[vc_row margin_bottom=”15″][vc_column][dt_banner image_id=”6564″ bg_color=”rgba(0,0,0,0.14)” min_height=”270″][/dt_banner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row margin_bottom=”15″][vc_column width=”2/3″][dt_quote]The 2015 Postgraduate BAAS conference brought together two academic associations (HOTCUS and BAAS) for a two-day event to promote postgraduate and early career research and explore, as the conference title suggests, “Collaboration in America and Collaborative Work in American Studies”, says conference organizer and BAAS Postgraduate Representative Rachael Alexander. The conference was striking, from start to finish, in the generosity of support and advice from both established academics and fellow postgraduates and early career researchers.[/dt_quote][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][ultimate_heading main_heading=”HOTCUS Postgraduate Workshop and BAAS Postgraduate Conference” spacer=”line_only” spacer_position=”bottom” line_height=”1″ main_heading_font_family=”font_family:|font_call:” main_heading_margin=”margin-top:17px;” sub_heading_font_family=”font_family:Roboto|font_call:Roboto|variant:500″ sub_heading_style=”font-weight:500;” sub_heading_margin=”margin-top:10px;”]Hosted by University of Glasgow

4 – 5 December 2015[/ultimate_heading][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]As is common with academic endeavours a brief conversation about a cosy American Studies get-together snowballed into something much larger last year. Jointly organised by researchers from the University of Glasgow and the University of Strathclyde, the 2015 Postgraduate BAAS conference brought together two academic associations (HOTCUS and BAAS) for a two-day event to promote postgraduate and early career research and professional development. Centered on the theme of “Collaboration in America and Collaborative Work in American Studies”, we hoped the event would address collaboration as a theme and a practice in American Studies research, as embodied in the organising committee who represented different academic associations and institutions. It is fair to say that the event surpassed the expectations of the committee—Danielle Fleming, Nicole Cassie and Bianca Scoti.

Hosted at the University of Glasgow, the first day was sponsored by HOTCUS and took the form of a career development workshop.  We were overwhelmed by the number of established academics willing to get involved and the advice they offered was very well received.  Each panel was thematically designed to address specific areas of concern for PGRs and ECRs. The day began with “Public Engagement and Collaboration”, where Phillips O’Brien (University of Glasgow), Simon Newman (University of Glasgow) and Cara Rodway (British Library) discussed potential opportunities for taking your research out with your institution.  This was followed by Mark Ellis (University of Strathclyde), Felicity Donohoe (University of Glasgow) and Zoe Colley (University of Dundee) who provided practical advice on approaches to teaching and module design. The final panel of the morning addressed what is, perhaps, one of the most crucial elements of academic career development: publications.  Bevan Sewell (University of Nottingham), Martin Halliwell (University of Leicester), Michelle Houston (Edinburgh University Press) and Michelle Green (U.S. Studies Online) provided a wide range of information and advice on academic publishing, from the traditional monograph to journal articles to blogging.

After a particularly cosy lunch—a testament to the excellent number of attendees—and some generously donated Tunnock’s biscuits, Jonathan Bell (UCL), Sue Currell (University of Sussex) and Marina Moskowitz (University of Glasgow) resumed proceedings with advice on the job market from the perspective of the interview panel.  This panel offered a rare and candid insight into what interviewers are looking for and, of course, what they are not. The final panel of the day was equally open, with Blair Smith (University of Dundee), Nick Witham (UCL) and Malcolm Craig (University of Edinburgh) providing their insight into life after the PhD, particularly the relatively undiscussed first year after completion.  Once we had made it through the rain, the conversations continued at a wine reception in the Picture Gallery of the Glasgow City Chambers, generously hosted by Glasgow City Council.  For me, the day was striking, from start to finish, in the generosity of support and advice from both established academics and fellow postgraduates and early career researchers.

While our hopes for a change in the weather for the second day proved futile, the BAAS postgraduate conference got off to a wonderful start with a panel comprised of two collaboratively produced and presented papers.  Malcolm Craig (University of Edinburgh) and Mark McLay (Glasgow Caledonian University) discussed practical approaches to podcasting, using the particular example of their own “American History Too!” podcast, while Rosemary Pearce (University of Nottingham) and Timo Schrader (University of Nottingham) presented on the organisation of academic events, asking us to question the prevailing models of academic events and encouraging increased engagement beyond academia.  The panels which followed covered a variety of areas of interest in American Studies including: collaboration beyond borders, literary pairings and influence, collaborative spaces and places, contemporary politics and/in popular culture, collaborative activism, and intertextuality. The diverse nature of the panels demonstrated the way in which American culture, society, history and politics have been, and continue to be, shaped by collaborative endeavours.

To close the event with a solitary speaker would have seemed incongruous considering the theme, so we were most fortunate that Jenny Barrett (Edgehill University), Faye Hammill (University of Strathclyde), and Warren Pleece (2000AD/DC Vertigo) agreed to be our collaborative keynotes, and more fortunate still that they all agreed to let us film it! Each addressed a particular aspect of the theme, “Collaborative Texts: Film, Magazines, Comics”, before responding to each other’s contributions prior to questions from the room.  I will refrain from a detailed description, since it can be watched in its entirety below. Suffice it to say it served as an excellent end to the BAAS PG conference and the event overall. The value of collaboration, of support and cooperation, cannot be exaggerated, particularly at a time when academic life seems to be becoming increasingly competitive. The particular successes of this event, in my opinion, lie in the questions it raised, the connections it forged, and the supportive and generous environment it fostered.

Rachael Alexander is a PhD candidate at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her research focuses on a comparative study of American and Canadian mass-market periodicals in the 1920s, considering them as both collaborative texts and cultural artefacts and bringing together literary perspectives with aspects of Consumer Culture Theory.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][dt_fancy_image type=”from_url” media=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwWIzvBp7x8″ lightbox=”true” width=”700″ margin_top=”15″ margin_bottom=”15″ align=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row margin_top=”15″ margin_bottom=”15″][vc_column][dt_fancy_title title=”Want to read more about the PG BAAS conference 2015?” title_color=”title” separator_color=”custom” custom_separator_color=”#d6cb6f”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”6450″ onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/review-collaboration-in-america-and-collaborative-work-in-american-studies/”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Head over to U.S. Studies Online to read Christina Brennan’s review of PG BAAS 2015. 

“In what ways do we understand academic collaboration and wider engagement? How do these understandings fit within contemporary research agendas? How, to expand this contemporary focus, do these understandings also have historical resonances in relation to American diplomacy, culture, and politics? These are a selection of the challenging, yet fascinating questions which delegates debated at this year’s British Association of American Studies Postgraduate Conference in Glasgow.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row margin_bottom=”15″][vc_column][dt_banner image_id=”9194″ min_height=”300″][/dt_banner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][dt_quote]The large Samuel L. M. Barlow collection at the Huntington Library has helped my research to show that by 1865, the Democratic party was more fractured than has been previously suggested by scholars, says Alexander Page, recipient of the BAAS John D. Lees Award 2015.[/dt_quote][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]The generous research grant I received through the John D. Lees Award for my doctoral project, ‘Reconstructing the Democracy: U.S. Political Culture and the Reformation of the Democratic Party during the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1860–1884’ allowed me to visit the Huntington Library in San Marino throughout August and September 2015. The project traces the reconciliation of northern and southern Democrats following the American[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Civil War, and the return of the Democratic party to the White House by 1884. The thesis investigates how, at a time when many Americans believed that the country was facing a major political realignment, the Democratic party was not only able to survive, but reassert itself as a truly national party.

While at the Huntington Library, I was able to examine the personal papers of leading Democratic politicians and strategists of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The large Samuel L. M. Barlow collection at the Huntington Library provided indispensable insights into the actions of one of the leading Democratic strategists of the era. Barlow, one of the wealthiest lawyers of the mid-nineteenth century, was a central figure in the national Democratic leadership. As a regular correspondent of other leading Democrats, such as August Belmont, Montgomery Blair, George H. Pendleton, Samuel J. Tilden, and James A. Bayard, Barlow was at the centre of the formulation of postbellum Democratic political strategy. Barlow’s influence in the Democratic party was at its highest point between 1860 and 1872, after which he began to lose faith in the party, and the collection at the Huntington highlights this. The lawyer’s wartime correspondence has provided insights into the fractured state of the Democracy; Barlow received letters from Democrats who held polarised views on the war, and as a result, has helped my research to show that by 1865, the party was more fractured than has been previously suggested by scholars. In Barlow’s postwar correspondence, the focus of Democrats on the reconciliation of northern and southern Democrats comes to the fore, as the central aim of the party. Barlow’s renewed correspondence with leading Confederates, such as Judah P. Benjamin, and Democrats who advocated the creation of a new party, has shown partisanship to be a more malleable, flexible concept than scholars have asserted. Moreover, Barlow’s role in presidential politics, and party strategy up to 1872, has revealed that the Democratic party was held together through the failure to create a viable alternative, and by active attempts to engender genuine reconciliation between the northern and southern wings of the party.

In addition to the Barlow collection, research at the Huntington Library provided me access to the smaller collection of Gideon Welles papers. Welles’ papers have helped to provide insight into the experience of, and the reasoning behind, the decision to change party affiliation. In the case of Welles, the Reconstruction policies of radical Republicans pushed Welles into the Democracy during the postwar years. Further to the Welles and Barlow papers, the John D. Lees Award allowed me to examine political ephemera held at the Huntington, including the speeches of leading Democrats such as Samuel J. Randall, and campaign pamphlets that have provided insights into party rhetoric and campaign strategy. My visit to the Huntington Library has provided my research with important insights into the inner workings of the Democratic national leadership during and following the Civil War, and has contributed significantly to my understanding of the Democratic party’s survival, and return to power in the postbellum United States.

Alexander Page is a third year Ph.D Candidate at the University of Sussex. His dissertation addresses the fracture and return to power of the Democratic party between 1860 and 1884. The thesis focuses particularly on issues of reconciliation, the role of civil war memory in the party’s struggle to regain political ascendancy, and the malleability of partisanship in nineteenth century America.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row margin_bottom=”15″][vc_column][dt_banner image_id=”9008″ min_height=”270″][/dt_banner][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][dt_quote]The resources at the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library of the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) have shaped my project on the cultural origins of Loyalism in New York and enabled me to incorporate voices from both sides of the Atlantic, says Sophie Heather Jones, recipient of the 2015 BAAS and Journal of American Studies Travel Award.[/dt_quote][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]Provisionally titled From Anglicisation to Loyalism: New York, 1691-1783, my research considers the cultural origins of Loyalism in New York as a consequence of 1690s Anglicisation policies and the later Consumer Revolution, before analysing the activities of Loyalists during the War of Independence and considering their responses to its aftermath. New York played a unique role to that of its neighbouring colonies during the revolutionary conflict, acting as both British military headquarters and a safe-haven for Loyalist refugees; however, as my research title[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]suggests, New York’s curious relationship with Britain pre-dates this by almost a century. Adopting a broader chronological perspective and challenging the dominant teleological approach to the study of early America as the prelude to revolution, my research considers the influence of previously unconnected events in New York’s colonial past upon the formation of subsequent political opinions. Furthermore, my research analyses motivations for Loyalism and patterns of support amongst ethnic, racial and socio-economic divisions, including African-American and Native-American Loyalists, who remain somewhat neglected within the existing historiography.

Thanks to the generous support of the BAAS/Journal of American Studies Travel Award and the EAAS Transatlantic Travel Grant, I was fortunate enough to visit New York for a three week research visit in September 2015 to consult rare books and manuscripts held within the city’s archives.

Primarily, the majority of my time was spent at the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library of the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS). Founded in 1804, the N-YHS is New York City’s oldest museum and the manuscript collections held within the library’s archives are inherently (although not exclusively) New York-focused and provide a rich wealth of information concerning the city’s history. At the N-YHS, I was able to consult an array of materials, including the diaries of Loyalist soldiers, prisoners and exiles, letters and papers of prominent Loyalist families, and various account books, daybooks and inventories of New York’s merchants, tailors and other middling classes.

During the N-YHS’s scheduled closures, I took the opportunity to view the collections of the New York Public Library (NYPL). The rare books and manuscripts collection held at the NYPL’s iconic Stephen A. Schwarzman Building contains a range of materials complementary to those of the N-YHS. Significantly for my study, the NYPL contains a sizeable set of manuscripts concerning interactions between Native Americans and colonial authorities; in particular, efforts by the British to gain Native American support following the events of the French and Indian war. This information is particularly sparse in British archives, so these collections will provide a unique perspective to my research.

Without the support of BAAS and EAAS, this trip would not have been possible. Being able to spend an extended amount of time in New York has shaped the direction of my project and provided a truly transatlantic element, by enabling me to incorporate voices from both sides of the Atlantic. Furthermore, time spent exploring the city’s surviving colonial landmarks enabled me to contextualise my research in a way that I could never do from behind my desk at Liverpool. I was struck by the assistance and support of the staff at the N-YHS and NYPL, both in the planning stages of this trip and during its execution. With their guidance I was able to hit the ground running upon arriving at the archives and maximise my time most effectively to consult as many documents as possible.

As I enter the second year of my PhD, I am incorporating the findings of my archival visit into my ongoing research. I am indebted to BAAS and EAAS for making this possible, and look forward to sharing the results of this trip as the project progresses.

Sophie Heather Jones is a second Year PhD candidate in History at the University of Liverpool, School of Histories, Languages and Cultures. Sophie is a  recipient of the PhD Studentship, ‘Changing Cultures: The Impacts of Global Cultural Change’, granted by The University of Liverpool’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row margin_top=”15″][vc_column][ultimate_carousel slides_on_desk=”1″ slides_on_tabs=”1″ slides_on_mob=”1″][dt_teaser image_id=”9045″ lightbox=”true”]St. Paul’s Chapel, Broadway & Fulton Street – Originally opened in 1766 as an outreach of Trinity Church, St. Paul’s survived the British occupation of New York City, including the Great Fire of 1776 which destroyed many structures, including the first Trinity Church. More recently, despite its proximity to the World Trade Center buildings, St. Paul’s narrowly avoided destruction again during the events of September 11, 2001. The interior of the chapel contains both Washington’s personal pew and the Governor’s pew, located directly across from each other at opposite sides of the chapel. Author’s own image.[/dt_teaser][dt_teaser image_id=”9046″ lightbox=”true”]Fraunces Tavern, 54 Pearl Street – While Stephen DeLancey was known to have constructed a three-story brick house at this location in c.1719, the current building was opened as the ‘Queen’s Head Tavern’ by Samuel Fraunces in 1762, in honour of Queen Charlotte. New York’s branch of the Sons of Liberty used the tavern as a meeting place, while Washington made his final address to the troops in the tavern’s Long Room in December 1783. Today, the tavern operates as a restaurant and museum, with the Long Room restored as an eighteenth-century public dining room. Author’s own image.[/dt_teaser][dt_teaser image_id=”9047″ lightbox=”true”]Revolution! NYC & the War for Independence – A temporary exhibition by the N-YHS at Governor’s Island documenting New York’s role in the Revolution, including a reproduction of the 1776 second Loyalist petition to Britain known as the ‘Declaration of Dependence’, signed by 547 of the city’s loyal inhabitants. The location of the exhibition itself is significant; under colonial rule Governor’s Island was for the exclusive use of the Royal Governor, and was under British military occupation from 1776 to 1783. In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, in order to prevent another successful invasion by sea, military fortifications began on Governor’s Island with the construction of Fort Jay and Castle Williams. Governor’s Island continued to operate as an American military base until the mid-1960s. Author’s own image.[/dt_teaser][/ultimate_carousel][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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The British Library houses microfiche copies of US government regulations and correspondence relating to the Alaskan seal fisheries in the period 1880 to 1920 that have enriched my project into the Alaskan seal industry during the period 1850-1914, says Helen Cowie, Eccles Centre Fellow 2015.

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The Pacific fur seal was heavily hunted in the nineteenth century for its coat. Every year, thousands of seals were culled on the Pribylov Islands in the Behring Sea and their skins shipped to London, where they were prepared and processed. They were then distributed to consumers in North America and Europe as shawls, pelisses, gloves and jackets. By the mid-nineteenth century, the fur seal industry was a global business, employing men and women in Alaska, San Francisco and London. It was also a highly

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]fragile and contentious enterprise whose existence was threatened by the uncontrolled exploitation of the natural resource upon which it was built.

My research project explored the development of the Alaskan seal industry in the period 1850-1914. In 1867, Alaska passed from Russian into US hands, and the USA gained control of a precious natural commodity. Over the next half century, the US Government attempted to protect that commodity, introducing legislation that brought it into conflict with Canada and Britain.

My research centred on two key aspects of the sealskin industry. Firstly, it focused on ecological concerns. A much sought after commodity, the fur seal had already been wiped out in the southern Pacific Ocean. By the 1890s, its survival in the Aleutian Islands was also under threat, with the number of seals arriving on the island to breed falling to an estimated 959,000 in 1890 – just a third of the number counted by naturalist Henry Elliott in 1874.^[1] Drawing on copies of governmental regulations and scientific reports held at the British Library, as well as articles in contemporary newspapers and periodicals, my research explored responses to this environmental crisis and assessed the effectiveness of the new legislation. I situated US policies towards the fur seal within a wider context of ecological awareness and conservation in this period, which also saw the creation of National Parks on the US mainland and the first measures to protect big game in British Africa and Asia.

Related to, but distinct from, these broader environmental concerns, animal rights activists also began to question seal hunting from a humanitarian perspective. In Britain, the RSPCA published several articles on seal culling in the late 1870s in which it alleged that seals were often skinned alive.^[2] Thirty years later, in 1910, campaigner Joseph Collinson penned a highly graphic and emotive description of the seal cull, citing chilling testimony from individuals who had witnessed the slaughter. One of these described the ‘pitiful’ sight of a seal, ‘its nostrils wide and quivering, its dark ox-like eyes trembling in agony as the knife tears down its white skin’. Another claimed that seals were often skinned while still alive – deliberately so, for ‘in the utmost agony the wretched beast draws its muscles away from the sharp steel, which tears away its skin, and thus assists in parting with its own coat’.^[3] Making use of the writings of humanitarians in Britain and the USA, I considered how far the sealskin controversy reflected changing attitudes towards animals in the Anglophone world and positioned sealing within a broader raft of animal welfare issues, including anti-vivisectionism and the slaughter of wild birds to decorate ladies’ hats. I also assessed the role of zoological gardens and aquariums in changing public attitudes towards seals by making them visible to a wider audience; in 1888, Forepaugh’s circus featured a troupe of ‘highly educated’ performing seals, whose skills ranged from playing the banjo to smoking a pipe!

My project benefited greatly from access to the collections at the British Library. The Library houses microfiche copies of US government regulations and correspondence relating to the Alaskan seal fisheries in the period 1880 to 1920 and reports from the United States Bureau of Fisheries. These are not available elsewhere in the UK. The Library also holds copies of correspondence between the US and Britain on the seal fisheries and important scientific reports submitted to the government by expert observers, including Henry W. Elliott, Report on the condition of the fur-seal fisheries of the Pribylov Islands in 1890 (Paris: Chamerot and Renouard, 1893), D.O. Mills, Our fur-seal fisheries (Washington, 1890) David Starr Jordan, Observations on the Fur Seals of the Pribilof Islands, Preliminary Report (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896), and Harold Heath, ‘Special Investigation of the Alaska Fur-Seal Rookeries, 1910’ in United States of America.-Bureau of Fisheries. In addition to studying this material, I used my time at the Library to study several important works by conservationist William Hornaday, superintendent of the National Zoological Park, Washington, and to read a range of animal welfare literature related to the practice of sealing – notably Collinson’s How sealskins are obtained (London: Animal’s Friend Society, 1910) and the RSPCA’s magazine The Animal World.

During the period of my fellowship I completed a chapter on the seal industry in Alaska, which I hope to publish as part of a larger, book-length project on animal commodities in the nineteenth century. I contributed an entry on sealing to the British Library’s Science blog and was grateful for an opportunity to give a paper at the Eccles Centre Summer Scholars programme.

Footnotes

[1] Henry W. Elliott, Report on the Condition of the Fur-Seal Fisheries of the Pribylov Islands in 1890 (Paris:Chamerat et Renouard, 1893), p.91.

[2] The Animal World, April 1878, p.54.

[3] Joseph Collinson, How sealskins are obtained (London: Animal’s Friend Society, 1910), p.3.

Helen Cowie is lecturer in history at the University of York. Her research focuses on the history of animals and the history of natural history. She is author or Conquering Nature in Spain and its Empire, 1750-1850 (Manchester University Press, 2011) and Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She is currently working on a history of animal-based commodities in the nineteenth century, including sealskin, ivory and alpaca wool. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][ultimate_carousel title_text_typography=”” slides_on_desk=”1″ slides_on_tabs=”1″ slides_on_mob=”1″][dt_teaser image_id=”8907″ lightbox=”true”]

‘Arbitration’, Punch, 17 January 1891. Author’s own image.

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During my research trip to the British Library, I discovered some attorneys shared their opinions on the Revolution with authority figures in the British government—either in power or in opposition—to remain useful to the men who might control their future pensions, says Sally Haddon, Eccles Centre Visiting US Fellow in North American Studies 2015. 18th century governor Thomas Hutchinson in particular was a hub for the exiled loyalist lawyer community.

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For my book project, I’m investigating lawyers who lived in 18^th century Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Towards the end of the century, these individuals took a leading role in conducting the American Revolution, and also in the creation of the legal structures that became new state governments and the national government of the United States. As lawyers, they were also a bit of a closed community, speaking an arcane language filled with terms that others could not understand unless they shared the same training: words like fee tail male, executrix, intestacy, writs of attachment, or tripartite bonds were their stock in trade, plus Latin tags for every occasion. Being part of

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]this community of men trained in the same field held them apart from all others, as well as holding them together in a sort of invisible association.

It was the friendships within this group that first drew my attention to loyalist lawyers. I began to turn up the names of individuals who had been part of this tight-knit invisible association, but whose politics led them to part from their friends, their profession (as they knew it), and take refuge during the American Revolution. As part of the exodus of (we estimate) over 50,000 individuals from the colonies, these men have sometimes been lumped in and studied with other loyalists—but they were a breed apart. Unlike the shoemaker or blacksmith, they could not readily find work in just any old town: they needed one with a courthouse, and enough people, to sustain their legal practices.

During the period of my grant at the British Library, I was able to review the complete contents of the following manuscripts that I had previously identified as centrally important to my project on loyalists lawyers from the Thomas Hutchinson papers. In addition, I reviewed the scattered correspondence from various loyalist lawyers that I identified in the Haldimand and Liverpool Papers.

From the Hutchinson correspondence, letterbook, and diaries, I was able to glean several important pieces of information that were omitted in the edition of his diary published by his lineal descendant (from the early 20^th century). Hutchinson’s diary indicates the flow of information from one loyalist in exile (Willard) about another loyalist lawyer (Blowers) who attempted to return to Boston during the Revolution after being banished by law. Hutchinson’s correspondence and diary prove that it was worthwhile to review all of his writings—he was a hub for the exiled lawyer community, though not a lawyer himself.

As for the scattered materials, I discovered that some attorneys shared their incoming correspondence (when they had any), and opinions on the Revolution, with authority figures in the British government—either in power or in opposition. This was a means for them to remain useful to the men who might control their future pensions. Some wrote to men who were veritable strangers in hope that their background as lawyers might position them well for any sort of post, whether it required legal knowledge or not. In the archives I discovered some of these individuals were extremely self-interested; others, like Joseph Galloway, tried to take a broader view of the loyalist situation while still engaging in self-promotion. He thought the peace treaty of 1783 was a complete disaster for all loyalists, and he shared his opinions with anyone who would listen.

The overwhelming conclusion is that the BAAS grant enabled me to find incredibly valuable information that can be woven in the fifth chapter of my book, and that will enrich it greatly. I also appreciated the opportunity to participate in the Eccles Centre lunchtime lecture series, and to offer a few comments about my own research while I was on site. I would welcome the opportunity to present my research on future occasions when I am in London, as a means to continue showing my support for this worthy venture.

Let me once again express my gratitude for the support this grant has given my research, and I will gratefully acknowledge it in publications that draw upon my findings.

Sally Hadden is a faculty member in the Department of History at Western Michigan University. She received her law degree and doctorate in history at Harvard University. She has written, co-written, or co-edited four books, including the Companion to American Legal History (Wiley, 2013). Her work on loyalist lawyers is part of a larger project on legal professionals in eighteenth-century America.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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The archives of Duke, University of North Carolina and the Virginia Historical Society have been crucial to my research on enslaved wet nursing in the antebellum south, says Rosie King, recipient of the 2015 BAAS Abraham Lincoln Award.

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As a British-based scholar of the United States, accessing archives is often challenging and always expensive. While the continued and expanding digitization of primary sources is making research on the U.S. more accessible than ever, the quantity of materials available online is incomparable to those manuscripts available at archives based in the United States. Consequently, for many

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]researchers of the United States, a period of study in American archives remains an essential part of doctoral research.

My own research focuses on the practice of enslaved wet nursing in the antebellum south, contextualised within a broader reinterpretation of white women’s roles on antebellum plantations and their relationships with the women they enslaved. Having examined digital sources such as the WPA narratives, which give insight into formerly enslaved women and men’s perspectives of the practice, and Early American Newspapers Online, which show the existence of wet nurses in slave-labour markets, exploring the wealth of sources authored by slave-holding women themselves was an essential aspect of my primary research. The BAAS Abraham Lincoln Award has enabled me to visit a number of archival collections in the U.S. to undertake this costly but crucial primary research.

Over the duration of my research in the United States, I was able to access collections at three different archives; Duke University’s Rubenstein Library collections, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Virginia Historical Society.

Firstly, through research of Duke University’s John Hope Franklin and Sallie Bingham collections I was able to examine a number of manuscripts that explored slave-holding women’s experiences of child-rearing and their relationships with enslaved women. In addition to this, Duke’s collection of prescriptive literature explores the aspirational ideals of women’s roles as wives and mothers, and medical texts give insight into physician’s views on pregnancy, childbirth, and infant-feeding, and consequently elucidates what may have influenced women’s approaches to mothering.

At the Southern Historical Collection, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was able to broaden and deepen my examination of white women’s experiences of motherhood and infant-feeding in their extensive collections of correspondence and diaries written by slave-holding women and their families. Though women did not always comment on their infant-feeding, the comments they did make give insight into the problematic nature of infant-feeding and the reasons that led women to procure wet nurses. This has helped me to better understand why and how slave-holders used black women in this exploitative practice.

I continued this research at the Virginia Historical Society. Family correspondence, diaries, and estate records at the VHS evidenced that white women, in their roles as mothers, were also economically-minded managers of the domestic economies of slavery.

The opportunity to study enslaved wet nursing through [predominantly] white women’s testimony revealed how the practice is one aspect of broader patterns of black women’s exploitation in the plantation house. It epitomises the interconnections of mothering practice and slave labour in the antebellum south; establishing a picture of white women’s continued and systematic utilisation of black women’s labour and mothering ‘skills’ in raising their own children. It also elucidates slave-holding women’s typical lack of consideration for how these enslaved women and their children were affected by their decisions. Though enslaved and slaveholding women’s relationships were characterised by spatial closeness, the emotional distance between them could hardly be clearer. Their relationships were determined by imbalances in racialized power, an inequality pronounced through the study of their infant-feeding practices.

Rosie Knight is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Reading. Her research focuses on slave-holding women’s exploitation of enslaved women’s mothering, through the practice of enslaved wet nursing. Her research trip was also supported by a Mellon Fellowship awarded by the Virginia Historical Society, and the British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH) Peter Parish award. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Probably no other place outside the US itself would have allowed me to compare and contrast narratives of ‘freedom’ as they have employed from the Cold War to the War on Terror, says Andrew Hammond, Eccles Centre UK Fellow in North American Studies 2015.

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Andrew Hammond (University of Warwick). I took up my Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship during July and August 2015. I used my time there to work on my forthcoming book Struggles for Freedom: Afghanistan and US Foreign Policy Since 1979 (EUP, 2016]. Alternatively called America’s ‘foundational ethic’, ‘ultimate codeword’, and ‘most resonant, deeply held value’, my book is the first in-depth systematic analysis of the role that the concept

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]‘freedom’ has played in US foreign policy. It does so by comparing and contrasting narratives of ‘freedom’ employed during the Cold War and the War on Terror amongst a number of other interventions into some of the most momentous events and historiographical debates of modern times, it argues that freedom plays a fundamentally important role in the cultural production of American national identity.

As expected, I found the Eccles Centre and the British Library extremely conducive in the aforementioned endeavour. After a busy year teaching, the opportunity to immerse myself in the collections – whether primary or secondary – and to concentrate on this project was a boon indeed. While I had already undertaken a lot of archival research in the US, as well as conducting oral history interviews, my time at the Eccles Centre allowed me to carefully execute my arguments by drawing upon the depth and breadth of the British Library’s holdings. Whether through consulting Records and Proceedings of the Congress, word searchable content of leading publications such as the New York Times, or through utilising the huge range of secondary material on intelligence, Afghanistan, and US foreign and security policy, no other place in the country – and probably no other place outside the US itself  – would have allowed me to erect such robust intellectual scaffolding around my argument.

I found the staff at the Eccles Centre unfailingly helpful – whether in terms of administration, organising the public talks that were a condition of the fellowship, or advice and tips on using the collections. I also had the pleasure of meeting other scholars at the inaugural event of the Eccles Centre network – a BBQ in lovely British sunshine on the balcony! – which I hope goes from strength to strength. While there was the space necessary to get down to some serious intellectual labour, one also got the sense that not too far away there was a genuine community of scholars working away on similar subject matter always ready to meet up for a quick coffee or a beer after a long day in the library. Whilst located in an international capital city, I also found the sense of physical distance from one’s erstwhile daytime commitments very helpful in terms of getting into the right frame of mind to write (I also managed to complete a book chapter on former CIA chief Bill Casey while there). All in all I am extremely grateful for the opportunity and hope that other scholars will benefit as I have done from the chance to spend a period of time at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library.

Andrew Hammond is an Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the National 9/11 Museum and a Visiting Scholar at NYU. He previously lectured at the University of Warwick where he completed his ESRC funded 1+3 PhD (national competition). In 2011 he was a British Research Council Fellow at the Library of Congress. During his Visiting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the British Library, he continued to work on his forthcoming book, Struggles for Freedom: Afghansitan and US Foreign Policy Since 1979, which will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2016.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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With the BAAS Founders Travel Grant I was able to travel to Illinois State University  to give the keynote paper at the second annual David Foster Wallace conference and continue my research into Wallace’s correspondence network in Bloomington-Normal, says Stephen J. Burn. Wallace’s letters are the submerged mass that lie beneath his novels, essays, blurbs, and interviews.

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Viewed abstractly, the geography of David Foster Wallace’s life spans the country. He was born on the East Coast, in upstate New York, in 1962, and he died 46 years later on the West Coast, in California. The centre of his creative life, however, arguably lies away from those metropolitan coastal hubs, in the country’s centre. Here, in a pair of small settlements that break-up a landscape that Wallace nearly always described in terms of its iconic flatness and endless corn fields, he enjoyed what Charles B. Harris has called “his most productive period,”[1] writing at least part

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]of everything he published after 1993, amid a “cartographic obelisk, walled at the sides and tapered to green points at the horizons front and back.”[2] With the generous award of a BAAS Founders Travel Grant, I travelled to the Midwest to give the keynote paper at the second annual Wallace conference (hosted by Illinois State University, where Wallace worked between 1993 and 2002), and spent a week conducting related research in the twinned city and town of Bloomington-Normal.

At the core of both this keynote and the associated research was my ongoing work preparing (in collaboration with the Wallace Literary Trust) a volume of Wallace’s selected letters. Because Wallace did not keep copies of his letters and cards, I’ve spent much of the last five years attempting to reverse-engineer a blueprint of Wallace’s correspondence network, working first, from clues in his published writing and interviews, and, second, from various leads present in the letters that I’ve gathered. Based on this reverse-engineering process, I’ve come to think that what we have in his novels, essays, blurbs, and interviews, is an iceberg map of Wallace’s literary America. That is, these different parts of his published work are the visible signs of deeper connections, intellectual investments, and personal engagements. The letters, by contrast, are the substantial submerged mass that lie beneath the polished, visible surface, and—because Wallace defined himself as a writer so strongly in his letters—what I think they present is an unusually vivid snapshot of an emerging collective of writers whose interchange of ideas and shared social, psychological, and cultural concerns is likely to provide material for later studies of writer networks and their relationship to literary movements.

The Illinois Wallace conference (which is the largest, and, in many ways, the most important event of its kind) provided me with an opportunity to present a skeletal outline of this network as it’s mapped in my edition-in-progress, describing the project’s challenges and my broader discoveries. Both the conference and the later research provided a vast amount of information about Wallace’s life and work in Bloomington that will significantly enrich my efforts to annotate his letters.  Because the conference featured many of Wallace’s former colleagues, friends, and students (including David Anderson, Victoria Frenkel Harris, JT Jackson Robert McLaughlin, Brian Monday, Sally E. Parry), and because many of his friends continue to live nearby, this was a rich atmosphere for a quasi-biographical researcher, and aside from locating new letters, I can only gesture, via one of Wallace’s signature forms—the list—toward the things I discovered: I knew that Wallace’s antipathy to John Barth had been overstated, but I didn’t know that he had been so excited by the appearance of Barth’s “Ad Infinitum” in Harper’s (Jan. 1994) that he’d had a graduate student Xerox the story so that he could press it enthusiastically into the hands of his colleague, Charles B. Harris; I knew that writing about literature and belief was often important to Wallace, but I hadn’t realized that James Wood (despite his many ambivalent comments about Wallace’s work) had specifically requested that Wallace be sent a copy of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate (1999), and that Wallace had read at least parts of the book; I knew that Wallace’s first blurb had probably been written for David Gurr’s The Ring Master (1987), but I didn’t think two Wallace scholars in a diner (Harris and Mary Holland) would completely change the way I saw that blurb in relation to Wallace’s other writing in the late 1980s; I knew that Wallace had been involved at the nexus of the hugely influential Review of Contemporary Fiction and Dalkey Archive Press in the 1990s, but not that he had reworked many of the literary translations undertaken by the journal; I knew that Wallace’s investment in poetry had been understated, but I was still surprised when Gale Walden told me that Wallace’s underlinings in his copy of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets might reveal unexpected lines of structural and thematic influence.

The full range of my findings will eventually underwrite my edition of Wallace’s letters. In the meantime, I’d like to express my gratitude to the BAAS; to Jane Carman and Jeanne Merkle at ISU; to the Harris family; to the David Foster Wallace Memorial Fund (Illinois State University Foundation); and to everyone who took the time to share their Wallace stories with me in Illinois.

Footnotes

[1] Charles B. Harris, “David Foster Wallace: ‘That Distinctive Singular Stamp of Himself.’” Critique 51 (2010): 170.

[2] David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair. New York: Norton, 1989. 268.

Stephen J. Burn (Reader in American Literature at the University of Glasgow) is the author or editor of five books and numerous essays about contemporary fiction. Forthcoming projects include American Literature in Transition: 1990-2000 (Cambridge UP) and (with Mary Holland) Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace (MLA).[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row margin_top=”15″][vc_column][ultimate_carousel title_text_typography=”” slides_on_desk=”3″][dt_teaser image_id=”8757″ lightbox=”true”]

Letter accompanying Wallace’s uncorrected proof of Wood’s The Broken Estate. Author’s own image.

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With Wallace scholar, Mary Holland, outside the house where Wallace put the finishing touches to Infinite Jest, and began all of his later major work. Author’s own image.

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Meeting Barth scholar Charles B. Harris (who hired Wallace into his first academic job) at the Bloomington Denny’s that Wallace acknowledges for their “generous and broad-minded support” in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men’s frontmatter. Author’s own image.

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Adam Matthew Digital essay prize – Deadline: 19 January 2018

BAAS is pleased to announce the Adam Matthew Digital essay prize consisting of £500 plus one-year’s access to one Adam Matthew Digital archival collection chosen by the author. This prize, which began in 2015, will be awarded to the best essay submitted on any subject that relates to the Adam Matthew North American collections. Adam Matthew has published unique, award-winning primary source collections from archives around the world since 1990. This award is eligible to postgraduates, early career researchers, and independent researchers, although the latter two groups will be prioritised on the grounds that this unique prize offers access to resources they may not otherwise have.

The essay should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words in length and relate to a topic covered by any one of Adam Matthew’s North American collections. Membership of BAAS is mandatory in order to be eligible to receive the prize.

Care should be taken to ensure that the name of the author does not appear on the essay itself, but only in the cover letter which should be submitted by e-mail along with the essay. 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 accordingly be taken with matters of presentation and documentation. Prize-winning essays will be offered publication in US Studies Online: the Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Network and Blog.

You can find the submission guidelines here.

BAAS is committed to promoting best practice in matters of equality and diversity, and will be attentive to issues of equality and diversity when judging applications.

2017 Winner – Alexander McDonnell (Durham University): Satire, Symbolism and the “Working Through” of Historical Ghosts in The Confidence-Man

2015 Winner – Patrick J. Doyle (Royal Holloway University, London): “Replacement Rebels: Confederate Substitution and the Issue of Citizenship”

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SAVAnT: a research network in American visual art and culture

SAVAnT (Scholars of American Visual Arts and Text) is a research network that aims to foster dialogue between Americanists and Art Historians working on American art and visual culture. It was founded by Joanna Pawlik (Art History, Sussex) and Doug Haynes (American Studies, Sussex) in August 2014.

We seek to investigate some of the different methodologies and emphases in approaches to visual material in Art History and American Studies and to think through how our teaching and research might benefit from interdisciplinary and inter-departmental exchange. Participants in the network are based in universities across the UK, at all career levels. We have recently begun working with the CHASE consortium; our plans are to extend the network further to create an academic community and research base in the hitherto relatively unexplored junction of American Studies and Art History.

SAVAnT so far:

An inaugural roundtable took place in September 2014 in Senate House, London. Fourteen invited participants addressed issues of concern to the network, such as how questions of (inter)disciplinarity in the study of American art and visual culture have affected career paths, teaching and research, as well as practical issues of which publishers, journals, conferences and REF panels we submit our research to. This meeting proved very fruitful and some longstanding academic ties were forged there; many participants recognised the institutional disjunction SAVAnT was formed to address.

In April 2015, a SAVAnT panel was convened for the BAAS (British Association for American Studies) conference in Northumbria.  In “Objects in Narrative”, speakers presented to a packed room on a diverse range of American art and visual material – from Civil War paintings of domestic interiors to postcards and mail art, and from the commodity aesthetics of Jeff Koons to cultural production exploring migration and exile by contemporary Chicana and Cuban American artists.

On July 10, 2015 SAVAnT hosted Facing America, a symposium co-sponsored by the Sussex Centre for American Studies and the Eccles Centre at the British Library. Professor Celeste Marie Bernier (Nottingham) and Professor David Peters Corbett (UEA) were keynotes.

The event explored the many ways in which faces, “facingness” and faciality can be understood in American art and visual culture. Papers addressed such areas as the painting of George Caleb Bingham, African-American portraiture, Native American portraits, presidential portraits, post-AIDs identity, Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs of the Soviet Union, faces in surveillance, Scarlet Johansson’s face on the cinema screen, and much else. Speakers came from UK, US and European universities. This was a wonderful event with excellent papers, many guests and plenty of informed and enlightening discussion. An edited collection of essays will, we hope, be forthcoming from this symposium.

In conjunction with the CHASE consortium (in this case primarily working with Sussex, Essex, UEA and the Courtauld), SAVAnT participated in a follow-up event to Facing America: Chasing America! The purpose of this event was to ascertain the range and detail of interest in American visual culture across CHASE in the fields both of PhD students and faculty research. The day showed us that there is considerable interest and expertise in art history, visual culture and American Studies in the consortium; SAVAnT seeks to enhance this intra-CHASE network through its connections with academics and research students from other universities and institutions in the UK and US.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row margin_top=”15″][vc_column][ultimate_carousel title_text_typography=”” slides_on_desk=”3″ slides_on_mob=”1″][dt_teaser image_id=”10574″ lightbox=”true”]George Caleb Bingham, The Jolly Flatboatman, 1846.[/dt_teaser][dt_teaser image_id=”10580″ lightbox=”true”]George Caleb Bingham, In a Quandary, or Mississippi Raftsmen at Cards, 1851.[/dt_teaser][dt_teaser image_id=”10579″ lightbox=”true”]Archibald J. Motley Jr., Mending Socks, 1924.[/dt_teaser][/ultimate_carousel][/vc_column][/vc_row]