from the public purse in the guise of central funding, teaching income and research awards, the generosity of private donors has made a significant qualitative difference. For example, Jim Compton, our former colleague whose previous gift established the Compton American History Library, has now established a prize, to be awarded annually, to reward the best student of American History at the University of Edinburgh. And, each year, we benefit from the munificence of one of our American History graduates, Simon Fennell, making possible activities as diverse as lectures by distinguished visitors and country-house reading parties.

Edinburgh University Press is the vehicle for BAAS publications, and editorial responsibility for these is shared by the Press’s excellent Nicola Ramsey and officers of BAAS itself. However, Edinburgh’s Americanists have for years made an unobtrusive but supportive contribution by serving on the Press’s committee. Current members of the committee include Susan Manning and Mark Newman, whose own book The Civil Rights Movement (2004) appeared under the BAAS/Edinburgh University Press imprimatur, and who was earlier a co-winner of the biennially awarded EAAS best-book award.

Recently, Susan Manning has been engaged in another initiative with Edinburgh University Press, a book series entitled “Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures.” The first title in the series has appeared, with four others due for publication over the next eighteen months (details: www.eup.ed.ac.uk). The series operates on “the assumption that the study of American literatures can no longer operate on a nation-based or exceptionalist paradigm.” Co-editing the series with Susan is Andrew Taylor, who has just edited, rather appropriately, a new edition of Henry James’s The Europeans.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

American Studies at Manchester

Manchester American Studies is very pleased to announce that the oldest programme of its kind in the United Kingdom is beginning the next stage of its re-development by making a number of new appointments.
Firstly the university wishes to welcome its newly appointed professor of American Studies, the first for over a generation. Professor Brian Ward has returned to the UK from the University of Florida and, as the programme’s new Chair, brings a wealth of expertise and achievements to the role. Professor Ward’s work in the fields of African American and southern history with emphases on both media and culture, have been the subject of outstanding praise at the international level. Two of his books, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (2004), and Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations (1998), are multi-award-winning publications, the former receiving the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s History Division Book Award and the American Library Association’s CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award, the latter the Organization of American Historians’ James A. Rawley Prize, as well as being a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Manchester would also like to welcome Dr. David Brown who is joining the programme from the University of Sheffield. Dr. Brown is an expert in 19th century American history, especially of the south, and his new book, Southern Outcast, nominated for the BAAS Book of the Year Award 2007, is the first full-length appreciation of one of that region’s most controversial thinkers; Hinton Rowan Helper. Dr Brown’s exciting follow-up, Race in the American South has been written with Clive Webb of Sussex and is available now from Edinburgh University Press.

With this input of new staff, Manchester has also initiated plans to re-invigorate its programmes of research and study. We would welcome enquiries and applications from all students interested in pursuing postgraduate study in the programme. We intend to extend our portfolio of MA pathways in the coming years and opportunities abound for any students with inter-disciplinary interests ranging from history and film, through literature and politics, to popular culture and theory. The university library is also embarking on an ambitious programme to augment its already significant holdings in the fields of American culture, history and literature and has recently purchased a massive database of 19th century U.S. newspapers containing 1.5 million pages of original text.

Any colleague, tenured academics as well as doctoral candidates who might have an interest in presenting their work to the programme and its students are also invited to contact the English and American Studies Subject Area, specifically through Dr. Natalie Zacek at: natalie.a.zacek@manchester.ac.uk
Dr. Zacek is the coordinator of the Manchester Critical MASS (Manchester American Studies Seminar Series) and would be very happy to hear from scholars who would like to present their current work in progress in a scholarly, collegial and encouraging environment.

Further details concerning Manchester’s programmes of study and research interests in American Studies can be obtained from our website: http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/subjectareas/englishamericanstudies/research/americanstudies/
Colleagues may also contact the Programme Director, Dr. Peter Knight at: peter.knight@manchester.ac.uk

Ian Scott

EAAS News

EAAS Report January 2007

The EAAS newsletter number 57 is now out. The new editor, Vice President Martin Heusser, has taken charge of the newsletter and it is hoped that the newsletter will be more timely with the introduction of new software. This version of the newsletter contains workshop reports from the 2006 Cyprus conference, Board minutes and minutes from the hand-over meeting in Paris as well as call for papers and reports from various national associations. The newsletter can be found on the EAAS web site, which has a new domain – please revise your web site favourites to www.eaas.eu

EAAS President Marc Chénetier has continued to work on his two latest initiatives: the European Journal of American Studies (EJAS), which has a continuous call for contributions, and the European library of American Studies. The European library is the plan of the President’s to promote the work of European scholars of America who have published in English.

EAAS also helped to sponsor an inaugural meeting of the European Study Group for 19th Century American Literature. The first meeting took place in Poland in October 2006 and was attended by 20 scholars from throughout Europe and the US. The Study Group hopes to consolidate its initial venture by having more study group meetings in future years. If anyone is interested in joining or learning more about this please consult the EAAS newsletter.

As noted above, the EAAS Treasure Hans-Jürgen Grabbe has acquired a new domain for the EAAS web site. The site is now accessible at www.eaas.eu The current site will continue to operate for the next few months until the transition is complete.

As an election will take place at the BAAS conference in Leicester for the new EAAS representative, anyone who is interested in standing for election and would like further details about what the job entails should contact me on J.Virden@hull.ac.uk

American Studies Recruitment Project

Issues affecting CIC Sixth Form Student Recruitment to American Studies

Undergraduate Degree Courses – Summary of Research

The BAAS Executive Committee is grateful to Hannah Lowe for making the results of her work on recruitment to American studies degrees available to the whole Association. Hannah teaches at the school described in the report and is a co-opted member of the BAAS Executive Committee, responsible for schools liaison. Hannah’s excellent report makes clear the scale of the challenges faced by our subject area in the current climate and offers some practical and thoughtful recommendations about steps we might take to improve recruitment. The Development Subcommittee has already discussed various measures and will be working on these over the next few months. Updates will appear in future ASIB issues.

Richard Crockett, Chair, Development Sub-Committee

Background

In 2006 I undertook a HEFCE funded project which examined the recruitment of students from City and Islington Sixth Form College to American Studies undergraduate degree courses. The project came under The Excellence Fellowship Awards scheme which was a £1.9 million initiative introduced in 2002 to support the Government’s plans for expanding participation in higher education The pilot’s aim was to provide an opportunity for teachers in schools and further education colleges to research issues with direct relevance to widening participation.
City and Islington Sixth Form (CIC) is a multi-ethnic 16-19 education provider based in the Borough of Islington and predominantly serves students from the London Boroughs of Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Islington, Haringey and Camden. The cohort of the centre has always been extremely mixed in terms of ethnic origin, social class and educational background. Many of the students at the Sixth Form are labeled “non-traditional” because of their class and/or ethnic background as well as their lack of family background in higher education. The majority of students (approximately 350) at CIC do apply for university and progress to a higher education course. Yet admissions from CIC to American Studies degree courses are traditionally low with only a handful of students applying for the course each year over the last few years.

Aims

The main focus of this research project was to examine the perception and uptake of American Studies by students from CIC, in the progress of choosing courses to study at university. The project also sought to examine the reasons why students did apply for American Studies (through examining the motivations of American Studies undergraduates at Kings College London in choosing their course) and offered suggestions for how interest in the subject might be fostered and promoted at CIC. In carry out this research, I held focus groups with students from Kings College London (KCL) and CIC students in both the AS and A2 years of study. I also issued questionnaires to AS and A2 Level Humanities students (as those most likely to apply for American Studies) and carried out extensive interviews with higher education advisors, admissions tutors and teachers.

Findings

CIC students’ perceptions of and access to higher education are affected by two factors – lack of knowledge and financial restriction. The lack of family background in higher education means students often lack the same “cultural capital” when it comes to their expectations and understanding of university. Students studying American Studies at KCL, the majority of whom do have parents/siblings who have been to university, cited family members as crucial in assisting them in making university course choices. Approximately half of all Sixth Form students interviewed and issued questionnaires had not heard of American Studies and were therefore unlikely to apply for it. Of those that had, most had vague ideas about what the subject involves, or what progressions and careers opportunities might come out of studying it.

The second factor affecting CIC students’ applications is finance. Again, approximately half the students involved in this research felt that a compulsory four year degree would prevent them from applying to the subject. Yet at the same time many students were attracted to the degree precisely because of the opportunity to study in the US.

Recommendations

To universities:

Increase non-traditional students’ knowledge of American Studies. This might be done in a number of ways:
– improve the links between American Studies departments and careers departments
– hold outreach Widening Participation workshops
– consider ways to increase teachers’ knowledge of American Studies

Focus on targeting students studying Humanities subjects such as Politics, History and English as these are the most likely to be interested in American Studies at HE

Ensure that the time studied in the US is offered in a flexible way to ensure that students have no extra financial burden if studying American Studies

Consider ways in which to ease the financial burden of higher education study on non-traditional students

To CIC:

Continue to work in collaboration with HE institutions to widen participation

Provide accurate predicted grades

Consider ways in which to improve careers advisors’/teachers’/tutors’ knowledge of non-school subjects at higher education level

Hannah Lowe

“America(s): Representations and Negotiations”. Report of the British Association of American Studies Annual Postgraduate Conference

University of Nottingham, 18th November 2006

In November the University of Nottingham welcomed delegates from universities including Harvard, Bergamo, University College Dublin, Cambridge, Oxford, Queens (Belfast), Leeds and Loughborough to the 51st BAAS Postgraduate Conference.

The conference was intended to offer opportunities to as broad a range of postgraduates as possible. In all sixty-seven people attended to participate in panels convened around topics as diverse as “Negotiating the Nineteenth Century: Contexts and Contestations”, “A Place for Memory: Twentieth-Century Regional Literatures”, “Sexuality and Violence: Memoirs Of The Americas”, “Between Two Worlds: Travel, Immigration And American Identity”, “(Trans) Nationalisms: American Cultural and Political Influence”, and “Exploring the Sixties: Images and Identities”. A selection of the best papers will be published as articles in an issue of US Studies Online.

Prof. Liam Kennedy (Head of The Clinton Institute, University College, Dublin) explored the idea of a ‘New’ American Studies in an informative and interesting plenary session which was well-received by delegates and provided focus for such a wide-ranging conference.

The final formal session of the day was a Roundtable Discussion on “Getting Published” with Elizabeth Boyle, editor of U.S. Studies Online, Prof. Nahem Yousaf (Nottingham Trent), editor of the book series Contemporary American and Canadian Writers with Manchester University Press; Dr. Julian Stringer, managing editor of Scope: Online Journal of Film Studies, Professors Sharon Monteith and Richard King from the University of Nottingham, together with former Nottingham PhD student, Karen McNally, currently leading the Film Studies team at London Metropolitan University and whose PhD is forthcoming as a book. This session was greeted enthusiastically by delegates who asked questions on all aspects of the publishing process, benefiting from the experience of a panel representing a wide range of publishing experience.

The buffet lunch and post-conference reception provided opportunities for post-graduates, delegates and speakers to mingle freely and discuss the issues explored during the day in an informal and relaxed manner. This stimulated debate and created a friendly and positive forum for postgraduates, some of whom were attending their first conference.

The organisers would like to thank all who participated in making the day a success. Particular thanks go the US Embassy in London and to BAAS for the financial support which made this conference possible.

Helen Bralesford

Travel Award Reports

BAAS/US Embassy Franklin Fellowship Report 2006

Matthew Pethers

Thanks to the Franklin Fellowship, awarded by the British Association for American Studies in association with the U.S. Embassy, I was able to spend six weeks in the United States at the end of 2006 starting a research project on the relationship between Revolutionary politics and the American theatre during the late eighteenth century. The American theatre has become an increasingly important field of study in the past decade, one which has allowed scholars to re-evaluate and refine their understanding of the way in which key concepts like race, class and gender functioned in the New World. Much of the best and most provocative of this recent work, however, has been carried out by scholars working on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A number of historians have examined the Revolutionary period, but they have largely focused on the early American theatre as an institution rather than as a site for ideological debate. Consequently, while they have provided us with valuable accounts of the actors and the economics involved in eighteenth-century theatre, they have neglected such important phenomena as the interaction between theatrical imagery and republicanism in Revolutionary discourse, the shift in representations of monarchy between 1750 and 1800, and the role of amateur productions in fostering patriotic sentiments. Wishing to pursue these issues, amongst others, I set out with the intention to begin recovering a much more detailed and comprehensive critical context for the early American drama.

As this area of study, not to mention my project, is still very much in a fledgling state I was primarily hoping to complete an ongoing collation of the theatrical repertoire of the period while investigating some particularly significant archive materials, and in this I was not disappointed. My trip began with a two week stint in New York, largely working in the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts at the Lincoln Center. Here I focused on tracking down and examining a number of rare playscripts (both published and unpublished), at the same time as trying to get a clearer picture through newspaper reports and personal documents of the kind of work being performed in the run up to the Revolution. One of the great challenges facing scholars of early American theatre is the elusive nature of the mid eighteenth-century canon, particularly as most plays and performers before 1776 were imported from Britain. The preliminary evidence from my research suggests that, just as American publishers edited novels such as Pamela and Robinson Crusoe to emphasize certain ideological messages about virtue and self-reliance, so they freely adapted British plays such as Thomas Otway’s The Orphan and Shakespeare’s Macbeth to reflect upon patriarchal relations and the nature of monarchy. But this line of research has also made clear to me the necessity for a more rigorous bibliographical account of early American drama in order to precisely appreciate what was being read and performed where and when. Some time spent trawling through booksellers’ catalogues and the records of circulating libraries appears to be beckoning…

Following my time in New York, I then moved on to Massachusetts where I spent another fourteen days. Amongst the hectic modernity of New York it may have been difficult to see traces of the eighteenth century but the quiet colonial vibe of Harvard was perfectly in tune with the period I was studying, and I whiled away many productive hours in the Houghton and Widener libraries in Cambridge. Here I was particularly interested in following up on some of the ‘non-professional’ aspects of American drama during the Revolutionary period. As a number of scholars have recently suggested, there was a vivid and vitally important street culture in eighteenth century America, replete with multiple parades and protests, and I am intrigued by how the theatricality of these events might be linked to the plays and dialogues being performed at the same time. Thus I took the opportunity of being in Boston, the hub of the Revolution, to gather some more details about the precise nature of those ‘spontaneous’ performances which the public would have witnessed in the 1760s and 1770s. Perhaps even more significant, though, was the chance to examine the records of the numerous student clubs which populated Harvard in its early days. Many of these clubs wrote and produced amateur theatricals which shed revealing light on how ordinary Americans conceived of and responded to the dramatic arts.

The students of Harvard were not alone in their concern for the theatre, of course, and so the final two weeks of my trip, which was spent working in the archives of Yale University, involved further research on the non-professional aspect of early American drama and its role in public institutions. Documents uncovered at the Beinecke and the Sterling Memorial libraries confirmed that Connecticut student bodies such as the Linonia Society were as dramatically prolific as their Massachusetts counterparts, and (as at Harvard) I also spent some valuable time examining college commencement plays – short dialogues and performances written for graduation ceremonies and other public events. The subtly changing political tone of these pieces pointedly suggests the gradual slide toward independence from Britain. The scattered nature of many of these materials, divided up as they are amongst collections of personal papers and in different institutional categories, rather than in a central theatre archive, presented something of a challenge, but thanks to the indefatigable detective work of the library staff I was able to view what seems to be the majority of the documents available. Rather more easy to work through were the electronic archives such Evans’ Early American Imprints and American Periodicals Series Online on offer at all the libraries I visited. Unfortunately unavailable in this country, these computer resources provided a fast and effective way of accessing some of the published texts which had previously escaped my notice.

To conclude, I would like to warmly thank BAAS and the U. Embassy for allowing me this invaluable and immensely stimulating opportunity to pursue my research. My gratitude must also be expressed (once again) to all the library staff who so ably assisted me during my time in America, and I should not forget Graham Thompson, who answered all my queries and requests prior to the trip with great patience. If nothing else, the Franklin Fellowship has left me with a deeper and more direct appreciation of American culture, and some fond memories of the people and places I encountered. But the wealth of material I gathered during my time abroad will also prove crucial to refining and, in many cases, challenging my initial theories about the early American drama, and will I am sure have laid the groundwork for pushing my project on toward the beginnings of the writing stage.

John D. Lees Award

Vicki Gordon, Oxford Brookes University

As the fortunate recipient of the John D Lees BAAS Short-Term Travel Grant I was able to spend two weeks in the United States in June 2006 conducting research for my PhD thesis titled: ‘Unilateral executive power: Shaping US national security policy from Kennedy to George W Bush’.

My thesis is an in depth study of how unilateral executive action has been used to shape US national security policy. Unilateral executive action is the ability of the president to act independently, either with or without the explicit consent of Congress or the courts, to effect policy change outside the bargaining framework. It is based on an institutional theory of the presidency, and builds upon and seeks to test the unilateral politics model developed by William G Howell (Power Without Persuasion: the Politics of Direct Presidential Action, Princeton University Press 2003). Whilst previous studies have focused on a single tool of unilateral executive action (e.g. executive orders or executive agreements) none have systematically looked for patterns across all the tools (executive orders, memoranda, national security directives, proclamations and signing statements). Using a four stage process to distinguish ‘significant’ unilateral actions from non-significant unilateral actions, my thesis examines the five tools across a single, albeit large, policy domain of national security to test the hypothesis derived from the unilateral politics model. I pay particular attention to national security directives in order to provide an understanding of what they are and their role within the unilateral making of national security policy. The study also provides some insights into how these tools have been used collectively to shape national security policy, by presenting an historical overview of the use of unilateral actions with some selected case studies.

The purpose of my trip was to conduct interviews with ex-national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Anthony Lake in order to gain an understanding of the extent to which these tools play a role in the development of national security policy. I also conducted an interview with a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer in order to gain some insight into the response of Congress to the use of unilateral actions in shaping national security policy in terms of its oversight and policy making role. I also managed to collect various documents which are not available in the UK.

I spent my time in Washington DC, where my first stop was the Library of Congress to visit the Congressional Research Service (CRS) where I had arranged to talk to a specialist in the government division. He was extremely helpful in providing data he had acquired after a long service at CRS and provided me with access to the CRS resources. As well as conducting interviews in DC I also spent some time at the library at Georgetown University, using the electronic databases to find national security policy documents and reports. I also spent some time at the Library of Congress using the Historical Newspapers Archive in order to find out the saliency of directives, executive orders etc over the specified period.

My visit to the US was a wonderful experience and I have made great progress in my research as a result. I have returned with many new ideas and renewed energy for my project. I am very grateful for the financial support of the BAAS which made my trip possible.

Marcus Cunliffe Award

Josephine Metcalf, University of Manchester

My PhD research focuses on contemporary street gang memoirs which have been variously demonised in the media as violent and sensationalist or, by contrast, praised as offering a pedagogic and preventative anti-gang stance. I will be exploring these contradictions both within the memoirs and in their reception, concentrating on three principal authors: Stanley “Tookie” Williams, Sanyika Shakur aka “Monster”, and Luis J Rodriguez. The BAAS short-term travel award allowed me the opportunity to spend three weeks in LA (in November/December 2006), in libraries, literally on the streets, and interviewing a wide range of sources.

Perceived by many to be the “gang capital” of the US, it comes as no surprise that LA’s libraries (UCLA, USC and public libraries) have an extensive collection of gang-related texts, some of which are not even stored by the British Library in the UK. Indeed, this was a valuable opportunity to access books such as Donald Bakeer’s out-of-print novel about the Crips gang, Sergeant Wes McBride’s analysis of gangs (the most mainstream study to ever be written by a police officer), Celeste Fremon’s report on gangs in East LA and a PEN Anthology of prison writing prize winners. As an aside, UCLA is renowned for its extensive collection of children’s literature, and I was interested to learn that Tookie’s series of anti-gang children’s books were actually held on reserve as they form part of this collection (and not, as you might assume, because of their controversial reputation).

To develop my interdisciplinary argument, I will not only be conducting close textual readings of the three texts, but moreover analysing their press reception. I therefore spent much time using LexisNexis at UCLA’s libraries, slowly working my way through the book reviews and media materials since the earliest publication date of my three authors (1993). Street gangs have traditionally been subjected to sensationalised and inaccurate coverage in the media, and thus I also researched articles by known gang journalists (for example, the infamous Jesse Katz who worked towards reversing this trend by trying to understand the street gang phenomenon). By coincidence, I was in LA for the one-year anniversary of the execution of Tookie and was shocked that despite the extensive media coverage this time last year, there was not a single article mentioning him in any of the major LA publications. I would regularly drop his name into conversations to gauge people’s reactions, and it was fascinating to note the wide range of responses, varying from complete amnesia, to sympathy, to adamant support of his death.

My project will contextualize this cycle of gang memoirs in terms of post-civil rights America. To this end, I was keen to meet a journalist who currently writes for the LA Weekly (a slightly alternative press to the mainstream LA Times) as well as a journalist who formerly worked for the Times throughout the gang heyday of the late 1980s/early 90s. I compared their viewpoints and comments about American society’s role in encouraging the development of the gang, and more specifically, society’s role that has led to the popular demand for the gang autobiography. We also discussed to what extent they felt the extended room of an autobiography, could possibly readdress the media’s selective coverage of gangs in general.

Through selective interviews, I began to trace actual responses by situated readers in order to test out the points of identification opened up by these memoirs. To reinforce this ethnographic element of my study, I spent time at four different high schools in lower socio-economic areas of LA (monitored by the LA Unified School District by how many students receive free school lunches), and spoke with teachers, librarians and students themselves. The majority of adults that I interviewed, felt strongly that it was better for students to read/discuss these controversial texts, than it was not to read/engage at all. Interestingly, Luis J Rodriguez’s text is the firm favourite; his book has apparently earned the award of being the most stolen book in LA’s library system. This trip permitted me the priceless chance to actually ask students in person why they thought this might be so.

Although I did some volunteer work in California ten years ago with a community gang project for minor gang involvement, I was never subjected to real gang life to this degree; suddenly everything I had read about in the autobiographies was being played out before my eyes. In one of the East LA schools that I visited (where the teacher actually spent several hours teaching a “gang unit” revolving around subjects such as Tupac’s lyrics and poetry), the metal classroom doors automatically locked behind you and the students spoke tentatively around the subject, not wishing to upset the classmate who had recently lost her boyfriend in a gang-related shooting. In a second school, the reception to welcome visitors was manned by police officers, while in a third, students were screened for weapons upon entry. At the last school I visited, the teacher showed me her classroom window where 6 months earlier she had witnessed two gang members trespassing on campus and shooting dead a school pupil. Whilst not wishing to sensationalise such a sensitive and sad topic (I must remind you that the vast majority of LA’s youth will never join a gang), these stories reinforced for me the context in which gang autobiographies are being used at schools across LA. Certainly, in order to comprehend student reactions it is useful to have some grasp of the reality of their situation.

I met with four former gang members whom I was introduced to through probation and through Father Greg Boyle (the “gang priest”). Whilst they were more than happy to show me bullet scars and heavily criticise the police, they were actually all very enthusiastic about the autobiographies themselves, and the potential part they could play in the lives of contemporary American youth. All four of them had their own children, and we conversed about these texts in view of their role as parents. Certainly, the politics of all these three memoirs have been seen as complex and contradictory; on one hand they offer a strong anti-gang sentiment, whilst simultaneously they can be seen to be glorifying violence. One of the highlights of my trip was listening to these young men, who have “been there and done that” and their resulting views of these gang memoirs.

I also interviewed the Head of the Media Operations at the LAPD, who spoke candidly about the press reports surrounding gang incidents, which contrasted with my meeting with a former Sergeant from the LA County Sheriff’s Department (the two institutions have varied greatly in their management of gangs). My eyes were also forced open following my meeting with a probation office (she had some intense stories to share), and a professional gang photographer who has spent 15 years tracking one particular gang in LA. I was thrilled to meet Angela Davis and ask her about her role as one of the most outspoken critics of Tookie’s execution, and was equally excited to meet Luis J Rodriguez and spend time with him at the Cultural Café he established out in the San Fernando valley. It was such a perfect opportunity to quiz him about so many questions that were raised by his book.

Unbeknownst to many, there is a vast body of academic work that is available on American street gangs (commencing with Frederick Thrasher’s renowned study from Chicago at the turn of the century). I was fortunate to meet with Professor Malcolm Klein, formerly of USC, who has made a huge contribution to gang studies over a 40-year career. Indeed, several of his texts have been seen to form the backbone to academic studies of gangs. We had a lively discussion about how contemporary academic gang studies have evolved and what other academics are critical when considering this subject. Sadly, Professor Vigil (an academic “barrio expert”) was not able to find the time to meet with me, but we have commenced an online interview so that I may be provided with further viewpoints from an academic perspective. I also ran out of time before having the chance to interview Jesse Katz, but we are again interviewing online. The only other last-minute cancellation was my police escort around the streets of South Central. However, due to recent demographic changes, Latino gangs far outnumber African American gangs, and therefore it was more logical that I spend time in the traditionally Latino areas of East LA anyway.

I think that I single-handedly funded the LA bus system for a period of three weeks (if you ever have any questions about the LA bus system then I am an expert; I discovered places that aren’t even listed in the guide book). Regular journeys of two hours by bus did not phase me: not only did it give me an idea of how far some of the children I met had to travel to school each day, it also gave me a true understanding of the socio-economic status of some of these neighbourhoods, which I wouldn’t have noticed had I driven on the freeways. Plus my nerves are still in tact having avoided driving anywhere myself.

Ironically, as a result of travelling all the way to California, I have now been placed in touch with a former Blood gang member who works with youth gangs and gun crime in South London, as well as a law lecturer (from Manchester University no less!) who is at the forefront of the internationally renowned “Eurogang” organisation. Upon returning to the UK, a friend had saved me a newspaper article reporting on Britain’s growing youth gang epidemic, and I hope that perhaps we can learn something from our colleagues worldwide to aid with the situation in this country.

Needless to say, I have gathered some valuable and fascinating materials for my research. I would like to take this opportunity to thank BAAS for awarding me the Marcus Cunliffe travel grant; I am sincerely grateful to them for making this trip possible. Thanks also to Claire Wardle and my supervisors for their assistance in preparing questions, to all those generously gave their time to interviews and provided me with further contacts or sources of information, and to Kayse Gehret for ferrying me to and from airports and letting me bore her with my stories.

Founders’ Award

Catherine Morley, Oxford Brookes University

I was fortunate enough to be amongst the inaugural recipients of the BAAS Founders’ Awards, which were launched at the Kent conference in 2006. My travel grant took me to the Midwest last summer. I travelled to Lincoln and Red Cloud, Nebraska, to participate in the annual Willa Cather conference at Red Cloud and to conduct archival work there and at the University of Lincoln, Nebraska, for a forthcoming monograph project.

The first part of my trip consisted of archival work at the University of Lincoln, where I was able to read Cather’s correspondence and that of her companion and editorial assistant, Edith Lewis. My most interesting discovery though, was the diary of Dr Frederick Sweeney which Cather used (with his permission) in the composition of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel One of Ours (1922). Such finds, only possible with close archival work, are incredibly illuminating for the literary scholar (and indeed the biographer) as they offer insights into the mind of the writer and processes of composition. Cather was often criticised for One of Ours, especially by the likes of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, who questioned her credentials as a war writer and dismissed her accounts of life at the front as unrealistic. The diary at Lincoln offers evidence to the contrary with Cather using vast swathes of Sweeney’s testimony in her composition.

From Lincoln, I travelled to Red Cloud, for the annual conference and to conduct further research. This was my first real taste of the Midwest and my first experience of an early morning siren call – a hangover from the Cold War days. I was lucky enough to stay at the Cather’s Retreat guesthouse, home of the Cather family after the author had moved East. The house was immaculately kept in the style that that Cather family would have known and I was delighted to stay in the room used by Willa on her visits home.

The conference gathered Cather scholars from all over the US. I, however, was the only non-US participant. This accolade won me a front-page feature and photograph on the local Hastings Herald Tribune – a source of much amusement for my fellow delegates throughout the conference. The conference kicked off with a wonderful walk over the Nebraska prairies and the unveiling of a plaque in honour of the writer. My paper, ‘Willa Cather and the International Modernist Movement’, was well received by the group and selected for publication in forthcoming volume on the author. I was also invited to participate in the upcoming international conference in Paris and Province as one of the keynote speakers.

My two-week trip concluded with nine days amongst the writer’s papers at Red Cloud. The archives are stored in a nineteenth-century bank, which has been beautifully maintained in its original state. I worked in the cage, and unearthed dozens of personal letters and diary materials. Cather’s letters and diaries cannot be published due to a clause the author placed over her estate and papers before her death. Again, these letters were of immense critical value. But they also offered insights into a very private personal and writing life. My work on Cather continues and I am grateful for the personal and intellectual value of my BAAS Founders’ Award, without which the trip and all its incipient benefits would not have happened.

David Torstensson, St. Anne’s College, Oxford

As my DPhil thesis is on Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, its main Community Action Program, and the executive agency running the antipoverty programs, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the two main sites I needed to visit on my research trip were the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas, and the National Archives, College Park, Maryland. For purposes of speed, efficiency and economy I opted for using digital imaging extensively to copy the relevant materials. During the course of my four week trip I took over 12,000 pictures.

Prior to the trip I had already gone through quite a lot of White House related material housed here in the UK or available online. This included White House War on Poverty central files, files of Presidential aides, oral histories, and taped conversations of Lyndon Johnson and his staff. Therefore, the focus of my research would be on the College Park records of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). These records include the papers of the OEO Director, Sargent Shriver; his deputy from 1966 and later OEO director, Bertrand Harding; the director of the Community Action Program (CAP), Ted Berry; internal investigations and evaluations of local and regional Community Action Programs and other antipoverty programs, such as the Job Corps, Head Start and Legal Services. Within these records were also documents from OEO sub divisions and regional offices. This was a wealth of material that has provided me with a not inconsiderable amount of raw data from the audits and evaluations of local Community Action Programs, and plenty of revealing internal memorandums between OEO staff. These sources have revealed that many historians understanding of the Community Action concept has been limited to the idea of it being a radical, revolutionary idea promoting dramatic social change. Actually, the documents show that the concept was not so static and that there existed many competing conceptions of the purposes of Community Action; a fact that caused great friction and conflict within the OEO. Of these the most prominent one was in fact a service-oriented, quite moderate approach.

In addition to the OEO documents, I spent some time at College Park looking at the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) records, and particularly the papers of their then secretary, Orville Freeman, and his assistant secretary John A. Baker. These records revealed an extensive correspondence between CAP’s rural affairs office and the USDA on how to combat rural poverty; something that many War on Poverty historians have missed altogether. I also managed to find a copy of a substantial 1969 General Accounting Office investigation of the OEO and the antipoverty program and several smaller investigations of specific local programs during 1966, 1967, and 1968.

In Austin the most interesting material were the files of several prominent presidential aides, in particular those of Bill Moyers and Fred Panzer. Unfortunately these files did not reveal as much as the College Park material. However, this was not a lost trip as the LBJ library also holds the papers of OEO’s 1965 deputy director Bertrand Boutin; several interesting oral histories not available anywhere else, like OEO director Shriver’s; and several useful secondary sources such as Robert F. Clark’s Maximum Feasible Success: A History of the Community Action Program.

In summary, my findings from the research trip support my thesis that there is a different and important history of the War on Poverty that still needs to be written; a history that adds to, and questions, many of the basic assumptions held about Community Action, the OEO, and the Johnson White House.

Awards Opportunities

BAAS Postgraduate Essay Prize

The prize is offered annually by the British Association for American Studies. It is awarded for the best essay-length piece of work on an American Studies topic written by a student currently registered for a postgraduate degree at a university or equivalent intsitution in Britain. The value of the prize will normally be £500.

Candidates should submit four copies of the typescript by February 16, 2007 to:

Dr. Ian Scott
English and American Studies Subject Area
SAHC, University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL

The essay should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words in length, and should be accompanied by a letter from an institutional representative, tutor or supervisor, as attestation that the candidate is registered for a postgraduate degree course, or has been accepted for a course.

Care should be taken to ensure that the name of the author does not appear on the essay itself, but only in the covering letter. All essays will be assessed anonymously by a panel drawn from the BAAS Executive Committee.

The essay should form a self-contained piece of writing, suitable for publication as an article in a professional journal. Care should be accordingly be taken with matters of presentation and documentation. Prize-winning essays will be offered publication in US Studies Online: the BAAS Postgraduate Journal.

BAAS Monticello Teachers’ Fellowships

Now in its second year The British Association for American Studies (BAAS), in conjunction with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) and the International Center for Jefferson Studies (ICJS), is delighted to announce two awards for teachers who cover the American Revolution, the Constitution and related materials in their A Level or Advanced Higher teaching of history and politics. To be eligible to apply for these awards, applicants must have at least three years teaching experience, and teach A Level or Advanced Higher materials relevant to the Fellowships. It is expected that these awards will be of particular interest to teachers interested in the new Edexcel History Paper ‘From Colonies to Nation 1763-87’, as well as to those teaching other 18th century history and American politics topics at A Level, such as the American Revolution, slavery, and the development of American constitutional government.

Barringer Fellowship

One Barringer Fellowship will be awarded to a British teacher in 2007. This award will enable a teacher to travel to Monticello, and work with academic staff at ICJS (including those involved in the Archaeology Department, and their extensive programme on slavery in Virginia). The Fellowship will allow the successful applicant to spend two weeks working on the development of classroom materials, lesson plans, and related materials. The successful applicant will be chosen by BAAS and then confirmed by the ICJS. Their application must demonstrate that the Fellowship will relate to and directly benefit their A Level or Advanced Higher Teaching. The Barringer Fellowship will include: a stipend of $1,500; travel costs up to $1,000; $1,400 for lodging in a local hotel; and $50 per diem for food. In addition, BAAS will provide a £500 travel award to pay for international travel. The grant can be taken at any time during the recipient’s summer vacation, with the approval of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. For more information see:
http://www.monticello.org/research/fellowships/barringer_fellowship.html

Monticello-Stratford Hall Seminar for Teachers (circa June-July 2007)

One Fellowship will be awarded to a British teacher in 2007 to enable participation in the annual Monticello-Stratford Hall Seminar for Teachers. Designed exclusively for teachers, this annual three-week programme has an interdisciplinary flavor and a distinctive historical approach. Seminar sessions will be held in the Jessie Ball duPont Memorial Library at Stratford Hall, in the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, and on the Monticello grounds, but historic Virginia itself also serves as a classroom. On-site instruction is featured, and students will study architecture by examining the historic structures and landscapes of both plantations (and of the University); agriculture by actually farming for a day with colonial tools and methods; urban life by visiting Williamsburg; slavery by tours along Monticello’s
Mulberry Row and at Stratford Hall’s “Quarters”; and commercial activity by an afternoon at Stratford’s eighteenth-century mill and wharf area. George Washington will be studied at Mount Vernon and Popes Creek, Patrick Henry at Hanover Court House and St. John’s Church, James Madison at Montpelier, John Marshall at his Richmond home, George Mason at Gunston Hall, and James Monroe at Ash Lawn-Highland.
The successful applicant will be furnished all books and course materials, as well as all room and board. All participating teachers will be housed near the “Great House” at Stratford and will take their meals in the scenic plantation dining room nearby; for the Monticello phase, housing and lodging will be “on the Lawn” at the University of Virginia. In addition, BAAS will provide a £500 travel award to pay for international travel. For more information see:
http://www.monticello.org/education/stratford.html
The successful applicants will be required to share their experiences and relevant teaching materials on the BAAS website for school teachers.

Conference and Seminar Announcements

The Commonwealth Fund Lecture on American History

Friday, 2 March 2007
5.30pm in the Chadwick Lecture Theatre
University College London, Gower Street, London

Professor Edward L. Ayers, University of Virginia (now president-elect of the
University of Richmond) will speak on ‘Making Black Freedom in the American South,
1863-1900’.

To be followed by a reception.
All are welcome
Contact Melvyn Stokes, University College London
M.Stokes@ucl.ac.uk

Hayes-Robinson Lecture at Royal Holloway

University of London
Friday 16 March 2007

The annual Royal Holloway, University of London, History Department Hayes-Robinson lecture will take place on Friday 16 March 2007 at 5.30pm in the Main Lecture Theatre. This year’s lecture will be delivered by Prof. Nell Irvin Painter talking on “America through French Eyes: Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont.”

Free admission and all are welcome.
Nell Irvin Painter is the Edwards Professor Emeritus of American History at Princeton University and a renowned interpreter of African American history. She is the author of five books and numerous articles about the American South; and her latest work, just published by Oxford University Press, is Creating Black Americans: African-American History and its Meanings, 1619 to Present (2006).

For travel information to Royal Holloway see
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/visitors-guide/directions.html

Comparative American Studies: Free on-line Access

https://online.sagepub.com/cgi/register?registration=FT6486
The current special issue of Comparative American Studies features articles from
such leading theorists as Slavoj Zizek, Richard H. King and Donald E. Pease. To
celebrate the publication of this special issue Sage would like to offer you free
online full text access to the journal until the 28th February 2007. If you would
like to take advantage of this opportunity then simply register here:
http://sage-news.msgfocus.com/c/1kaM24legVtGsLg

Articles Include:

Slavoj Zizek, Co-Director of the International Center for Humanities, Birkbeck
College, UK: Notes Towards a Politics of Bartelby

Richard H. King, University of Nottingham, UK: Intellectuals and the State: The
Case of the Straussians

Maria Ryan, University of Birmingham, UK: Neoconservatives and the Reagan
Administration: The Dilemmas of Strategy and Ideology

Pierre Guerlain, University of Paris 10, France: Robert Kagan and Noam Chomsky:
Two Ways of Being a Political Intellectual

Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College, USA: After 9/11, or, Whither the New
Americanists?

NB: Your free online access to this journal will finish on February 28th 2007. To continue to access this journal online in 2007, please encourage your institution to subscribe to the print and electronic versions using the
http://sage-news.msgfocus.com/c/1kaNcWevPbhxbj7
library recommendation form.

AHRC Postgraduate Conference: Redefining Conflict in Post-Cold War Media

School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, UK
March 29-30th, 2007

UPDATED CFP: PLEASE NOTE AMENDED DEADLINE 1 FEBRUARY.
Plenary Speaker: Professor John Tulloch

John Tulloch, a Professor of Sociology at Brunel, and a survivor of the London bombings of 7th July 2005, has been a vocal critic of Blair’s political uses of the event.

Exhibiting Artist: Dan Williamson
There will be an exhibition and talk by artist Dan Williamson, whose recent mixed media work on the ‘War on Terror’ was one of the most popular installations at the British Art Sideshow 2006.

Round Table Participants: (to include) Chris Cleave and Matt Carr
Chris Cleave, author of Incendiary — a novel about a terrorist attack in London whose publication date was coincidentally the 7th July 2005 — and Matt Carr — author of Unknown Soldiers: How Terrorism Transformed the Modern World — will be participating in a roundtable discussion.

Since the end of the Cold War, scholarship has provided new definitions of conflict that have attempted to reconfigure the identity of the ‘enemy’ or ‘other’. Whether in the realm of personal interaction or political engagements, the changing nature of global politics in the post-Cold War era has fundamentally impacted the many ways people see themselves in relation to others. This inter-disciplinary conference encourages fresh scrutiny of contemporary debates concerning the relevance of ‘globalisation’, and the rise of the media to the so-called ‘war on terror’.

In order to encourage debate and a productive exchange of ideas, the conference will combine traditional panels with themed round table discussions, determined by the content of the papers submitted. The conference will include opportunities to discuss issues related to the professional development of research students such as publishing opportunities and academic networking.

To register, contact:
Ceri Gorton, Conflict Conference
School of American and Canadian Studies
Trent Building
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham NG7 2RD
E-mail: conflictconf@nottingham.ac.uk

“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”

An Interdisciplinary Symposium on James Agee and Walker Evans at the University of London, Stewart House (Russell Square).

With papers by: Caroline Blinder, John Dorst, Mick Gidley, Blake Morrison, Paula Rabinowitz, and Alan Trachtenberg.

Friday the 16th. Feb. 2007
9.00-17.00
£25/£15 -Students
For registration and information contact: c.blinder@gold.ac.uk

F. Scott Fitzgerald Ninth International Conference

The Ninth International F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference will be held in London, from 8 through 14 July 2007. Senate House, near Russell Square in Bloomsbury, will be the conference center where panels and plenary sessions will be held.
Registration will run from 1 April to 31 May 2007.
NOTE: The University of London’s Institute of English Studies will serve as conference organizers, and the IES will provide a dedicated website later this year (linked to the Fitzgerald Society website) with registration and accommodation information as well as further information about the Call for Papers.
If you have any questions about the conference program, contact either Kirk Curnutt, Jim Meredith (meredithjh602@hotmail.com), or Ruth Prigozy (engrmp@hofstra.edu).
Conference Directors: William Blazek (blazekw@hope.ac.uk) and Philip McGowan (philip.mcgowan@qub.ac.uk)

CFP: The Literatures of Captivity

Department of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth
5-6 July, 2007
Closing date: End of February 2007

“Open your newspaper — any day of the week — and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable” -Peter Benenson, Founder, Amnesty International Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that no one shall be subjected to torture, or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Yet the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, the world over, have seen unjustified and pre-emptive incarceration and restrictions of freedom, from the American slave plantations to the Soviet Gulags, from the North Korean labour camps to Burma’s closed borders, from the Holocaust to the prison cells of apartheid.

Writers from Frederick Douglass to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nelson Mandela to Vaclav Havel, have spoken out against such acts, and served to draw the world’s attention to the abuses of its peoples. This conference will explore the role of the literatures of captivity in the struggle for human rights.

What role does the writer have in the struggle for human rights?
What is the relationship between writing and rights?
How can prisoners of conscience best express and protest their situation?

Areas of interest might include:
the literature of slavery and abolition
representations of the Gulag
the Holocaust
Japanese American internment
memoirs of Communism
memoirs of northern Korean labour camps
African national struggles for independence

400-word proposals should be sent to the Conference Organisers, Helena Grice and Tim
Woods at hhg@aber.ac.uk
Closing date: End of February 2007.

CFP: National Political Cultures and the Wider World: The Transnational Dimension of Political Ideas and Party Politics in Europe and the United States since 1918

A Conference at the University of Reading, 4-6 September 2007
The deadline for proposals is 1 March 2007

Historians have recently become increasingly aware of the extent to which political parties and organisations shared political ideas and experience in an age of rapid industrial and technological change. Although much work has been done on national political cultures and political parties, only in the last decade has much attention been paid to the connections between the national and international dimensions of the political process and of political ideas. From the relationship between different socialist parties after World War One to the impact of national politics on the processes of European integration to the impact of welfare state building in Europe on American liberal politics after World War Two, attention to transnational aspects of political change in the twentieth century is yielding new insights into the workings of the state in the modern world.

This conference will address issues related to the transnational dynamics of political culture, political parties, non-governmental organisations, and political ideas in the industrialised world since World War One in a comparative perspective, with particular attention to Europe and North America.

We welcome paper proposals on any aspect of transnational political relationships of the kind described above. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words, together with your name, professional affiliation, and brief biographical summary to the conference organisers by email attachment. The deadline for proposals is 1 March 2007.

Please direct all enquiries and paper proposals to:
Dr Jonathan Bell j.w.bell@reading.ac.uk
Dr Linda Risso l.risso@reading.ac.uk
Dr Matthew Worley m.worley@reading.ac.uk

CFP: The Sixth Biennial Conference in London of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Conference American Literary and Cultural Studies

A Three-Day International Conference on All Areas of Anglo-American Literary and Cultural Studies.
Venue: Brunel University, West London
Dates: 12th – 15th July 2007
Submission deadline: Sunday 8th April, 2007

Keynote: Ian Bell (Keele University). Other significant keynote speakers are to be announced shortly.

All Areas & Periods Are Welcome. Headline Theme: ‘Anglo-American Aesthetics: Innovations and Economies of Influence?’

The School of Arts at Brunel University is delighted to collaborate with Symbiosis in hosting the Sixth Biennial Symbiosis Conference in West London. “Anglo-American Aesthetics: Innovations and Economies of Influence?” will take place at the Uxbridge Campus, Brunel University, July 12 – 15, 2007.

Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary and Cultural Relations specifically addresses the artificial divide between literatures and cultures on either side of the Atlantic, a separation recognized by few creative writers but often institutionalized in the modern academic community. It is the journal uniquely concerned with studies of literary and cultural relations between the British Isles and the Americas and is interested in all genres, all theoretical approaches, and all periods from the beginnings of Anglophone America to the present. We welcome submissions and expressions of interest from a whole range of fields.

This should be an occasion for productive dialogue between scholars of literary and material culture. Papers on any aspect of literary, theoretical, and material transatlantic cultural exchange are anticipated. Panel proposals for integrated sessions are particularly welcomed.

Our venue seems apt since a concept of innovation in education and learning is central to Brunel’s identity, especially given its origin in the ‘White Heat of Technology’ in the 1960s. Brunel has expanded and embraced the arts and humanities, and the Symbiosis conference offers an opportunity for collaboration with scholars interested in the principles and practice of Anglo-American literary and cultural influence from around the globe. The headline theme of the event does not exclude any other proposals concerning any other aspect of relevant transatlantic themes and contexts, which are most welcome, as are complete panels (subject to scrutiny and final approval by the conference organizers).

Proposals of approximately 300 words should be submitted, with a brief description (where relevant indicating institutional affiliation and publications in particular) of the proposer, by email only, to
Philip Tew; Philip.tew@brunel.ac.uk
William Watkin: William.watkin@brunel.ac.uk

Submission deadline: Sunday 8th April, 2007. All submissions: please add ‘Symbiosis Brunel 2007’ to your message subject line since all such submissions will be stored and retrieved automatically. If you fail to do so, your submission will be lost.
Please note that early approval regarding submissions can be indicated on request if it is required for any institutional or other funding, or for those wishing to make early travel plans.
Panel proposals will also be considered and encouraged.

A draft program will be published on the web at
http://www.symbiosisonline.org.uk/conference.htm and on the Brunel website, in 2007.

Conference fee payable to: ‘Brunel University’ £180 (one hundred and eighty pounds sterling) [the fee includes lunches, refreshments, Saturday conference dinner with drinks, plus two-year Symbiosis individual subscription]; £150 (one hundred and fifty pounds sterling) postgraduates and retired academics; note also that for partners and family of academics not offering a paper a fee of can be negotiated, in most circumstances of £100). These discounted rates will apply until May 25th 2007 after which a 20% surcharge will apply of £216 (two-hundred and sixteen pounds) & £180 (one hundred and eighty pounds). Daily attendance rates will be set later and will be substantially higher than the discounted rates. Payment may be made by cheque or credit card; in both cases please request a payment form by e-mail. Subsequently send monies to:

Sara Brown
Symbiosis Conference Administrator
Department of English
School of Arts
Brunel University
Uxbridge Campus
Uxbridge
Middlesex
UB8 3PH

All other contact should be by e-mail, at:
sara.brown@brunel.ac.uk
+44 (0)1895 266374 (in emergencies only)
Fax: +44 (0)1895 269768

Accommodation will be available for delegates at the Brunel University Conference Centre, where en suite single and double accommodation is provided for those booking early. Your accommodation must be booked direct from the Brunel University Conference Centre, and will be charged in addition to the overall conference fee, and you need to refer to ‘Symbiosis Brunel 2007’ in contacting:

Brunel Conference Services
Uxbridge, Middlesex
UB8 3PH
+44(0)1895 238353
Fax: +44(0)1895 269745
Email: conference@brunel.ac.uk

Information regarding other accommodation can be made available on
request. Queries to: sara.brown@brunel.ac.uk

‘Why Study American Studies’

A project with Subject Centre for Language, Linguistics and Area Studies (LLAS) and with the financial support of the US Embassy and in conjunction with BAAS to produce a high-quality recruitment brochure/CD for American Studies

We are currently undertaking a project with Subject Centre for Language, Linguistics and Area Studies (LLAS) and with the financial support of the US Embassy and in conjunction with BAAS to produce a high-quality recruitment brochure/CD for American Studies — ‘Why Study American Studies’ — with the aim of developing interest in prospective school and sixth form students.

We are writing to BAAS members to ask for contributions to this important project for securing the future well-being of American Studies in the UK. The project is based at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Sara Wood and Dick Ellis.

We want to speak to American Studies practitioners and/or BAAS members working in schools or sixth form colleges and would be interested to hear from anyone that may be able to answer questions and distribute a questionnaire to their students on American Studies.

To secure a compelling visual dimension to the CD-rom and printed material we are intending to include a large number of striking images but financial restrictions dictate the use of visual material that is not subject to copyright. In addition to the use of images from historical sources from the Library of Congress (and related resources) we are also asking BAAS members for assistance in this area. If you have any suggestions for good copyright free visual resources, or photographs you yourself have taken that are available for use, please contact me, or send the images in as high resolution jpegs (or the like). In a previous project undertaken for the ‘Why Study Languages’ project the images were drawn from photographs donated by language practitioners in the field. Therefore, if you do have any high quality photographs from holidays or research trips that you would not mind being used on the project, we would be most grateful to receive them.
Please send them to Sara Wood: osakaword@hotmail.co.uk

As part of the project we will also be including short film clips in which students describing their reasons for choosing American studies and why they enjoy studying it at University. We would like to get the broadest possible response from students around the UK and will be visiting American Studies departments from various institutions to accomplish this.

We have all the necessary technical equipment and would only need a room and some student volunteers. If you would be willing to host a visit from us to your department to undertake this filming with your students then please contact Sara Wood at: osakaword@hotmail.co.uk or telephone on 0121-414-7812

Beyond the Book

SHARE YOU THOUGHTS ON READING & YOU COULD WIN A £100 BOOK VOUCHER!

Go to http://www.beyondthebookproject.org/ and click on ‘questionnaire.’

Thanks for contributing to our research project on shared reading and the role that reading plays in our lives.

‘Beyond the Book’ is an academic research project, based at the University of Birmingham, funded chiefly by the Arts & Humanities Research Council
(AHRC)

Woody Guthrie: Hard Times and Hard Travellin’

A live musical presentation by Will Kaufman

Woody Guthrie: Hard Times and Hard Travellin’ is an hour-long musical programme that sets the songs of Woody Guthrie in the context of the American 1930s-the Dust Bowl, the Depression, the New Deal and the state of popular music itself. It explores through the performance of twelve songs, buttressed by historical commentary, the blending of music and radical politics that characterised Guthrie’s most powerful and evocative work.

Will Kaufman is a Reader in English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire and has been a semi-professional folksinger and musician for over thirty years.
For more detailed information, including testimonials, please see:
http://www.uclan.ac.uk/facs/class/humanities/staff/kaufman1.htm

To book the presentation for your students, research seminars or academic conferences, contact: wkaufman@uclan.ac.uk.
Web page: http://www.uclan.ac.uk/facs/class/humanities/staff/kaufman.htm

BAAS Postgraduate Conference 2007

Following the great success of the BAAS Postgraduate Conference 2006 which took
place this in Nottingham, this is a call to find a venue for the conference in 2007.
If you think your institution might be interested in hosting this annual event, then
please email the BAAS Posgraduate Representative, Josephine Metcalf, on
josephinemetcalf@yahoo.co.uk

The interested parties will be discussed at the next BAAS Committee meeting in
January, and receive notice of the success of their application by the end of
January.

Imagining Transatlantic Slavery

16-17 MARCH 2007, CHAWTON HOUSE LIBRARY
A conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain and the United States
Registration enquiries: please contact: Chawton House Library, Chawton, Alton GU34 1SJ. T: +44 (0) 1420 541010 E: info@chawton.net
General enquiries: please contact: Sandy White, School of Humanities, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ. T: +44 (0) 23 8059 7710 E: sw17@soton.ac.uk
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Vincent Carretta Moira Ferguson Catherine Hall Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace Marcus Wood

Eccles Centre: The 12th Annual Douglas W Bryant Lecture

The New Security: A Post-Cold War Understanding of Security in the 21st Century
Speaker: Gary Hart

Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library
Conference Centre, St. Pancras
14 March 2007

The New Security in the 21st Century: in a revolutionary age of globalization, information, eroding nation-state sovereignty, and the changing nature of warfare, new realities require new definitions, new policies, and new structures. Unlike the Cold War era where security meant the prevention of Soviet encroachment into Western Europe and the exchange of nuclear missiles, security in the 21st century must include security of borders, security of energy supplies, security of livelihood, security of the environment — in short, security of the global commons. A new understanding of the nature of security will also require new global institutions to achieve it.

Gary Hart represented the State of Colorado in the US Senate from 1975 to 1987. In
1984 and 1988, he was a candidate for his party’s nomination for President. Since retiring from the Senate, he has been extensively involved in international law and business, as a strategic advisor to major U.S. corporations. Currently Scholar in Residence at the University of Colorado and Distinguished Fellow at the New America Foundation, he was recently named chairman of the Council for a Livable World and is chairman of the American Security Project. He was co chair of the U.S. Commission on
National Security for the 21st Century. He has a PhD from Oxford University and graduate law and divinity degrees from Yale University. He is the author of 17 books, including Restoration of the Republic: The Jeffersonian Ideal in 21st-Century
America.

Event time: 19.00-20.00 (reception 18:15)
Location: Conference Centre, St Pancras
Price: FREE (by ticket only)

To book tickets, please contact the British Library Box Office (Mon – Fri, 10.00 –
17.00).
Tel +44 (0)20 7412 7222 or call at the Information Desk in the St Pancras building.

Eccles Centre Events

Area Studies and the Globalised World – Tuesday 27th February
10am – 5 pm — British Library conference centre, St Pancras

Programme:

10.00 – 10.30
Registration and coffee

10.30 – 11.15
Keynote Speaker
Lord Giddens (London School of Economics)
Author of Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives

11.15 – 2.45
Panel: Higher Education
Chair: Michael Kelly (Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, University of Southampton)

Panel:
Itesh Sachdev (Head, School of Languages, SOAS)
Elspeth Jones (International Dean, Leeds Metropolitan University)
David Sadler (Director of Networks, Higher Education Academy)

12.45 – 13.30
Lunch

13.30 – 14.15
Area Studies, Globalisation and British Library resources
Matthew Shaw and Dorian Hayes
(British Library curators for US and Canadian Studies)

14.15 – 15.00
Keynote Speaker
John Ralston Saul (Essayist and Philosopher)
Author of The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World

15.00 – 15.30
Tea

15.30 – 17.00
Panel: Area studies, Globalisation and 21st Century diplomacy
Chair: James Dunkerley (Institute for the Study of the Americas)

Panel:
Frank Pieke (Director, Institute for Chinese Studies, University of Oxford)
John Dumbrell (Professor of US Politics, Durham University),
Yasir Suleiman (Director, Institute for the Study of the Arab World & Islam,
University of Edinburgh)

Advance registration is £25.00
Find the registration form at http://www.llas.ac.uk/events

Monday 5 March
Burning Bright: An evening for William Blake
18.30-20.00

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the writer, artist and visionary
William Blake, join the London-resident American novelist Tracy Chevalier who will
be reading from her forthcoming novel Burning Bright, an imaginative revocation of
Blake’s London, partly based on research on Blake’s note book held by the British
Library. The evening will also feature an introduction to Blake’s poetry and methods
as a printer. The Treasures Gallery will also feature of small exhibition of Blake
manuscripts and related materials.

Tickets £6 (£4 concessions) from the BL box office — 020 7412 7222

Tuesday 6 March
John Paul Jones: America’s First Sea Warrior — a talk by Admiral Joseph Callo

18.30 – 20.00 followed by wine reception & book signing — British Library
conference centre, St Pancras

Joseph Callo’s book John Paul Jones, America’s First Sea Warrior received the
prestigious Samuel Eliot Morison Award. Callo emphasises Jones’s dedication to the
principles of Liberty – and his willingness to risk everything in the fight to
achieve it.

Tickets £6 (£4 concessions) from the BL box office — 020 7412 7222

Monday 19th and Tuesday 20th March
The Federal Nations of North America — British Library conference centre, St Pancras

This conference brings together some of the leading scholars from both sides of the
Atlantic to discuss recent research and interpretations of contemporary domestic
politics and policy in the federal systems of the USA and Canada. A distinguished
line up of speakers includes Tim Conlan, John Kincaid, and Joseph Zimmerman, all
winners of the APSA Distinguished Scholar Award in the field of Federalism and
Intergovernmental Relations, Joel Aberbach, Director of UCLA’s Center for American
Politics and Public Policy, and Des King, Mellon Professor of US Politics at Oxford.

Monday 19th March (registration from 13.00)

13.30 Welcome & Keynote
Tim Conlan (George Mason University)
The Bush administration, intergovernmental relations & public policy

15.00 Panel:
John Kincaid (Lafayette College, PA)
Schizophrenic federalism: trends since the 1960s
Carl Stenberg (UNC, Chapel Hill)
Blurring boundaries: interlocal collaboration and regional governance strategies
Joseph Zimmerman (The University at Albany, NY)
Congressional devolution of powers to the states

Tuesday 20th March (doors open 09.30)

10.00 Panel:
Edward Ashbee (Copenhagen Business School)
Gay rights, the Marriage Protection Amendment, and the states
Christopher Dunn (Memorial University, Newfoundland)
Canadian federalism: quo vadis ~ the Harper government’s approach
Robert McKeever (London Metropolitan University)
National politics & state implementation of abortion policy in the US & Canada

12.00 buffet lunch for all registrants

12.45 Panel:
Christopher Bailey (Keele University)
Clearing the air: the new politics of public smoking in the USA
Jonathan Parker (Keele University)
No Child Left Behind? federal and state education policy in the Bush years
Alissa Worden and Andrew Davies (The University at Albany, NY)
Indigent defence policy in US states 1982-2002

15.00 Panel:
Desmond King (Nuffield College, Oxford)
Hard cases and the search for race equity in the USA
Gillian Peele (LMH, Oxford) and Joel Aberbach (UCLA & Oxford)
The American conservative movement and the constitution
Alex Waddan (Leicester) and Douglas Jaenicke (Manchester)
US Health politics and policy since the 1990s

Conference registration (advance booking only) costs £10 (£5 for students).

Access the registration form at:
http://americas.sas.ac.uk/events/Mar07FederalistRegform.doc

The Richard E. Neustadt Book Prize, 2007

The American Politics Group of the PSA is pleased to invite entries for the 2007
Richard E. Neustadt Book Prize.

The prize of £400 will be presented to the best book in the field of US government
and politics published in the calendar year 2006, and authored by an academic
permanently employed at a UK university. The APG is pleased to acknowledge the
generous support of the US Embassy for this prize.

The winner of the prize will be announced at the APG/BAAS annual colloquium at the
US Embassy, London in November 2007.
Previous prize winners have been Professor John Dumbrell, of Durham University, and
Dr Nigel Bowles, of St Annes College, Oxford.
Entrants for this prize should arrange for four (4) copies of their book to be sent
to:
Professor Philip Davies (APG Chair)
Eccles Centre for American Studies
The British Library
96, Euston Road
London NW1 2DB
Before the closing date of 31st March 2007

University of Edinburgh, Transatlantic Seminars Spring 07

All sessions 1-2.30pm Fridays in Room G10 Adam Ferguson Building,
George Square,

23 February Professor John Henley, University of Edinburgh, ‘Foreign
Direct Investment in Africa: A Dynamic from the South?’

9 March Dr Christina Boswell, University of Edinburgh,
‘Migration and Security after 9/11’

16 March Dr Ali Ansari, University of St Andrews, ‘Understanding
Iranian Foreign Policy’

23 March Professor Mats Berdal, King’s College London,
‘The United Nations: A Necessary Irrelevance’.

Transatlantic Exchange: African Americans and the Celtic Nations (Swansea University, March 28-30 2007)

Keynote speakers: John Callahan, Glenn Jordan, Jeffrey Stewart, Werner Sollors.
Readings by Leonora Brito and Jackie Kay (sponsored by Academi).

Music by African American singer Rhiannon Giddens (sponsored by the Collegium for
African American Research), and jazz guitarist Jean Paul-Bourelly (ex Miles Davis,
Pharaoh Sanders, Cassandra Wilson) will perform with the Welsh jazz quintet Cennad).

Panel speakers include Linden Peach, Alan Rice, Helen Mary Jones AM and Robert Lawson-Peebles.

Cheaper ‘early-bird’ registration ends on January 26th. All information – posters, programme, and registration form – on the conference website
http://www.swansea.ac.uk/english/crew/transatlanticexchange

Institute for the Study of the Americas Events

Except the Canadian Metropolis conference all the events are free.
All are welcome!

Wednesday 21 February, 5:00 – 7:30 pm
Argentina’s Partisan Past: Nationalism, Peronism and Historiography, 1955-76
Michael Groebel, UCL
Room 12, 35 Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9HA

Wednesday 21 February, 5:00 pm
Visualizing the City: the Modern Megalopolis in Latin America
Dawn Ades OBE, Centre for Latin American Studies, University of Essex
Old Library, 31 Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9HA

Thursday 22 February, 5:30 – 7:30 pm
From Red Menace to Yellow Peril: Reaganomics, Party Politics and the Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles
Michael Heale, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford
Pollard Room, Institute of Historical Research, North Block, Senate House, London
WC1E 7HU
RSVP Olga Jimenez: olga.jimenez@sas.ac.uk, tel. 020 7862 8870

Tuesday 27 February, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Alan Angell and The Study of Modern Chile
HE Rafael Moreno, Ambassador of Chile
Alan Angell, St Antony’s College, University of London
Joe Foweraker, St Antony’s College, University of London
James Dunkerley, Institute for the Study of the Americas
Panel followed by the launch of “Democracy after Pinochet: Politics, Parties, and
Elections in Chile” by Alan Angell
Events jointly organised with Chatham House
Room 12, 35 Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9HA

Wednesday 28 February, 5:00 pm
The Idol Rich: Spanish and Maya Christians in the Belize Colonial Encounter
Elizabeth Graham, Institute of Archaeology, University College London
Room 12, 35 Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9HA

The Institute for the Study of the Americas
31 Tavistock Square
London WC1H 9HA
tel. 020 7862 8870
www.americas.sas.ac.uk
americas@sas.ac.uk

New Members

Larissa Allwork is the current Thomas Holloway scholar in History at Royal Holloway,
University of London. She completed her Masters in the History of Art and Visual Culture at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. She completed her BA in Modern History at Mansfield College, Oxford University. The title of her PhD thesis is “The Visual Culture of the ‘Silent Majority’ and the Reaction of the West Coast Artistic Avant-Garde, 1964-1968.” Her research interests include 1960s ‘Great Society’ era history, politics and culture, with special emphasis on California; Cold War American Avant-Garde Art on both the East and West coasts; and the dynamics between ‘Art’, politics and ‘public sphere’.

Stella Bolaki holds an MSc in Comparative and General Literature from the University of Edinburgh where she is presently a PhD candidate and a teaching assistant in the Department of English Literature. Her thesis focuses on ethnic American revisions of the Bildungsroman by women writers. Her research interests lie mainly in the fields of life writing, ethnic American fiction, genre and new developments in transnational studies. She has published articles on border issues and Chicana literature as well as creative writing.

Heike Bungert teaches US History at the University of Cologne, Germany, and is interested in BAAS because in Britain, historians seem to play a larger role in American Studies. She will be attending the 2007 BAAS conference. She received her M.A. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, her PhD at the University of Tuebingen, and her habilitation at the University of Cologne. Her special fields are international relations, ethnic history, cultural history, and the history of universities

Suman Chakraborty completed his BA at the University of Calcutta. He is an MLitt postgraduate student at the Unviersity of Glasgow . Suman’s main research interest focuses on experimental American verse, especially L=A-N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. His dissertation is ‘Postmodern Space and Postwar American Poetry.’ He has previously published on Sherlock Holmes and twentieth-century fantasy writing.

Jenny Chapman is a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Her PhD examines the conception and representation of agency in American evangelical prophecy literature, from the writings of J.N. Darby to the Left Behind series of Rapture novels by Tim Lattaye and Jerry Jenkins. She is currently planning a research trip for Spring 2007 to go to the Boston Centre for Millenial Studies and the Billy Graham Centre in Wheaton.

Rachel Farebrother is a Lecturer in English at Leeds Metropolitan University. Her research and teaching interests are primarily in African-American literature and culture. Work in progress includes a critical study of the Harlem Renaissance.

Dawn Marie Gibson is a doctoral student at the University of Ulster. She is currently undertaking research on the Nation of Islam in African-American history. Her research interests include twentieth-century African-American religious and cultural history. She is a member of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University.

Otared Haidar is a Syrian writer and journalist living in the UK. She completed her DPhil in Arabic and comparative literature and theory at the University of Oxford in 2005. She teaches Arabic at the Oriental Institute at Oxford. She is a member of the Arab Union of journalists and the British Association of writers

Alex Hobbs holds an undergraduate degree in American Studies from University of
Wales, Aberystwyth, and a Masters in Literature from The Open University. He is currently working on a PhD through the English Department at Anglia Ruskin University. His thesis is entitled ‘Stereotypic Male Images in the Novels of John Irving and Philip Roth’. Alex’s primary research interests are in the contemporary American novel, especially issues of masculinity contained therein.

Jeffrey Herlihy is a PhD candidate at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona; his thesis concerns the use of foreign settings as a literary resource in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction. He has been employed as Visiting Instructor of Spanish at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa.

Ying Kong is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Manitoba. Her major researches are in Life Writing and twentieth-century literature. Her doctoral thesis is “Duplicities of Life Writing in the Works of Carol Shields.” Currently, she is an
instructor of Chinese in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Winnipeg, Canada.

Lee Margaret Jenkins is Senior Lecturer in English at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author of Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order (Sussex Academic Press, 1999) and The Language of Caribbean Poetry (University Press of Florida, 2004), and is co-editor of Locations of Literary Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Current research interests focus on Caribbean experimental poetries and Southwestern modernisms.

Andrew Johnstone is a Lecturer in American History in the Centre for American Studies and School of Historical Studies at the University of Leicester. His research focuses on 20th-Century US foreign policy, particularly on the theme of US internationalism, and on relations between the state and private spheres in creating and mobilising support for US foreign policy.

Stephen C. Kenny is a Lecturer in American History at the University of Liverpool. His current research focuses upon slavery and Southern medicine. He teaches Ethnicity and Immigration in the US, Civil Rights history, Southern Culture, and the History of Medicine in the US.

Debbie Lelekis is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her current research focuses on nineteenth century American literature with a particular interest in elements of urbanism.

Mark Llewellyn is a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool. He is currently working on a three-year project about the Victorian Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone’s reading. His other main research interests are the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore (1852-1933) and contemporary women’s writing. Through editing Moore’s Collected Short Stories (Pickering and Chatto, 2007), mark developed an interest in undertaking further research on Moore’s attitude to the American publishing market (1900-1930), and his relationship with his American ollaborators.

Madeline Lyes is a doctoral research student at the Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin. Her thesis title is ‘The Resurrection of Urban Thought: Urban Literature and Theory During the Golden Era of the New Yorker.’ Other areas of interest include contemporary urban literature, spatial theory, post-Chicago School urban theory, the New Yorker magazine and its cultural footprint, the city writing of Maeve Brennan, John Cheever and Donald Barthelme, as well as Irish- American literature of the 20th Century.

Katy Masuga is a Ph.D. The University of Washington, Seattle in the Department of Comparative Literature. She is currently finishing her doctoral thesis on language in the work of Henry Miller. Her areas of interest include twentieth-century American, British, French and German literature, philosophy and cinema.

Joe Merton is a D.Phil student at Balliol College, University of Oxford researching Republican Party attempts to capture working-class, ‘white ethnic’ electoral support in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan Administrations. He holds a BA in History & Politics from the University of Sheffield and an MSt from the University of Oxford. His research interests centre on post-1945 social and political history, particularly developments in the 1970s and 1980s. He is a keen follower of Leicester City and a great admirer of President Richard Nixon.

Thomas Mills is a PhD student at the History and Politics Department at Brunel University. His research examines Anglo-American economic diplomacy during the Second World War. He also works as a teaching assistant on American History and Politics modules at Brunel.

Benjamin Moderate took his BA, Mphil and PhD at Girton College, Cambridge. A specialist in 20th Century American fiction and poetry, he recently returned from two years teaching in Japan. He is currently engaged in independent research on the San Francisco Renaissance.

Marie Molloy is a PhD student at the University of Keele. Her research focuses on the multifaceted role of single women in the South during the 19th Century. Her work examines how the spinster fitted into family life, work, politics and patriarchy.

Niall Munro is currently at work on a PhD at Oxford Brookes University on Hart Crane, which explores the poet’s gay, modernist, aesthetic.

Anil Narine received his B.A. Hons. In English from the University of Victoria and his M.A. From McGill University. He is currently at work on a Ph.D. In Communication at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he studies how post-war American and French documentaries and narrative films mediate the memory of traumatic historical events. His analysis of ‘Deliverance’ will appear in the Journal of American Studies.

Mara Oliva is a PhD candidate at the Institute for the Study of the Americas. His work examines the role of the US press in US-China relations during the Eisenhower administration.

Andrew Priest is a Lecturer in the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales. His main interests are the history of US foreign policy and US-Uk relations. His PhD from the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham focused in US-UK relations and NATO in the 1960s. He recently published a monograph, Kennedy, Johnson and NATO: Britain, America and the Dynamics of Alliance (1962-1968), (Routledge, 2006).

Rebekah Scott is a PhD student in the English Faculty at the University of Cambridge writing a thesis on Henry James, ethics and aesthetics.

Mark Storrey is a PhD student in American Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is working on urbanisation and imaginative conceptions of the city in rural and small town American fiction from the 1870s to the 1910s

Karen Veitch is a postgraduate student at the University of Glasgow.

Abi Vine graduated in 1989 from the University of Liverpool with a degree in American Studies & Divinity. After her BA, she attended the Liverpool Polytechnic (now Liverpool John Moores University) where she gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Library & Information Studies. Abi currently works as an administrator in Mallorca, but hopes to return the UK in order to take up an MA in American Studies. Her interests include US government & politics.

Aaron Winter is a Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Brighton (School of Historical and Critical Studies) and an Associate Tutor in Sociology at the University of Sussex. His Dphil thesis, in Social and Political Thought at the University of Sussex, was on the transformation of the American extreme right in the post-Civil Rights era, focusing specifically in the Christian Patriot movement. His research interests include social and political theory, political identity and ideology, anti-Semitism and racial politics in the US and UK, conspiracy theory and terrorism, and the concept of ‘extremism.’

Members’ Publications

Mark Newman of the University of Edinburgh has recently published a volume, co-edited with Suzanne W. Jones, Poverty and Progress in the U.S. South since 1920, (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2006). ISBN 90-8659-0489.

Members’ News

Peter Rawlings has been appointed to a Chair in English and American Literature at the University of the West of England, Bristol where he has also become the Director of the Graduate School in the Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences

Mark Newman of the University of Edinburgh has been awarded the 2006 Willie D. Halsell Prize from the Mississippi Historical Society for his article “The Catholic Church in Mississippi and Desegregation, 1963-1973”, Journal of Mississippi History, Winter 2005.

Fellowship Opportunities

The Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford

The Rothermere American Institute is a centre for research in the field of American studies based at the University of Oxford, UK. It houses the Vere Harmsworth Library, with specialist collections of American materials, and also offers access to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The Institute, which was opened in 2001 by former US President Bill Clinton, also has seminar rooms and offices for Fellows.

We are now inviting scholars to apply for fellowships to commence from September 2007. We offer fellowships for up to one year; however appointments may be awarded for shorter time periods.

No stipends are offered, but modern and efficient offices are provided to scholars, including computers, phones and access to administrative support. We also offer travel grants for research purposes with a value of up to £600. During the periods when the colleges of the University are in operation, we provide Senior Fellows with common room rights at one of the neighbouring colleges.

For more details and an application form, please visit our website at http://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/scholars/application.html, or contact the Assistant Director at the Rothermere American Institute, 1A South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3TG, United Kingdom.

Tel: +44 1865 282710
Fax: +44 1865 282720
Email: assistant.director@rai.ox.ac.uk
Website: www.rai.ox.ac.uk

Newberry Library Fellowships in the Humanities, 2007-08

The Newberry Library, an independent research library in Chicago, Illinois, invites applications for its 2007-08 Fellowships in the Humanities. Newberry Library fellowships support research in residence at the Library. All proposed research must be appropriate to the collections of the Newberry Library. Our fellowship program rests on the belief that all projects funded by the Newberry benefit from engagement both with the materials in the Newberry’s collections and with the lively community of researchers that gathers around those collections. Long-term residential fellowships are available to postdoctoral scholars for periods of six to eleven months. Applicants for postdoctoral awards must hold the Ph.D. at the time of application. The stipend for these fellowships is up to $40,000. Short-term residential fellowships are intended for postdoctoral scholars or Ph.D. candidates from outside of the Chicago area who have a specific need for Newberry collections. Scholars whose principal residence or place of employment is within the Chicago area are not eligible. The tenure of short-term fellowships varies from one week to two months. The amount of the award is generally $1200 per month. Applications for long-term fellowships are due January 10, 2007; applications for most short-term fellowships are due March 1, 2007. For more information or to download application materials, visit our Web site at
http://www.newberry.org/research/felshp/fellowshome.html
http://www.newberry.org/nl/research/L3rfellowships.html>

If you would like materials sent to you by mail, write to Committee on Awards, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL 60610-3380. If you have questions about the fellowships program, contact research@newberry.org or (312) 255-3666.

Publishing Opportunities

Call for Special Editors: British Records Relating to America in Microform (BRRAM) Series

Special editors are needed for new titles in the BRRAM series, published under the aegis of BAAS since the 1960s, with Professor Kenneth Morgan of Brunel University the current General Editor. The series comprises images from a wide range of primary sources on North America and the West Indies from collections around the British Isles. One forthcoming project requiring a special editor relates to the 18th century Jamaican plantation papers of the Goulburn family, held at the Surrey History Centre. Further projects at present being explored relate to manuscript materials on Canada from the National Library of Scotland. Ideas are also welcome for other unpublished collections, perhaps related to current doctoral or postdoctoral research. The principal duties of the special editor are to make a selection of documents to be microfilmed from a collection and to produce a introduction outlining the provenance, content and scholarly significance of the archive.
For further details, contact Dr Roderic Vassie (rvassie@microform.co.uk), Head of Publishing at Microform Academic Publishers.

BAAS Membership of Committees

BAAS Committee
BAAS Officers

The Association is administered by an elected committee (see below), including three officers:

BAAS Officers
Professor Simon Newman, Chair,
Director, American Studies, Modern History,
2 University Gardens,
Glasgow University,
Glasgow G12 8QQ
Tel: 0141 330 3585
Fax: 0141 330 5000
E-Mail: simon.newman@baas.ac.uk

Professor Heidi Macpherson,* Secretary,
Department of Humanities,
Harris 222,
University of Central Lancashire,
Preston, PR1 2HE
Tel: 01772 893040
Fax: 01772 892970
E-Mail: heidi.macpherson@baas.ac.uk

Dr Graham Thompson, Treasurer,
School of American & Canadian Studies,
University of Nottingham,
University Park,
Nottingham, NG7 2RD
Tel: 0115 9514269
Fax: 0115 9514270
E-Mail: graham.thompson@baas.ac.uk

Executive Committee (after 2006 AGM)

In addition to these three officers, the current committee line up of BAAS is:

Professor Richard Crockatt,
School of American Studies,
University of East Anglia,
Norwich NR4 7TJ
Tel: 01603 872456
E-Mail: R.Crockatt@uea.ac.uk

Dr Jude Davies,*
Faculty of Arts,
University of Winchester,
Winchester SO22 4NR
Tel: 01962 827363
E-Mail: Jude.Davies@winchester.ac.uk

Professor Martin Halliwell,
Centre for American Studies,
University of Leicester,
Attenborough Building,
Leicester Road,
Leicester LE1 7RH
Tel: 0116 252 2645
Fax: 0116 2522065
E-Mail: mrh17@le.ac.uk

Dr Will Kaufman,
Department of Humanities,
University of Central Lancashire,
Preston PR1 2HE
Tel: 01772 893035
Fax: 01772 892924
E-Mail: wkaufman@uclan.ac.uk

Professor Susan Castillo, (Ex-Officio),
Editor, Journal of American Studies,
Kings College London
Strand
London
WC2R 2L
Tel: 020 7836 5454
E-Mail: susan.castillo@kcl.ac.uk

Ms Hannah Lowe, (Co-opted), Development Subcommittee,
E-Mail: hlowe@candi.ac.uk

Dr Sarah MacLachlan,
Department of English,
Manchester Metropolitan University,
Geoffrey Manton Building,
Rosamond Street West,
Manchester, M15 6LL
Tel: 0161 247 1755
Fax: 0161 247 6345
E-Mail: S.MacLachlan@mmu.ac.uk

Ms Josephine Metcalf,*
Postgraduate Representative,
English and American Studies Subject Area,
School of Arts, Histories and Cultures,
University of Manchester,
Oxford Road,
Manchester M13 9PL
E-Mail: josephine.metcalf@baas.ac.uk

Dr Catherine Morley,†
School of Humanities,
Oxford Brookes University,
Gipsy Lane Campus, Headington,
Oxford, OX3 OBP
Tel: 01865 484977
E-Mail: catherinemorley@brookes.ac.uk

Mr Ian Ralston, (Ex-Officio), Chair, Library & Resouces Subcommittee,
American Studies Centre,
Aldham Robarts Centre,
Liverpool John Moores University,
Liverpool L3 5UZ
Tel: 0151 231 3241
Fax: 0151 231 3241
E-Mail: I.Ralston@livjm.ac.uk

Dr Theresa Saxon,
Department of Humanities,
University of Central Lancashire,
Preston PR1 2HE
Tel: 01772 893026
Fax: 01772 892924
E-Mail: TSaxon@uclan.ac.uk

Dr Ian Scott,*
Department of English and American Studies,
University of Manchester,
Oxford Road,
Manchester, M13 9PL
Tel: 0161 275 3059
Fax: 0161 275 3256
E-Mail: ian.scott@baas.ac.uk

Ms Carol Smith,*
Faculty of Arts,
University of Winchester,
Winchester SO22 4NR
Tel: 0196 282 7370
E-Mail: Carol.Smith@winchester.ac.uk

Dr Jenel Virden,* Representative to EAAS,
Department of American Studies,
University of Hull,
Hull HU6 7RX
Tel: 01482 465638/303
Fax: 01482 466107
E-Mail: J.Virden@hull.ac.uk

* indicates this person not eligible for re-election to this position.
† Indicates that the newly-elected Committee member is fulfilling an unexpired position due to resignations from the Committee.
All co-optations must be reviewed annually.

BAAS Sub-Committee Members

Development:
Professor Richard Crockatt (Chair)
Dr Jude Davies
Ms Hannah Lowe
Ms Josephine Metcalf
Professor Simon Newman
Mr Ian Ralston

Awards:
Dr Ian Scott (Chair)
Professor Martin Halliwell
Dr Will Kaufman
Professor Heidi Macpherson

Publications:
Ms Carol Smith (Chair)
Professor Susan Castillo
Dr Catherine Morley
Dr Theresa Saxon
Professor Ken Morgan (Editor of BRRAM)

Conference:
Dr Sarah MacLachlan (Chair)
Dr Graham Thompson
Dr Jenel Virden
Dr George Lewis (Leicester Conference Secretary, 2007)
Dr Robert Mason (Edinburgh Conference Secretary, 2008)

Libraries and Resources:
Mr Ian Ralston (Chair)
Ms Jane Kelly (Secretary) (Cambridge University Library)
Mr Dave Forster (Treasurer) (American Studies Centre, Liverpool John Moores University)
Ms Kate Bateman (Eccles Centre)
Dr Jude Davies (BAAS representative)
Professor Philip Davies (Eccles Centre)
Dr Kevin Halliwell (National Library of Scotland)
Dr Catherine Morley (BAAS representative, Oxford Brookes)
Ms Jean Petrovic (Eccles Centre)
Dr Matthew Shaw (British Library)
Rose Goodier (John Rylands University Library of Manchester)
Mr Donald Tait (University of Glasgow Library)

Notice of BAAS AGM 2007

Agenda:

1. Elections: Chair, 3 committee members, EAAS rep, any other offices that
fall vacant before the AGM
2. Treasurer’s report
3. Chair’s report
4. Report of the Conference Sub-Committee, and Annual Conferences 2007-2009
5. Report of the Publications Sub-Committee
6. Report of the Development Sub-Committee
7. Report of the Awards Sub-Committee
8. Report of the Libraries and Resources Sub-Committee
9. Report of the Representative to EAAS
10. Any other business

At the 2007 AGM, elections will be held for three positions on the Committee (three year terms), for the Chair of the Association (three year term), for the EAAS rep (five year term, non-renewable) and for any offices that fall vacant before the AGM. Current incumbents of these positions (apart from the EAAS rep) may stand for re-election if not disbarred by the Constitution’s limits on length of continuous service in Committee posts.

Elections can only take place if the meeting is quorate; please make every effort to attend.

The procedure for nominations is as follows: Nominations should reach the Secretary, Heidi Macpherson, by 12.00 noon on Friday 20 April 2007. Nominations should be on the appropriate written form, signed by a proposer, seconder, and the candidate, who should state willingness to serve if elected. The institutional affiliations of the candidate, proposer and seconder should be included. All candidates for office will be asked to provide a brief statement outlining their educational backgrounds, areas of teaching and/or research interests and vision of the role of BAAS in the upcoming years. These need to be to the Secretary at the time of nomination so that they can be posted in a prominent location and available for the membership to read before the AGM. Those standing for election are expected to attend the AGM.

Professor Heidi Macpherson
BAAS Secretary
Department of Humanities
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
United Kingdom
Tel. (01772) 893039
heidi.macpherson@baas.ac.uk

The Secretary requests that those who send forms to her through the post or via email also keep a copy and bring it with them to the conference, in case of delays or missing post. All forms will need to be signed.

Archive