A Biographical Pursuit of ‘Peggy Guggenheim’

Lisa Rull
© Lisa Rull. All Rights Reserved

This article on American art collector and dealer, Marguerite—known as Peggy—Guggenheim (1898-1979) explores the inherent difficulties of researching her work and life within the constraints of the dominant models of art history and popular biography. Born in New York, she was a Jewish American heiress from one of the key German-speaking Swiss industrialist families of the nineteenth century. From the late 1930s onwards, she became an art collector and dealer supporting Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, operating two commercial gallery spaces during the 1930s and 1940s: Guggenheim Jeune in London (1938-39) and Art of This Century in New York (1942-47). Consequently she is a crucial figure in tracking the shift of avant-garde cultural practices from Europe to the USA in the mid-twentieth century. Following a successful showing of her collection at the Venice Biennale in 1948, she moved to Venice where she continued to welcome the art world and later opened her collections to the public. However, to date there has been little serious consideration of her work and life. If people are familiar with her at all, it is through her autobiographical writings, which continue to be referenaced as the standard text on her life and opinions.

Guggenheim’s Out of This Century was first published in America in 1946, with virtually all the characters given pseudonyms (for example, Samuel Beckett—Oblomov). An edited but updated English edition reinserting real names was published in 1960, and a final combined and (again) updated edition was published just prior to Guggenheim’s death in 1979.[1] The autobiographies provide an emotionally raw portrayal of a woman whose flamboyant sexuality and exploitation of money shaped her experiences as an art patron. Guggenheim was wealthy, but prone to ‘penny-pinching’. She could be fickle and vengeful—especially in her relations with other women. Indeed, artist Lee Krasner frequently remarked that Guggenheim was “a real bitch, bitch, bitch.”[2] Above all Guggenheim presented herself as aggressively heterosexual and emotionally manipulative. She married twice: to Bohemian socialite, Laurence Vail, and briefly to the Surrealist painter, Max Ernst. Amongst those she claimed as her lovers were Samuel Beckett, Humphrey Jennings, E.L.T. Mesens, Roland Penrose, and Yves Tanguy. Additionally many subsequent biographical texts discussing her suggest an even more complex sexual identity, since Guggenheim frequently flirted and seduced her female and male acquaintances despite—or because—of their homosexual practices. Although noted for her apparently indefatigable personality, closer reading of the auto/biographical material on Guggenheim also reveals her emotional weaknesses. For example, when Ernst divorced Guggenheim, his son Jimmy remained a friend to her. Despite the tempestuous marriage Guggenheim constantly pleaded with Jimmy to confirm: “Max must have loved me at one time. Didn’t he?”[3]

From this synopsis, Guggenheim’s character appears far removed from the proto-feminist heroines who dominated early feminist scholarship in the field of auto/biographical studies.[4] The gossipy style of her autobiographies—which are curiously dissembling texts in themselves—dominates the tone of many discussions generated around Guggenheim’s life and work. The trivia is both fascinating and appalling for a feminist critic to try and deal with, and has proved a major stumbling block for both art historians and biographers writing about Guggenheim. Their difficulty foregrounds the necessity of acknowledging the complexities of human interactions across gender lines and raises two key issues for feminist researchers. One is the frequently masculine perspective that dominates the broader picture of historical and cultural circumstances in which Guggenheim operated. The pretence of gender neutrality—or its irrelevance—within traditional art historical scholarship continues to maintain a certain power within the dominating Modernist history of twentieth century culture. The other difficulty concerns our understanding of the fraught relationship between art and life, where banal, reductive, yet often extraordinary, forms of auto/biographical writing can prove particularly disastrous for women. Can the researcher escape from reading the work (in this case art and its patronage) as a prooftext of the life (biography)? Is it possible to acknowledge the seductiveness and value of the mostly untheorised material on her, whilst simultaneously critiquing the ideologies at work in constructing her character in this manner? Can we move towards analysing Guggenheim’s activities in cultural production as sites of struggle and negotiation with biography?

Aspects of such approaches have become of increasing concern for (feminist) studies on auto/biography and the whole concept of ‘writing a woman’s life.’[5] From early twentieth century debates about the ‘new biography’, through to specifically feminist analyses regarding how “women’s lives have rarely fit the model of the normative biographical hero-type”, the strategies and processes of auto/biography and biographers have begun to be unmasked and interrogated.[6] In doing so, historians have become more critical about how auto/biographies deal with the subjectivity of both the subject and the author. These issues have been considered by, amongst others, Shari Benstock, Julia Swindells, and Liz Stanley, as the methodology and uses in reading a life become more problematised by this engagement with theories of identity.[7] Feminists have also become more open to acknowledging the impact of ‘disappointment’ with the subjects of feminist research. Irit Rogoff’s essay, ‘Tiny Anguishes—Reflections on Nagging, Scholastic Embarrassment, and Feminist Art History’ (1988), provides a careful analysis of how the feminist scholar invests her subject with certain expectations.[8] When the subject is ‘revealed’ as less unique and innovative, and more “male-identified” or dependent, than we might prefer how does the analysis deal with this? How do we negotiate our understanding of a subject in the light of such material?

In pursuing an analysis of ‘Peggy Guggenheim’, I have sought to take account of such theoretical debates in order to find a way of ‘dealing’ with my subject. In this I found Toril Moi’s study Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994) a stimulating—if sometimes perversely awkward—inspiration.[9] In common with some of the aforementioned writers on auto/biographical approaches, Moi is concerned to make more visible the manner by which readers come to know/understand their subjects. Moi uses the wealth of auto/biographical material available on de Beauvoir to produce a critical analysis of ‘the making of’ her subject; one that is specifically “based on the assumption that there can be no methodological distinction between ‘life’ and ‘text’” (SB, 3-4, original emphasis). Drawing on Freud’s exploration of the relationship between psyche (person) and text (dream) in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Moi asserts that the person is only revealed “in the form of a text”. As such,

the intertextual network of fictional, philosophical, autobiographical and epistolary texts …[and] all the texts about her: letters, diaries, newspaper interviews and reviews, scholarly studies, films, biographies, personal recollections by friends and enemies—all contribute to the production of the network of images and ideas we recognize as ‘Simone de Beauvoir’ (SB 4).

Moi describes the possibility—and indeed necessity—when analysing how a (female) subject is constructed, of reading all the available texts “with and against each other” in order to avoid reducing “her achievements to mere effects of her personal circumstances” (SB 5). Of course this recognition of the danger of reading creative output or activities as “biographical evidence” has been of concern to self-reflexive biographers for some time.[10] However, Moi’s description of her methodology is particularly appealing since it prioritises analysis concerning how our understanding of a biographical subject is structured by the mass of critical and anecdotal material written about her/him. Echoing Moi’s study of de Beauvoir, I would suggest that ‘Peggy Guggenheim’ too is the product of “an extraordinarily complex effect of a whole network of different discourses or determinants” (SB 6).

Moi describes her work as a Foucauldian-inspired approach to reading a subject and, echoing Foucault’s approach to history, uses the term “personal genealogy” rather than ‘critical biography’ to describe her study (SB 7). This distinction perhaps reveals more about Moi’s own ambiguous relationship with biography than it does in identifying specific differences between these approaches. Many aspects that Moi identifies as integral to “personal genealogy” are considered standard in most serious biographical analyses. Moi, as a biographical commentator and frequent reviewer of biographical works for magazines such as The Times Literary Supplement, appears strangely horrified that her own investigation might be condemned by her reviewing peers as biography:

‘It sounds like a critical biography’, my friends said. As it had never occurred to me to write the story of de Beauvoir’s life, their objections seemed conclusive: another title would clearly have to be found. The offending title refused to go away… (SB 6, emphasis added).

Moi’s discomfort rests partly on contemporary debates about a conflict between biography and literary analysis. How does each form utilise the information and revelations of the other? On the one hand biography using literary material as evidence; on the other, literary researchers falling back upon references to the life. Despite Moi’s own problematic understanding of biography, her notion of “personal genealogy” is nevertheless quite appealing. For all that recent biographers have begun to acknowledge the “final, truthful ‘definitive’ account must always be something of a chimera,”[11] public expectations for the biographical format nevertheless demand something like the ‘telling of the life’ with a largely chronological impetus. (This trait of biography perhaps explains why the genre continues to attract novelists to write them.)[12] Moi’s denial of the possibility for a “final totalization of knowledge” of its subject provided through linear narrative offers a more explicit recognition that there is no “original identity” which can ultimately be disclosed through research and analysis. Instead, she proposes that the various “textual strands”—texts /work /life need to be read as “a complex network of signifying structures … haunted by the ghosts of the individual and social unconscious” (SB 8).

Whilst Moi’s criticism of the genre of biography is part of a wider debate beyond the scope of this article, her definition of “personal genealogy” certainly appears relevant with regard to Guggenheim, about whom limited contextualised analysis has been carried out within conventional biographical forms. By using a subject’s own writings and an array of popular and scholarly material to examine the broad social, cultural, educational, and political contexts that shaped her attitudes and experiences, perhaps we can confront the “disputed opinions and entrenched public myths” (SB 74) surrounding her. Although de Beauvoir’s position as a writer offers a somewhat different archive of written material to analyse, as contrasted with the activities of Guggenheim the collector, I would nevertheless suggest that elements from Moi’s study ring familiar with regard to Guggenheim. For example, Moi’s attention to issues of gender identifies how the (almost) consistent presence of an autobiographical voice in de Beauvoir’s writings is frequently used as a reason to dismiss her political and philosophical work and beliefs (SB 77-84). Instead many texts on de Beauvoir concentrate on her personality and private life, where

[t]he intended effect is to depoliticize her by presenting her political choices not as the outcome of careful reflection on the issues at stake, but as the inexplicable élans of an overemotional or even hysterical woman (SB 81).

According to Moi, this negative elision of the personal and the professional culminates in the work being reduced to autobiography, being reduced to an aspect of ‘femininity’. It is de Beauvoir’s status as a woman that ultimately results in this critical obsession with her “looks, character, private life or morality” (SB 78). I would argue similarities between this diminishing of de Beauvoir and the attitudes expressed towards Guggenheim’s work within the cultural market. The dismissal of Guggenheim as possessing “erratic” and instinctive taste[13] reliant upon her personal (sexual) relationships with artists reflects similar discourses and constructions of femininity.

In order to progress with a self-consciously theorised feminist analysis of Guggenheim’s contribution to twentieth century American and European culture, a summary of how art history and (popular) auto/biography have both failed and shaped the discourses on Guggenheim may prove helpful. Traditionally, art history has emphasised ‘quality’ as a symbolic representation of status, concentrating on objects (often imbued with a singular, timeless meaning) or on the romantic image of the inspired individual artist—the tortured genius.[14] The Canon of suitable subjects and the hegemonic power of its approach to methodology have remained resolutely intact despite the interventions of Other discourses.[15] Correspondingly, the trademark concerns of patronage—an emotionally detached commitment to aesthetics, connoisseurship of skill, and ‘good taste’—echo this Canonical approach to art history, which is often demonstrated through collecting ‘Old Masters’. However, patrons themselves remain largely the subjects of biography, rather than art history, since the latter concentrates more on the minutiae of the objects collected and the artists who produced them. Guggenheim provides a particularly problematic character for art history to consider. Firstly, the primary text on her work—namely the autobiography—presents a tangled web of business, social, and sexual relationships that seemingly inform her roles as patron, dealer, and collector. Secondly, her embrace of avant-garde European and American art, displayed and sold through salesroom galleries, challenged both male domination of the public economic arena and the definitions of ‘good taste’.

Much art historical research on Guggenheim has attempted to enforce art history’s traditional concerns and support of ‘good taste’. For example, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF) took over the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on her death in 1979, and has assiduously documented and promoted its content since then.[16] These texts largely concentrate on evaluating the art objects for their aesthetic and art-historical significance, providing only brief detail on their acquisition apart from occasional ‘literature references’ to the autobiographies.[17] There is limited analysis of how Guggenheim accumulated her collection, and even less on exploring her reasons why. In recent years some biographical material has shaped the promotion of the Guggenheim franchise. For example, rather than publishing a catalogue for the exhibition Peggy Guggenheim: A Celebration (1998), the SRGF produced a glossy illustrated volume dominated by a biographical essay by granddaughter, Karole P.B. Vail. With its numerous photographs and extracts from Guggenheim’s Venice guest-books, what the book celebrated appeared to be as much Guggenheim’s status as a celebrity—and her crowd of cultural celebrity friends and lovers—as her collection. (In the context of recent large-scale populist and branded exhibitions such as the Armani show by the Guggenheim Museums, this move towards exploiting celebrity and commercialism links to issues discussed later in this piece.)[18]

Some aspects of the patronage process have been accepted as part of art historical research. For example, there has been a growth of interest in work and evidence of ‘good taste’ of those formulating collections and cultivating professional relationships with artists. This area has seen considerable work done on the activities of those that advised and administrated Guggenheim’s work as a patron, such as her New York assistant, Howard Putzel.[19] Putzel undoubtedly deserved his due credit as a curator and collector working with Guggenheim, since it was largely thanks to his cultivation of contacts that many of the Abstract Expressionists gained their first successes at Art of This Century. However, Guggenheim’s canny accumulation of associates, including Putzel, Humphrey Jennings, Sir Roland Penrose, Sir Herbert Read, and Marcel Duchamp, has essentially been left unexamined, portraying her by implication as merely the financially-enabled passive receptacle for their ‘expert’ input.

Other studies have emphasised the philanthropic element of patronage, and although considerable feminist history has been produced in the wake of Ann Douglas’s groundbreaking The Feminization of American Culture (1977), few have extended her analysis to the modern era, or to the work of women operating in the public domain such as Guggenheim. For example, the papers from the 1995 inter-disciplinary symposium Cultural Leadership in America: Art Matronage and Patronage concentrate on the late nineteenth century up to World War I, whilst Kathleen D. McCarthy’s Women’s Culture finishes at 1930. Steven Watson’s Strange Bedfellows, provides a fascinating cultural history of many of the female figures woven into Guggenheim’s early life—for example, Katherine Dreier, Mina Loy, Mabel Dodge Luhan—but cuts off at around 1920. Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank—Paris 1900-1940 does provide a valuable feminist attempt to write against the “hegemony of masculine heterosexual values that have for so long underwritten our definitions of Modernism”. However, her analysis makes only limited mention of Guggenheim’s participation and association with the American and European (women) writers, artists and philanthropists living in pre-World War II Europe. Moreover, the autobiography remains the virtually unchallenged primary source.[20] Ferris Olin’s 1998 thesis ‘Consuming Passions—women art collectors and cultural politics in the United States 1945-95’ begins as Guggenheim’s formal career as a dealer and patron was drawing to a close. Only Deidre Robson’s scholarly Prestige, Profit and Pleasure (1994) directly covers the art market of the 1940s and 1950s, but there is limited consideration of Guggenheim’s work within this study.[21]

Some journalistic work, feeding the popular interest after the art auction boom of the 1980s, does refer briefly to Guggenheim’s contribution to the art market. Peter Watson’s book From Manet to Manhattan—The Rise of the Modern Art Market (1992) is typical, but candidly acknowledges that the author has “pillaged, précised and paraphrased shamelessly” from several books for his text.[22] Correspondingly his tone of language discussing Guggenheim is simplistic and familiar, essentially summarising the autobiography and Weld biographical account.

As with other pseudo-art historical texts, this type of material privileges the biographical impulse. The style echoes the popular biographical accounts of patrons’ lives that captured the public imagination in the mid-twentieth century. Aline Saarinen’s The Proud Possessors (1958) is characteristic of these, and the opening sentence to her essay on Guggenheim—‘Appassionata of the Avant-Garde’ (note the title)—provides ample evidence of contemporary attitudes towards Guggenheim:

In 1937, Peggy Guggenheim, at the age of 39, found herself temporarily without a man. Having made a frantic career of men for the past twenty years, she could easily have acquired another, but she was momentarily surfeited.[23]

What is rather more concerning is how the provocative character of Guggenheim continues to stimulate such attention and caricatured portrayals. For example, Charlotte Gere and Marina Vaizey’s glossy ‘history’ of Great Women Collectors (1999) made Guggenheim a prominent part of their promotional campaign for the book, using their essay on her as part of a three-page illustrated article for the Weekend Guardian. Their language was dominated by phrases describing Guggenheim’s “addictive personality” and “her wildness and emotional extravagance.”[24] Like Saarinen more than forty years earlier, Gere and Vaizey continue to reflect uncritically and rely upon the tone of Guggenheim’s autobiographies, emphasising character and personal emotional life rather analysis of the work as patron.

Guggenheim family biographies have supported similarly-focused considerations of Peggy Guggenheim’s ‘scandalous’ life, and both Edwin P. Hoyt Jnr. in 1967 and John H. Davis in 1978 enthusiastically adopt the tone and anecdotes of Peggy Guggenheim’s autobiographies with little question.[25] As part of a genre of popular biography which puts elite families up for mass observation—their quirks, their morality, their financial success (and failure)—a central object of such texts is to underline how overwhelmingly different such groups are to the rest of society. Stephen Birmingham’s “Our Crowd”—The Great Jewish Families of New York (1967) and Kate Simon’s A Very Social History (1978) about the families of New York’s Fifth Avenue exemplify this approach within the format of the group biography.[26]

There have been relatively few individual studies of Peggy Guggenheim herself, and until recently the autobiography and Jacqueline Bograd Weld’s book, revealingly subtitled The Wayward Guggenheim (1986) were the standard works. Although written with Guggenheim’s permission and using interviews conducted by the author in the late 1970s, Weld’s book provides little more than a lively recounting of anecdotes, with patchy supporting evidence for oral testimony, and offers limited critical or contextual discussion. The two most recent books on Guggenheim have both been written by family members, and thus at least make more explicit their potential partiality regarding their chosen subject. Both the photograph-based Peggy Guggenheim—A Collector’s Album (1996), and the aforementioned Peggy Guggenheim: A Celebration (1998), continue the repetition of the familiar autobiographical tales and anecdotes from the Weld biography. (Anton Gill’s forthcoming biography on Peggy Guggenheim is due for publication by HarperCollins in October 2001. However, the author himself readily acknowledged that his text remains a “straightforward telling of a life-story” rather than a theoretically informed critical analysis concerned with the identity of ‘Peggy Guggenheim’.)[27]

Peggy Guggenheim nonetheless regularly appears in numerous biographies and memoirs, and it seems that no account of mid-twentieth century American and European culture can be considered ‘authentic’ or complete without some reference to Guggenheim. This reached its apotheosis in the 1998 Nat Tate biography. William Boyd’s (fictional) ‘rediscovered’ American artist cleverly pastiches of all the central clichés in modern artist biographies. Whilst the hoax itself was short-lived, virtually all the reviews commented on the inclusion of an obligatory affair with Peggy Guggenheim: the excesses of her life had transcended reality and passed into mythology.[28]

***

If we are ever to move beyond such mythologising of ‘Peggy Guggenheim’, the methodologies implicit to Moi’s “personal genealogy” may prove a useful starting point. By thoroughly contextualising and interrogating what shaped Guggenheim’s attitudes and behaviour, we may be able to analyse how herself and others have constructed her character in auto/biographical texts. As a demonstration of how our understanding of a subject might be expanded I now want to outline a preliminary analysis of a key document relating to Guggenheim.

The text concerned is a letter written to Guggenheim from Baroness Hilla Rebay (1890-1967). As Director of Solomon R. Guggenheim’s Museum of Non-Objective Art in New York, Rebay was both his advisor and personal assistant, and had overseen the development of his private collection into an important public museum. Solomon Guggenheim (1861-1949) was Peggy Guggenheim’s uncle, and no doubt his example played a role in her decision to set up the Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London in 1938. One of the first shows there was to feature work by the Expressionist artist Vassily Kandinsky. During his early years as a collector, Solomon Guggenheim had enthusiastically supported Kandinsky. However, in recent years Rebay had encouraged Guggenheim to support the work of a follower of Kandinsky—Rudolf Bauer.[29] Aware of her uncle’s latent interest, Peggy Guggenheim wrote offering to arrange the sale to him of an important early work by Kandinsky. Solomon initially wrote a friendly response, but the final task of replying was handed to Rebay. The letter has been reproduced and quoted—but never previously analysed—in virtually every book and article written on Peggy Guggenheim’s work as a dealer.

Dear Mrs. Guggenheim “jeune”
Your request to sell us a Kandinsky picture was given to me, to answer.
First of all we do not ever buy from any dealer, as long as great artists offer their work for sale themselves & secondly will be your gallery the last one for our foundation to use, if ever the need to get an historically important picture, should force us to use a sales gallery.
It is extremely distasteful at this moment, when the name of Guggenheim stands for an ideal in art, to see it used for commerce so as to give the wrong impression, as if this great philanthropic work was intended to be a useful boost to some small shop. Non-objective art, you will soon find out, does not come by the dozen, to make a shop of this art profitable. Commerce with real art cannot exist for that reason. You will soon find you are propagating mediocrity; if not trash. If you are interested in non-objective art you can well afford to buy it and start a collection. This way you can get into useful contact with artists, and you can leave a fine collection to your country if you know how to choose. If you don’t you will soon find yourself in trouble also in commerce.
Due to a foresight of an important man since many years collecting and protecting real art, through my work and experience, the name of Guggenheim became known for great art and it is very poor taste indeed to make use of it, of our work and fame, to cheapen it to a profit.
Yours very truly, H.R.
P.S. Now, our newest publication will not be sent to England for some time to come (N31).
(OTC, 170-171)

In her tone and language, Rebay’s eventual reply provides an acute illustration of the ideological conflict Peggy Guggenheim’s commercial activities generated amongst those (such as Rebay and Solomon Guggenheim) who saw themselves as members of the philanthropic cultural elite. The letter explicitly condemns Peggy Guggenheim’s decision to buy and sell art, but also reveals that Rebay’s attitude went beyond an accusation that Peggy Guggenheim lacked (appropriate) aesthetic taste. The letter also provides specific evidence of ambivalence about Jewish identity amongst each of the three parties concerned: Rebay, Peggy Guggenheim, and Solomon Guggenheim. Moreover, the debates it raises reflect the concerns of art history and biography and how they have structured discussion on Peggy Guggenheim: not only concerning her relationship to commerce, but also her inherent lack of seriousness and exploitation of ‘celebrity’. (By naming her gallery Guggenheim Jeune, she not only capitalised on her uncle’s fame but also implied a closer relationship than uncle and niece.[30] Rebay’s letter also implicitly condemns Guggenheim’s non-professional relationships with artists in praising the more formal procedure of establishing “useful contacts”).

Although Peggy Guggenheim desired financial self-sufficiency, her galleries only ever accumulated losses. This was in spite of her often demonstrated perverse attention to detail such as checking the money made from the 25 cents entrance fee to Art of This Century (TWG 292). In promoting minority tastes during the years she was working in London and New York, Guggenheim was rarely able to economically capitalise on her selections, and her basements were often filled with works she herself purchased to avoid disappointing her artists (TWG 161). When Guggenheim Jeune closed, it had a deficit of around £600 (1939 value), and despite all the critical attention Jackson Pollock acquired under her patronage, Guggenheim never sold one of his paintings for more than $1000.[31] Despite Rebay’s belief that Peggy Guggenheim had entered the art world with commercial profit in mind, Guggenheim eventually proved singularly unsuccessful to that end.

Solomon Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay approached their engagement with art in a completely different manner. Baroness Hildegard Anna Augusta Elisabeth Rebay von Ehrenwiesen, daughter of a Prussian military officer, had studied art from an early age. She subsequently became intimately connected with European avant-gardism through her relationship with Dadaist Hans Arp. It was Arp who introduced Rebay to the writings of German expressionist Vasily Kandinsky, with whom she shared philosophical beliefs on the spiritual aspects of art. In 1927 she moved to the USA, and building on the artistic reputation she had established in exhibiting with the expressionists at Der Sturm, Rebay was commissioned by Solomon R. Guggenheim to paint his portrait. The meeting established an intense and life-long working relationship, with Rebay encouraging the formerly conservative Solomon Guggenheim to acquire ‘non-objective’ modern artworks in large numbers. Previously, his small collection had been directed by his wife, Irene Rothschild and her conservatively traditional taste in Old Masters, and was easily accommodated within his suite at the Plaza Hotel, New York. As the course of the collection changed under Rebay’s tutelage, selections from the now Bauer-dominated collection required a more expansive home, and were thus transformed into the publicly edifying Museum of Non-Objective Art.[32]

In common with many of ‘our crowd’, this reflected the Guggenheims’ fostering of a “German-Jewish emphasis on Kultur” (TWG 111). Kultur expressed a “pride in[Germans] own achievements and their own being”, referring especially to “intellectual, artistic and religious facts….”[33] The idea was particularly central to German-Jewish life as they tended to be “more intensively involved in the cultivation of their Bildung[culturally identifying education] than were their Gentile counterparts.”[34] Certainly the Guggenheims were keenly involved in establishing their philanthropic and cultured credentials in the United States. For example, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation set up in 1925 by Peggy Guggenheim’s uncle Simon, provided generous and non-prescriptive fellowships to “writers, economists, scientists[and] artists.”[35] Similarly, the family of Peggy Guggenheim’s mother—the Seligmans—keenly demonstrated how cultured they were through their support of classical education, opera, and library donations (TWG 111). However, like Solomon Guggenheim’s ventures into art collecting and patronage, what these activities highlighted were the family’s desire for acculturation—assimilation in American society.

Solomon Guggenheim’s enthusiastic adoption of Rebay’s ideas in the form of his collection of ‘non-objective art’, and most especially in his establishing a public venue for this work, thus made two key statements about the level of ‘culture’ he had attained. Firstly, this increasingly secular man probably found the alternative aesthetic spirituality of such art very appealing. Although T.J. Jackson Lears’ remarks were made regarding the antimodernist tendency of the period 1880-1920, his comments on artistic philanthropy have a certain resonance with regards to Solomon Guggenheim: “what many collectors sought … was a religious surrogate”, where art provided “spiritual comfort and therapeutic restoration.”[36] As Lawrence Levine has also discussed in Highbrow/Lowbrow—The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988), a “sacralization of culture” occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whereas previously museums had sought to educate the public, now both they and individual collectors—many of whom were responsible for founding public museums—sought instead to promote aesthetic elitism and the divine inspiration of art.[37] This “sacralization” was paradoxically a response to, but also a part of, society’s move towards secularisation as a constituent element within modernisation. Correspondingly, this increased concern for spirituality did not necessarily coincide with a greater commitment to formalised religions, especially amongst those seeking to establish themselves amongst the elite families in major cities such as New York. By the 1920s, public affirmations of Jewish faith including attendance at the high status Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side of Manhattan had largely dissipated amongst Solomon Guggenheim’s generation of ‘our crowd’. Solomon Guggenheim had also grown up through continual waves of nativist fears. These had been additionally fuelled by the “mass migration of co-religionists from Eastern European, whose coming seemed to threaten their hard-won respectability” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Consequently wealthy (second generation) Jews often avoided displaying their Jewish identity too fervently and actively pursued behaviour and habits demonstrating their assimilation.[38]

The second statement Solomon Guggenheim made through his collecting of modern art was the portrayal of himself as someone a step ahead of cultural sensibility, as a pioneer in public taste. Of course, cultural patronage was already established as a means to evidence one’s munificence. The Gilded Age’s tendency to encourage the pursuit of “non-utilitarian activities”—such as collecting, setting up foundations, and instituting cultural venues—supported the desires of families such as the Guggenheims to advance their class status.[39]

Unlike her uncle, Peggy Guggenheim demonstrated no similar quasi-religious inclinations with her taste in avant-garde art, but in collecting Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism especially, she arguably challenged the boundaries of public taste in a much more threatening manner than her uncle and Rebay. For example, in supporting Surrealism, Peggy Guggenheim effectively endorsed the movement’s exploration and representation of the unconscious, fantasy, fetishism, and the world of dreams (psychoanalysis). And in promoting Communism or mocking the power of the (Catholic) church, Surrealism also sought to undermine the dominant power structures controlling social and artistic expression. Similarly, Abstract Expressionism brought American modern art to the international stage of cultural production and changed the possibilities in painting for subsequent generations of artists. By associating herself so closely with these radical movements, Peggy Guggenheim demonstrated no inclination to pursue the spiritual enlightenment her uncle and Rebay sought through their support of non-objective art. Peggy Guggenheim’s selections also indicated little comparative desire to lead the public taste or to inculcate a more broad-minded aesthetic sensitivity.

Nor did she probably feel as obliged explicitly to demonstrate, through her activities as a patron, her cultural advancement and distance from the family’s origins in mining. Born in 1898, some fifty years after her great-grandfather Simon Meyer Guggenheim (1792-1869) had arrived at Philadelphia[40], Peggy Guggenheim’s generation had all been born in America and had grown up as part of its increasingly wealthy (if not yet fully respected) elite. She had been brought up in—relatively secure—affluence, and actually described it as a “Gilt-edged Childhood” in her autobiography (OTC 1-15) (N49). Consequently, I would suggest that part of her willingness to challenge both conventional artistic tastes and those of her uncle derived from her more firmly established American identity.

Yet what the Rebay / Guggenheim letter most especially reveals is the importance of ‘semitic discourse’ to understanding the Jewish relationship to cultural philanthropy and commerce.[41] Brian Cheyette’s Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society (1993), here offers crucial assistance in my analysis. Referring to Victorian English cultural critic, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), particularly his Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1869), Cheyette progresses the thesis that ‘the Jew’ represents a highly unstable and ambivalent identity within Arnoldian thought, wherein they “embod[y] simultaneously both ‘culture’ and anarchy’.”[42] Since Arnold was a considerable force in American cultural life during the later decades of the nineteenth century, this makes him a highly relevant point of reference for us to consider in applying Cheyette’s ideas to understanding the Rebay letter.[43]

According to Cheyette, Arnold believed that “fixed racial differences between ‘Aryans’ and ‘Semites’” could be “transcended by his[Arnold’s] ideal of culture”. That is, by becoming an “acculturated ‘Jew’”, Jews could move away from “unaesthetic, worldly Hebraism.”[44] Despite this apparently universalising discourse, wherein the Jew adopts the benchmarks of Hellenic culture as his own, Cheyette nevertheless identified within Arnoldian thought a dual existence for ‘the Jew’: both “acculturated”—assimilated—and “racialised”. Identifiable with the modernising middle-class impulses Arnold despised, this “racialised” Jew embodied the commercialism of “bourgeois individualism.”[45]

Returning to the Rebay letter with this in mind, it appears clear that Rebay’s articulation of the ideological conflict between art and commerce was informed by this historically rooted ambivalence towards ‘the Jew’. In his philanthropy, Solomon Guggenheim—as guided by Rebay—embodied the traits of the “acculturated Jew”. By contrast, Peggy Guggenheim’s entry into the art market not only reminded Rebay of the mercantile origins of the Guggenheim family (as peddlers and subsequently mine-owners), but also reconfirmed their inherent Hebraic racial identity, in contrast to the identity Rebay worked to present—namely a cultured philanthropic assimilated self. This appears to link with John Murray Cuddihy’s arguments in The Ordeal of Civility (1974) where he quotes and discusses Karl Marx’s comments on the Anglo-Jewish economist David Ricardo (1772-1823). Cuddihy asks whether those wishing to affirm the power of the ‘acculturated Jew’ would be annoyed to “see economic relations exposed in all their crudity[read ‘Jewishness’], to see the mysteries of the bourgeoisie unmasked?”[46] Is this what Rebay feared Peggy Guggenheim was doing by offering to sell the Kandinsky to Solomon Guggenheim? (And is it not ironic that in recent years the development of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum franchise has been publicly condemned for commercialising the museum experience—pace the Armani exhibition?)

What the Rebay letter to Peggy Guggenheim ultimately marks is a point of implosion regarding identity—community, family, individual—within the Guggenheim ‘family’. (Given the intimate working relationship Rebay had with Solomon Guggenheim, it may be taken that she was effectively a ‘family member’ during Solomon’s lifetime). In offering to negotiate the Kandinsky sale to her uncle—and no doubt take a dealer’s commission—Peggy Guggenheim explicitly challenged Rebay and Solomon Guggenheim’s conception of ‘the Jew’ as acculturated ‘culture-bearer’. By analysing the letter within its historical context, such issues previously unconsidered by art historians and biographers of Peggy Guggenheim have thus been brought to the fore. They indicate both the possibilities for more theorised approaches to cultural biography, and also identify the deficiencies of more traditional approaches in biographically pursuing ‘Peggy Guggenheim’.

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century: The Informal Memories of Peggy Guggenheim (New York: Dial Press, 1946); Confessions of An Art Addict (London: Andre Deutsch, 1960); Out of This Century: Confessions of An Art Addict (London: Andre Deutch, 1979). Unless otherwise specified all subsequent references will be to the 1979 edition and hereafter abbreviated in text as OTC.

[2] Jacqueline Bograd Weld, Peggy: The Wayward Guggenheim (London: The Bodley Head, 1986), 401. The remark concerned Guggenheim’s lawsuit against Krasner for damages over the estate’s disposal of works by Jackson Pollock allegedly from 1946-48 (the period when his output was contracted to Guggenheim). Hereafter abbreviated in text as TWG.

[3] Jimmy Ernst, A Not-So-Still-Life (New York: St Martin’s / Marek, 1984), 238.

[4] Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (editors), Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). Their introduction succinctly describes the development of auto/biographical studies from heroic retrieval through theories of subjectivity (3-52).

[5] Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (London: The Women’s Press, 1989)

[6] Regarding ‘new biography’ see for example Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical discourses: theory, criticism, practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 90-134; regarding “normative biographical hero-type” see Lois Rudnick ‘The Male-Identified Woman and Other Anxieties: The Life of Mabel Dodge Luhan’ in Sara Alpern, Joyce Antler et al (editors), The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 116-138, 118.

[7] Shari Benstock (editor), The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (London: Routledge, 1988); Julia Swindells (editor), Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995); Stanley, Liz, The auto/biographical I: the theory and practice of feminist auto/biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).

[8] Irit Rogoff, ‘Tiny Anguishes—Reflections on Nagging, Scholastic Embarrassment, and Feminist Art History’ in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Genders (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) 4:3, 38-65.

[9] Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Hereafter abbreviated in text as SB.

[10] John Haffenden, ‘Life Over Literature; or, Whatever Happened to Critical Biography?’ in Warwick Gould and Tomas F. Staley (editors), Writing the Lives of Writers (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press in association with Centre for English Studies and School of Advance Study, University of London, 1998), 19-35, 33

[11] Richard Holmes ‘Biography: Inventing the Truth’, in John Batchelor, The Art of Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 15-25, 19

[12] Anton Gill, author of a forthcoming biography on Guggenheim, although academically perhaps most familiar for his work on mid-twentieth century German history, has also produced a number of crime thrillers set in ancient Egypt.

[13] Aline B. Saarinen, The Proud Possessors—The lives, times and tastes of some adventurous American art collectors (New York: Random House, 1958) ‘Appassionata of the Avant-Garde—Peggy Guggenheim’, 326-343, 337. The comment on Guggenheim’s taste was made by Clement Greenberg.

[14] Eric Fernie, ed., Art History and Its Methods—A Critical Anthology (1995; London: Routledge, 1996).

[15] See Chapter One ‘About Canons and Culture Wars’ in Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon—Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), 3-21.

[16] Elena Calas and Nicholas Calas, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966); Lucy Flint (text) and Thomas M. Messer (selection), Handbook: The Peggy Guggenheim Collection (New York: Harry N. Abrams; New York: SRGF, 1983); Angelica Zander Rudenstine, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (New York: Harry N. Abrams; New York: SRGF, 1985); SRGF, Art of This Century: The Guggenheim Museum and Its Collection (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1993); Karole P.B. Vail, Peggy Guggenheim: A Celebration (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1998).

[17] See Arts Council of Great Britain, The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2^nd edition (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1965) for the exhibition at Tate Gallery, London 31 December 1964-7 March 1965.

[18] Elaine Showalter, ‘Fade to Greige’, London Review of Books, 23:1 (cover date 14 January 2001) (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n01/show2301.htm checked 7 March 2001)

[19] Melvin Lader, Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of the Century: The Surrealist Milieu and the American Avant-Garde 1942-1947 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, 1981) and ‘Howard Putzel—Proponent of Surrealism and Early Abstract Expressionism in America’, Arts 56:7 (March 1982), 85-96.

[20] Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A Kopf Inc., 1977; London: Papermac-Macmillan, 1996); Wanda M. Corn, ed., Cultural Leadership in America: Art Matronage and Patronage (Boston: Gardner Museum, 1998); Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture—American Philanthropy and Art, 1830-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows—The First American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991). Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900-1940 (University of Texas Press, 1986; London: Virago, 1994).

[21] Ferris Olin, ‘Consuming Passions—women art collectors and cultural politics in the United States 1945-95’, Rutgers University, New Jersey (1998); Deidre Robson, Prestige, Profit and Pleasure: The Market for Modern Art in New York in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Garland, 1994).

[22] Peter Watson, From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market (London: Vintage-Random House, 1993), xvii

[23] Saarinen, The Proud Possessors, 326.

[24] Charlotte Gere and Marina Vaizey, Great Women Collectors (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 1999) 196; Marina Vaizey, “Rich Pickings,” The Guardian Weekend 2 October 1999: 76-78.

[25] Edwin Hoyt Jnr, The Guggenheims and the American Dream (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1967); John H. Davis, The Guggenheims: An American Epic (New York: William Morrow and Company Inc., 1978). The first biography of the family was written prior to Peggy Guggenheim’s decision to open an art gallery. Harvey O’Conner, The Guggenheims: The Making of an American Dynasty (New York; Covici Friede, 1937).

[26] Stephen Birmingham, “Our Crowd”: The Great Jewish Families of New York (New York: Harper and Row, 1967); Kate Simon, Fifth Avenue: A Very Social History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978).

[27] Laurence Tacou-Rumney, Peggy Guggenheim: A Collector’s Album (Paris and New York; Flammarion, 1996); Vail, Peggy Guggenheim. Anton Gill, interview with Lisa Rull 5 December 2000.

[28] William Boyd, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960 (London: 21 Publishing Ltd, 1998), 48

[29] Thomas Krens, ‘The Genesis of a Museum: A History of the Guggenheim’, in SRGF, Art of This Century, 7-38, 7-8

[30] Jennifer Blessing, ‘Peggy’s Surreal Playground’ in SRGF, Art of This Century, 180-216, 181

[31] Davis, The Guggenheims, 326, 347

[32] Material on Rebay is drawn from Krens, o cit., 7-38, 7-8.

[33] Norbert Elias (translated by Edmund Jephcott with some notes and corrections by the author), The Civilising Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (1939; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). Revised edition edited by Eric Dunning, Johan GoudMoilom, and Stephen Mennell, 6

[34] Jacob Katz, “German Culture and the Jews” in Jehuda Reinharz / Walter Schatzberg (editors), The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War (Hanover and London: Clark University by the University Press of New England, 1985) 85-99, 86

[35] O’Conner, o cit., 432

[36] T.J.Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983, reprint 1994), 190

[37] Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). See Chapter Two “The Sacralization of Culture” 85-168, especially 146-155

[38] For the term ‘our crowd’ see Birmingham, op cit. On nativism, immigration, and assimilation, see for example, Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (1990; New York: Harper Perennial paperback, 1991) Chapter 10, “The Triumph of Nativism”, 265-284. The quotation on “mass migration” comes from Moses Richin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 95.

[39] Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982) 144

[40] Davis, ‘The Genesis of a Museum’, 43

[41] Brian Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Cheyette adopts the term ‘semitic discourse’ rather than the more familiar ‘anti-Semitic’ in order to include reference to “the protean instability of ‘the Jew’ as a signifier”, 8.

[42] Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’, 269

[43] See John Henry Raleigh, Matthew Arnold and American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).

[44] Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’, 5.

[45] Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’, 18.

[46] John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1974) 141 quoting Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963) 49, 51. Emphasis and inset remark made by Cuddihy.

Finding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson, Republicanism and the Politics of Patrimony in Gore Vidal’s Burr

Anthony Hutchinson
© Anthony Hutchinson. All Rights Reserved

Gore Vidal’s novel Burr is narrated by Charles Schuyler, a young journalist in 1830s New York who has been assigned the task of procuring politically sensitive information from an ageing Aaron Burr. Like most of the other characters in the novel Burr is a real historical figure. Once regarded as a ‘founding father’, Burr was a hero of the War of Independence who went on to help establish the political machine that became Tammany Hall. By 1800 he had become a powerful enough figure in the Republican Party to tie with Jefferson in the Presidential election of that year. In 1804, however, Burr’s reputation took a turn for the worse. It was in that year that—whilst still Jefferson’s Vice-President—he killed Alexander Hamilton in the most famous duel of the era. Furthermore between 1805 and 1807 Burr was accused of involvement in a filibustering attempt to invade Mexico, detach the western states from the union and create an empire in the newly occupied territories with himself at its head. This image of a North American Bonaparte determined to break up the union has, at least in the eyes of historians, been a potent and enduring one.

Although often adding color to narrative accounts of the early national period, in the realm of American intellectual history Burr is a somewhat more marginal figure. US historians’ recovery of a ‘republican’ ideology of the revolutionary and early national period in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, for instance, adds little to our understanding of this figure. In contrast to the Lockean emphasis on negative liberty and the autonomy of the private sphere such historians identified an ideology that valorised the public sphere and articulated a positive sense of liberty associated with participation in civic affairs. The health of the public sphere was premised on the willingness of citizens to demonstrate their ‘virtue’ by subordinating private interests to a higher notion of the public good. Only a virtuous citizenry—whose virtue and autonomy were assured by their status as property-holders and associated freedom from the economy—could be sufficiently ‘disinterested’ in political matters to maintain the moral rectitude of the republic and resist the temptations of empire.[1] The ‘self-interested’, neo-imperial actions of Burr would thus seem to qualify him as the republican statesman’s ‘other’. Having said this in the subsequent counter-offensive which aimed to restore Lockean texts to their central position within the canon of American political thought Burr is also nowhere to be found.[2]

Thomas Jefferson was a crucial figure within this debate as both sides were eager to appropriate his political and intellectual legacy. Accordingly it is to the politics of Jefferson—both in theory and practice—as well as its contested legacy that this study will turn. By focusing as much on Jefferson as it does, Burr can be read as a contribution to this debate and Vidal himself as an insightful intellectual historian. It is not Vidal’s intention primarily to affirm or resurrect the soiled reputation of a maligned historical figure; it is rather to imagine how a cynical, political animal like Burr might have reflected on the the first few decades of the American republic. Aaron Burr, in this way, also offers a fascinating prism through which to view the historical personage of Thomas Jefferson.

Even more interestingly Vidal situates Burr’s assessment of Jefferson in the radically different context of the 1830s. The insight afforded via this retrospective narrative strategy is crucial to the way in which Burr’s views come to engage with the broader themes I am concerned with. The acute sense of historical transition conveyed in Burr is skilfully achieved via several narrative devices. The overarching narrative is set against the backdrop of Andrew Jackson’s presidency (1828-1836). More specifically it depicts the events leading to the succession of Jackson’s Vice-President Martin Van Buren in 1836, the first American President we are reminded—lest we forget the symbolism of the novel’s architecture—to be born in the post-colonial era.

In the opening scenes of the novel Schuyler quickly becomes aware that he is in pursuit of a figure now widely regarded as a traitor to the union. This hostility is compounded, moreover, with the notoriety Burr has acquired as the ‘slayer’ of a ‘founding father’ whose ideological stock has risen considerably with the emergence of a society organised around an increasingly commercial market economy. Between Schuyler’s narrative and the narrative of Burr’s political career—recalled via his own memoirs and conversations held with Schuyler—we are able to chart this very process.

By the 1830s the United States is seen to have realised the Hamiltonian vision of an expansionist republic supported by those modern economic principles that aroused the suspicions of the old Republican opposition during the first Federalist administrations. Furthermore, Burr’s commentary on the first Republican administrations from 1800 onwards clearly shows the extent to which—once these structures were in place—Jefferson could not dismantle the whole edifice of the ‘treasuro-bankites’.[3] Equally interesting, however, is the way in which this is in tension with certain democratic developments of the Jacksonian era that bear a trace of the Jeffersonian tradition. Most prominent amongst these are Jackson’s hostility to the idea of a National Bank, appeals to states’ rights and the anti-élitist character of the era’s populist political rhetoric.

The Jacksonian Democrats perceived themselves to be at the vanguard of a de-centralising movement that would ultimately place power back into the hands of the people. But what type of power: economic or political? And if the appeals were to Jefferson’s principles then which Jefferson, the liberal forward-looking commercial farmer or the classical republican yeoman? The formal structure of Burr foregrounds this notion of political legacy as it manifests itself in a more recognisably modern social context. What was the legacy the founding fathers wished to leave to their descendants and how might they have wished them to interpret it? And what was the interpretation of that legacy by those descendants in the new social world? Although the United States was still a pre-dominantly rural society in the 1830s, it was nonetheless a society in transformation. Schuyler’s New York City, for instance, is beginning its march towards the twentieth century. Burr relays how Manhattan Island is about to be occupied by its first commercial buildings and new penny papers are appearing ‘…that make a fortune by each day giving the public some atrocious novelty’.[4] It is a city in political turmoil where masses congregate; abolitionists trigger riots; and anti-Catholic diatribes lambast the new ‘papist’ immigrants as a threat to American civilisation. These were circumstances that could not possibly be foreseen by the constitution-makers for whom mass meetings were a cause for alarm; slavery an accepted (if somewhat troubling) component of the economy; and ‘liberty of conscience’ a cornerstone of the American moral universe. By the 1830s new patterns were beginning to emerge and the sense of a gap between past and future they prompted explains the narrative complexity of Vidal’s novel.

Some of these new patterns evident in Burr intersect, of course, with those traced by the intellectual historians of liberalism and republicanism referred to earlier. There is an important sense, however, in which Vidal’s novel avoids some of the drawbacks inherent in this debate. One of the blind spots in this debate has been its inability to perceive the extent to which both republicanism and, more obviously, liberalism are ex post facto concepts. Despite having provided us with trenchant understandings of how Lockean and classical republican concepts entered the mainstream of American political thought, both sides in the dispute have tended to dichotomise these respective theories. The impression left is of the United States as understood unequivocally by its founders as either a modern liberal polity or a civic-humanist republic. This almost certainly downplays the flexibility, or—as Vidal would no doubt argue—the expediency, of the founders’ politics.

The problem is particularly evident, for reasons I will explore, in those instances where the thought of Thomas Jefferson is under consideration. A certain consistency is invariably assumed in the way in which liberal or classical republican ideas shaped Jefferson’s confrontation with modernity. But what is not commonly taken account of is the fact that although Jefferson was himself undoubtedly aware of such phenomena as an expanding economy, commercialisation, property rights, corruption and so forth, he was not aware in the same way as we are retrospectively in the late twentieth century. They may have been striking features of American public life to Jefferson but they were certainly not perceived in the context of the ‘rise of liberal capitalism’ or ‘the end of classical politics’ in the sense we (can only) now understand such developments. Before speaking of the ‘Lockean’ or ‘Machiavellian’ nature of Jefferson’s encounter with modernity, then, we might recall that, in Gordon Wood’s words,

For early Americans there never was a stark dictionary of traditions, liberal or classical republican. None of the historical participants ever had any sense that they had to choose or were choosing between Locke and Machiavelli. The categories of ‘liberalism’ and ‘classical republicanism’ into which the participants in the past presumably must be fitted are the inventions of historians and as such are gross distortions of past reality.[5]

In this sense recent historiography has constructed two Jeffersons from a broad spectrum of ideas that have only subsequently acquired their own respective coherence. The historical novelist, of course, can re-construct the past in the present tense. Within this context the imposition of such conceptual frameworks appears more conspicuous. The self-serving and evasive dimensions of Burr’s narration, moreover, are made explicit in the novel. Accordingly when filtered through Vidal’s narrative Jefferson is no strict adherent to any cohesive body of political thought. Burr notes, rather, how ‘each swift response’, of Jefferson’s, be it as ambassador to France or as President, ‘[is] rich with ambiguities’.[6]

The reader is presented via the focalised voice of Burr, with a radical re-reading of Jefferson’s character and thought as it responds to a number of unfolding political crises and predicaments. Jefferson’s posthumous glory is inexplicable to the elderly Burr who, as the presiding authority in the Senate, witnessed Jefferson’s attempt to ‘subvert the Constitution and shatter the Supreme court’ during the trial of Justice Samuel Chase in 1805. ‘Judge Chase was acquitted’, Burr writes in his memoirs, ‘for the very good reason that there was no true case against him’.[7] Burr regards Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana territories as similarly unconstitutional. Furthermore, compounding this apparent deviation from strict ‘constructionist’ republican constitutional principles was the fact that

Jefferson made it plain that he was in no hurry to extend to the 50,000 souls he had just bought any of those freedoms he had once insisted must be enjoyed by all mankind.[8]

This remark is foreshadowed in the novel by an earlier episode recalled in Burr’s memoirs where Jefferson is recorded as speaking favourably of Montesquieu. The principle, however, of true republican government being able to exist only on a small scale espoused by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws is seen by Burr to prompt a drastic change of opinion in Jefferson after the Louisiana Purchase. Perhaps because Burr’s career itself is notable chiefly for the absence of any consistent adherence to a political philosophy, Vidal can portray him as alert to instances of this shortcoming in the views of his contemporaries.

Certainly this ‘ideal’ [republican] form of government is not practical for an empire of the sort Jefferson gave us when he illegally bought Louisiana. …To justify himself Jefferson turned on his old idol [Montesquieu] and attacked him for (favourite and characteristic Jefferson word) ‘heresy’.[9]

Likewise Burr wryly notes the irony of Jefferson’s republican suspicion of executive power throughout the first federalist administrations. ‘By the time Jefferson’s Presidency ended’, he claims, ‘the Executive was more powerful than it had ever been under those two ‘monarchists’, Washington and Adams’.[10] Moreover, it is not only Burr who is shown to make such cynical assessments of Jefferson. We learn, for instance, how ‘[Alexander] Hamilton and Jefferson spent a good deal of time reading each other’s correspondence’. Hamilton has discovered that Jefferson ‘had wrote to advise a Mr Short to invest his money in the bank! In the very bank Jefferson is publicly accusing of being a menace to the republic!’. With regard to his self-cultivated image as a peace-loving, frugal yeoman suspicious of luxury, commerce and the unbridled accumulation of wealth, Hamilton claims Jefferson is ‘as two faced as Janus’. His eagerness for a war in Europe, he adds, is based on the opportunity it allows him for personal enrichment via sales of hemp, cotton and flax. War is, Hamilton quotes Jefferson, ‘helpful to domestic manufacture’. Astutely, Burr goes on to add: ‘I have no idea if any of this were true. The important thing is that Hamilton believed it to be true.’[11]

It is via such means that the novel acquaints the reader with how the tensions in Jefferson’s commitment to republican principles were first received. These are the very tensions that persist in historiographical debates today but are perceived, with hindsight, within the context of an emerging liberal democracy underpinned by a capitalist economy. The siege mentality of Jefferson and Hamilton becomes more comprehensible, however, if we—following Vidal—realise that this eventual path was far from clear to the protagonists themselves. Jefferson and Hamilton believed that at stake in their quarrel was nothing less than the survival of the republic. Whether their respective philosophies were informed by Lockean or Machiavellian values was neither here nor there: they embraced or espoused such values as and when the occasion demanded. As Lance Banning has written in an attempt to bring his fellow historians around to this fact: ‘Logically, it may be inconsistent to be simultaneously liberal and classical. Historically, it was not.’[12]

No era in American history perhaps illustrates Banning’s distinction with greater clarity than the period in the early nineteenth century associated with the rise of Andrew Jackson. Jackson came to power in 1828 with Jefferson’s funeral eulogies still ringing in American ears. In many ways the election of that year re-enacted the bitterly partisan battle of 1800. The spectre of monopoly, in the form of a second National Bank, for instance, was once more the object of fiery political rhetoric. Was the United States, the Jacksonians asked, as Jefferson had in 1800, to be governed by the few or the many, the minority or the majority, the aristocracy or the people? What remained unaddressed was whether such appeals to the people’s sovereign will undermined the republican order championed by the Founding Fathers.

Public reaction to Jefferson’s death in 1826 helped sweep the Democratic Republicans to victory in 1828, tributes to the sage of Monticello giving added resonance to Jackson’s professed commitment to ‘repeat [ Jefferson’s ] revolution of 1800’.[13] The reaction to the death of Aaron Burr ten years later was somewhat different. On Burr’s death, it was said, ‘decency congratulated itself that a nuisance was removed, and good men were glad that God had seen fit to deliver society from the contaminating contact of a festering mass of moral putrefaction’.[14]

Vidal is only too aware of the ironies of this characterisation of Burr given the political developments of the 1830s. Such is Burr’s infamy at this historical juncture, the reader learns, that the establishment of any connection, particularly a political connection, past or present, with the disgraced former Vice-President could seriously check the ambitions of any aspiring politician. With this effect in mind, Charles Schuyler’s employer at the Evening Post, William Leggett, attempts to ruin Vice-President Martin Van Buren’s chances of succeeding Jackson by unmasking him as Burr’s illegitimate son.

Leggett claims to be acting in the name of democracy, as a supporter of Jackson, whose reforms, he believes, will be reversed should Van Buren attain office. Revealing Burr as Van Buren’s biological father, however, is intended by Leggett only as a preliminary strike which will help establish what he perceives to be a more pernicious figurative form of paternity. Burr, he wishes to show, can also be regarded as Van Buren’s political father. ‘Americans are a moral people,’ Leggett tells Schuyler, ‘but even more damaging than his bastardy is his political connection with Burr, particularly in recent years. If we can prove dark plots, secret meetings, unholy combinations—then, by Heaven, Van Buren will not be chosen to succeed General Jackson.’[15] This exchange in the novel gives an early signal of Vidal’s interest in the politics of patrimony, in this case by excavating a long-forgotten rumour ultimately lost to history as a result of its failure to ignite a full-blown political scandal. The figurative pull of such genealogical themes is a powerful one within American political culture. If it has been said of Jefferson that ‘parties do not take sides for or against him, but contend, like children, as to their legitimate descent’,[16] then what, Vidal appears to be asking, might it mean if a whole generation of American politicians could be construed as, in some sense, the ‘heirs’ of Aaron Burr?

The point Vidal wishes to extrapolate from the Burr-Van Buren rumour is twofold: who are the Founding Fathers and who are their legitimate heirs? Burr is at pains to stress how virtually every senior politician of the 1830s—including Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren and Henry Clay—were, at the very least, tacit supporters of Burr during his Mexican misadventure. William Leggett’s attempts to discredit the Vice-President by raising the spectre of Burr are motivated by a refusal to acknowledge Van Buren as the legitimate heir to Andrew Jackson. Vidal, however, ironises Leggett’s efforts in those sections of Burr’s memoirs which recall Jackson’s own fierce loyalty to Burr in his several hours of need. Here for instance is Burr’s recollection of Jackson’s response to the Hamilton duel:

‘Never read such a damn lot of nonsense as the press has been writing!All that hypocritical caterwauling for that Creole bastard who fought you of his own free will, just like a gentleman which he wasn’t, if you’ll forgive me, Colonel!….He was the worse man in this union, as you, Sir, are the best’.[17]

The irony thickens, furthermore, when Burr records how the great champion of the ‘common man’ was once himself the object of public derision in the aftermath of the Burr conspiracy trial:

A few days later Jackson was nearly mobbed when he addressed an anti-Burr crowd….But he held his ground and with many an oath declared that I was the victim of political persecution….I fear—hard as it is to believe now—that the plebs actually laughed at their future idol Andrew Jackson. I at least blessed him for the friend he was.[18]

What then are we to make of such affiliations and their bearing on any understanding of the American political tradition? What does it mean when Vidal has Aaron Bur—a figure supposedly antithetical to that tradition—announce: ‘it has been a rule with me to measure people by what they think of Andrew Jackson. Anyone who does not appreciate that frank and ardent spirit is an enemy to what is best in our American breed—by the Eternal!’?[19] did a man perceived by Jefferson himself as a grave threat to the republic acquire support from Andrew Jackson, later promoted as Jefferson’s supposed political heir? Furthermore, how does Burr come to admire the supposed inheritor of the Jeffersonian political tradition? Has the imperialist, we might ask, come to embrace the republic or has the republic, without realising it, always secretly embraced the imperialist? These are intriguing questions which finally bring us back to the issues of commerce and expansion, democracy and empire given a fresh impetus by the republican turn in early American historiography.

In Burr, it might be said, we find a discernible slippage between rhetoric and reality, word and deed, theory and practice in the early republic: a gap prompted by the confrontation between republican discourse and an emerging capitalist economy. For Vidal this gap gave many of the ‘republican’ pronouncements of the founding generation of American statesmen a contradictory flavour. Aaron Burr, Vidal’s novel makes clear, was one of the few members of that generation who consistently refused to countenance the republican claims of the American Revolution. Burr’s eventual fate, it is implied, is tied to his contempt for such idealistic claims and his refusal to harness new economic impulses and developments to the spirit of 1776, 1800, 1828 or any other republican meridian. Jefferson and Jackson, on the other hand, are depicted as careful to acknowledge the cultural power and importance of such demands, so re-assuring Americans by connecting past to future, modernity to tradition.

Vidal’s Burr views his own career retrospectively as a premature attempt to embrace new realities which was doomed precisely because of its failure to provide a commensurate (and to Burr no doubt a spurious) political discourse. His inability to legitimate his actions within an acceptable republican rationale resulted in marginalisation and ignominy. By contrast, for Vidal, Jefferson and Jackson deftly circumvented this problem by extending the conceptual territory covered by the term. They knew that although liberalism—the philosophy best suited to the demands of a broadening capitalist economy—appealed to the heads of Americans, republicanism still appealed to their hearts. It is the complex set of contradictions involved in this harmonising strategy, however, that makes the politics of these figures so difficult to compartmentalise. In this vein Vidal has a cynical Burr articulate the persuasiveness and sphinx-like qualities of Jefferson in the following passage:

It is amazing how beguilingly [Jefferson] could present [his] contradictory vision. But then in all his words if not deeds Jefferson was so beautifully human, so eminently vague, so entirely dishonest but not in any meretricious way. Rather it was a passionate form of self-delusion that rendered Jefferson as president and as man (not to mention as writer of tangled sentences and lunatic metaphors) confusing even to his admirers…when Jefferson saw that he could not create the Arcadian society he wanted, he settled with suspicious ease for the Hamiltonian order…he was the most successful empire-builder of our century succeeding where Bonaparte failed. But then Bonaparte was always candid when it came to motive and Jefferson was always dishonest. In the end,candour failed; dishonesty prevailed. I dare not preach a sermon on that text.[20]

Jefferson’s self-deception was generated by the co-existence of a republican philosophy which associated ‘virtue’ with participation in government alongside a laissez faire economy where it was transplanted into the social sphere and became associated with participation in society. Having never subscribed to any notion of ‘virtue’, in his public or private life, Aaron Burr consequently remained untroubled by this paradox. With virtue banished from the public sphere, the imperial adventurism and political opportunism of a later generation of Americans gives Burr’s actions, in Vidal’s representation, something of a prophetic quality. ‘Ahead of the times! That should be on his tombstone’, exclaims one character in Vidal’s novel, ‘Aaron Burr always saw the future first. Yet never profited by it’.[21] of the several fascinating sub-plots within Burr features the ageing ‘embryo Caesar’ gambling, one last time, on America’s deviation from its republican heritage. In attempting to buy land in Texas to be settled by German immigrants, Burr’s prospective investment turns on the United States ultimately annexing the territory from Mexico. He dies, however, before the onset of the Mexican War that would have made his investment good by extending US territories beyond Texas to the Pacific Coast.

Vidal’s focus on this prophetic dimension of Burr’s career—his emphasis on the secret imperial impulse that lurks behind the façade of agrarian republican innocence—is a useful corrective to the relatively uncritical interpretations of early American political thought often evident in the debates on republicanism. Burr not only foregrounds some of the destructive effects and legacies of the aggressive and acquisitive individualism unleashed by modern liberalism but also questions the tenability of reading ‘republicanism’ as a central guiding ethos in the early national period. Yet Vidal is, also, obviously taken with the idea of republicanism as a path not chosen, as a set of ideas to be invoked against the imperialism and the centralisation of power characteristic of the twentieth century American state.

This sentiment appears more explicit in an afterword where the author distances himself from Burr’s view of early American history. ‘All in all’, Vidal admits, ‘I think rather more highly of Jefferson than Burr does; on the other hand, Burr’s passion for Jackson is not shared by me.’[22] This betrays Vidal’s sympathy for a figure who, unlike Jackson, understood virtue in still broadly classical terms and, however much in self-deception, sought to keep the United States’ republican robe unsoiled by imperialism and the base imperatives of commerce. There was, after all, none of the US military imperialism during Jefferson’s period in office which Vidal believes has ultimately led in the twentieth century to a tax devouring military-industrial leviathan and global American ‘empire’ premised on economic power. With regard to this latter development, however, Burr himself appears less convinced in Vidal’s novel. ‘I do think that we are the first empire in history’, he recalls Jefferson remarking after the Louisiana purchase, ‘to buy its territory rather than to conquer it.’[23]

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] The most notable amongst these works were Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1969) and J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975).

[2] For a statement of the ‘liberal’ interepretation see the essays collected in Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

[3] ‘This cumbersome phrase’, Burr explains in the novel, ‘was of Jefferson’s coinage’, Burr, p.242.

[4] Burr, 522.

[5] ‘Hellfire Politics’, a review of John Patrick Diggins’ The Lost Soul of American Politics, Gordon Wood, The New York Review of Books, February 28, 1985, 30.

[6] Burr, 431.

[7] Burr, 404 -5.

[8] Burr, 342 –3.

[9] Burr, 215.

[10] Burr, 268.

[11] Burr, 224.

[12] Lance Banning, ‘Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Jan 1986, 43: 1, 12.

[13] Quoted in Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 72.

[14] Quoted in Peterson, 144.

[15] Burr, 28.

[16] Quoted in Peterson, 29.

[17] Burr, 416.

[18] Burr, 483-84.

[19] Burr, 426.

[20] Burr, 218.

[21] Burr, 440-41.

[22] Burr, 576.

[23] Burr, 430.

Finding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson, Republicanism and the Politics of Patrimony in Gore Vidal’s Burr

Anthony Hutchinson
© Anthony Hutchinson. All Rights Reserved

Gore Vidal’s novel Burr is narrated by Charles Schuyler, a young journalist in 1830s New York who has been assigned the task of procuring politically sensitive information from an ageing Aaron Burr. Like most of the other characters in the novel Burr is a real historical figure. Once regarded as a ‘founding father’, Burr was a hero of the War of Independence who went on to help establish the political machine that became Tammany Hall. By 1800 he had become a powerful enough figure in the Republican Party to tie with Jefferson in the Presidential election of that year. In 1804, however, Burr’s reputation took a turn for the worse. It was in that year that—whilst still Jefferson’s Vice-President—he killed Alexander Hamilton in the most famous duel of the era. Furthermore between 1805 and 1807 Burr was accused of involvement in a filibustering attempt to invade Mexico, detach the western states from the union and create an empire in the newly occupied territories with himself at its head. This image of a North American Bonaparte determined to break up the union has, at least in the eyes of historians, been a potent and enduring one.

Although often adding color to narrative accounts of the early national period, in the realm of American intellectual history Burr is a somewhat more marginal figure. US historians’ recovery of a ‘republican’ ideology of the revolutionary and early national period in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, for instance, adds little to our understanding of this figure. In contrast to the Lockean emphasis on negative liberty and the autonomy of the private sphere such historians identified an ideology that valorised the public sphere and articulated a positive sense of liberty associated with participation in civic affairs. The health of the public sphere was premised on the willingness of citizens to demonstrate their ‘virtue’ by subordinating private interests to a higher notion of the public good. Only a virtuous citizenry—whose virtue and autonomy were assured by their status as property-holders and associated freedom from the economy—could be sufficiently ‘disinterested’ in political matters to maintain the moral rectitude of the republic and resist the temptations of empire.[1] The ‘self-interested’, neo-imperial actions of Burr would thus seem to qualify him as the republican statesman’s ‘other’. Having said this in the subsequent counter-offensive which aimed to restore Lockean texts to their central position within the canon of American political thought Burr is also nowhere to be found.[2]

Thomas Jefferson was a crucial figure within this debate as both sides were eager to appropriate his political and intellectual legacy. Accordingly it is to the politics of Jefferson—both in theory and practice—as well as its contested legacy that this study will turn. By focusing as much on Jefferson as it does, Burr can be read as a contribution to this debate and Vidal himself as an insightful intellectual historian. It is not Vidal’s intention primarily to affirm or resurrect the soiled reputation of a maligned historical figure; it is rather to imagine how a cynical, political animal like Burr might have reflected on the the first few decades of the American republic. Aaron Burr, in this way, also offers a fascinating prism through which to view the historical personage of Thomas Jefferson.

Even more interestingly Vidal situates Burr’s assessment of Jefferson in the radically different context of the 1830s. The insight afforded via this retrospective narrative strategy is crucial to the way in which Burr’s views come to engage with the broader themes I am concerned with. The acute sense of historical transition conveyed in Burr is skilfully achieved via several narrative devices. The overarching narrative is set against the backdrop of Andrew Jackson’s presidency (1828-1836). More specifically it depicts the events leading to the succession of Jackson’s Vice-President Martin Van Buren in 1836, the first American President we are reminded—lest we forget the symbolism of the novel’s architecture—to be born in the post-colonial era.

In the opening scenes of the novel Schuyler quickly becomes aware that he is in pursuit of a figure now widely regarded as a traitor to the union. This hostility is compounded, moreover, with the notoriety Burr has acquired as the ‘slayer’ of a ‘founding father’ whose ideological stock has risen considerably with the emergence of a society organised around an increasingly commercial market economy. Between Schuyler’s narrative and the narrative of Burr’s political career—recalled via his own memoirs and conversations held with Schuyler—we are able to chart this very process.

By the 1830s the United States is seen to have realised the Hamiltonian vision of an expansionist republic supported by those modern economic principles that aroused the suspicions of the old Republican opposition during the first Federalist administrations. Furthermore, Burr’s commentary on the first Republican administrations from 1800 onwards clearly shows the extent to which—once these structures were in place—Jefferson could not dismantle the whole edifice of the ‘treasuro-bankites’.[3] Equally interesting, however, is the way in which this is in tension with certain democratic developments of the Jacksonian era that bear a trace of the Jeffersonian tradition. Most prominent amongst these are Jackson’s hostility to the idea of a National Bank, appeals to states’ rights and the anti-élitist character of the era’s populist political rhetoric.

The Jacksonian Democrats perceived themselves to be at the vanguard of a de-centralising movement that would ultimately place power back into the hands of the people. But what type of power: economic or political? And if the appeals were to Jefferson’s principles then which Jefferson, the liberal forward-looking commercial farmer or the classical republican yeoman? The formal structure of Burr foregrounds this notion of political legacy as it manifests itself in a more recognisably modern social context. What was the legacy the founding fathers wished to leave to their descendants and how might they have wished them to interpret it? And what was the interpretation of that legacy by those descendants in the new social world? Although the United States was still a pre-dominantly rural society in the 1830s, it was nonetheless a society in transformation. Schuyler’s New York City, for instance, is beginning its march towards the twentieth century. Burr relays how Manhattan Island is about to be occupied by its first commercial buildings and new penny papers are appearing ‘…that make a fortune by each day giving the public some atrocious novelty’.[4] It is a city in political turmoil where masses congregate; abolitionists trigger riots; and anti-Catholic diatribes lambast the new ‘papist’ immigrants as a threat to American civilisation. These were circumstances that could not possibly be foreseen by the constitution-makers for whom mass meetings were a cause for alarm; slavery an accepted (if somewhat troubling) component of the economy; and ‘liberty of conscience’ a cornerstone of the American moral universe. By the 1830s new patterns were beginning to emerge and the sense of a gap between past and future they prompted explains the narrative complexity of Vidal’s novel.

Some of these new patterns evident in Burr intersect, of course, with those traced by the intellectual historians of liberalism and republicanism referred to earlier. There is an important sense, however, in which Vidal’s novel avoids some of the drawbacks inherent in this debate. One of the blind spots in this debate has been its inability to perceive the extent to which both republicanism and, more obviously, liberalism are ex post facto concepts. Despite having provided us with trenchant understandings of how Lockean and classical republican concepts entered the mainstream of American political thought, both sides in the dispute have tended to dichotomise these respective theories. The impression left is of the United States as understood unequivocally by its founders as either a modern liberal polity or a civic-humanist republic. This almost certainly downplays the flexibility, or—as Vidal would no doubt argue—the expediency, of the founders’ politics.

The problem is particularly evident, for reasons I will explore, in those instances where the thought of Thomas Jefferson is under consideration. A certain consistency is invariably assumed in the way in which liberal or classical republican ideas shaped Jefferson’s confrontation with modernity. But what is not commonly taken account of is the fact that although Jefferson was himself undoubtedly aware of such phenomena as an expanding economy, commercialisation, property rights, corruption and so forth, he was not aware in the same way as we are retrospectively in the late twentieth century. They may have been striking features of American public life to Jefferson but they were certainly not perceived in the context of the ‘rise of liberal capitalism’ or ‘the end of classical politics’ in the sense we (can only) now understand such developments. Before speaking of the ‘Lockean’ or ‘Machiavellian’ nature of Jefferson’s encounter with modernity, then, we might recall that, in Gordon Wood’s words,

For early Americans there never was a stark dictionary of traditions, liberal or classical republican. None of the historical participants ever had any sense that they had to choose or were choosing between Locke and Machiavelli. The categories of ‘liberalism’ and ‘classical republicanism’ into which the participants in the past presumably must be fitted are the inventions of historians and as such are gross distortions of past reality.[5]

In this sense recent historiography has constructed two Jeffersons from a broad spectrum of ideas that have only subsequently acquired their own respective coherence. The historical novelist, of course, can re-construct the past in the present tense. Within this context the imposition of such conceptual frameworks appears more conspicuous. The self-serving and evasive dimensions of Burr’s narration, moreover, are made explicit in the novel. Accordingly when filtered through Vidal’s narrative Jefferson is no strict adherent to any cohesive body of political thought. Burr notes, rather, how ‘each swift response’, of Jefferson’s, be it as ambassador to France or as President, ‘[is] rich with ambiguities’.[6]

The reader is presented via the focalised voice of Burr, with a radical re-reading of Jefferson’s character and thought as it responds to a number of unfolding political crises and predicaments. Jefferson’s posthumous glory is inexplicable to the elderly Burr who, as the presiding authority in the Senate, witnessed Jefferson’s attempt to ‘subvert the Constitution and shatter the Supreme court’ during the trial of Justice Samuel Chase in 1805. ‘Judge Chase was acquitted’, Burr writes in his memoirs, ‘for the very good reason that there was no true case against him’.[7] Burr regards Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana territories as similarly unconstitutional. Furthermore, compounding this apparent deviation from strict ‘constructionist’ republican constitutional principles was the fact that

Jefferson made it plain that he was in no hurry to extend to the 50,000 souls he had just bought any of those freedoms he had once insisted must be enjoyed by all mankind.[8]

This remark is foreshadowed in the novel by an earlier episode recalled in Burr’s memoirs where Jefferson is recorded as speaking favourably of Montesquieu. The principle, however, of true republican government being able to exist only on a small scale espoused by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws is seen by Burr to prompt a drastic change of opinion in Jefferson after the Louisiana Purchase. Perhaps because Burr’s career itself is notable chiefly for the absence of any consistent adherence to a political philosophy, Vidal can portray him as alert to instances of this shortcoming in the views of his contemporaries.

Certainly this ‘ideal’ [republican] form of government is not practical for an empire of the sort Jefferson gave us when he illegally bought Louisiana. …To justify himself Jefferson turned on his old idol [Montesquieu] and attacked him for (favourite and characteristic Jefferson word) ‘heresy’.[9]

Likewise Burr wryly notes the irony of Jefferson’s republican suspicion of executive power throughout the first federalist administrations. ‘By the time Jefferson’s Presidency ended’, he claims, ‘the Executive was more powerful than it had ever been under those two ‘monarchists’, Washington and Adams’.[10] Moreover, it is not only Burr who is shown to make such cynical assessments of Jefferson. We learn, for instance, how ‘[Alexander] Hamilton and Jefferson spent a good deal of time reading each other’s correspondence’. Hamilton has discovered that Jefferson ‘had wrote to advise a Mr Short to invest his money in the bank! In the very bank Jefferson is publicly accusing of being a menace to the republic!’. With regard to his self-cultivated image as a peace-loving, frugal yeoman suspicious of luxury, commerce and the unbridled accumulation of wealth, Hamilton claims Jefferson is ‘as two faced as Janus’. His eagerness for a war in Europe, he adds, is based on the opportunity it allows him for personal enrichment via sales of hemp, cotton and flax. War is, Hamilton quotes Jefferson, ‘helpful to domestic manufacture’. Astutely, Burr goes on to add: ‘I have no idea if any of this were true. The important thing is that Hamilton believed it to be true.’[11]

It is via such means that the novel acquaints the reader with how the tensions in Jefferson’s commitment to republican principles were first received. These are the very tensions that persist in historiographical debates today but are perceived, with hindsight, within the context of an emerging liberal democracy underpinned by a capitalist economy. The siege mentality of Jefferson and Hamilton becomes more comprehensible, however, if we—following Vidal—realise that this eventual path was far from clear to the protagonists themselves. Jefferson and Hamilton believed that at stake in their quarrel was nothing less than the survival of the republic. Whether their respective philosophies were informed by Lockean or Machiavellian values was neither here nor there: they embraced or espoused such values as and when the occasion demanded. As Lance Banning has written in an attempt to bring his fellow historians around to this fact: ‘Logically, it may be inconsistent to be simultaneously liberal and classical. Historically, it was not.’[12]

No era in American history perhaps illustrates Banning’s distinction with greater clarity than the period in the early nineteenth century associated with the rise of Andrew Jackson. Jackson came to power in 1828 with Jefferson’s funeral eulogies still ringing in American ears. In many ways the election of that year re-enacted the bitterly partisan battle of 1800. The spectre of monopoly, in the form of a second National Bank, for instance, was once more the object of fiery political rhetoric. Was the United States, the Jacksonians asked, as Jefferson had in 1800, to be governed by the few or the many, the minority or the majority, the aristocracy or the people? What remained unaddressed was whether such appeals to the people’s sovereign will undermined the republican order championed by the Founding Fathers.

Public reaction to Jefferson’s death in 1826 helped sweep the Democratic Republicans to victory in 1828, tributes to the sage of Monticello giving added resonance to Jackson’s professed commitment to ‘repeat [ Jefferson’s ] revolution of 1800’.[13] The reaction to the death of Aaron Burr ten years later was somewhat different. On Burr’s death, it was said, ‘decency congratulated itself that a nuisance was removed, and good men were glad that God had seen fit to deliver society from the contaminating contact of a festering mass of moral putrefaction’.[14]

Vidal is only too aware of the ironies of this characterisation of Burr given the political developments of the 1830s. Such is Burr’s infamy at this historical juncture, the reader learns, that the establishment of any connection, particularly a political connection, past or present, with the disgraced former Vice-President could seriously check the ambitions of any aspiring politician. With this effect in mind, Charles Schuyler’s employer at the Evening Post, William Leggett, attempts to ruin Vice-President Martin Van Buren’s chances of succeeding Jackson by unmasking him as Burr’s illegitimate son.

Leggett claims to be acting in the name of democracy, as a supporter of Jackson, whose reforms, he believes, will be reversed should Van Buren attain office. Revealing Burr as Van Buren’s biological father, however, is intended by Leggett only as a preliminary strike which will help establish what he perceives to be a more pernicious figurative form of paternity. Burr, he wishes to show, can also be regarded as Van Buren’s political father. ‘Americans are a moral people,’ Leggett tells Schuyler, ‘but even more damaging than his bastardy is his political connection with Burr, particularly in recent years. If we can prove dark plots, secret meetings, unholy combinations—then, by Heaven, Van Buren will not be chosen to succeed General Jackson.’[15] This exchange in the novel gives an early signal of Vidal’s interest in the politics of patrimony, in this case by excavating a long-forgotten rumour ultimately lost to history as a result of its failure to ignite a full-blown political scandal. The figurative pull of such genealogical themes is a powerful one within American political culture. If it has been said of Jefferson that ‘parties do not take sides for or against him, but contend, like children, as to their legitimate descent’,[16] then what, Vidal appears to be asking, might it mean if a whole generation of American politicians could be construed as, in some sense, the ‘heirs’ of Aaron Burr?

The point Vidal wishes to extrapolate from the Burr-Van Buren rumour is twofold: who are the Founding Fathers and who are their legitimate heirs? Burr is at pains to stress how virtually every senior politician of the 1830s—including Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren and Henry Clay—were, at the very least, tacit supporters of Burr during his Mexican misadventure. William Leggett’s attempts to discredit the Vice-President by raising the spectre of Burr are motivated by a refusal to acknowledge Van Buren as the legitimate heir to Andrew Jackson. Vidal, however, ironises Leggett’s efforts in those sections of Burr’s memoirs which recall Jackson’s own fierce loyalty to Burr in his several hours of need. Here for instance is Burr’s recollection of Jackson’s response to the Hamilton duel:

‘Never read such a damn lot of nonsense as the press has been writing!All that hypocritical caterwauling for that Creole bastard who fought you of his own free will, just like a gentleman which he wasn’t, if you’ll forgive me, Colonel!….He was the worse man in this union, as you, Sir, are the best’.[17]

The irony thickens, furthermore, when Burr records how the great champion of the ‘common man’ was once himself the object of public derision in the aftermath of the Burr conspiracy trial:

A few days later Jackson was nearly mobbed when he addressed an anti-Burr crowd….But he held his ground and with many an oath declared that I was the victim of political persecution….I fear—hard as it is to believe now—that the plebs actually laughed at their future idol Andrew Jackson. I at least blessed him for the friend he was.[18]

What then are we to make of such affiliations and their bearing on any understanding of the American political tradition? What does it mean when Vidal has Aaron Bur—a figure supposedly antithetical to that tradition—announce: ‘it has been a rule with me to measure people by what they think of Andrew Jackson. Anyone who does not appreciate that frank and ardent spirit is an enemy to what is best in our American breed—by the Eternal!’?[19] did a man perceived by Jefferson himself as a grave threat to the republic acquire support from Andrew Jackson, later promoted as Jefferson’s supposed political heir? Furthermore, how does Burr come to admire the supposed inheritor of the Jeffersonian political tradition? Has the imperialist, we might ask, come to embrace the republic or has the republic, without realising it, always secretly embraced the imperialist? These are intriguing questions which finally bring us back to the issues of commerce and expansion, democracy and empire given a fresh impetus by the republican turn in early American historiography.

In Burr, it might be said, we find a discernible slippage between rhetoric and reality, word and deed, theory and practice in the early republic: a gap prompted by the confrontation between republican discourse and an emerging capitalist economy. For Vidal this gap gave many of the ‘republican’ pronouncements of the founding generation of American statesmen a contradictory flavour. Aaron Burr, Vidal’s novel makes clear, was one of the few members of that generation who consistently refused to countenance the republican claims of the American Revolution. Burr’s eventual fate, it is implied, is tied to his contempt for such idealistic claims and his refusal to harness new economic impulses and developments to the spirit of 1776, 1800, 1828 or any other republican meridian. Jefferson and Jackson, on the other hand, are depicted as careful to acknowledge the cultural power and importance of such demands, so re-assuring Americans by connecting past to future, modernity to tradition.

Vidal’s Burr views his own career retrospectively as a premature attempt to embrace new realities which was doomed precisely because of its failure to provide a commensurate (and to Burr no doubt a spurious) political discourse. His inability to legitimate his actions within an acceptable republican rationale resulted in marginalisation and ignominy. By contrast, for Vidal, Jefferson and Jackson deftly circumvented this problem by extending the conceptual territory covered by the term. They knew that although liberalism—the philosophy best suited to the demands of a broadening capitalist economy—appealed to the heads of Americans, republicanism still appealed to their hearts. It is the complex set of contradictions involved in this harmonising strategy, however, that makes the politics of these figures so difficult to compartmentalise. In this vein Vidal has a cynical Burr articulate the persuasiveness and sphinx-like qualities of Jefferson in the following passage:

It is amazing how beguilingly [Jefferson] could present [his] contradictory vision. But then in all his words if not deeds Jefferson was so beautifully human, so eminently vague, so entirely dishonest but not in any meretricious way. Rather it was a passionate form of self-delusion that rendered Jefferson as president and as man (not to mention as writer of tangled sentences and lunatic metaphors) confusing even to his admirers…when Jefferson saw that he could not create the Arcadian society he wanted, he settled with suspicious ease for the Hamiltonian order…he was the most successful empire-builder of our century succeeding where Bonaparte failed. But then Bonaparte was always candid when it came to motive and Jefferson was always dishonest. In the end,candour failed; dishonesty prevailed. I dare not preach a sermon on that text.[20]

Jefferson’s self-deception was generated by the co-existence of a republican philosophy which associated ‘virtue’ with participation in government alongside a laissez faire economy where it was transplanted into the social sphere and became associated with participation in society. Having never subscribed to any notion of ‘virtue’, in his public or private life, Aaron Burr consequently remained untroubled by this paradox. With virtue banished from the public sphere, the imperial adventurism and political opportunism of a later generation of Americans gives Burr’s actions, in Vidal’s representation, something of a prophetic quality. ‘Ahead of the times! That should be on his tombstone’, exclaims one character in Vidal’s novel, ‘Aaron Burr always saw the future first. Yet never profited by it’.[21] of the several fascinating sub-plots within Burr features the ageing ‘embryo Caesar’ gambling, one last time, on America’s deviation from its republican heritage. In attempting to buy land in Texas to be settled by German immigrants, Burr’s prospective investment turns on the United States ultimately annexing the territory from Mexico. He dies, however, before the onset of the Mexican War that would have made his investment good by extending US territories beyond Texas to the Pacific Coast.

Vidal’s focus on this prophetic dimension of Burr’s career—his emphasis on the secret imperial impulse that lurks behind the façade of agrarian republican innocence—is a useful corrective to the relatively uncritical interpretations of early American political thought often evident in the debates on republicanism. Burr not only foregrounds some of the destructive effects and legacies of the aggressive and acquisitive individualism unleashed by modern liberalism but also questions the tenability of reading ‘republicanism’ as a central guiding ethos in the early national period. Yet Vidal is, also, obviously taken with the idea of republicanism as a path not chosen, as a set of ideas to be invoked against the imperialism and the centralisation of power characteristic of the twentieth century American state.

This sentiment appears more explicit in an afterword where the author distances himself from Burr’s view of early American history. ‘All in all’, Vidal admits, ‘I think rather more highly of Jefferson than Burr does; on the other hand, Burr’s passion for Jackson is not shared by me.’[22] This betrays Vidal’s sympathy for a figure who, unlike Jackson, understood virtue in still broadly classical terms and, however much in self-deception, sought to keep the United States’ republican robe unsoiled by imperialism and the base imperatives of commerce. There was, after all, none of the US military imperialism during Jefferson’s period in office which Vidal believes has ultimately led in the twentieth century to a tax devouring military-industrial leviathan and global American ‘empire’ premised on economic power. With regard to this latter development, however, Burr himself appears less convinced in Vidal’s novel. ‘I do think that we are the first empire in history’, he recalls Jefferson remarking after the Louisiana purchase, ‘to buy its territory rather than to conquer it.’[23]

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] The most notable amongst these works were Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1969) and J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975).

[2] For a statement of the ‘liberal’ interepretation see the essays collected in Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

[3] ‘This cumbersome phrase’, Burr explains in the novel, ‘was of Jefferson’s coinage’, Burr, p.242.

[4] Burr, 522.

[5] ‘Hellfire Politics’, a review of John Patrick Diggins’ The Lost Soul of American Politics, Gordon Wood, The New York Review of Books, February 28, 1985, 30.

[6] Burr, 431.

[7] Burr, 404 -5.

[8] Burr, 342 –3.

[9] Burr, 215.

[10] Burr, 268.

[11] Burr, 224.

[12] Lance Banning, ‘Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Jan 1986, 43: 1, 12.

[13] Quoted in Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 72.

[14] Quoted in Peterson, 144.

[15] Burr, 28.

[16] Quoted in Peterson, 29.

[17] Burr, 416.

[18] Burr, 483-84.

[19] Burr, 426.

[20] Burr, 218.

[21] Burr, 440-41.

[22] Burr, 576.

[23] Burr, 430.

Contents

“A Biographical Pursuit of ‘Peggy Guggenheim’”

LISA RULL, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

“Finding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson, Republicanism and the Politics of Patrimony in Gore Vidal’s Burr“

ANTHONY HUTCHINSON, UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

You can also download this issue of ASIB in PDF format

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.

You can also download this issue of ASIB in PDF format

Editorial

As a teacher of American Studies, and indeed as Editor of ASIB, I am frequently assumed to be someone who will defend the United States through thick and thin. The events of this summer have supplied my friends and others with ample scope for questions geared to shuttle me into a defence of American foreign policy. Despite protestations of a literature specialisation and diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing on my part, I rarely escape a barrage of anti-American opinion. Indeed, one does not need to look far these days to see how far the tide has turned in public sentiment towards the United States – every bookshop in Britain groans under the weight of such polemics.

My standard line after such calls to justify my professional existence is to point out the difference between American policies and the American literature, history and politics that we in BAAS teach and research every day. I often drift into my personal experiences and my travels in the US to demonstrate the vastness of the continent and its inherent variety.

My sense of the multiplicity and diversity of American culture was strengthened this summer by two very different experiences of the United States. In the first instance, I travelled to New York City aboard the Queen Mary 2. We cruised from Southampton to NYC, passing, on arrival, the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. The crossing itself was a splendidly surreal affair of sumptuous mock art-deco decadence, the walls of the decks lined with sepia photographs of glamorous passengers from a bygone era: Charlie Chaplin, Vera Lynn, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald and so on. The ship itself seemed a vessel of transatlantic exchange, transporting celebrities who would offer insights into one nation or the other.

New York, with its easy East Coast affluence and sass, brought the expected frenzy, heat and bustle, unfriendly commuters and angry men in cafes bemoaning the current lot of the American people. Like many visitors to the United States, I left with a sense that Americans felt themselves misrepresented to the world, apologetic for their nation.

A few weeks later, however, I saw a very different side of American life. Visiting Red Cloud, Nebraska, for my BAAS-funded research into the works of Willa Cather, I saw the rural Midwest for the first time. It could hardly have been more different: the gentle pace of small-town life, the great air-raid warning waking the townsfolk every morning at six, the sweeping prairies and unhurried smiles. A local undertaker drove me the 120 miles from Red Cloud to Lincoln airport, extolling the virtues of Tony Blair and the Republicans. Both experiences were unmistakeably American, and even if there were any doubt, the staggering abundance of national flags made it perfectly obvious.

But neither bore much resemblance to the caricatures of American life and culture that pass for commentary in so many of our daily papers. On the one hand, we are bombarded with invective against the great imperialist Satan, suffused with mad religiosity and blood-lust; on the other, equally impassioned pundits insist on America as the champion of freedom, the beacon of hope, and other similarly debased clichés.

Of course, neither version does justice to the truth. For the great attraction of the United States – and of American Studies – is that it encompasses so much. No stereotype can do justice to a country that stretches from the frozen plains of Minnesota to the deserts of Texas and from New England clam chowder to New Orleans seafood gumbo. What single slogan, after all, can capture all at once the imagination of Walt Disney, the grace of Muhammad Ali, the genius of Philip Roth or the easy cadences of Sandra Cisneros?

As many readers will recognise, American Studies is not universally admired in British university common rooms. But in today’s fevered world of political controversy and instant opinion, it is arguably one of the most important of all the humanities. If the United States
stands alone as the world’s hyperpower, then understanding it – in all its exhilarating, bewildering vastness – is more vital than ever.

BAAS, however, as evidenced by the extensive list of new members inside, is in fine fettle. Last year’s conference, held at the University of Kent at Canterbury, was a great success. Next year’s conference, which will be hosted in Leicester, will be no less an exhibition of the wonderful diversity of our scholarship – covering everything from those New York delis to the prairies of Red Cloud, with some weighty polemics thrown in for good measure.

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

BAAS Annual Conference: University of Leicester 2007

Call for Papers

The BAAS Annual Conference for the year 2007 will be hosted by the Centre for American Studies at the University of Leicester, from 19-22 April.

2007 marks the tenth birthday of the Centre for American Studies at the University of Leicester so we are particularly pleased to host the conference this year. It also promises to be a very interesting year for reflecting on American history and culture given that it will be 400 years after the founding of Jamestown, Virginia and 50 years since Little Rock and Sputnik.

There is no overarching theme for the conference and we would encourage papers across as wide a range of disciplines as possible, on any American Studies topic broadly defined. At the 2007 conference we would like to showcase Leicester as one of the most diverse and multicultural of cities in the United Kingdom by inviting papers that deal with ethnicity and/or cultural diversity. We would, though, encourage panel proposals on any theme, roundtable discussions, and innovative ideas for sessions which we might incorporate into the schedule.

Proposals for 20-minute papers should be a maximum of 250 words with a provisional title. These will be arranged into panel groups. Panel proposals and roundtable discussions by two or more people, sharing a common theme, are also invited. We would like to include papers across the spectrum of higher education: from postgraduates to senior scholars.

Proposals for BAAS 2007 at the University of Leicester should be submitted by
31 October 2006, preferably by email attachment, to:

Dr George Lewis
BAAS Conference Secretary
Centre for American Studies
School of Historical Studies
University of Leicester
University Road
Leicester. LE1 7RH. U.K.
Email: gdgl1@le.ac.uk

Any other comments or suggestions about BAAS 2007 are also welcome to:

Leicester Conference Secretary
Dr George Lewis
Tel: +44 116 2525370
Fax: +44 116 2523986
E-mail: gdgl1@le.ac.uk

Director of American Studies
Professor Martin Halliwell
Tel: +44 116 2522645
Fax: +44 116 2522065
Email: mrh17@le.ac.uk

BAAS Annual Conference: University of Kent, 2006

Chair’s Report

Annual General Meeting, held at the BAAS annual conference, University of Kent, Saturday 22nd April 2006

This, the fiftieth year of the British Association for American Studies, has been a good year for the organization. In the run-up to the Research Assessment Exercise in 2008 BAAS members have secured a large number and wide variety of research awards; been appointed to new academic posts; and have published monographs, essays and articles with an impressive array of international presses.

Congratulations to BAAS members on a variety of promotions, appointments and awards. These include Martin Halliwell, who was appointed to a chair in American Studies at Leicester; Brian Ward (currently at Florida) to a chair in American Studies at the University of Manchester; Peter Ling and Sharon Monteith to chairs in American Studies at Nottingham; Bridget Bennet to a chair in American Literature at Leeds; and Susan Castillo to a chair in American Studies at King’s College, London.

Heidi Macpherson was appointed Head of the Department of Humanities at the University of Central Lancashire; David Seed of the University of Liverpool was appointed to the AHRC Postgraduate Panel for English Language and Literature; Martin Halliwell and Sharon Monteith were appointed members of the AHRC Peer Review College; and Jay Kleinberg was appointed a member of the International Board of the American Studies Association.

BAAS members have continued to receive a wide variety of research grants and awards. Peter Ling at Nottingham has received a large AHRC grant for his project on “Social Capital and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference”, which will include two PhD studentships and a postdoctoral research assistantship. In fact BAAS members have secured support for their research from virtually every major British grant-giving institution, including AHRC Research Leave Awards and research grants; British Academy Small and Larger Research Grants; and awards from the Leverhulme Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, the Carnegie Trust. Further afield BAAS members have secured fellowships and research awards from such major institutions as the Library of Congress, the John Carter Brown Library, and Harvard University.

The point here is that although relatively few American Studies departments will be entered for RAE 2008 under the American Studies and Anglophone Area Studies, and although interdisciplinary American Studies sometimes fall between the disciplinary categories of the British Academy and the AHRC, the large academic and postgraduate membership of Britain’s American Studies community continue to excel in their scholarship. The awards made after yesterday’s banquet are a tangible way in which this organization can support and reward excellent work and innovative research: these depend upon the continued support of the BAAS membership.

The BAAS Executive Committee continue to work to support this academic community, and to protect its best interests. This includes a good deal of work with the media, as the public face or voice of British American Studies, and committee members have been interviewed by a range of British radio, television and newspaper journalists, as well as by other from other abroad. Committee members represent BAAS and the American Studies community at conferences and events around the world, including the annual conferences of the American Studies Association and the International American Studies Association.

In a variety of ways, BAAS work hard to provide opportunities for members at conferences, through publishing outlets, and through an increasing number of fellowships and awards. BAAS sponsors postgraduate conferences and regional conferences, helping make it possible for postgraduate students to attend and to present what are often their first conference papers. BAAS’s on-line, peer-reviewed postgraduate journal U.S. Studies Online, now edited by Elizabeth Rosen, has emerged as an excellent academic journal, and editor Jay Kleinberg and Associate Editor Susan Castillo continue to confirm the status of the Journal of American Studies as a world-leading publication. The BAAS paperbacks series published by Edinburgh University Press and edited by Carol Smith and Simon Newman is expanding, with healthy sales of a wide variety of books.

Furthermore, members of the BAAS Committee regularly respond to a variety of questionnaires, initiatives and other documents and policies that require responses in order to protect the interests of the American Studies community. Over the past year this has included a good deal of work in communications with the organizers of RAE 2008; with the QAA in regard to subject benchmarking; with the AHRC with regard to doctoral research, nominations for the Peer Review College, and AHRC participation in the ESF European Reference Index for the Humanities.

The Executive Committee enjoys an excellent working relationship with the staff of the US Embassy in London, and we were delighted to have Ambassador Tuttle as our guest at yesterday’s banquet, where he was able to give awards supported by the Embassy. Over the past year we have been working closely with Sue Wedlake, Cultural Affairs Assistant at the Embassy, but also with new staff members including Rick Roberts (Minister Counselor for Public Affairs), Michael Macey (Cultural Attache) and Beth Poisson (Press Counselor). We are fortunate to work with embassy staff who are genuinely interested in academic research and teaching, and who are happy to support a wide range of projects.

As Chair I see first-hand the hard work and dedication of members of the BAAS Executive Committee and the various sub-committees, and on your behalf I would like to publicly thank them for all of the hard work done on top of full time academic posts, often with little support from their universities: these are Heidi Macpherson (Secretary); Graham Thompson (Treasurer); Carol Smith (Vice-Chair and Chair of the Publications Sub-committee); Ian Scott (Chair of the Development Sub-committee); Sarah MacLachlan (Chair of the Conference sub-committee); committee members Kathryn Cooper, Richard Crockatt, Jude Davies, Clare Elliott, Will Kaufman, Jay Kleinberg, Catherine Morley, Martin Padget, Ian Ralston, Jenel Virden, and Tim Woods. Thanks also to ex-officio committee members George Conyne, Martin Halliwell, George Lewis, and Ken Morgan, and the members of the hard-working Libraries and Resources committee under Ian Ralston.

Finally, I would like to thank George Conyne and his colleagues and the support staff here at the University of Kent, for all of their hard work in organizing an excellent conference. This annual event continues to be an excellent showcase for Britain’s American Studies community, and the kind of socially enjoyable occasion that makes the intellectual and academic dimensions all the more enjoyable.

Minutes of 2006 BAAS AGM

The 2006 AGM of BAAS was held on Saturday 22 April at University of Kent at Canterbury at 2pm.

Elections:

Treasurer: Graham Thompson (to 2009)
Committee:
Martin Halliwell (to 2009)
Theresa Saxon (to 2009)
Ian Scott (to 2009)*
Postgraduate Rep : Josephine Metcalfe (to 2008)*

*Not eligible for re-election

The Treasurer reported that there was a successful handover meeting in June 2005 when he received the full set of documents from Nick Selby, the previous Treasurer. However, getting bank details changed caused some unnecessary delays. GT reported that the 2004 accounts have been submitted as required to the Charity Commission.

GT reported on membership figures; there were 575 members at end of 2005, including 202 postgraduates; current numbers are somewhat lower because individuals do not always renew at the beginning of the year. Including those who have yet to update their standing orders, membership stands at 470; however, individuals who have not updated their standing orders to the correct amount will not receive JAS and are technically not eligible for BAAS rates of conference, nor are they eligible to vote in the elections. GT will shortly write to all individuals who are currently in this position to remind them to update their SOs.

GT then circulated copies of the draft audited accounts, which he asked the AGM to approve. He noted in particular the following changes:

Last year was the first year of distributing hard copy of JAS to members and this had an impact on the accounts in terms of outgoings.

The 50th anniversary conference was more expensive than previous conferences, but a lot of the increase in costs was covered by incoming money from the US Embassy. BAAS had paid conference fees for visiting students from Virginia and New Hampshire last year to offer evidence of our ongoing relationship with these universities; we have BAAS Teaching Assistantships there. GT also noted that there had been an increase in support for a variety of conferences in order to encourage the growth and sustenance of American Studies in the UK.

GT also noted that in previous years, the accountant had expressed some concern about the fact that our outgoings were not as high as our balances; however, due to the proactive nature of the Committee this year in funding special initiatives, this was no longer seen to be an issue.

Richard Crockatt proposed that the accounts be approved; George Conyne seconded the motion, and it was carried unanimously.

GT reported that the Committee had proposed to raise the amount of STAs to £750 next year to take into consideration rising costs of flights to US. This was welcomed.

GT noted two further issues. First, overseas scholars who wished to be members of BAAS sometimes found it hard to secure US dollar or sterling cheques. Thus from this year, an electronic payment system will be set up as an optional way of paying; individuals choosing to pay their subscriptions this way will face a small additional charge. GT also noted that he was in the process of claiming back GiftAid; BAAS had purchased a software system to accumulate the correct information to allow us to make a claim this year.

The Chair was unable to attend in person, but Carol Smith, the Vice Chair, read out Simon Newman’s report. The report noted that the 50th year of BAAS had been a good year. In the run-up to the Research Assessment Exercise in 2008, BAAS members have secured a large number and wide variety of research awards; been appointed to new academic posts; and have published monographs, essays and articles with an impressive array of international presses. Congratulations were extended to the following BAAS members in relation to appointments, promotions, and awards.

Martin Halliwell, who was appointed to a chair in American Studies at Leicester; Brian Ward (currently at Florida) to a chair in American Studies at the University of Manchester; Peter Ling and Sharon Monteith to chairs in American Studies at Nottingham; Bridget Bennet to a chair in American Literature at Leeds; and Susan Castillo to a chair in American Studies at King’s College, London.

David Seed of the University of Liverpool was appointed to the AHRC Postgraduate Panel for English Language and Literature; Martin Halliwell, Heidi Macpherson, Richard Crockatt, and Sharon Monteith were appointed members of the AHRC Peer Review College; and Jay Kleinberg was appointed a member of the International Board of the American Studies Association.

Peter Ling at Nottingham has received a large AHRC grant for his project on “Social Capital and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference”, which will include two PhD studentships and a postdoctoral research assistantship. In fact, BAAS members have secured support for their research from virtually every major British grant-giving institution, including AHRC Research Leave Awards and research grants; British Academy Small and Larger Research Grants; and awards from the Leverhulme Trust, the Nuffield Foundation, the Carnegie Trust. Further afield BAAS members have secured fellowships and research awards from such major institutions as the Library of Congress, the John Carter Brown Library, and Harvard University.

The report noted that although relatively few American Studies departments will be entered for RAE 2008 under American Studies and Anglophone Area Studies, and although interdisciplinary American Studies projects sometimes fall between the disciplinary categories of the British Academy and the AHRC, the large academic and postgraduate membership of Britain’s American Studies community continue to excel in their scholarship. The awards made after the Conference Banquet reflect a tangible way in which BAAS can support and reward excellent work and innovative research: these depend upon the continued support of the BAAS membership.

The BAAS Executive Committee continue to work to support this academic community, and to protect its best interests. This includes a good deal of work with the media, as the public face or voice of British American Studies, and committee members have been interviewed by a range of radio, television and newspaper journalists in the UK and abroad. Committee members represent BAAS and the American Studies community at conferences and events around the world, including the annual conferences of the American Studies Association and the International American Studies Association.

In a variety of ways, BAAS works hard to provide opportunities for members at conferences, through publishing outlets, and through an increasing number of fellowships and awards. BAAS sponsors postgraduate conferences and regional conferences, helping make it possible for postgraduate students to attend and to present what are often their first conference papers. BAAS’s on-line, peer-reviewed postgraduate journal U.S. Studies Online, now edited by Elizabeth Rosen, has emerged as an excellent academic journal, and editor Jay Kleinberg and Associate Editor Susan Castillo continue to confirm the status of the Journal of American Studies as a world-leading publication. The BAAS paperbacks series published by Edinburgh University Press and edited by Carol Smith and Simon Newman is expanding, with healthy sales of a wide variety of books.

Furthermore, members of the BAAS Committee regularly respond to a variety of questionnaires, initiatives and other documents and policies that require responses in order to protect the interests of the American Studies community. Over the past year this has included a good deal of work in communications with the organizers of RAE 2008; with the QAA in regard to subject benchmarking; with the AHRC with regard to doctoral research, nominations for the Peer Review College, and AHRC participation in the ESF European Reference Index for the Humanities.

The Executive Committee enjoys an excellent working relationship with the staff of the US Embassy in London, and we were delighted to have Ambassador Tuttle as our guest at yesterday’s banquet, where he was able to give awards supported by the Embassy. Over the past year we have been working closely with Sue Wedlake, Cultural Affairs Assistant at the Embassy, but also with new staff members including Rick Roberts (Minister Counsellor for Public Affairs), Michael Macey (Cultural Attaché) and Beth Poisson (Press Counsellor). We are fortunate to work with embassy staff who are genuinely interested in academic research and teaching, and who are happy to support a wide range of projects.

The report was followed by a round of applause from the members who were present.

Conferences:

Sarah MacLachlan offered a short report and formally thanked George Conyne for organizing this year’s conference, which had been stimulating, with two excellent plenaries from Michael Zuckerman and Margaret Walsh. She noted that the Executive and the membership were looking forward to Michael Bérubé’s plenary address after the AGM. SM reported that next year’s conference dates were 19-22 April and it would be held at the University of Leicester; thanks were extended to the Vice Chancellor for hosting the reception on the first evening of the conference. George Lewis and Martin Halliwell would be acting as Conference Secretaries for the event, and a call for papers would be distributed shortly in addition to the CFP in the conference pack. The 2008 conference will be held at Edinburgh University, 27-30 March, organized by Robert Mason and that the 2009 conference will be held at Nottingham and organized by Graham Thompson. SM reported that negotiations are underway for the 2010 conference and that the successful applicant will be announced shortly. SM then invited suggestions for future conferences.

Publications:

Carol Smith reminded the AGM that minutes of all meetings are published on the website, and so individuals may keep updated about current activities that way. She then reported on some of the highlights of the year in relation to the Publication Subcommittee. In relation to BRRAM, Ken Morgan continued to negotiate with various sources, including the House of Commons and Lords, Beaverbrook and Lloyd F. George; the Edward Long papers will be published shortly. BRRAM and BAAS signed a new contract this year; in exchange for advertisement space in ASIB, BRRAM now offers all BAAS members a 10% discount.

CS noted apologies from the JAS editor, Jay Kleinberg, who could not attend the conference, and she reported that the main business of the subcommittee this year had been the appointment of a new editor and associate editor. Following the normal BAAS and CUP procedures, Prof. Susan Castillo (Kings College London) would take up the editorship on 1 January 2007 and Prof. Scott Lucas (Birmingham) would become Associate Editor. Thanks were extended to the present editorial team (Jay Kleinberg and Susan Castillo) for their continued steering of such a prestigious journal. They received a round of applause. Thanks were also extended to the editorial assistants, Maggie Selby and John Matlin.

CS reported that the EUP series continues to do well, with two books in the series recently published: Niall Palmer’s The Twenties in America and Will Kaufman’s The Civil War in American Culture. CS offered her thanks to those who responded to the call for new books which had been published in various sources, and reported that there are currently discussions ongoing in relation to the following topics: theatre; African-American music; the short story; and science fiction and television. CS and SN remain interested in hearing from anyone with an idea for a new book in the series.

CS reported that Catherine Morley had finished her first year as editor of ASIB, and that the newsletter continued to be an excellent source of information for members. The next deadline is 15 August 2006 if anyone had articles or notices that they wanted to include. Another new editor this year was Elizabeth Rosen, who finished her first year as the editor of U.S. Studies Online, the BAAS postgraduate journal which publishes essays from British and non-UK based postgraduates; this year, a new CFP went out through the UPenn list and the response had been very high. There were some changes to the editorial board this year, with Douglas Tallack resigned as editorial board member and being replaced by Will Kaufman and Jude Davies.

CS reported that the BAAS website goes from strength to strength: 4 April 2006 saw the highest ever number of unique hits in one day, totalling 1596.

As a final note, CS reported that the 2006 BAAS Book Prize had been won by Richard Follett, as announced at the Conference Banquet. CS noted that the book prize was an excellent way to promote American Studies, and she asked that individuals remind their publishers of the strict December deadline for receipt of books, since late material cannot be considered. There had been a strong field this year, and it was likely that next year, as the prize becomes even more well known, there would be another good selection of excellent texts to choose from.

Development:

IS reported on funding opportunities, postgraduate events, Area Studies networks, and planned changes to the subcommittee for the following year. In particular, he noted that BAAS is happy to receive applications for funding. BAAS has a mission to extend our reach and help to all manner of groups and associations. A new funding form will shortly be available from the website to help individuals target their funding applications.

IS thanked Clare Elliott for all of her hard work as postgraduate representative, and noted that the 2005 postgraduate conference, held at Sheffield, was a big success; thanks were extended to Anne Marie Evans and Elizabeth Boyle. IS reported that the next postgraduate conference will be held in Nottingham in November and that information on this conference is already available on the web. IS reported that there were ongoing discussions about extended the postgraduate conference over two days, which speaks to the range and quality of the work currently being done by postgraduates.

IS reported that he sits on the Area Studies subcommittee of the LLAS as the BAAS representative, and he paid tribute to the work done by the Area Studies subcommittee, especially Dick Ellis and Jude Davies who coordinate the work on publicity. There are plans to work with them on publicity materials for teachers.

IS reported that there will be a substantial change this year to the subcommittee structure for BAAS, with a new subcommittee proposed: the Prize Subcommittee. This is work that was originally undertaken by the Development subcommittee, but prizes have become a much bigger part of what BAAS does. This year, there were around 28 awards with a total value of over £30K, as opposed to a few years ago, when BAAS had 6 awards worth about £1400. Thus in order to manage and extend the prizes without detriment to the other work done by the Development subcommittee, it was agreed that there would now be two different subcommittees. Further publicity about the prizes would soon follow. IS thanked the US Embassy, in particular Sue Wedlake, for their help, as well as individuals who had been anonymous judges of the various awards. Thanks were also extended to those BAAS members who offer financial support for the STAs and other awards through voluntary contributions.

Libraries and Resources:

IR reported that the revamped libraries’ newsletter, now the annual journal Resources for American Studies, had been successfully relaunched. This year’s issue of the journal will be distributed to all BAAS members along with the autumn publication of ASIB. The editors welcome feedback and responses; anyone with articles or resource reviews should please send them to the editor, Matthew Shaw, at the British Library. His email address is Matthew.Shaw@bl.uk

The subcommittee is also seeking feedback from members on the next project, to build on success of newspaper database. A request from Kevin Halliwell, the special projects officer, went out on the mailbase regarding what the next database should examine. IR asked members to reply to this call, and noted that it would be reissued. IR also noted that there were two new members of the subcommittee: Donald Tate, from the University of Glasgow Library, and Catherine Morley, from Oxford Brookes. IR offered thanks to all members of the subcommittee, in particular Matthew Shaw, who had put in a phenomenal amount of work as editor of the journal; and Sue Wedlake, the Public Affairs officer at US Embassy, who had been a good friend to the subcommittee.

EAAS:

JV offered a report on EAAS, and noted that she will be contributing to the next issue of ASIB with even more information about EAAS, what it does, and what members can do for it. JV reported that the EAAS Board met at Nicosia in Cyprus during the conference, which was held 6-10 April, 2006. The Treasurer, Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, noted that the accounts remain healthy at about 20,000 euros. JV also reported that there is an Amsterdam trust fund, which generates 6-8,000 a year.

JV noted that the first volume of EJAS is now online, and on behalf of BAAS, she thanked Dick Ellis who wrote the BAAS contribution. The EAAS Board selected a committee of 7 to run on line journal, and the editor will be chosen at the next meeting of the committee, later in April. JV suggested that members continue to consult the updated website, www.eaas.info. She also reported that the American Studies in Europe Newsletter is now fully electronic. The new Vice president, Martin Heusser, will run the newsletter as per normal practice. JV was pleased to report that the EAAS webmaster had commended BAAS’s website.

JV reported that EAAS has received a request from the Bulgaria American Studies Association (BASA) to join EAAS. The EAAS board is now 20 members strong, so it needs to find a way to coordinate new membership, especially as some associations are small. Germany, France and UK are the biggest ones. There have been suggestions for Regional associations like the Nordic Association, but there are some historical and political concerns that need to be worked through for this to become viable. JV will put together a talking point paper for discussion about this at next board meeting.

JV reported on future conferences: the next will be held 9-12 May 2008 in Oslo, hosted by the Nordic Association; the later date is to take account of Scandinavian weather patterns. The theme, yet to be finalized, is “e pluribus unum OR e pluribus plura.” The following conference, in 2010, will be held at the Clinton Institute, University College Dublin. JV reported that the conference proceedings for both the Bordeaux and the Prague conferences are now out. The latter proceedings, America in the Course of Human Events, include contributions from BAAS members, such as Carol Smith. There is ongoing discussion about the next set of proceedings, including options for ensuring more coherence, and the possibility that a new publisher will be approached.

The Nicosia conference had 220 delegates and a good range of papers and topics. However, it was pointed out that there had not been a single plenary or parallel lecture by a woman delegate. Partly in response to this, a new woman’s caucus will be forming.

JV reported that like BAAS, EAAS also gives out awards and prizes. However, there was a disappointing response rate, with only 5 applications for postgraduate travel grants, and none of them from the UK. JV has agreed to put together a list of postgraduate reps in other EAAS associations, though she noted that many did not have such a representative yet.

Finally, JV reported that elections had taken place, and Martin Heusser (Switzerland) was elected Vice President, and Jenel Virden had been elected Secretary General.

AOB:

Iain Patterson announced that Michael Heale was unwell and unable to attend the conference, the first he has missed in 40 years. Good wishes for a speedy recovery were extended to him, and the Secretary agreed to send a card on behalf of the Association.

The AGM concluded at 3pm.

BAAS Requests and Notices

Message from BAAS Chair, Professor Simon Newman

To BAAS members and others in the American Studies subject community:

As many of you are no doubt aware, the government is considering how best to reorganise the RAE after 2008, in order to find a cheaper way of assessing and then funding research. Last week the Department for Education and Skills published a consultation document entitled ‘Reform of higher education research assessment and funding,’ which can be found at http://www.dfes.gov.uk/consultations/conDetails.cfm?consultationId=1404

It is becoming ever more apparent that there will be a shift to some form of metrics, though the degree to which this will affect the arts and humanities and the social sciences is unclear. We cannot simply say no, for the government will not accept a system of peer review for the arts and humanities that is far more labour intensive and thus expensive than the one for the sciences.

I will respond to this document on behalf of BAAS, and would very much appreciate ideas and suggestions as to how we can constructively engage with this. The American Studies subject community has been very effective at communicating our ideas to the RAE organizers, the AHRC and other bodies,and I hope that as many BAAS members as possible will send in their own responses. (The on-line response form can be found at the above website).

I hope that you all enjoy a productive but restful summer.

With best wishes,

Simon P. Newman
Sir Denis Brogan Professor of American Studies
Chair, British Association for American Studies (BAAS)
Department of History
1 University Gardens
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ
Telephone 0141 330 3585
Fax 0141-330-5000

BAAS L&RS Request

The BAAS Library & Resources Subcommittee would like to follow up its database of US Newspaper holdings in UK libraries by providing some more information on resources in American Studies. Limited resources in the group, however, mean we are only able at present to pursue one of the following options. We would therefore like to invite colleagues with
American Studies interests to indicate which of the following holdings surveys they would regard as most useful. Please email your response to Kevin Halliwell (BAAS L&RS Special Projects Officer) at k.halliwell@nls.uk.

The options are:

1) UK holdings of visual resources (photographic collections, artworks and other image collections) in American Studies.
2) UK holdings of microform collections (microfilm and microfiche) in American Studies.
3) UK holdings of microform and digital collections (microform collections and electronic databases) in American Studies.
4) Artefact collections of interest to American Studies (in libraries, museums, archives, galleries).
5) Special Collections of relevance to American Studies (mainly library collections of printed and manuscript material).
6) UK manuscript collections of interest to American Studies.’

Dr Kevin Halliwell
Curator, US & Commonwealth Collections
National Library of Scotland
George IV Bridge
EDINBURGH EH1 1EW
Tel.: +44 (0)131 623 3837
Fax: +44 (0)131 623 3809
Email: k.halliwell@nls.uk

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

Call for a new Editor for U.S. Studies Online

This summer Elizabeth Rosen will complete her successful term as Editor of U.S. Studies Online and therefore the British Association of American Studies (BAAS) welcomes applications for a new editor (for a term of two years).
This online journal enables postgraduate students at British Universities and beyond to have their work published in a refereed environment. Each issue covers a broad range of topics, drawing upon the interdisciplinary nature of American Studies to incorporate History, Politics, Cultural Studies, Literature and Film. The editor works with the editorial board (see http:http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site) to produce two or three issues a year. S/he will be expected to attend the BAAS post-graduate conference (Nottingham 18th Nov 2006), papers from which constitute one issue, and have good contacts though the BAAS postgraduate network. S/he must be a postgraduate and be a member of BAAS. Knowledge of and skills in managing online resources will be useful.

Please send a letter of application with C.V. and arrange for a reference to be sent.

Applications and further information from – by e-mail only
Carol Smith (Chair BAAS Publications Sub-committee)
Carol.Smith@winchester.ac.uk
The successful applicant will be notified in September

Change of Timing for the AGM 2007

In a change to the usual practice, the BAAS Executive Committee have decided to hold the AGM on the first full day of the Annual Conference, Friday, 20 April 2006. (The conference begins with registration on the afternoon of the 19th.)

Elections will be held for the Chair of BAAS (three year term), three members of the Committee (also three year terms; one current incumbent is ineligible for re-election), the EAAS representative (five year term, non-renewable) and any offices that fall vacant before the AGM due to resignations from the Committee. Anyone currently serving on the Committee who wishes to stand for a different office will need to resign his or her post in order to stand in the elections.

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 in 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.

Downloadable nomination forms will be available from the website in early January and will be printed in the next issue of ASIB. 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.

Heidi Macpherson
BAAS Secretary
Dept. of Humanities
Fylde Building
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
Heidi.macpherson@baas.ac.uk

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.

U.S. 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

EAAS News

It seems odd to me now, after being the EAAS representative for BAAS for several years, but people at the BAAS conference often ask me ‘what is the EAAS?’ To be quite honest I was one of those people when I first joined BAAS and it took some time for me to understand completely the role of the EAAS. The EAAS was founded just over 50 years ago and is a ‘federation of constituent national or joint-national associations,’ which includes 20 national American Studies Associations today. Member associations include: France, Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain, Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Poland, Ireland, Hungary, Romania, Denmark, Belarus, Turkey, Greece, Russia, The Netherlands and Austria. As you can imagine, the size of the member associations varies enormously from the ‘Big Four’ (Germany, France, Great Britain and Spain) to much smaller associations, with membership in double-digits (Belarus, Hungary, Switzerland and Ireland). The EAAS is a non-profit organization with each national association making a small contribution to a general EAAS fund charged at the rate of a few Euros per member (which comes from membership fees to the national association). That money is then utilized by the EAAS to sustain its objectives, which include ‘the study of and research in all areas of American culture and society and the promotion of co-operation and intercommunication among European students of the United States of America.’ The EAAS does this by, in part, sponsoring a biennial conference and generating opportunities for European scholars of America. The latest project is the launch of an electronic journal (noted below). EAAS is run by a Board, consisting of a single voting representative from each member association. The Board meets once a year; a day or two before the conference on conference years and in the spring of each non-conference year at different locations. The EAAS is held together by the same things that bring people to join BAAS, an interest in the study of America and a firm belief in promoting the collegiality among fellow scholars of all backgrounds. If you haven’t been to an EAAS conference yet, I highly recommend them.

Much has happened at EAAS in the interval since the last ASIB went to print. The Biennial conference took place in Nicosia, Cyprus from 7-10 April 2006 under the theme: “Conformism, Non-Conformism, and Anti-Conformism in the Culture of the United States.” It was well attended and the workshop titles and individual papers represented a wide range of disciplines and subjects within American Studies. The Workshop Reports will appear in the forthcoming edition of the EAAS newsletter due out soon (No. 57, to be found on the web site under EAAS publications) on the EAAS web site, www.eaas.info

The CFP for the next EAAS conference has also gone out (see elsewhere in ASIB) and will be held in Oslo, Norway from 9-12 May 2008. The theme for that conference is: “E Pluribus Unum” or “E Pluribus Plura”? For those of you who haven’t been to an EAAS conference before, they differ somewhat from your usual conference. In this case the call goes out now for people to propose workshops whose titles fit within the theme. The Board then meets to decide which workshops to include and the workshop chairs (usually two chairs – from different countries) send out a subsequent CFP for individual papers under these separate titles. There is also the possibility of proposing a ‘parallel lecture’ which does what it says on the box. Of the parallel lecture proposals that EAAS receives, 8 or so are selected for the conference. These are often given by senior academics within the American Studies community. The Guidelines for workshops is available on the EAAS web site or contact me if you think you would like to submit a proposal and have any questions. The EAAS conference in 2010 will be hosted by the University College Dublin’s Clinton Institute for American Studies.

As many of you already know the EAAS has launched the on-line European Journal of American Studies (EJAS). The first issue has already appeared, edited by EAAS President Marc Chénetier. The second issue is in production and an editorial board has been appointed to be led by co-editors Cornelius van Minnen and Pawel Frelik. The editors are currently putting together a working advisory board. For more details about this exciting new project and to discover how to submit proposals for articles or offer to review books please see the EAAS web site under publications.

Elections for Vice President and Secretary General were held in Nicosia by the EAAS Board and the list of officers now includes:
President, Marc Chénetier (Université de Paris VII) – chenetier@eaas.info
Vice President, Martin Heusser (Universität Zürich) – heusser@eaas.info
Treasurer, Hans-Jürgen Grabbe (Martin-Luther-Universität) – grabbe@eaas.info
Secretary General, Jenel Virden (University of Hull) – virden@eaas.info

As I have now been elected as Secretary General for EAAS, and my four year term as BAAS representative will come to an end at the Leicester conference, there is the possibility of running an election for the EAAS representative place for BAAS. BAAS will only be able to have 1 vote on the EAAS Board, however.

Although there is much more I could write about EAAS I think I have gone on long enough. I would just end by noting that EAAS also sponsors travel grants for post-graduates, works in co-operation with the American Studies Network to sponsor a book prize, and advertises conferences and CFPs. If anyone has any questions, suggestions or comments please get in touch. Also, if any BAAS members would like me to mention recent publications in the EAAS newsletter please forward the relevant information to me. I will pass on any new information about EAAS to the BAAS web page but the best way to keep on top of EAAS information is to check the EAAS web site.

Jenel Virden, J.Virden@hull.ac.uk

EAAS Conference Oslo, Norway, May 9-12, 2008

Theme: “E Pluribus Unum” or “E Pluribus Plura”?

The motto “E Pluribus Unum” mostly subsumes an institutional and political will. But, from all historical data and possibly even more from contemporary dissensions, it appears that the social and cultural realities of America might well illustrate the possibility for an “E Pluribus Plura” version of the formula. How does the United States negotiate the inner tensions that, because of its constitutive diversity, might threaten its unity? How do traditions (political, artistic, literary…), modes of consensus building (from myth to national icons and patriotic assertions of exceptionalism), the feeling of a wished-for common good counteract potential strife and the tensions of particular interests and particular groups, make up for the aporias of nationhood and communitarian feeling, of ideological consensus and a tradition of dissent? Could it be that there are indeed several “Americas”? Is being an American necessarily being in many ways double? Can the politically unifying, centripetal power of the State, hidden under the neutral Unum, accommodate the centrifugal forces that might generate a societal and cultural “plura” out of the hallowed political and territorial “pluribus”? Do diversities imply, for their survival and development, a “middle ground”, a “mainstream”, a “tradition” – some kind of American norm? Seen in light of the various subdisciplines of our fields, these are some of the questions that might generate the wished-for contributions to this Conference.

Deadlines:

January 31, 2007: Deadline for submission of workshop and parallel lecture proposals to include a one-page abstract and a ½ page c.v. of potential workshop chairs and parallel lecturers.

Please do not submit proposals for individual workshop papers at this time. These will be sent to selected workshop chairs who will be announced in the May 2007 issue of ASE.

September 1, 2007: Workshop paper proposals (with 150-200 word abstract) to be sent to Workshop Chairs.

September 15, 2007: Deadline for sending the tentative list of speakers and titles of workshop papers to be included in the October 2007 issue of ASE.

December 1, 2007: Deadline for submitting FINAL titles of papers and names and addresses of speakers.

January 10, 2008: Deadline for information to be included in the 2008 biennial conference program.

Please send all information via e-mail to the EAAS Secretary General, Jenel Virden, at virden@eaas.info

News from Centres

American Studies Centre (JMU) Annual Report 2005-2006

This year has again been another productive and busy year for the ASRC, with a successful conference programme and a continued extensive use of the ASRC’s facilities.

Conferences and visiting speakers

The annual schools conference, held at the Maritime Museum Liverpool in October, attracted another capacity audience of students and teachers of American politics. The topic this year of The Imperial Presidency, Special Interest Groups, Voting Behaviour, and Congressional Powers, saw lectures given by John Dumbrell (Leicester), Jon Herbert (Keele), Eddie Ashbee (Copenhagen) and Colleen Harris (Loreto, Manchester). The continued success of these schools conferences again highlights the point made in last years report that the study of the USA in schools remains healthy and vibrant. This can only have a continued positive impact on the promotion of American Studies at degree level.

In April the ASRC played host to journalist Dr.Ezekiel Mobley, and Dr.Kathryn Grabowski from the University of Pittsburgh. Dr.Mobley presented a lecture at Liverpool John Moores on the Memin Pinguin controversy and African American –Latin American relations. The transcript of the lecture is available on the ASRC web site at http://www.americansc.org.uk/Online/Ezekiel.htm A visit was also made to the Toxteth TV community project in Liverpool. After presenting an inspirational lecture to a large group of trainees and staff on the development of community TV in Pittsburgh, Ezekiel and Kathy were given a guided tour of the extensive facilities at Toxteth TV by Sue Scott, a lecturer at Liverpool Community College. Following on from this, programmes made by the Toxteth students were broadcast on TV Channel 21 in Pittsburgh. It is anticipated that closer ties will be developed between the Pittsburgh and Liverpool and that exchanges will continue. Earlier in the year the ASRC was again visited by CL Henson, a member of the Centre’s US Advisory Panel and former head of the Special Education Unit of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

ASRC Web site (ARNet) and American Study Today magazine

By June of 2006 the total figure for hits to the web site stood at close to 9 million. The busiest month this academic year was February, with a total of 93,000 hits being received. The addition of new articles, book reviews and an updating of other online sections by Resources Coordinator Dave Forster and Research Assistant Helen Tamburro, has further contributed to the continued success of this valuable resource. The September issue of the ASRC’s hard copy journal, American Studies Today was distributed to a record number of schools, colleges, universities and individuals. Again, this consisted of a wide range of original articles, book reviews and news. The September 2006 issue is in the final stages of preparation and will be posted before the end of the 2005-6 academic year.

Requests and Student Visits to the ASRC

The level of information and research support requests received by the ASRC remains at the high levels of previous years. These have again included contacts from the media, particularly the BBC, the Discovery Channel and National Geographic TV. Extensive use of the ASRC’s facilities continues to be made by students and staff from Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool Community College and others educational institutions. Requests from all over the world via email also continued to increase.

2006-2007

2007 marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the ASRC in Liverpool. It is anticipated that this will be celebrated by special guest lectures as well as a continued full programme of other events.
The Annual Schools Conference will take place in January 2007 and will consider the impact of the Depression and the New Deal. Details will be posted to all those on the ASRC mailing list in early December, as well as being available on the ASRC web site in September.

Finally, thanks go all those who helped make this another successful year. Particular thanks go to Resources Coordinator Dave Forster for his work on the ASRC web site and magazine and Research Assistant Helen Tamburro for her invaluable work in coordinating the distribution of review texts, updating of the ASRC web site pages and dealing with the numerous requests for information via email. Thanks for support must also go to the Public Affairs Office of the US Embassy (in particular Sue Wedlake and Michael Macy), the British Association for American Studies (BAAS), the Eccles Centre at the British Library, the speakers at ASRC conferences and lectures, contributors to the web site and magazine and others too numerous to mention.

Ian Ralston (ASRC Director)

The Eccles Centre for American Studies @ the British Library

Recent and forthcoming activities:

Cartooning Political America

This one-day conference, held in October 2005, brought together commentators including Chris Lamb, Colin Seymour-Ure, Allan McLaurin, Matthew Shaw and Kenneth Baker, and editorial cartoonists Nick Garland (Telegraph), Peter Brookes (Times),Steve Bell (Guardian), KAL (International Herald Tribune, Baltimore Sun) and Pulitzer Prize winner Matt Davies. It is intended that some of the papers will appear in Journalism Studies.

America’s Americans

Held over two days in May 2006, in co-operation with the Institute for the Study of the Americans, this conference brought together a team of top quality speakers from the USA and UK. Plenary addresses were given by William Frey and Rhodes Cook. A book from the papers is planned, to be edited by Iwan Morgan and Philip Davies.

Research resource events

American Research Heaven was an open seminar mounted in November 2005, introducingthe newly acquired ‘Readex’ electronic database of documents presented to Congress. This rich resource in political history will grow steadily as more documents are added to the electronically searchable files. In March 2006 ‘Books Express’ joined with the Centre to sponsor a Gallerywatch seminar on research tools concerned with US Congress.

The Eccles Lecture at BAAS

… was in 2006 delivered by Margaret Walsh, and took as its topic the US 1950s automobile industry. The Lecture will be published in pamphlet form by the Eccles Centre. The 2005 lecture, by John Dumbrell is now available from the Centre, or at the Centre’s webpages http://www.bl.uk/ecclescentre

The Eccles Lecture at BACS

… was a new initiative in 2006, and was delivered by Canadian aboriginal fimlm-maker Alanis Obomsawin.

The 2006 Bryant Lecture

… was delivered by venture capitalist and former CEO of Pepsi Cola, and of Apple Computers, John Sculley, who spoke about digital innovation and the creation and storage of research information in the US and globally.

Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary Exhibition:

The British Library’s US curator, Dr Matthew Shaw, curated an exhibition of materials covering all aspects of Ben Franklin’s life – especially the almost two decades that he lived in London. The exhibition, on the Upper Ground Floor of the Library, was open from early April to July 5th.

Concert:

The Centre sponsored a concert on Franklin’s Glass Armonica, an instrument invented while he was living in London. A full auditorium heard Alisdair Malloy and the London Soloists play pieces by Mozart, Gluck, and Beeethoven as well as examples of the modern use that has been made of this instrument in film scores and rock music.

This is London: American Newspaper Correspondents in London

On the evening of July 18th, as part of the BL’s major exhibition ‘The Front Page’, the Centre is sponsored a panel, featuring the London correspondents of the New York Times, the Washington Post and Time magazine.

Autumn 2006 Lectures:

New Insights into the Battle of the Little Big Horn
A lecture by Doug Scott, President of the Society for Historical Archaeology. 2pm,
British Library Conference Centre. See www.americancivilwar.org.uk/meetings_2006.htm for the booking form (£15)

Ben Franklin tercentenary lectures

The Centre will be hosting lectures at the Library Conference Centre on October 11th and November 1st organised in co-operation with the Ben Franklin House, and stimulated by Ben Franklin’s status as a Man of Science and a Man of Letters. Check the Eccles Centre webpages for details http://www.bl.uk/ecclescentre

The APG/BAAS colloquium

… will take place at the US Embassy on Friday November 17th. Speakers will include Iwan Morgan and Rob Singh, reviewing the emerging ‘heritage’ in domestic and foreign policy areas of the Bush second term; a video link session with a Washington-based expert, on the impact of the midterm elections; and a panel featuring two former Members of the US Congress, and other experts on American political future.

The Bryant Lecture 2007

… is planned for Wednesday March 14th, with former Senator and presidential hopeful Gary Hart PhD as the speaker. Entry is free, but ticketed. If you would like to be on the guest list, please email eccles-centre@bl.uk

BAAS Schools Conference 2006

Organized by members of the BAAS North West Group a half-day conference on ‘Black Civil Rights’ was held at the Geoffrey Manton Building, Manchester Metropolitan University on Wednesday 8 February. More than a hundred students from schools and sixth-form colleges in the region attended what was a highly successful event. The main presentations, all by BAAS members, were as follows:

John Kirk (Royal Holloway, University of London) examined the most recent work on Martin Luther King. Noting the scholarly focus on King’s leadership during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-56 and the years 1963-65 he highlighted the need for more study on the years 1956-62 and 1965-68 which remain comparatively neglected periods in King’s life.

Kevern Verney (Edge Hill College of H. E.) considered the changing historiography of the Civil Rights Movement. He demonstrated how an initial ‘King-centric’ approach and a preoccupation with a ‘Montgomery to Memphis’ timeline had developed into a more complex analytical framework. This was reflected in a better appreciation of the Movement in earlier decades and at local level and the significance of civil rights issues in the international arena.

Eithne Quinn (University of Manchester) analysed Hollywood depictions of the civil rights struggle. Looking at the career of Sidney Poitier in particular she examined the complex symbolism and meaning in two of his most successful films of the period, In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967).

In a lively concluding session all three speakers formed a joint panel answering questions raised by members of the audience.

In what was an interesting an enjoyable afternoon the conference highlighted the positive role of BAAS in encouraging the development of American Studies at school and sixth form level. My thanks to my fellow speakers and also to Glyn Barker, Kathryn Cooper, Sarah MacLachlan, and Ian Scott in helping to make the event possible.

Report on the BAAS North West Group 2006

In addition to the schools conference on ‘Black Civil Rights’ held at Manchester Metropolitan University on 8 February (see elsewhere) the North West Group also organised the following events this academic year:

Thursday 23 March: Research seminar by Professor John Walton (University of Central Lancashire), ‘Transatlantic Popular Resorts: Blackpool and Coney Island’.

Friday 21 or Saturday 22 April. AGM of the BAAS North West Group.

Thursday 8 June. Research seminar by Dr Vanessa Toulmin (National Fairground Archive, University of Sheffield), ‘Barnum and Bunkum: The Impact of American Showmen on British Popular Culture, 1840-1940’.

Kevern Verney
BAAS Northwest Group
Edge Hill College of Higher Education
e-mail: Verneyk@ehche.ac.uk

Exhibition Review: Americans in Paris, National Gallery, London

22 February – 21 May, 2006

Americans in Paris, 1860-1900, curated by Kathleen Adler and Erica E. Hirschler, with H. Barbara Weinberg.

The oblique story told by Americans in Paris, 1860-1900 is of teacups, armchairs, mirrors, and painted paintings on painted walls and easels. But, first, the straightforward story of an exhibition that moved from the National Gallery in London to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and will close at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There, as in London, one may presume that the capstone will be Childe Hassam’s Allies Day, May 1917 (1917), which is indebted to Paris street-scenes by Monet, but, appropriately, shows the Union Jack, the Tricoleur and the Stars and Stripes flying on Fifth Avenue. Americans in Paris, then, re-tells the international theme of Henry James, to whom the catalogue and the audio-tour regularly genuflect (See Kathleen Adler, Erica E. Hirschler, H. Barbara Weinberg, with contributions from David Park Curry, Rodolphe Rapetti and Christopher Riopelle, with the assistance of Megan Holloway Fort and Kathleen Mrachet, Americans in Paris, 1860-1900, London: National Gallery Company Limited, 2006). American artists, such as Ellen Day Hale, William Merritt Chase and Willard Metcalf visited Paris, spent some time picking up the directions of modern art, before returning home. Mary Cassatt, Elizabeth Nourse and Henry Ossawa Tanner – an African-American who experienced less discrimination than in the U.S. – were among those who stayed. The expatriate theme is completed by James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent who moved to London, while continuing to speculate on American allegiances. Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1871) dominates the second room in the exhibition, evoking, at once, in its almost monochrome colours a stern New England puritanism and pared-down, European modernism. The curators accord it further and interesting prominence by flanking it with Chase’s Portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler (1883) and Cecelia Beaux’s Les derniers jours d’enfance (1885). Even so, it is difficult to leave the exhibition without thinking of Sargent as the leading expatriate artist, given the traditional but still dramatic pairing of his two American women in Paris: his “white” and “black” women, Mrs Henry White (Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd) (1883) and Madam X (Madam Pierre Gautreau) (1883-4).

Most of the American artists who transplanted to Paris, including Thomas Eakins, who represented the academic realist strand, came home and resumed an artistically enriched career. The other main strand was an American variety of Impressionism, on which the critical and curatorial line hasn’t changed since the important American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885-1915, also co-curated by Barbara Weinberg from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and opening there in 1994. That exhibition promoted, in American art criticism, a social history of American art strongly influenced by T J Clark’s monograph on Manet, The Painting of Modern Life (1984). The helpful audio-tour of Americans in Paris reaches a similar conclusion, accusing Edmund Tarbell’s Three Sisters – A Study in June Sunlight (1890) of losing its painterly nerve. The summary view that American artists learned their techniques in Paris but could not match the subtle social and political critique of the French is mostly fair, though not entirely so, and Tarbell’s 1899 painting Across the Room (c. 1899) – also exhibited in the last room – is a disturbing depiction of a well-dressed woman with a blank look on her face, isolated on a sofa at the far side of a polished wood-floored room. On the whole, though, the interpretation holds, and an earlier room entitled “Summers in the Country”, contains some striking instances of American Impressionist works that verge on respectful art-tourism: Robinson’s A Bird’s Eye View (1889), Metcalf’s Poppy Field (Landscape at Giverny) (1886) and John Leslie Breck’s Giverny Landscape (1888).

The few exceptions to the persuasive official itinerary may, perversely, be the ones that attract attention. Tanner’s Les Invalides, Paris (1896) adjoins Charles Curran’s In the Luxembourg Garden (1889), Nelson Bickford’s In the Tuileries Garden, Paris (1881) and Maurice Prendergast’s The Luxembourg Garden, Paris (1892-4), but its disorientating slanting perspective, large painted spaces and indistinct figures bisecting the structuring bands, contrast with the neighbouring conventionally busy scenes in which space is filled up with anecdotes and characters. And then there are the remarkable works collected in two rooms captioned “At Home in Paris”. In Mary Fairchild’s Portrait of Mlle S. H. (Sara Tyson Hallowell) (1886), the consistent browns of wallpaper, couch and the woman’s dress concentrate around a brilliant blue teacup, as the Tennessee landscape is obliged to do around Wallace Stevens’ jar. Cassatt has three paintings of tea-time, with The Tea (1880) notable because the two women are compositionally dominated by the silver tea-set, angled, Matisse-like, on the table in front of them, and by the cup that obscures much of one woman’s face as she delicately sips from it. The cup does not obscure her eyes, though, and she and her companion have a distracted look common to many of Cassatt’s women. They seem less at home than the domestic settings and rituals would suggest, and this group of paintings sits uneasily with the portraits of, and by, mostly, men who easily, if superficially, adopt flâneur-like poses in the opening room of the exhibition. Objects are as important as they are in the Victorian novel, and exaggeratedly so in Sargent’s very large The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882). The giant Japanese vases, a red screen and a dark interior in the background dominate the painting, even as the four girls are the ostensible subject matter and are painted very precisely. An obsession with things runs through these “at home” paintings, though only Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) fully uses modernist composition to play off against traditional detailed representation. The little girl is both individualized – she is bored and, at once, a child and a woman – and claustrophobically embraced by the startling blue armchair and suite and the lack of contextualising space. Another Cassatt painting might almost be the girl grown up. In Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge (1879) the young woman seems to be under the same kind of surveillance as in Cassatt’s accompanying but more famous, In the Loge (1878), until we notice that the occupants of the other loges, behind her, are reflected in a mirror and are, therefore, in front of her. The visual self-consciousness is equally compelling in Mary Fairchild’s In the Nursery – Giverny Studio (Dans la nursery) (c 1896-8). There is a subtle politics in the mix of, on the one hand, domesticity and acceptance of traditional women’s work, carried out by the woman of the house and her female servant, and, on the other hand, the room doubling as Fairchild’s studio. We see her own work – also doubled, as it were – on an easel.

The international theme is inescapable, though, and remains a helpful structure in which to appreciate formal developments in American art. Hassam’s flag painting rather conveniently concludes the exhibition, but a less obviously iconic conclusion to the theme might have been the two Winslow Homer paintings featured earlier. Prisoners from the Front (1866) is American in Civil War theme and traditional in the subservience of paint to drawing. In A Summer Night (1890) the white flecks and vague shapes are not explicable by reference, but only by a self-consciousness about paint that, fifty years later, would be very much at home in New York’s high modernism.

Douglas Tallack, University of Nottingham

After They’ve Seen Paree…

Staging this major show of the works of American impressionists in London brings an ironical transnational dynamic to an overwhelmingly rich hanging of the work of some of the most significant and remembered artists of the period. Paris, London and New York have been the centres of the international art world for the last two centuries and this exhibition transports the life of the bustling Paris of the nineteenth century to the cool underground rooms of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, via the eye, mind, and brush of some of the United States’ most singular and best loved painters.

These many men and women left their homes in distant America to travel to France in order to study at the Beaux-Arts, as well as numerous private studios. Paris, in the glittering days of the Second Empire and Third Republic presented hundreds of young Americans with an opportunity to see so much art with their own eyes, both brand new pieces, from whose creators they took instruction, and the older works that revealed to them a heritage in which they wished to share. Carolus-Duran, a friend of Manet and Monet who became the teacher of many of the most familiar names in the group, attracted renown at a young age due to his insistence that his students paint directly onto canvas, rather than pre-sketching their work. John Singer Sargent was delighted by the contrast between the atelier kept by Carolus on the rue Notre-Dame des Champs, where no more than thirty students were taught, and the studios of other instructors, where hundreds of men and women studied at once. His 1879 portrait of his master is one of the very darkest pieces in the exhibition, with a striking contrast between the studio background, Carolus’s drab clothing, and the bright white of his lace cuffs. The two most prominent of Sargent’s society portraits hanging here, Madame X and Mrs Henry White, similarly bring out their startlingly bright subjects from colourless or darkly coloured backgrounds.

Sargent, one of the most recognizable among these Americans in Paris, might be seen as the least American of the artists in the exhibition being born in Florence to expatriate American parents. Likewise, Whistler, whose 1871 portrait of his mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1, is the best known of the eighty-odd paintings hung here, was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, but spent much of his childhood in Europe and eventually permanently settled in London, as did Sargent. Having studied in Paris from 1855, but settling down on the other side of the channel by 1860, Whistler painted his mother in Chelsea in 1871.

Oscar Wilde wrote that ‘They say when good Americans die they go to Paris’, what this exhibition might conversely tell us is that Paris gives birth to good Americans. These artists, children of the United States, were moulded by their Parisian education, and their subjects, natural for an artist in Paris, were both exotic and automatically privileged for those who might later see the work in the Museum of Fine Arts, or their own Boston drawing room, and thus Paris gives to them the ultimate prize, to be an artist with an American lineage but one who could not be accused of being in any way parochial or provincial. Mary Cassatt, who has pictures in the main exhibition as well as a small adjunct hanging of her own, was the only American to be officially associated with the impressionists. Given the opportunity by Degas to participate in the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879, Cassatt went on to show with the impressionists three further times. Fully integrated into Parisian life unlike many of her compatriots, Cassatt’s work includes many informal and familial portraits, the most engaging, at least from the point of view of an Americanist, being The Tea (1880), which, in the setting of an immaculate Paris flat, foregrounds the artist’s sister drinking from an American tea-set that had crossed the Atlantic as a family heirloom.

Of those painters who did return to the New World, their subjects often remained constant with those they had painted in France, with, naturally and wonderfully, American landscapes in the impressionist style featuring heavily. Williard Metcalf’s Gloucester Harbour (1895), is a much stiller picture than his Giverny Poppy Field of 1886, but one in which the influence of Monet’s palette is as strong. Winslow Homer’s A Summer Night, painted at his home in Maine in 1890, depicts two women dancing against a striking background of dark sky, dark sand and black rocks, on which the foam of the crashing surf is picked out in white and an almost unbelievable blue. A Boston illustrator who served as an artist-correspondent during the Civil War, had settled in Maine after studying in Paris and spending time in Northumberland. A Summer Night was sent to the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris where it and the other works entered by Homer won a gold medal. Purchased by the French government and now in the collection of the Musee d’Orsay, the travels of this picture and its artist make it the typifying piece in this exhibition which is, fundamentally, about the exchange of ideas and images, across both the Atlantic and the Channel.
The exhibition travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 25 June to 24 September, then the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 17 October until 28 January 2007.

Joe Kennedy, University of Sussex

‘America Actually’: Report of the 50th Anniversary Postgraduate Conference

The 2005 BAAS Postgraduate Conference was enormously popular, attracting over 72 delegates, including 60 postgraduate students. As always, the conference succeeded in providing a supportive and informal environment within which young academics could present their work.

The conference provided a forum for some interesting research within American Studies. Scholars attended from across the UK, but also from Switzerland, Romania, Florida, New York, and Chicago. This ensured variety not just in academic discipline, but also in attitudes and opinion. Dr Graham Thompson (University of Nottingham) offered a stimulating and well-received plenary examining the current state of American Studies in the UK. The panel sessions sparked some intense debate around many issues, including international foreign policy, race, Hurricane Katrina, and Iraq. Papers ranged from an exploration of hypertext fiction to a discussion of Eminem’s lyrics and phenomenological conventions in the work of Paul Auster.

The aim of the conference was to provide a stimulating and welcoming environment for postgraduates to present their research and receive helpful feedback, and the lively discussions after each panel were a highlight of the day, often continuing into coffee breaks. The workshop on developing and using WebCT software in the classroom, led by Dr Bob McKay (University of Sheffield), allowed delegates to explore new pedagogical methods for teaching American Studies. The publishing workshop was led by Dr Holly Farrington (Open University), Dr Hugh Wilford (University of Sheffield) and Dr Shirley Foster (University of Sheffield) and offered practical advice to postgraduates on the politics of publication, editing, writing reviews and negotiating book contracts. Throughout the day, Dr Liz Rosen, editor of US Studies Online, was also available to answer questions about submitting articles for publication.

The organisers would like to thank the British Association for American Studies and the US Embassy in London for their financial support, and continuing encouragement of UK postgraduate work in American Studies.

Anne-Marie Evans and Elizabeth Boyle,
University of Sheffield

Travel Award Reports

David Anderson, University of Dundee

Properly, my first thanks go to the British Association for American Studies for their award of a short-term travel grant in support of my recent research trip to the University of Georgia during a suitably humid two-week stay in Athens. When quizzed as to the purpose of my visit by a clearly no-nonsense airport immigration officer, I was met with a look of disbelieving incredulity for I spent the bulk of my time in that most bohemian of American college towns in their fabulously well-equipped university library examining materials relating to Old South plantation Christmases and southern Christmas celebrations during the Civil War.

Christmas tends to assume a strong sense of its own significance in times of protracted conflict, especially when the meaning of Christmas itself is clouded. That this is the case was not lost on southerners during the Civil War. Ensconced in the history stacks in the main library – with regular visits to the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Georgiana collection in the Georgia Room, and supplemented with additional materials from an excellent Interlibrary Loan system – I set about examining scores of Civil War memoirs and biographies, along with military histories and campaign narratives; earmarking relevant articles and opinion pieces in southern sympathetic publications such as the Southern Historical Society Papers and Confederate Veteran magazine; and painstakingly summarizing anguished diary and journal entries and the often wrenching exchange of letters between family members and friends. Contained therein one finds a repeated commentary upon the larcenous nature of history, its rude habit of intrusion into peoples’ lives, and the theft of the irreplaceable. Indeed, for those southerners who remained at home – predominantly wives, mothers, and sisters – Christmas was a time of loneliness, constant worry, and ominous foreboding. Children, however, felt the temper of the times more than most. Toys and decorations were usually homemade because of the scarcity of materials and crippling wartime prices. One ingenious Richmond family decorated their Christmas tree with the ears and tails of butchered hogs; the tails garlanded with paper, the ears doubling as candle-holders. Common gifts included various fruits and assortments of nuts, candy, popcorn, and cakes. Others were not so lucky. General Howell Cobb’s children were informed that nefarious Yankees had shot Santa Claus.

By Christmas 1864 many war-weary Confederates had become almost endemically depressed. Camp life was generally tedious and rumors and hearsay filtered through the ranks regarding Yankee whereabouts. Wretched weather conditions invariably emphasized wretched circumstances as thoughts of food and furloughs occupied yuletide minds. Drunkenness was a particularly acute problem at this time of year as soldiers imbibed hastily concocted eggnog rather freely. There were, however, some seasonal entertainments to occupy even the most forlorn of souls: parties, games, singing, dancing, and wrestling competitions, races, and snowball fights being the most popular. One Alabamian wrote of the soldiers in his company who drummed out a percussive version of ‘Dixie’ on a variety of pots and pans while others impersonated their superiors in an unrehearsed march past. I had hoped to unearth some examples of seasonal fraternization between Union and Confederate soldiers in ways similar to the famous game of football between British and German soldiers during the First World War but, unfortunately, found nothing – on that front the search continues.

During my research trip I also examined several plantation reminiscences and similarly themed remembrances in relation to New South nostalgia for Old South Christmases. As an integral part of the literary Lost Cause, these plantation reminiscences traversed the abyss of the Civil War years to an antebellum era that appeared simpler and more contented than the complicated and seemingly gloomy postwar scene. In most wars stability and sameness are among the earliest casualties, their loss emphasising the rift and rupture between past and present, then and now, old and new. Nostalgia emerges, then, in one of its forms, as a means of rewinding time and preserving the past against the discontinuity of experience. Through an investigation of older medical journals and various psychology based studies, I was also able to detail the etymology of nostalgia from a type of homesickness that plagued – and killed – seventeenth century Swiss mercenaries to its usage today as a more generalized form of longing.

The variation of style, structure, and substance in most plantation reminiscences is slight, and one standard chapter – the plantation Christmas – provided an acutely nostalgic setting in which an Old South of agrarian rapture, social gaiety, and lavish hospitality could be recalled in all its former glory. Indeed, here one can locate all elements of that plantation lifestyle that takes out breath away: extended visits and splendid parties; elaborately prepared dinners and a generally sybaritic description of an abundance of food; eggnog fueled badinage and drinking with Bacchanalian excess; innocent childhoods and youthful exuberance; and relaxed social barriers between master and enslaved, all enveloped by a sense that here was a picture of the Old South at its absolute moment of perfection.

These nostalgic reveries for an Old South de luxe are acutely aware of what was past, very nearly funereal in their writing for an irrevocably lost world. They represent nostalgia for the Old South at its most rampant, essentially a fictionalization of a past that more often than not taxes credibility and completely erases any conflicting memories of the era. Indeed, perhaps the most damning verdict of the Christmas season came from the pen of antislavery propagandist Frederick Douglass in his Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, the second of three autobiographies, published in 1881. Christmas on the plantation, asserted Douglass, with its emphasis on revelry and carousing, muted any insurrectionary desires among slaves and diverted attentions away from thoughts of freedom and liberty.

I am currently writing-up my research and once again thank BAAS for their financial support and warm encouragement.

Oliver Belas, Royal Holloway, University of London

My thesis is an investigation of African American genre fiction, and the first part examines the detective fiction of Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes. Thanks to a BAAS Postgraduate Short Travel Term Award, I was able between mid May and early June of 2006 to conduct a three week research trip to the United States, during which time I visited Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL); Yale University’s Beinecke Library; and New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The trip was geared primarily to furthering my work on Himes, with a secondary emphasis on Fisher (on whom the available archive is a lot smaller).

Situated on the tenth floor of the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory’s MARBL holds the substantial (and in places chaotic) Michel Fabre Archive of African American Letters, which contains a large body of Himes’s letters to Fabre and others, and an extensive correspondence between Fabre and Lesley Packard, Himes’s wife. This first leg of the trip culminated in a minor discovery – an unopened envelope containing a floppy disk copy of an interview, as far as we can tell unpublished, by Fabre of Lesley Packard. Other unexpected materials of interest included a type-script alternative ending to Himes’s second volume of autobiography, and a scathing but incisive criticism of Himes and his work made by Ralph Ellison in a letter to Horace Cayton.

Week two was spent at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Beinecke’s James Weldon Johnson Collection contains the Carl Van Vechten Correspondence, which includes some three hundred pages of letters to Van Vechten from Himes, written between 1946 and 1964. For those familiar with Himes, this collection of letters shows a perhaps surprisingly intimate side, and illustrates the emergence of a hardening bitterness from a once relatively optimistic writer. The Van Vechten papers also contain a brief correspondence between Van Vechten and Fisher, and although one can not glean much biographical detail from these letters they do hint at a “taking of sides” in areas of the New Negro culture debate. Sadly, what looked to be the largest folder of letters written by Fisher (in the Dorothy Peterson Collection) is currently under restricted access.

The Schomburg Centre in Harlem, the final stop on the research tour, contains amongst other materials of interest a 1937-1942 correspondence between Himes and his cousin Henry Lee Moon, and the Henry Lee and Mollie Moon Papers have provided me with invaluable contextual material. Henry Moon was prominent in the New York Federal Writers’ Project, Roosevelt’s so-called “Black Cabinet”, and the NAACP; and apart from the fact that in his letters to Moon Himes displays a rare deference, Moon is interesting because of the direct and indirect contact he gave Himes with some of the dominant literary, social, and political currents of the day.

The research trip has provided me with access to important resources which have not been collected and published, and the materials gathered over the past few weeks will contribute greatly to my attempt to read Himes and Fisher broadly in their cultural, political, and historical contexts, and locally in relation to their interpersonal networks. The staff at all three libraries were extremely knowledgeable and helpful, and I would like here to extend particular thanks to Carmelita Pickett at Emory for her warm and friendly assistance in preparation of my trip. Finally, of course, I thank BAAS, without whose support I could not have undertaken the trip in the first place.

Jeff Farley, University of Glasgow

Upon receiving the Malcolm Bradbury award for 2005, I was able to spend some time in New York City pursuing my research into jazz. It was the first time I was ever in New York, and so the trip was invaluable because I was able not only to see the centre of jazz since the late 1920s, but also to see the city from which so much of American culture emanates. This was probably the most unexpected benefit from the generous scholarship—to be able to see and experience what I see only in words most of the time.

I spent a lot of time at the Schomburg Centre in Harlem, which has an indispensable collection of not only jazz-related material but also of media, arts, photographs, videos, recordings of rare value in African American culture since the 1920s. Here I was able to see some rare footage of shows and newsprint which helped me get a much more detailed understanding of how jazz has been represented in various forms of media. I also spent a lot of time in the comfortable New York Performing Arts Library, which is at the famous Lincoln Centre at 66th and Broadway. This is home to Julliard School of Music (former school of Miles Davis, to name just one) and the present day leading ‘establishment’ for jazz—Jazz at the Lincoln Centre run in part by Wynton Marsalis. Here I was able to pour through old issues of jazz magazines, newspapers, and fan publications from the 1920s to the 1960s. I was also able to view several films including the excellent 1943 Cabin in the Sky starring Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.

What I was not able to see here, I supplemented with a short trip to the LOC in Washington D.C. The amount of amazing information stored there is staggering to think about and I put in many open-to-close days trying to get through their collection of rare music publications from 1920s to the present. Outside of the library, I also got to see some live jazz at the Friday night fish fry at a Baptist church on the south side.

As I found out, research libraries in New York are not known for their long opening hours. This afforded me time wander around New York.
Harlem was a beautiful area I was really excited to explore and I had a great time walking around and talking to people there. It was interesting to see first-hand the differences that remain between Harlem and most the rest of Manhattan. I won’t forget the surprise upon paying 20% less for the same Coke from the same type of shop in Harlem as compared to Midtown. It also amazed me to walk the streets and think of what was happening there every night about eighty years ago that was to change the way many people around the world heard music.

The lauded 52nd Street of 1940s, a place even Duke waxed nostalgic about, is now completely devoid of jazz clubs, which for the most part are located in the Village. I had the opportunity to see several shows down that direction and elsewhere in Manhattan and in Brooklyn. It was through this experience that I really began to see how easy it was for the best musicians of the day to be able to exchange ideas. It was such an experience to see just how many clubs can be within a ten minutes walk, let alone even in the same city.

I really enjoyed all my time that this award made possible. The effects that this research has on my thesis and on my future as an academic will, I think, prove to be immeasurable. I would truly like to thank BAAS for their generosity and support.

Nick Monk, University of Warwick

The following is a brief account of my recent trip to the United States funded, in part, by a BAAS travel award. My proposal to the BAAS was threefold: that I present a paper at the American Literature Association conference in San Francisco; that I visit South Texas to view the Cormac McCarthy archive at Texas State University at San Marcos; and, finally, that I visit a number of Native American sites and museums in New Mexico. Firstly, then, I was fortunate enough to invited by the Cormac McCarthy Society to deliver a paper on an ALA panel the subject of which was “Cormac McCarthy: Novels of the Border”. My paper was entitled “Spiritual Formation in the Border Trilogy and Leslie Silko’s Ceremony” and was concerned with the notion that both McCarthy’s and Silko’s novels are versions of the bildungsroman that focus on the spiritual, and might, therefore, be described as seeleroman, or “novels of the soul”. My argument was that whilst Silko’s principal character, Tayo, at the conclusion of his journey, is re-connected to his community, landscape and religion; McCarthy’s protagonists in the Border Trilogy, are left with mere traces of salvation; illusory and fragmented. The panel was well attended and my paper provoked a lively debate concerning McCarthy’s work and the notion of nihilism – a controversial area amongst McCarthy scholars. Earlier I had been able to attend another McCarthy panel in which one of the contributors offered an account of the opening night of McCarthy’s new play “The Sunset Limited”, which began a run in Chicago a few weeks ago. There was some fascinating and highly relevant material I was able to glean from this, and which I will be using in my dissertation.

Finally, at the ALA, I was able to attend a number of other panels at which I met numerous scholars in my field – the panels on Native American literature were particularly useful in this regard – and the opportunity to discuss my work with academics of all levels at a large conference was of enormous benefit.
The second part of my trip involved a journey by road through New Mexico and South Texas. I was able to visit The Native American Museum of Art in Santa Fe, the Acoma Pueblo, and, importantly, I was able to spend a full day at the Laguna Pueblo, from where Leslie Silko originates. Even more useful, perhaps, was the opportunity I had to spend time walking in, and photographing, the landscapes of the Southwest that are so important to the fiction of both McCarthy and Silko, and upon which I will focus in my two dissertation chapters concerning “cultural geography”. I feel certain that to have experienced this environment first-hand cannot fail to enrich my understanding. Finally, I was able to view the McCarthy archive, part of the Southwestern Writer’s Collection in the Albert. B. Alkek Library. The archive contains, amongst other items, typescripts of McCarthy’s plays, extensive research material by John Sepich on McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, and the drafts and proofs of the first ever collection of critical essays on McCarthy. This material is unavailable anywhere else.

The visit was of enormous benefit as I was able to discover vital evidence, in McCarthy’s unpublished screenplay “Of Whales and Men”, in support of a number of assertions I make in my dissertation – the most significant of which concerns McCarthy’s profound suspicion of Eurocentric modernity and instrumental reason. In addition I was able to read McCarthy’s adaptation for the screen of his novel The Crossing, and review a considerable volume of correspondence between a number of significant McCarthy scholars. In conclusion, then, I would say that to be able to combine a presentation at a major conference in the United States, to travel through the region upon which my thesis is focused, and to research a unique archive of relevant material was an extraordinary and singularly valuable experience.

Conference and Seminar Announcements

American Modernism: Cultural Transactions

22-23 September 2006, Institute for Historical and Cultural Research, Oxford Brookes University

American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (22-23 September 2006) is a two-day event where a number of professorial speakers from the U.K. and a plenary U.S.-based speaker will discuss the manifestations and perimeters of modern American literary and popular culture. The event aims to assess the impact and the magnitude of transatlantic influences, address questions pertaining to the rise and domicile of the literary avant-garde and examine issues surrounding race, gender and sexuality in the period. In short, it aims to assess the U.S.’s current place in the global landscape in light of its modernist cultural transactions

American Modernism: Cultural Transactions was conceived under the IHCR’s focus group in the Cultures of Modernism. The conference aims to bring together scholars of international standing to engage in a series of dialogues that address the cogency of the term with specific emphasis upon their own research. Speakers include: Professor Janet Beer (Manchester Metropolitan), Dr Paul Giles (Oxford), Professor Martin Halliwell (Leicester), Professor Steven Mattthews (Oxford Brookes), Dr Mark Whalan (Exeter), Professor Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway), Dr Rebecca Tillett (UEA) and Professor Laura Marcus (Sussex). Each dialogue will last for one hour (including questions) and the conference will commence with a plenary discussion of the difficulties inherent in the term ‘American Modernism’ by Professor Cassandra Laity (Drew University), co-editor of the journal Modernism/modernity.

The first afternoon of the conference will be dedicated entirely to postgraduate research and work in the field of American Modernism. To register for the conference please download a registration form from the conference website: ah.brookes.ac.uk/conferences/americanmodernism
and return to Dr Catherine Morley catherinemorley@brookes.ac.uk
or Dr Alex Goody agoody@brookes.ac.uk

The conference is open to all BAAS members and the general public. Please contact the organisers at the above e-mail address for registration.
Conference Fee: £35 (waged) and £20 (unwaged/PG).

University of Westminster, London, England. – Representations of 9/11 (UK)

Call for papers for a one-day Interdisciplinary Conference

The UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies in partnership with the University of Hull invites proposals for papers and panels for our Interdisciplinary “Representations of 9/11” Conference.

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Prof. Peter Brooker, University of Nottingham

In an article in the New York Times, Michiko Katutani wrote that of the emergent artistic responses to 9/11, “Thus far, words alone have proved curiously inadequate as a means of testimony”. In the aftermath of 9/11, many artists were called upon to express their views of the most appalling events that had just taken place. It was as if, more than most people, they might frame some response adequate to the moment: as artists with language, their linguistic responses might somehow achieve an expressive intensity capable of embodying or representing the events themselves and the feelings they generated. This raises the question of artistic responsibility and the role of the artist in relation to the pressure of momentous contemporary events.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

The problems of representation
The politics of representation
Representation of New York City post-9/11
The role of the artist in relation to the momentous contemporary events
Iain Banks; Paul Auster; Don DeLillo; Glyn Maxwell; Frederic Beigbeder; Jonathan Safran-Foer; Philip Roth; Art Spiegelman; Ken Loach; J.G. Ballard; 11’09”01 Film anthology; Will Self; David Hare; Martin Amis; Ian McEwan; Claire Tristram; Slavoz Zizek; Jean Baudrillard

We will be pursuing various publishing outputs related to the conference.

Send abstracts (no more than 250 words) for proposed 20 minute papers by 30th September 2006 to martyn.colebrook_at_english.hull.ac.uk. Please mark the subject of your email “Representations of 9/11 abstract”. Alternatively, you can post your abstracts to Martyn Colebrook, Department of English, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull, East Yorkshire, England HU6 7RX. Proposals for comprised panels of three speakers are also welcome.

Institute of North American Studies

The Department of North American Studies, part of the larger Institute of North American and European Studies, is hoping to create links with other universities with American Studies programs

The Department of North American Studies, part of the larger Institute of North American and European Studies, was founded in January 2005. The Department brings together a diverse collection of professors and lecturers from a wide variety of disciplines within the University of Tehran. This multi-disciplinary approach encompasses History, Literature, Politics, Economics, and Cultural Studies to produce innovative research and analysis and to provide students with a broad base of knowledge and skills for their future careers.

The Department of North American Studies has established a fruitful partnership with
the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham,
United Kingdom, and we are hoping to create links with other universities with American Studies programs. As the department is the first of its kind in the country, we are hoping that sister programs within the American Studies Association might be able to assist us by sending audio and video material as well as books on American literature (including literary texts), history, culture, politics, and Philosophy.

Seyed Mohammad Marandi
Head of the North American Studies Department
University of Tehran
mmarandi@ut.ac.ir
Tel: 0098-21-66965065
Fax: 0098-21-66965066
P.O. Box: 14155-6468
Web site: inaes.ut.ac.irinaes.ir

This message is posted on behalf of on behalf of the American Studies Association’s International Initiative. For further information contact, the International Initiative Project Director, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, sfishkin@stanford.edu or the Project Coordinator, Kate.Delaney@covad.net

Salzburg Seminar American Studies Alumni Association (SSASAA)

Redefining America: Race, Ethnicity and Immigration
7-10 September 2006

Keynote Speaker: Emory Elliott, University Professor of the University of California and Distinguished Professor of English, University of California Riverside; President-Elect, American Studies Association Ronald Clifton, Adjunct Professor of American Studies, Stetson University, Deland, Florida

Deborah L. Madsen, Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Geneva

Ruben Rumbaut, Professor of Sociology, University of California Irvine (via video conference – status pending)

In the last thirty years, millions of people from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa have migrated and immigrated to the United States, contributing to remarkable social, political and cultural transformations for both the new arrivals and the communities and regions in which they have settled. Economic shifts, social tensions, and political conflict have often accompanied these population changes.

At the same time, the cultural production of the new immigrants often mediates the social pressures of change as they often bring with them not only family but a variety of goods, styles of dress, religious practices, forms of art and expression, and perspectives on all aspects of human experience that daily transform the cultural fabric of their communities and of the United States. This symposium will focus on how these factors relate to current social, political and economic dynamics in the United States and their implication for cultural change and America’s role in the world. Discussion will be invited on how the literature, film, music, art, and other forms of cultural production mediate or not the conflicts and tensions produced by such rapid immigration and social changes.

The 2006 SSASAA symposium is open to all Salzburg Seminar alumni interested in the field of American Studies, as well as any scholar working actively in the area of American Studies. The symposium will consist of presentations by distinguished scholars of American Studies as well as theme-based discussion groups. Additional events include a barbeque, receptions, a concert in Schloss Leopoldskron, and a gala dinner on the final evening.

Payment information: The fee for the symposium is 500 Euro for a single 800 Euro for a double room. If the total payment is made by March 1, 2006, the fee is 475 Euro for a single and 760 Euro for a double. The fee includes accommodation and meals for three nights, tuition and fees and social events, but does not include travel expenses. Limited financial aid is available for partial scholarships to help cover the symposium fee. This need should be stated at the time of registration.

Credit cards are accepted (payment in Euro only)

In order to reserve a space, a completed registration form and a 100
Euro deposit (refundable until July 1) is required.

Space is limited and reservations will be confirmed in the order in which they are received. For further information about the SSASAA symposium, contact SSASAA leader Marty Gecek, mgecek@salzburgseminar.org

Transatlantic Conflict and Consensus: Culture, History, and Politics

The Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies issues a call for papers for its fourth biennial conference on Transatlantic Studies. The conference, entitled “Transatlantic Conflict and Consensus: Culture, History, and Politics”, will be held October 25-28, 2006, on the campus of Teikyo University Holland, Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Along with presentation of accepted papers, the conference will feature speakers representing the American view of transatlantic relations, a continental European view of transatlantic relations, and an academic overview of the discussion.

Organizing and sponsor institutions of the conference include the Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies; Gloucestershire University, UK; and The University of South Dakota, USA. Contact Dr. Neil Wynn at nwynn@glos.ac.uk or Dr. Tim Schorn at tschorn@usd.edu, or see the conference website, for additional information.

The Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford

U.S. National Identity in the 21st Century, 9-11 November 2006

The Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, invites registrations for a three-day interdisciplinary conference examining the subject of American national identity in the twenty-first century. The RAI welcomes proposals analyzing the historical, social, political, literary, and cultural meanings of the American nation.

After 9/11, there was an upsurge of patriotism among the American people but five years on, has this strong sense of united nationhood proved resilient? Can a national identity fuelled by fear and anger be sustained? Or can a more positive patriotism be fostered? Alongside the impact of 9/11, numerous changes in international relations and global affairs have transformed the ways in which the United States understands itself and in how others perceive it. From the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China, to the spread of digital information technology and global corporatism, to the election of Bush and the invasion of Iraq, the pace of change is rapid and seemingly uncontrollable. Do the founding principles of the United States still translate into a workable creed for the globalized twenty-first century? Or have the pressures of multiculturalism, multilingualism, and transnationalism changed the shape and direction of the country beyond recognition?

This conference will engage with the meaning of the United States of America today and in the past, as a nation and as an international presence. It allows for interdisciplinary approaches, with the historical, political, cultural, and literary significance of American-ness all contributing to the constructions of the identity of the nation and its people.

To register for the conference contact: Cheryl Hudson, Assistant Director, Academic Programme, Rothermere American Institute, Oxford, OX1 3TG, or e-mail academic.programme@rai.ox.ac.uk

Eccles Centre: Custer at Little Big Horn

Custer at the Little Big Horn – some new insights

A lecture by Doug Scott, President of the US Society for Historical Archaeology. Sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies and the American Civil War Round Table UK

Saturday 7th October, 1.30 for 2.00 pm start, the British Library Conference Centre, £15
Book through www.americancivilwar.org.uk

Hellenic Association for American Studies

Ex-centric Narratives, Identity and Multivocality in Anglo-American Cultures
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, School of English
HELAAS Graduate Student International Conference Inaugural, March 15-18, 2007

The Hellenic Association for American Studies, and the Department of American
Literature and Culture of the School of English of Aristotle University aim to bring together Greek and foreign graduate students (MA & PhD) as well as young scholars at the start of their careers from various fields and disciplines to a conference which is organized at the Aristotle University Campus.

The conference, which is the first of its kind to be held in Greece, invites papers that address the concepts of de-centrism and ex-centrism within a globalized context where borders between the canonical and the other are being contested. Within this context, individual cultures and individual writers and artists are now viewed as participants in an intercultural and multiple exchange of experiences and perspectives in their attempt to move beyond “boundaries.” With the peripheral having now become the center of contemporary culture, this conference is interested in examining cultural and literary diversity that have merged from the reciprocal traffic of ideas and influences between cultures, politics, aesthetics and disciplines with an emphasis on identity as a site of crisis and fragmentation. To investigate the newly created political and socio-cultural reality as well as the literary and artistic aesthetics, prospective participants are encouraged to contribute paper proposals relating to the conference theme, in the fields of literature, history, film, language, pedagogy, psychology, music, art, politics, economics, and law.

Ex-centricity, identity and multivocality may be examined in relation to one of the suggested topics below, the list not being exhaustive.

Personal Boundaries in the Negotiation of Identity
Locality and Belonging
Place and Identity
Contested Landscapes/ Contested Narratives
Local v/s transnational politics
Setting boundaries – Transcending Boundaries; Spatial and Social Organization
Ethnic Groups – Minorities – Immigration – Alienation – Exile
Local vs. Global: Shifting Borders and Hybrid Identities
Doppelganger metaphor /Otherness
Polyphony vs. Authorial voices in politics/history, philosophy, psychology,
sociology, journalism/law.
Gender – Racial identity
New Novels – Old Narratives
Multileveledness – Politext – Hypertexts
Intertextuality
Peripheral/Marginal
Postcolonial Narratives
Cultural Preservations and Electronic Technologies
Embodiment – Disembodiment
World English
Semantics

Selected papers will be published in electronic and hard copy format.
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract, for a 20-minute presentation and a short bio to the address below by October 31, 2006.
E-mail to: excentric@enl.auth.gr
Or post to:
“Ex-centric Narratives”, 2007 HELAAS Graduate Conference,
School of English, Department of American Literature and Culture,
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, 54 124

Transatlantic Exchange: African Americans and the Celtic Nations

University of Wales Swansea, March 28 – 30 2007

Deadline for panels/ papers: 29/9/2006
Conference website: http://www.swansea.ac.uk/english/crew/transatlanticexchange

In his introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man Ralph Ellison described the gestation of his seminal novel and recalled publishing a story entitled ‘In a Strange Country’ ‘in which a young African American seaman, ashore in Swansea, South Wales, was forced to grapple with the troublesome ‘American’ aspects of his identity.’ This conference – taking place in Ellison’s ‘strange country’ and in the town where he was stationed during the Second World War – aims to grapple with some of the ‘troublesome’ aspects of African American and Celtic identities, and to explore moments of interaction, of correspondence, of hostility and of attraction between cultural traditions. To evoke the idea of a ‘Celtic’ or ‘African American’ identity is already to invite controversy. The conference seeks, however, to encourage transatlantic approaches that move out of self-enclosed, exceptionalist, models in exploring specific moments of interaction that are often completely ignored when a merely ‘British’ or ‘American’ perspective is brought to bear.

The Keynote Speakers are:
Professor John F. Callahan, Lewis and Clark College, Oregon, USA.
Dr. Glenn Jordan, University of Glamorgan, Wales
Professor Werner Sollors, Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA. (provisional).
Professor Jeffrey C. Stewart, George Mason University, Virginia, USA.

Possible topics for paper or panel proposals might include, but are no means limited to:
The role of the Celts in the slave trade
African-American abolitionists in Ireland, Wales and Scotland.
Pan-Africanism and Pan-Celticism
The use of ‘Celtic’ identities in the American South
The Harlem and Celtic Renaissances
Responses by Ida B. Wells, Paul Robeson, Ralph Ellison and others to their visits to
Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
The idea of the ‘folk’ in Black and Celtic cultural and political thought.
Gender, Ethnicity and Nationalism
Boxing and Sport.
African-Americans and the making of Black Celtic, or Afro-Celtic, identities.
Black and Celtic Marxisms / Nationalisms / Feminisms / Religious Traditions.
Influences and correspondences between literary and political traditions.
African-American texts in Welsh and Gaelic translations.
The case for comparative and transatlantic models in relation to Celtic and African-American studies.

The main language of the conference will be English, but proposals for papers/panels in Welsh are also welcome.

Please submit abstracts of not more than 250 words by Friday 29th of September 2006 to
Dr. Daniel Williams, CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and
Language of Wales), Department of English, University of Wales Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales UK.
daniel.g.williams@swansea.ac.uk

Institute for the Study of the Americas

The Institute for the Study of the Americas (ISA), University of London, is calling for event proposals on topics relating to the Americas for the 2006-07 academic year. The successful event (a short seminar series, workshop, lecture or conference) will be held in London under the auspices of the Institute as part of its events programme (see http://americas.sas.ac.uk/events/events.php for a preliminary list of 2006-07 events).

The Institute hosts academic events on Latin America, the USA, Canada, the Caribbean and comparative topics, covering the disciplines of politics, history, economics, political economy, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and literature, environment and geography, foreign policy and international relations, development, music and archaeology. Many of its events have a multi-disciplinary approach.

The Institute will provide a venue, administrative support through its Events Officer and a contribution of £1500 towards appropriate expenses (such as speaker travel, accommodation and some catering costs) for the successful event.

Event proposals should outline the theme of the event, the proposed participants and an indicative budget and be no more than two sides of A4.

Proposals should be sent to Karen Perkins at ISA on Karen.perkins@sas.ac.uk by Wednesday 20 September, for consideration by the Institute’s Academic Staff Committee at its 28 September meeting. Proposals are encouraged from academic staff of UK universities.

Karen Perkins
Administrative Manager, Institute for the Study of the Americas
School of Advanced Study, University of London
31 Tavistock Square
London WC1H 9HA
Tel 020 7862 8875
Fax 020 7862 8886
Web: www.americas.sas.ac.uk

Chatham House conference: Latin America – New challenges, new responses

Chatham House, London, 14 November 2006

Organized by Chatham House, the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London and the Inter-American Development Bank. Supported by the UK Department for International Development and the EU-Latin America Research Observatory

Conference web site: http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/latinamerica

Coinciding with a major electoral year for Latin America, this free conference will explore the major political, social and economic challenges new governments will face as the region moves beyond the era of the Washington consensus.

The region’s new political makeup will be a starting point for examining likely policy objectives and challenges in the areas of citizen participation, social cohesion and inequality, gas and oil resources, violence and security.

Conference sessions:
Governance Post-2006
Social Cohesion, Violence and Security Policy
Energy Security, Nationalization and Regional Integration
Social Policy and Inequality

Confirmed speakers include:
Dr Julia Buxton, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for International Co-operation and
Security, University of Bedford
Professor James Dunkerley, Director, Institute for the Study of the Americas,
University of London
Luis Giusti, former President, Petroleos de Venezuela, Senior Adviser, Centre for
Strategic and International Studies
Alejandro Grinspun, Regional Antipoverty Programmes Coordinator, UNDP
Marta Lagos, Founding Director, Latinobarómetro
Dr Fiona Macaulay, Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford
Fiona Mackie, Economist Intelligence Unit
Professor Maxine Molyneux, Professor of Sociology, Institute for the Study of the
Americas, University of London
Dr Tim Power, Lecturer in Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford
Dr Javier Santiso, Chief Development Economist, OECD
Michael Schifter, Vice President for Policy, Inter-American Dialogue

To apply for a place or receive further information on this conference, please email conferences@chathamhouse.org.uk, call +44 (0)20 7957 5753 or visit http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/latinamerica

James Baldwin: Work, Life, Legacies

School of English & Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, June 29-30, 2007

Queen Mary, University of London is hosting a two day international conference to mark the 20th anniversary of James Baldwin’s death. The conference will revisit
Baldwin’s extraordinary career as a novelist, essayist and playwright, his thinking about national, sexual and racial identity and difference and his analysis of politics and culture. Writers, critics, artists and filmmakers will look at all aspects of Baldwin’s career as writer and activist, in Europe and in the United States and at his formidable legacy and widening influence on culture and politics in the new millennium.

Confirmed speakers include:
Caryl Phillips, Colm Tóibín, Cheryl Wall, Stuart Hall, Dwight McBride

Invited speakers include: Horace Ové, Isaac Julien

We welcome papers on every aspect of Baldwin’s life and work, and would be especially interested in his influence on writers and writing, the theatre, art practices, on the politics and theory of race and of sexuality, on American identity, on his years in Europe, and his time in Turkey and Africa.

Abstracts of up to 500 words should be sent to the organizers:
Bill Schwarz (b.schwarz@qmul.ac.uk) and Cora Kaplan (c.l.kaplan@qmul.ac.uk)
by 15 October, 2006.

University of Birmingham – Olaudah Equiano and Transnational Agency

The University of Birmingham in conjunction with the City of Birmingham is planning in 2007 an exhibition revolving around its strong abolitionist past and taking as a specific focus the visit of Olaudah Equiano to what is now the UK’s second largest city. To coincide with this exhibition, the University will host a one-day symposium which is intended to serve as part of the preparations for this event.

Entitled ‘Olaudah Equiano and Transnational Agency’, the symposium will feature short position papers by leading international Equiano scholars, including Vincent Carretta (University of Maryland, author of Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man), Chis Apap (University of New York)and Gesa Mackenthun (University of Rostock).

‘Olaudah Equiano and Transnational Agency ‘ is set for Friday 27 October 06. The symposium will commence with registration between 10.00 and 11.00am and will finish in the early evening.

Enrollment for this symposium will cost £10.00 ($15.00), which includes a buffet lunch and refreshments, including morning coffee and afternoon tea and biscuits. Spaces on the symposium are limited, in order to facilitate discussion, so book early to avoid disappointment. (After October the enrollment will increase to £15 ($30.00.)

Enquiries should be directed to
s.k.wood@bham.ac.uk

We warmly invite you to this symposium and look forward to welcoming
you to the University of Birmingham.

Sara K Wood and R J Ellis,
Chair, Dept. of American & Canadian Studies
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT
United Kingdom
Editor, Comparative American Studies
r.j.ellis@bham.ac.uk
http://www.uscanada.bham.ac.uk/

Beyond the Book: Contemporary Cultures of Reading

University of Birmingham, 1 & 2 September 2007

Keynote Speakers: Janice Radway (Duke University) & Elizabeth Long (Rice University)

Book groups, Lit Blogs, on-line bookstores, book festivals, reader magazines, ‘One Book, One Community,’ Reader’s Guides, ‘Richard & Judy’s Book Club,’ Book TV, ‘Canada Reads,’ the ‘Nancy Pearl Action Figure,’ ‘Tuesday Night Book Club,’ … reading is hot!

This conference will explore the diverse formations, mediations, practices and representations of reading and readers in the contemporary moment. Cultures of reading are dynamic and complex: they involve not only readers reading, but also multiple agencies including publishers, booksellers,broadcast networks, national, regional and municipal governments, and educational institutions. The aim of the conference is to interrogate the relations among these agents and their investment in the meanings of reading.

The study of readers and reading encourages, maybe demands, multi-and interdisciplinary analysis. We therefore invite scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to consider the contemporary meanings and experiences of reading in any culture or location. Selected papers will be included in an edited collection on contemporary cultures of reading/book cultures.

Possible topics for consideration:
Reading as a form of popular culture
Books & reading as cultural events
Investigating reading and reader response: methodological problems & strategies
The production of readers and/or reading
Books/Reading and/in/through the mass media
Reading spaces
Reading together: shared reading
Reading as a medium of/for social change
Reading practices
Reading and the state

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers (abstracts of 200-300 words) or complete three-person panel sessions (including abstracts for each paper) by 15 January 2007 to: burrealz@adf.bham.ac.uk using “BTB proposal” as the subject line in your email.

Proposals may also be sent to:
Beyond the Book Conference
Department of American & Canadian Studies
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Eighth conference of the Scottish Association for the Study of America

University of Edinburgh, 2 March 2007

The Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA) was formed in 1999 to encourage and facilitate the study of America in Scotland. The annual conference aims to provide a forum for Americanist postgraduate students andfaculty to share and discuss their research. Neither membership of the Association, nor participation at the conference is limited to scholars based in Scotland. The next conference will take place at the University of Edinburgh on Friday 2 March, 2007. Proposals are invited from scholars of international relations, politics, history, literature, religious studies and other cognate disciplines. Proposals for both individual papers and panels are welcomed; each paper proposal should not exceed one page and must include a provisional title and full contact information.

Postgraduate students are particularly encouraged to submit. Proposals may be sent electronically or by post to the address below. The deadline is 1 December 2006.
For further information, please contact: Kirsten Phimister School of History and Classics University of Edinburgh William Robertson Building 50 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9JY United Kingdom

American Politics Group Annual Conference

University of Leicester, Leicester, January 4-6, 2007

The conference organisers are delighted to receive paper proposals on any aspect of American politics, including political history, cultural and media politics, and US foreign policy. Please send a brief, one page description of the proposed paper to either Dr Alex Waddan and/or Professor John Dumbrell (Department of Politics and International Relations, University of
Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK).

Email: Alex Waddan: aw148@le.ac.uk and/or John Dumbrell: jwd5@le.ac.uk

Do try to attend and contribute to this conference. Any suggestions for panels, roundtable discussions or other activities will be considered. The keynote speaker for the conference will be Professor James Pfiffner (George Mason University: visiting professor at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London).

2008 OAH David Thelen Award

The Organization of American Historians sponsors a biennial award (formerly the Foreign Language Article Prize through 1998) for the best article on American history published in a foreign language. The winning article will be published in the Journal of American History. David Thelen was editor of the Journal of American History 1985-1999.

Entries must have been published during the preceding two calendar years. To be eligible, an article should be concerned with the past (recent or distant) or with issues of continuity and change. It should also be concerned with events or processes that began, developed, or ended in what is now the United States. It should make a significant and original contribution to the understanding of U.S. history. We welcome comparative and international studies that fall within these guidelines.

The Organization of American Historians invites authors of eligible articles to nominate their work. We urge scholars who know of eligible publications written by others to inform those authors of this award.
Under unusual circumstances unpublished manuscripts will be considered.

We ask authors to consult with the committee chair before submitting unpublished material. Since the purpose of the award is to expose Americanists to scholarship originally published in a language other than English to overcome the language barrier that keeps scholars apart this award is not open to articles whose manuscripts were originally submitted for publication in English or by people for whom English is their first language.

Please write a one- to two-page essay (in English) explaining why the article is a significant and original contribution to our understanding of American history. The essay and five copies of the article, clearly labeled “2008 David Thelen Award Entry,” must be mailed to the following address and received by May 1, 2007

Edward T. Linenthal, Editor, Journal of American History
(Committee Chair)
David Thelen Award Committee
1215 East Atwater Avenue
Bloomington, IN 47401

The application should also include the following information: name, mailing address, institutional affiliation, fax number, email address (if available), and language of submitted article. Copies of the article and application will be reviewed by contributing editors of the Journal of American History who are proficient in the language of the submission, as well as by referees (proficient in the language of the submitted article) who are experts on its subject matter. The final prize decision will be made by the David Thelen Award Committee by February 1, 2008. The winner will be notified by the OAH and furnished with details of the annual meeting and the awards presentation. In addition, the winning article will be printed in the Journal of American History and its author awarded a $500 subvention for refining the article’s English translation.

New Members

Anne Marie Acklam is a PhD candidate at the Departments of Art History & Theory at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on the performance and installation work of Luiseño artist James Luna and draws upon a broader context of Native/-American art. This has included the organisation of an ‘artist in residence’ project by James Luna at the University of Essex and research visits to the U.S. and Canada.

Nicholas Allen is an undergraduate at the University of Reading where he studies international relations and politics. His American Studies interests include race and ethnicity, specifically race and slavery in English Colonial America from 1607-1770.

David Anderson completed his PhD at the University of Dundee in 2004 and currently holds a teaching assistantship at Dundee’s Department of American Studies. His main subject interest is in the post-Civil War American South and his current research examines post-Civil War nostalgia for the Old South and Christmas in the Confederacy. His research has taken him to Chapel Hill, Duke, Emory, the University of Florida, University of Georgia, Ole Miss, Vanderbilt and the University of Virginia. He has published in the Journal of Southern History and Crossroads Annual.

Kathryn Ashton is an M.Res student at the University of Keele. Her research interests lie in late 19th Century literature, particularly the work of Edith Wharton.

Emma Barber is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her academic background is in English but her current research is in the field of medical history, specifically the American Civil War and its impact on the medical profession.

Guy Barefoot has been a lecturer in Film Studies and a member of the Centre for American Studies at the University of Leicester since 2003. As a film specialist, his main interest has been Hollywood during the era of the studio system. His book, Gaslight Melodrama: From Victorian London to 1940s Hollywood, was published in 2001, and his interest in melodrama in American cinema and culture is currently being extended in a project on the Hollywood sound serial, with a particular focus on the 1930s.

Martyn Beer is a history teacher at the Queen Elizabeth Secondary School in Cumbria. He teaches the AQA A-Level History syllabus, focusing on 20th Century US domestic and foreign policy.

Alex Benchimal teaches 20th Century American literature at the University of Glasgow. His research interests include Jewish-American and African-American intellectual culture in the 20th Century. He is also interested in the cultural practices of the I.W.W. and intellectual sociability in the Transcendentalist movement.

David Boulting is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant at the University of Salford. He holds an M.Phil from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. His current research interests include American war literature and representation of war in American popular culture.

Anthony Caleshu is originally from the United States and has been teaching in Ireland and England since the 1990s. He currently holds the post of Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Plymouth. His research interest is primarily in postmodern and contemporary poetry. At the moment he is working on the poets John Berryman and James Tate and on ‘posture in poetry.’

Hamilton Carroll is a Research Fellow at the Clinton institute for American Studies at University College Dublin. He was educated at Indiana University and has published in Modern Fiction Studies on Asian-American Literature. He is currently completing a monograph on neo-liberalism and masculinity in US culture.

Chin-jau Chyan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on female hard-boiled detective fiction.

Michael James Collins is a graduate student at the University of Nottingham. His work examines the writing of Bret Easton Ellis, spatiality and architecture. He is about to commence a PhD on Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk and Coupland.

Sally Connolly is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Harvard. She has recently completed her doctoral dissertation, ‘A Genealogy of Poetry: Elegies for Poets Since 1939.’

Paul Crosthwaite is engaged on a PhD project, ‘Shock Waves: Temporality, History and Trauma in the Postmodernist Response to WWII’, at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His essay, ‘Time Bombs: Pynchon, Postmodernism, and the Temporality of Total War’, will appear in The Stories of World War II (Amsterdam: Vrije UP, 2006). In 2005 he co-organised an international conference on the work of Paul Virilio.

Nina Dietrich is a postgraduate student at the University of Kent. Her research interests include American modernist literature, with a particular interest in Willa Cather.

Roy Drummond graduated from St. John’s College Cambridge before becoming Head of English at Framlingham College. He is currently completing a thesis on Henry James’s short fiction of the 1890s, beyond which he has interests in American prose fiction and film.

Leonard James Ellison is a retired engineer and has spent the last forty years researching the ACW. Most of his research has been on the effect the ACW had on Merseyside and Lancs. He gives regular talks in the North War and in the US on the Civil War and he is a member of ACWRT(UK) and the Librarian and the Civil War Preservation Trust in Washington. He has written many articles on the ACW, including the Liverpool Daily Post and the Washington Post. He has also spoken for the BBC and various local radio stations on the ACW.

Jacqueline Fear-Segal is a lecturer at the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her main interest is in Native American history but she also works on the history of childhood and 20th Century US social history.

Andrew Fearnley is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. His work examines the intersection of ideas about race and mental health in the post-bellum United States.

Serena Formica is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include divergence and convergence in the work of Peter Weir and in American and Australian film more generally. She has spent time at the Mongonet Herrick Library and USC in Los Angeles.

James Fountain is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow. His work looks at British and American literary responses to the Wall Street Crash in the 1930s. The authors under scrutiny include John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, George Orwell and Joseph McLeod.

Lucy Frank works on nineteenth-century women’s writing and literary and popular responses to the Civil War. In March 2007 she will spend some time at the Philadelphia Library Company as a Barra International Scholar. She is currently working on a project that examines the representation of mourning in relation to the Civil War, focusing specifically on Mark Twain, Henry James and Charles Chesnutt. Her edited collection of essays, ‘Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century American Writing and Culture’ is forthcoming with Ashgate in 2007.

Danielle Fuller is Director of the Regional Centre for Canadian Studies in the Department of American & Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her background is in American and Canadian literary studies but she continues to shunt sideways into book history, cultural studies and the sociology of literature. She is currently collaborating with DeNel Rehberg Sedo on an interdisciplinary project, “Beyond the Book: Mass Reading Events and Contemporary Cultures of Reading in the UK, USA and Canada,” (www.beyondthebookproject.org) funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (2005-2008). This project aims to produce a trans-national analysis of shared reading mediating by mass reading events such as “One Book, One Chicago” and “Richard & Judy’s Book Club.” US research sites for this study include Chicago, Seattle and Arizona.

Alexander Hincliffe is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. He is researching the construction of the ‘Other’ in early Cold War (1947-1959) Hollywood cinema.

Jayne Hoare is a librarian at Cambridge University Library working in English-language collection development, with special emphasis on American Studies. She holds a degree in American Studies from the University of Birmingham and a Postgraduate Dip. In Library and Information Studies from UCE, Birmingham.

Zoe Hyman is currently doing an M.Phil at the University of Sussex. Her research is based on the Killen trial of 2005 in order to examine a ‘truth and reconciliation’ model in the American South.

Nadja Anna Janssen holds an MA in American History, Sociology and Political Science from the Free University of Berlin. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Sussex undertaking a thesis on the Neo-Conservative Critique of Post-WWII Liberalism. Her other fields of interest include American-Jewish history and American diplomatic history after WWII.

Mara Keire is a Lecturer in the Department of History at Queen Mary, University of London.

Louis J. Kern is Professor of History at Hofstra. He teaches American cultural history, American literature, film and popular culture. His current interest examines the early eugenics movement from 1870-1900.

Nicole King is the Academic Coordinator of the English Subject Centre. She is based at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Aurelia Laitano is a postgraduate student at the Unviersity of Glasgow. Her main interests are 18th, 19th and 20th Century American literature with a particular interest in writers of the American Renaissance.

Richard Larscham is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. His main interests are in the poets of New England and the work on Sylvia Plath.

Jason Michael Lippy is a postgraduate student at the Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He received his BA from Dickinson College, Pennsylvania and further postgraduate qualifications from Penn State University and the University of North Carolina. In addition, he has participated in historical research at the Ephrata Cloister Pennsylvania, the Centre for Pennsylvania Culture Studies and the Charlotte History Museum.

Scott Lucas is Professor of American Studies at the University of Birmingham, having moved from Modern History to American and Canadian Studies in 1997. His background is in international history (particularly in relation to US and British foreign policy) and international relations. Professor Lucas’s most recent books have all been on US foreign policy in the early Cold War, on George Orwell, and on the concept of the ‘betrayal of dissent’ within US and British political culture. He is currently working on a project that aspires to reconsider US foreign policy from the Cold War to the War on Terror, based on the concept of ‘political warfare’ and the perpetual tension between the objectives of power and liberation.

Laura McDonald is based at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto. She is interested in American musical theatre.

James Mackay is based at the University of Glasgow where he is undertaking a thesis entitled ‘Ethnic Imposture in Native American Literature.’ His case studies include Hysmeyohsts Storm and Forrest Carter – among others. His research interests include: Native American literature, society and history; faking literature; spiritual and religious literature; authority and authenticity in the humanities.

Polina Mackay holds a PhD in American literature and her interests include Beat Generation literature, especially the works of Willaim S. Burroughs, experimental fiction and film, and the contemporary Gothic. Her next major project is a book on Burroughs’s influence on women artists and a collection of essays on Beat literature and travel.

Christina Makris is an associate tutor at the University of Sussex.

Rachel M. E. Malkin is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her thesis considers aspects on the discourse of the ordinary in 20th Century American thought and writing. She is particularly interested in literary-philosophical convergences, both in America and between the US and Europe.

Sarah Martin completed a PhD in 2003 on Histories of Law and Space in Contemporary Native American Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is currently researching further topics in Native American literature as well as pursuing a developing interest in Jeffersonian politics in American literature.

Christopher McKenna is a Lecturer at the Said Business School, University of Oxford.

Artemis Michailidou is a Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Athiens. Her research interests include modern American poetry, feminist criticism, comparative literature and the fiction of the American South. She has recently published articles in the Journal of American Studies and in Comparative American Studies.

HollyGale Millette is a postgraduate research student with interests in transatlantic popular culture and biography of the 19th and 20th centuries. She is also interests in 19th American theatre, fine art, Native-American and African-American culture, as well as globalisation.

Nick Monk is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Warwick. He holds an MA from Rutgers (The State University of New Jersey) and an MA from the University of Warwick in 1999. He has recently published an article on Cormac McCarthy; taught in the US; lectured for the Open University; and taught at Warwick.

Carolyn Morningstar teaches at Mansfield College, University of Oxford. Her current research interests include Walt Whitman, the St. Louis Philosophical Society, the ‘Phrenological Fowlers’, twentieth-century theatre and the influence of German idealist philosophy on American nineteenth-century literary production.

Louise Mousseau is a PhD candidate at the Unviersity of Sheffield. Her work studies narrative ecphrasis in contemporary New York fiction, looking at the ways in which depictions on the New York art scene create an alternative historiography of American culture.

Tom Packer is researching a D. Phil at St. Cross College, University of Oxford, on ‘Senator Jesse Helms and North Carolina Politcs 1972-1984.’ He holds a BSc in Government and History from the LSE and an MA in the History of International Relations (also from the LSE). His interests include Conservatism, Religion and recent political history.

Bruce Pilbeam is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at London Metropolitan University. His research interests are primarily in the area of contemporary political ideologies, with a special interest in conservatism. He was published various articles in this area, as well as a book entitled Conservatism in Crisis? Anglo-American Conservative Ideology after the Cold War.

Finn Pollard is a Lecturer in American History at the University of Glasgow. His interests include the literature, culture and politics of the early American Republic, in particular the life and writings of Washington Orving and Hugh Henry Brackenridge. He is also interested in the life and writings of Henry Adams.

Claire Powell is a student at Dame Alice Owens School in Hertfordshire. Her interests lie in the Civil Rights Movement and in the Vietnam War.

Nicola Presley is a postgraduate student at Bath Spa University. She has research interests in contemporary women’s poetry, especially Plath, Sexton and Olds. She is also interested in representations of motherhood, indeterminacy and the relationship between self and place.

Diego Quiroz is a PhD candidate, researching corporate social responsibility, at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. He holds an LL.M in international Human Rights Law and advanced studies in European Community law, peace and conflict resolution, intellectual property and human rights. His current interests include international human rights, refugee and humanitarian law, literature and art.

Edward Ragg completed a PhD on Wallace Stevens (University of Cambridge) in 2004 and was co-organiser of ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe’ – the first international conference (held at the Rothermere American Institute) to address the modernist aspects of Stevens’s work. Edward teaches at Cambridge and is currently planning a book entitled The Question of Abstraction: Wallace Stevens’s Poetry and Prose as well as articles derived from this research. He also writes poetry and has published poems in PN Review, Aesthetica and other magazines.

Lucas Richert is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, UCL. His research interests include the Reagan era and the pharmaceutical industry.

Katharina Elisabeth Rietzler has recently commenced a PhD at UCL on the topic of ‘American Philanthropic Organisations in Interwar Europe.’

Cara Rodway is a PhD candidate at Kings College London. Her interests lie in 20th Century American history and literature. Her doctoral work examines the social and cultural history of road-side spaces, briefly summarized as mobility, motels and moral holidays!

Tessa Kate Roynon is a doctoral student at the University of Warwick. Her research interests include American literature, African-American literature – especially Toni Morrison, and the classical tradition in the Black Atlantic.

Barbara Roy-Macauley is an advisory teacher in the London borough of Redbridge. She is interested in inner city communities and has been an interviewer at the Broadwater Farm Estate after the Tottenham riots. Her current work is with vulnerable children and she is researching an article on the behaviour of boys in the Caribbean community, with possible links to other aspects of the black Diaspora.

David Sarias is a postgraduate student at the University of Sheffield. He is in the final stages of a doctoral thesis entitled ‘Anatomy of Counter-Hegemony: The New Right in the United States from Buckley to Nixon (1955-1974).’

Linda Sher is a research student in the Department of American Studies at Kings College London.

Gary Smith is a research student at tutor in the Department of History at the University of Dundee.

Tara Stubbs is a PhD candidate at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Her thesis focuses on the American modernist poet Marianne Moore and her interests in Irish writers and writing. Tara’s broader interests include American immigrant literature and the development of Irish-American culture in the US.

Alex Symons is currently studying for a doctoral degree at the University of Nottingham. His research is a reception study about the filmmaker Mel Brooks. His interests include comedy theory, reputation and distinctions of audience, taste and class cultures.

Sarah Louise Thwaites is a PhD student at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Her research project is an interdisciplinary study of American prose fiction between 1826 and 1855 and the scientific origins of photography which arrived in America in 1939. She will focus on the work of Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville.

William E. Van Vugt is Professor of English and American History at Calvin College, Michigan. He is the author of numerous books on topics such as British migration and the history of South Africa.

Robin Cheyne Vandome is a PhD student working on American intellectual history at Christ’s College Cambridge. His current focus is on the presence of modernist thought in Progressive Era America. Previous research has included a study of Richard Hofstadter’s intellectual development.

Members’ Publications

Professor Phil Davies (Eccles Centre) has recently published:
Winning Elections with Political Marketing, edited by Philip John Davies and Bruce I. Newman, (The Haworth Press, New York, 2006)

Right On? Political Change and Continuity in George Bush’s America, edited by Iwan Morgan and Philip Davies (London, Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2006)

Politics USA, Robert J. McKeever and Philip Davies (London, Pearson Longman, 2006)

A Brief Introduction to US Politics, Robert J. McKeever and Philip Davies (London, Pearson Longman, 2006)

‘The grinding politics of realpolitik: the US, the UK and Europe’, Philip John Davies, John Dumbrell, Tim Hames, Elizabeth Meehan and Shirley Williams in 21st Century Society, v.1, no. 1 (June 2006), pp. 73-98.

Members’ News

Paul Grainge has been appointed Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham.

John A. Kirk has been promoted to a chair in United States history in the Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London.

John Wrighton of the University of Wales at Aberyswtyth has recently been awarded the Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Travel from the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut. As part of his doctoral research project into the ethics and politics of modern American poetry, he will be visiting the center this summer in order to access their unique archive of materials from the Beat and Black Mountain writers as well as their Alternative Press Collection.

The editors of 49th Parallel would like to announce that the First Special Edition 2006 commemorating the ‘Engaging the “New” American Studies’ Conference held at the University of Birmingham in May is now published and available online at http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/. This edition marks the foreign policy strand of the conference, under the probing title ‘US Hyper-Power’ features articles from Giles Scott-Smith, Maria Ryan, Adam Cooper and Lizzie Telfer, Howard Fuller, Ryan O’Kane, Christabelle Peters, Mark Spokes, and Bevan Sewell. We hope you enjoy this special edition, which offers but a sample of the immensely rewarding and engaging scholarly debate witnessed in Birmingham last May. The Second Special Issue marking the cultural strand of the Conference is due to be published in September 2006.

University of Gloucestershire Acquires Paul Oliver Collection of African American Music and Related Traditions
The University of Gloucestershire has been granted custody of a major part of the Paul Oliver Collection of African American Music by the European Blues Association (which has a base in Gloucester). The announcement of the agreement was celebrated by a launch including performances by Michael Roach and Philadelphia Jerry Ricks organized by the Department of Humanities This extensive collection of books, papers, recordings, visual material, and other artifacts represents an enormously valuable resource in teaching and research as Paul Oliver is one of the world’s leading authorities on the Blues. Among his many publications are the award-winning Blues Fell This Morning, The Story of the Blues, and Blues Off the Record. His work, which began in the 1950s, includes interviews, fieldwork, and research in recording and printed sources tracing the origins and development of African American music and culture from the time of slavery through to the Twentieth Century. Paul also met with and corresponded with figures such as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, as well as numerous blues legends. The Paul Oliver collection is therefore an invaluable resource for students and researchers working in American and African American History, African American Literature, American Studies, Cultural Studies, Music and Popular Music Studies, Anthropology, and Transatlantic Studies. It is anticipated that the material will gradually become available for use by researchers early in 2007.

For further information contact:
Prof. Neil Wynn, Department of Humanities, nwynn@glos.ac.uk
or
Lorna Scott, University Archivist, lscott@glos.ac.uk

Bruce Baker (RHUL) and Brian Kelly (Queens University Belfast) have recently received a major AHRC award for their project “After Slavery: Race, Labour and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas. The total project cost (2006-2010) is £290,000.

Bruce Baker describes the nature of the project here:
The tumultuous half century that followed slave emancipation in the US South has been the subject of extensive historical examination and passionate debate in recent years, revisiting question that scholars working within the prevailing racial assumptions of the first half of the twentieth century had considered settled. In place of passive slaves who, as one historian suggested, “twanged banjos around the railroad stations” waiting for “some Yankee” to “come along and give each of them forty acres and a mule,” virtually all scholars no acknowledge that African Americans played a central role in compelling a reluctant Northern government to follow through on emancipation. In place of an older depiction of the immediate post-emancipation period as a ‘tragic era’ marked by corruption and anarchy, revisionist historians have asserted freed people’s centrality in the attempt to reconstruct the South along democratic and bi-racial lines. Reconstruction, formerly held up as a morality tale confirming the folly of any attempt to “artificially force” racial equality, is now more likely to be viewed as America’s “great missed opportunity” for building a society based on egalitarian principles.

The recent historical literature on African Americans and the post-emancipation
South has vulnerabilities of its own, however: weaknesses which present critical openings for the historical project proposed in “After Slavery: Race, Labour and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas”. Revisionist historians have sometimes projected a monolithic black community, downplaying the fissures and cleavages that developed among black Southerners, particularly during the years that followed the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877. Secondly, in challenging the racialist assumptions of an earlier generation of historians, contemporary scholars have by and large engaged them on their own terrain–within the parameters of a race relations framework–often losing sight of the larger social and economic context in which Southerners of both races lived their lives. Thirdly, in their promotion of a ‘celebratory’ history of the post-Reconstruction black South and their stress on black agency, historians have simultaneously underestimated the structural impediments to black progress and overstated the room for manoeuvre available to African Americans. Finally, and perhaps unavoidably, the development of African-American history as a distinct field has relieved historians of the obligation to examine closely the full complexity of changing relations between black and white Southerners at the bottom of Southern society. While a more dependable history of the post-emancipation South could not ignore the very substantial antagonism that often prevailed between these two groups, it should also take note of the areas and historical moments where their interests overlapped or converged.

This project will undertake a series of close studies of labour and African-American history in the post-emancipation Carolinas in order to address questions that have as much to do with the changing nature of work and the effects of class-based alliances and tensions as they do with issues of race. In taking such an approach, we are to some extent revisiting and refining an analysis of the period pioneered by W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1930s in his work Black Reconstruction, a book that broke with the conventions of its period both by placing African Americans at the centre of the narrative and by considering them first and foremost in their capacity as workers. Building on several innovative labour-centred histories of Reconstruction written in the last decade, this project will also use its original research to advance a broad historiographical argument that the time has come for a new synthesis of the post-emancipation American South.

Bruce E. Baker
Lecturer in United States History
Royal Holloway, University of London

Fellowship Opportunities

British Academy Fellowships for Study in the USA

The British Academy has partnership arrangements with three American institutions, the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, and the American Philosophical Society. Fellowships are available providing airfare and a maintenance allowance for one-to-three months of research by postdoctoral researchers at the Huntington, the Newberry, or at any libraries in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. These awards are not particularly well known, and may not be as competitive as other British Academy awards. They should be of particular interest to BAAS members.

Information about the Huntington Library can be found at
http://www.huntington.org/LibraryDiv/LibraryHome.html
Situated in San Marino, on the western outskirts of Los Angeles, it is the most significant research library in the western United States, with particular strengths in literature; early American history; Native American studies; and western history and literature.

The Newberry Library is situated on the near north side of Chicago, and is an equally significant private research library, with particular strengths in the exploration and settlement of the Americas; the history, literature and culture of Chicago and the Midwest, and Native American studies. More information about the library can be found at
http://www.newberry.org/collections/L3coverdesc.html

The American Philosophical Society is adjacent to Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Its fellowship allows study at any research libraries in the greater Philadelphia area, including the libraries at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University; the Library Company of Philadelphia; the Free Library of Philadelphia; and libraries within easy reach of the city including Princeton University and the Winterthur Museum and Library in Delaware.

More information about the awards and the application process can be found at
http://www.britac.ac.uk/funding/guide/intl/usanfa.html
The application deadline is 15 January for awards over the following research year (1 July to 30 June).

Simon Newman

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 a major library, seminar rooms, and offices for Fellows. The Institute was opened in 2001 by former US President Bill Clinton.
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 new 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 £500. 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 282 710
Fax: +44 1865 282 720
Email: assistant.director@rai.ox.ac.uk
Website: www.rai.ox.ac.uk

University of London Research Fellowships at the School of Advanced Study

Applications are invited from academic staff in the Colleges of the University of London for Research Fellowships for the period May-August 2007. The Fellowships are 4-month appointments, designed to provide relief from teaching and administration in order to give academic staff dedicated research time not otherwise available to them within the research leave arrangements of their College. The Fellowships are available to staff of any grade in permanent academic posts at Colleges of the University of London in a discipline of the Humanities and Social Sciences relevant to any Institute of the School of Advanced Study. Fellowships are not remunerated. The School will provide £5,000 (paid to the College or Department, as appropriate) towards buy-out of teaching. Fellows will have access to a desk and appropriate facilities, in shared office space in the School. Fellows will normally be expected to give a seminar in the Dean’s seminar series, and will be expected to contribute to the life of the School in other relevant ways.

Applicants are required to submit a research proposal (max. 1,500 words). The research to be pursued may be a new project or a more mature one: a defined research output is assumed as the goal of the research but it is not required that this would immediately follow the Fellowship. The project proposal should indicate the contribution to the project expected from the proposed period of research leave. A statement about other academic commitments that might affect how the proposed research leave is used should also be included, and information about any other funding sources applied to (or expected to be applied to).

Applications must be on the attached form, and must include a brief cv and the names of two academic referees. Applications require the endorsement of the applicant’s head of department.

The closing date for applications is 30 September 2006.

For further information and application form see the website www.sas.ac.uk or contact:
The Dean’s Office
School of Advanced Study
University of London
Senate House, Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU
T: 020 7862 8659
F: 020 7862 8657
E: Deans.Office@sas.ac.uk

Publishing Opportunities

Call for Articles: European Journal of American Culture

The European Journal of American Culture is looking for articles on race and ethnicity in America, with an emphasis on history and politics, but articles on literature, film and popular culture will also be welcomed. Potential contributors should contact either Simon Topping
(simon.topping@plymouth.ac.uk) or Kris Allerfeldt (allerfel@globalnet.co.uk) with a brief outline of their topic. The deadline for submissions is summer 2007.

Call for Articles: EJAS Special Issue: Reading/Misreading ‘America’

As part of its goal to broaden American Studies and to foster a transEuropean ‘academic space’ for discussing the United States, EJAS would like to devote an issue to investigating the many representations of ‘America’, and how and why they are used in particular contexts.

Narratives and images of the United States and what is ‘American’ have so multiplied and become globalised that they have become detached from the country itself. It is no longer a question of what ‘America’ is, but of what people do with the many available ‘Americas’. Narratives of America are used and abused for specific political, cultural, and social purposes, each one related in some way to a piece of reality that is the United States but each one also possessing a life and a power of its own. Readings (both literary and visual) have been created and claimed even by those who have had little or no contact with the USA. They have differed wildly between historical periods, generations, nations, and political perspectives, and have been as much empowering (freedom, individualism) as denigrating (inequality, violence) in their intent. Such narratives are inseparable from power relations and social hierarchies, but these relations play out in different ways and can be equally enabling and debilitating.

EJAS invites articles from all disciplines and approaches to examine the causes and consequences of these readings/interpretations of America:

How have narratives and images of the USA been used in Europe in support of
particular (political/cultural/social) causes – including US foreign policy itself?
How have Americans mis-read their own country – and themselves?
Why are certain readings of ‘America’ particularly attractive in particular European countries, and what are the consequences?
Is it possible to ‘misread’ America when its identities are so fluid and multifaceted?
Translating America: How have cultural preferences in Europe affected the adoption/
translation of particular US literary canons and specific authors?

EJAS issues

Alongside Special Issues, EJAS runs regular accretive issues and welcomes submissions on all subjects related to its interests. The Journal will post articles online in the regular issue as soon as they are accepted and cleared for publication. The accretive issues will be closed each June and December.

EJAS does not accept abstracts and proposals – only finished articles in compliance with the
Submission guidelines posted on the EJAS website will be considered for publication.

Marc CHENETIER
Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot
Institut Universitaire de France
President, European Association for American Studies
30 rue Pouchet
75017-Paris
Tel/fax : +33 (0)1 48 56 15 54
e-mail : chenetier@eaas.info

Call for Articles: The Journal of the Vernacular Architecture

Vernacular architecture shapes everyday life. Comprised of those buildings generated in a particular place, by a particular community, or for a particular function, vernacular architecture comports behavior, constructs identity, orchestrates ritual, and mediates social politics. Dedicated to the study of ordinary architecture, Perspectives in
Vernacular Architecture, the scholarly refereed journal of the Vernacular
Architecture Forum, invites submissions of articles that explore the ways the built environment constructs the everyday. The editors encourage the submission of articles employing cross-disciplinary methodologies and engaging topics within and beyond North America. We are particularly interested in articles that incorporate field work as a component of the research.

All manuscripts should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style.

Contributors agree that manuscripts submitted to the PVA will not be submitted for publication elsewhere while under review by PVA. Two hard copies of the manuscript and photocopied reproductions of the illustrations should be sent directly to each of the two editors. Please feel free to direct any inquiries to either editor via email:
Howard Davis
Associate Professor of Architecture
110 Gerlinger Hall
1246 University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon 97403-1246
hdavis@aaa.uoregon.edu

Louis P. Nelson
Assistant Professor of Architectural History
School of Architecture
Campbell Hall
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4122
Lnelson@virginia.edu

BAAS Membership of Committees

BAAS Committee

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

Dr 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 Commitee (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 Haliwell,
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 Jay Kleinberg, (Ex-Officio),
Editor, Journal of American Studies,
School of International Studies,
Brunel University,
Kingston Lane,
Uxbridge,
Middlesex, UB8 3PH
Tel: 0181 891 0121
Fax: 0181 891 8306
E-Mail: jay.kleinberg@baas.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 Haliwell
Dr Will Kaufman
Dr Heidi Macpherson

Publications:
Ms Carol Smith (Chair)
Professor Jay Kleinberg
Dr Catherine Morley
Dr Theresa Saxon
Professor Jay Kleinberg (Editor of Journal of American Studies), until 31 December 2006
Professor Susan Castillo (editor elect of Journal of American Studies)
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 Hoare (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)
Mr Matthew Shaw (British Library)
Rose Goodier (John Rylands University Library of Manchester)
Mr Donald Tait (University of Glasgow Library)

Report on Symposium to Honour Professor Mick Gidley

School of English, University of Leeds, Friday June 16, 2006

Symposium
Function: noun. Etymology: Latin, from Greek symposion, from sympinein to drink together, from syn- + pinein to drink — more at POTABLE. Date:1711
1 a : a convivial party (as after a banquet in ancient Greece) with music and conversation b : a social gathering at which there is free interchange of ideas
2 a : a formal meeting at which several specialists deliver short addresses on a topic or on related topics — compare COLLOQUIUM b : a collection of opinions on a subject; especially: one published by a periodical. Webster’s

10.00 Coffee and ‘Registration’

10.30-10.40 Introduction. Jay Prosser, Senior Lecturer in American Literature, University of Leeds

10.45– 11.45 Panel 1. American Studies
Chair: Bridget Bennett, Senior Lecturer in American Literature, University of Leeds
Susan Castillo, John Nichol Professor of American Literature, University of Glasgow: Mick as colleague
Rob Kroes, Professor of American Studies, University of Amsterdam Euro/EAS/NIAS year
David Nye, Professor of History and American Studies, University of Warwick: Mick Abroad
Eric Sandeen, Professor of American Studies, University of Wyoming: Mick in Wyoming

11.55-1.20 Panel 2. Teaching and Collegiality
Chair: Denis Flannery, Senior Lecturer in American Literature, University of Leeds
Christine Bold, Professor of American Literature, University of Guelph, Ontario: Mick as External – and Beyond
Ann Massa, Senior Fellow in American Literature, University of Leeds: Mick as Boss
Richard Haw, Assistant Professor, English and IDS, John Jay College, CUNY: The Mick effect
Andrew Warnes, Lecturer, American Literature and Culture, University of Leeds: Mick as teacher (and more)
Helen Mayhew, Broadcaster and producer, BBC Radio: New Orleans R&B
David Horn, Senior Fellow, School of Music, University of Liverpool: American music

1.20-2.30 BUFFET LUNCH

2.30-3.40 Panel 3. Native America
Chair: Andrew Warnes, Lecturer in American Literature and Culture, University of Leeds
Richard King, Professor of American Studies, University of Nottingham: On Native Grounds
Paul Oliver, Visiting Professor of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University: Curtis’s Photographs
David Murray, Professor of American Studies, University of Nottingham: Native American representations and Mick’s role
Helen Carr, Professor of English, Goldsmiths, University of London: Native Americans at Exeter
Clifford Trafzer, Professor of History, University of California, Riverside: Among American Indian People
Read in absentia by Rachel Farebrother, Lecturer in English, Leeds Metropolitan University and former PhD student

3.50-5.00 Panel 4. Ways of Looking
Chair: Richard Haw, Assistant Professor, English and IDS, John Jay College, CUNY
Russell Roberts, Head of Photography, NMPFT, Bradford: Mick as collaborator (Photography)
Douglas Tallack, Professor of American Studies, University of Nottingham: Ways of Seeing
Ron Tamplin, Professor and Honorary Fellow, University of Exeter: Exeter years
Richard Maltby, Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide: Long-time research (Exeter)
Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Gray Professor of English and American Studies, Yale University: ‘Stands What I Am’: Mick and American Studies
Miles Orvell, Professor of English and American Studies, Temple University: A Tribute to Mick (Am Studies)
Read in absentia by Rob Ward, Lecturer, School of Culture, Media and the Environment, St Martins College, Lancaster University and former PhD student

5 .00 TEA AND DRINKS WITH THE SCHOOL OF ENGLISH (PRESENTATION)

[In addition, the original programme included a short poem by Heinz Ickstadt, Professor of American Literature at the Free University, Berlin, and the names of absent friends and colleagues who had sent brief messages, including independent writers, such as N. Scott Momaday and James Ayres, former students from Exeter and Leeds, and many members of BAAS, EAAS, ASA, and the European American Indian Workshop.]

New Titles In Microform Series

The collected papers of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship

Regarded as the father of American poetry, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) maintained an active correspondence with this obscure group of socialist and ordinary working-class readers. Indeed, once, when the critic Herbert Gilchrist asked Whitman: “It surprises me that you should be so taken with those Bolton folks; they’re not famous in England at all,” the poet was heard by Horace Traubel to reply: “It surprises you, does it? Well, I’ve had my bellyful of famous people! Thank God they’re just nobody at all, like all people who are worthwhile.”
In addition to letters, the papers include photographs and journals of pilgrimages by founding members to Whitman in New Jersey, as well as records of the group’s annual celebration of his birthday. So close became the relationship that the friendship between the poet’s inner circle and the group continued long after his death.

Order no. R50030: 17 reels
Price for set £1,054/$2,040

These papers comprise the bulk of the archive generated by members of the group. Together with the letters, essays, etc. deposited at John Rylands Library, Manchester, by Charles F. Sixsmith, who refused to unite them with the main collection (above), following a disagreement in the early 1950s with the librarian in Bolton over the ownership of certain Whitman relics, not least the stuffed subject of the poem, ‘My Canary Bird’, and the Johnston papers, they form an essential resource for the reader-oriented study of the foremost exponent of 19th century American poetry. All three collections are available, each with a detailed finding list which can be consulted online.

Materials on the history of Jamaica in the Edward Long papers

The first edition of The history of Jamaica, or, General survey of the antient and modern state of that island: with reflections on its situations, settlements, inhabitants, climate, products, commerce, laws and government, was published in 1774 by T. Lowndes, London. This microfilm publication, accompanied by an introduction by Professor Kenneth Morgan, Brunel University, brings together all the extant drafts and additional material collected by Edward Long (1734-1813) for his planned but never completed second edition, deposited at the British Library, London.
Along with Long’s plentiful manuscript revisions and notes, including an annotated copy of the first edition with copious marginalia in his own hand, this archive contains many unique copies and transcriptions of earlier British histories of Jamaica and of the proceedings of its House of Assembly, of which Long was a prominent member. All this is supplemented by a wealth of information on topics as diverse as the meteorology, zoology and defences of the island.

Of particular significance today, at the bicentenary of the 1807 act on the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire, are the many proslavery writings by Long and others. Nor was the “Negro-cause” the only issue on which the views of the West Indian plantation-owning class ran counter to the growing consensus in late 18th century Britain, as shown in Long’s staunch polemic against any British embargo of trade with the newly independent United States of America.

Order no. R50027: 12 reels: Price for set £804/$1,560

MICROFORM ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS. For more details or orders: www.microform.co.uk/academic/

Editorial

By the time this editorial goes out much of the furore surrounding Gordon Brown’s speech to the Fabian Society on the subject of national identity will have died down. In the past few weeks, Britons have been asked over and over again to consider the nature of their individual and collective national identity. Media attention, naturally, has focused on the more sensational aspects of the debate. What does it mean to be British if you are a young Muslim living in Bradford? What does it mean to be British if you are the child of an Afro-Caribbean second-generation immigrant? What does it mean to be British if you are a Catholic Republican from West Belfast?

What columnists and political analysts have largely failed to recognise, however, is the extent of the Chancellor’s love affair with the systems and institutions of the United States. A large part of the speech was given over to a consideration of the importance of the British flag, proposing that Britain should elect a national flag day – akin to the 4 July in the US or the 14 July in France. In fact, the Chancellor expressed his hope for a constitutional settlement on the issue, as well as an explicit definition of citizenship, a renewed civic society and ‘the pursuit of liberty.’

Contrary to what many people imagine, the Labour Party has always exhibited a strong fascination with all things American. In the late 1950s, left-wing politicians openly looked to the United States as the embodiment of democracy, liberty and social mobility, while in the mid-1960s, Harold Wilson explicitly based his ‘New Britain’ appeal on John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. On the right, meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher made no secret of her admiration for Ronald Reagan’s brand of conservatism, and he returned the favour: indeed, in 1980 the Republicans even ran Thatcher’s old campaign commercials on network television.

The world over, of course, nations are struggling to redefine themselves in the new global environment. The issue of national identity is not unique to Britain and the United States. But, as BAAS members will appreciate it is an issue which has dominated the American political scene for centuries, since the inception of the nation in fact. Americans have long since faced the task of consolidating their national identity, asking what it means to be an American. What’s fascinating is how the tide has turned. In twenty-first century Britain, many people look to the United States for an example of an immigrant society that has successfully combined assimilation and diversity. Yet in the early years of the American Republic, it was the example of Britain – Protestant, white, capitalist and individualistic – to which many Americans turned as they built their own national identity.

Nowhere is this more evident, of course, than in the character of Benjamin Franklin, who was born in Boston three hundred years ago, an anniversary we will celebrate at this year’s BAAS Conference in Canterbury. Since Franklin is generally regarded as the epitome of the self-made-man, an American par excellence, he has often served as something of a straw man for radical scholars critical of the individualism, capitalism and materialism they associate with American national identity. Indeed, even Emerson, Melville and Hawthorne were unsure of what to make of this national figure. But as this year’s Conference will doubtless make clear, Franklin’s legacy was at once more ambiguous and more fascinating. For Franklin, American identity was not a narrow, rigid, constricted phenomenon, but brave, tolerant and open, forever evolving in the crucible of global historical change. As a polymath and an autodidact, a man with a profound sense of civic responsibility, and as an enthusiastic traveller equally at home in the coffee houses of London, the salons of Paris and the printing houses of Boston, he remains the classic example of American eagerness, tolerance and open-mindedness – the characteristics our Chancellor described as profoundly British earlier this year. As a successful scientist, businessman and philanthropist, he was exactly the kind of person that Gordon Brown rather likes. What better symbol could there be of the cultural brotherhood between Britons and Americans? What better inspiration for BAAS as we begin our second half-century?

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

51st BAAS Annual Conference 2006

The University of Kent, Canterbury, UK 20-23 April 2006

PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME

Thursday, 20 April

2.00-5.00 Registration Keynes (hereinafter ‘K’) foyer

3.00 Tour of Canterbury Meet K Foyer

5.00 Keynote Speaker: Prof. Michael Zuckerman (University of Pennsylvania) KLT1 Brabourne

6.30 Reception & Welcome from the Vice Chancellor, sponsored by the University of Leicester (BAAS 2007 conference host) K Foyer

7.30 Dinner Eliot Hall

9.00 A Musical Performance by Will Kaufman: Woody Guthrie and the Songs of the Depression Era Keynes Bar

Friday, 21 April

7.30-9.00 Breakfast Eliot Hall

9.00-11.00 Session A

Panels

1. Franklin’s Via Negativa: Emerson, James & Adams Negotiate Franklin
David Greenham (Nottingham Trent) Unrepresentative Man: Emerson’s Neglect of Benjamin Franklin
Peter Kuryla (Vanderbilt) The Dynamo & the Leyden Jar: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, & the American Impoverishment of Sexual Electricity
Peter Rawlings (UWE) ‘This is the Age of Experiments’: Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, & the Empirical Tradition

2. Nineteenth Century Poetics: Nature, the Body and Death
Claire Elliott (Glasgow) Restoring the Winged Life: Religious Fervour and the Veneration of the Natural in Blake, Emerson and Whitman
Paraic Finnerty (Portsmouth) To Make Me Fairest on Earth: Emily Dickinson and the Beautiful Body in America
Linda Sher (King’s London) ‘Even unto Death’: Gethsemane & the Place of Poetic Making in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

3. Topics on Civil Rights
Chair: Adam Fairclough (Leiden)
Walter David Greason (Ursinus) Race Organizing at the Shore: The NAACP, UNIA, and the Urban League in Central New Jersey, 1920-1950
Rebecca Karol (Rowan) Mary’s Café, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Forgotten Beginnings of a Civil Rights Leader
Jonathan Watson (Sussex) The Los Angeles NAACP 1940-1945: Fighting for Justice in the Struggle for Double Victory

4. The Language of Business: A Roundtable Discussion
Chair and Moderator: Graham Thompson (Nottingham)
Eric Guthey (Copenhagen Business School) The Construction of Image
Mara Keire (Queen Mary, London) Reputation or Lack Thereof
Christopher McKenna (Said Business School, Oxford) The Influence of Institutions
Marina Moskowitz (Glasgow) The Culture of the Market

5. Theoretical Questions in Contemporary American Literary Studies
Graeme Finnie (Dundee) Land (Ab)use in New Mexico: An Ecocritical Look at the Fiction of Castillo, Silko and Nichols
James Mackay (Glasgow) and David Rees (Bergen) Science, Non-science & Nonsense in Vine Deloria, Jr’s Evolution, Creationism and Other Myths
Steven Van Hagen (Kent) Protect Everything, Detect Everything, Contain Everything – Obsessional Society: Narratives of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in Twentieth-Century American Fiction

6. Frontiers Then and Now
Karen Jones (Kent) The Strange Tale of the Goose and the Beaver: Revisiting Lewis and Clark in the 2lst Century
William Van Vugt (Calvin) The Agrarian Myth Meets Reality on the American Frontier: the English Courtauld Settlement of the 1820s
John Wills (Kent) Playing Cowboys and Indians: Videogames and the American West

7. New Work on Native America
Chair: Mick Gidley (Leeds)
Deborah Madsen (Geneva)
David Murray (Nottingham)
Joy Porter (Swansea)

8. American Fiction and 9/11
Martyn Colebrook (Hull) The Problem of Representation: Literary Responses to 9/11 in Jonathan Safan-Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies
Ann Hurford (Nottingham) From 12/7 to 9/11: History Destabilises the Expected in Anne Tyler’s The Amateur Marriage
Aliki Varvogli (Dundee) The Uses of Africa: Identity, Idealism & Post-National Crisis in Russell Bank’s The Darling

11.00-11.30 Coffee K foyer

11.30-1.00 Session B

Panels

1. Benjamin Franklin and Public History
Marcia Balisciano (Benjamin Franklin House, London) Restoring Benjamin Franklin House
Matthew Shaw (The British Library) Franklin and his Modern Public: Presenting the Printer and Scientist

2. Women’s Roles in Public Life
Jennifer Black, (Cambridge) Race, Rest Rooms and Reluctant Legislators: Jury Service for Women in 1950s South Carolina
Pierre-Marie Loiszeau (Angers) A Women’s Place is in the House. Or is It?

3. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919
Cheryl Hudson (Vanderbilt/Oxford) Citizenship by Race Division: The Chicago Commission on Race Relations, 1919-1921
Kevin Yuill (Sunderland) Reformulating Race: Robert Ezra Park’s Pivotal Role in U.S. Race Theory

4. Early Twentieth-Century Art
John Fagg (Birmingham) Genre Painting as a ‘Residual’ Presence in Early-Twentieth Century Illustration
Douglas Tallack (Nottingham) Awkward Commissions: Illustrating New York, 1880s-1910s

5. Women & Race in Literature
Rachel McLennan (Glasgow) Stories to Pass On: Signifying Adolescence in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex
Pi-hua Ni (National U. of Kiaohsiung, Taiwan) On the Fluid Gender Construction in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

6. Analysis of Mid-Century Democrats
Robert Mason (Edinburgh) ‘As Goes Maine, So Goes Vermont’: Republican analysis of New Deal realignment, 1933-1940
Jonathan Pearson (Durham) The Harry S Truman Presidential Library and the Development of Public Identification with the Presidency

7. Representing the Chinese Experience in the U.S.
Christine Cynn (Abidjan/Fulbright) ‘The ludicrous transition of gender & sentiment’: Representations of Chinese labour in Ambrose Bierce’s The Haunted Valley and Bret Harte’s Plain Language of Truthful James
Fiona Wong (Warwick) Effective ‘translation’: Talk-stories in Selected Works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan

8. The Virgina Company: A Roundtable on the Company, Jamestown and its Consequences, held in conjunction with Kent County Council
Chair: Stephen Mills, Keele
Discussants: John Finch (William & Mary) and others be be announced

1.00-2.00 Lunch Eliot Hall

2.00-3.30 Session C

Panels

1. Benjamin Franklin and Public Matters
Louis J. Kern (Hofstra) The ‘Man of Science’ and the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’: Benjamin Franklin and the Reasonable Science of Virtue
Stephen Shapiro (Warwick) The ‘Public Sphere’ of a Circumatlantic World-System: Franklin and the African Slave Traders

2. Post-War Women Authors
David Evans (Dalhousie) The Apotemnophilac Text: Flannery O’Connor’s Fraudulent Bodies
Richard Larschan (Massachusetts-Dartmouth) Art & Artifice in Sylvia Plath’s Self-Portrayals

3. Henry James
Maeve Pearson (Goldsmith’s) Henry James and the ‘Colossal Machine’ of American Education
Theresa Saxon (Manchester Met) Experiments in the Line of Comedy Pure and Simple: The ‘Comicality’ of Henry James’ Theatricals

4. Abstract Expressionism
Christopher Gair (Birmingham) Not AbEx, not New York: Wally Hedrick & American Art in the 1950s
Lisa Rull (Independent Scholar) ‘Them Wide Open Spaces’: Jackson Pollock & the American Landscape

5. Liberalism, Backlash and Cultural Representation
Sarah MacLachlan (Manchester Met) Backlash on the Border: Violence & Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men
Eithne Quinn (Manchester) Liberalism, Backlash & the Blaxploitation Film Cycle

6. Presidents and their Behaviour
Tim Blessing (Alverna) Comparing the First & Last Nine Presidents: The Breakdown of the Selection Process
Timothy Lynch (ISA, London) Woodrow Wilson’s 9/11: Assessing America’s Response to the Luisitania

7. Two Intellectuals on Race
Mark Ellis (Strathclyde) Interracial Co-operation and Social Science: The Contribution of Thomas Jackson Woofter, Jr.
Fred Arthur Bailey (Abilene Christian) All Men are Created Equal: M. E. Bradford, Race and the Reagan Revolution

8. Problems in Telling American History
John-Paul Colgan (Trinity College Dublin) ‘Everything Now is “Was”‘: Memory and Nostalgia in John Updike’s Recent Fiction
Laura MacDonald (Toronto) Musical Theatre and Politics in the ’60s: Two Case Studies, Hair and 1776

3.30-4.00 Tea K foyer

4.00-5.30 Session D

Panels

1. Benjamin Franklin and his Image
Matthew Pethers (Independent Scholar) ‘That Grub Street Sect’: Partisan Politics and the Franklinian Image, 1790-1808
Finn Pollard (Glasgow) Benjamin Franklin and the Problem of American National Character Revisited

2. The Photography of the Rural United States
John Hensley (Saint Louis U. & Westminster) The Ozarks Mountains Body: Images of Hillbillies & Mountaineers at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904
Mark Rawlinson (Nottingham) ‘A Photograph has edges, the world does not’: The Uncanny in Stephen Shore’s American Landscape Photography

3. Congressional Debates
Elisabeth Boulot (Marne-le-Vallee) Privatization or Disentitlement? The Reform of the American Welfare State.
Laurence Horton (Essex) Political Connecting: House Members & the 1981 Budget

4. Race and Schools
Catherine Maddison (Cambridge) ‘This Intolerable School System’: The Politics of Education in the District of Columbia, 1960-1975
Keith Olson (Maryland) Brown v. Board of Education: A Fifty Year Critique

5. Women’s Autobiographies
Joanne Hall (Nottingham) Deviance, Difference and the Exception to the Rule: The Construction of the Female Hobo through Autobiography
Elizabeth Nolan (Manchester Met) Authorising the Female War Text: Women’s Autobiographical Narratives of Conflict

6. Explanations: Race & Class
Andrew Fearnley (Sidney Sussex, Cambridge) How Much Further Do We Have to Go in Explaining Racial Change in the United States?
Andrew Lawson (Leeds Met) Why Class (Still) Counts

7. American Writers and ‘Abroad’
Tatsushi Narita (Nagoya City) T.S. Eliot’ s Virtual Transoceanic Crossing Over & Unitarianism
Mary Lou O’Neill (Kadir Has, Turkey) ‘More than Just Passing Through’: American Expatriate Travel Writing

5.30-6.30 Eccles Centre Lecture, Prof. Margaret Walsh (University of Nottingham): At Home at the Wheel? The Woman and Her Car in the 1950s KLT1 Brabourne

6.30-7.30 Canterbury City Reception K foyer

7.30 Banquet and Awards Eliot Hall

Saturday, 22 April

7.30-9.00 Breakfast Eliot Hall

9.00-11.00 Session E

Panels

1. Inter-War Literature
James Fountain (Glasgow) Fighting ‘the enemy of the arts’: British & American Literary Reactions to the Spanish Civil War
Paul-Vincent McInnes (Glasgow) Campus Culture: Percy Marks’s Campus Novels and Youth Culture in the 1920s
J. E. Smyth (Warwick) From Here to Eternity, Robert E. Lee Prewitt and James Jones’ One-Volume History of Interwar America

2. Violence against Mexican Americans
Chair: Arturo Rosales (Arizona St.)
William Carrigan (Rowan) The Law & Anti-Mexican-American Mob Violence in Texas 1848-1926
Nancy Gonzalez (Texas-El Paso) Violence and Unequal Justice against Mexicans in El Paso, Texas, 1880-1920
Clive Webb (Sussex) African-American Reaction to Mob Violence against Mexican -Americans

3. American Decades
Martin Halliwell (Leicester) The 1950s Beyond the Cold War
Duco van Oostrum (Sheffield) Sports & the Nation in the 1970s
Graham Thompson (Nottingham) The 1980s: Ronald Reagan’s America?

4. The Post-Post Modern
Chin-jau Chyan (Essex) Gender and Genre: Marcia Muller & Hardboiled Detective Fiction
Danielle Fuller (Birmingham) One Book, One Chicago: ReadingMatters
Jaroslav Kusnir (Presov) American Fiction after the Post-Modern: Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace

5. Recent and Contemporary American Poetics
Catherine Martin (Sussex) In the Analytic Hour that is Midnight: Susan Howe’s The Midnight
Nick Selby (Glasgow) ‘…and the professors’ wives licked popsicles’: Non-conformity, gender & the poetics of the body at Black Mountain
John Wrighton (Aberystwyth) Face-work: Bruce Andrews’ Poethical Praxis

6. American Indians : Memory and Healing (I)
Chair: Rebecca Tillett (East Anglia)
Native Studies Research Network, UK

7. Conservatives and Neo-conservatives
Lee Ruddin (University of Sheffield) There’s no ‘neo-con’ revolution, stupid! The myth of United States foreign policy, the Bush Administration and the international security corollary
George Tzogopoulos (Loughborough) Understanding neo-conservativism in the press of Britain, France, Germany and Italy

8. Civil Rights : Case Studies
Zoe Colley (Dundee) ‘We’ve Baptised Brother Wilkins’: The NAACP & Civil Rights Prisoners in the South, 1960-1965
Mark Newman (Edinburgh) The Tennessee Catholic Church & Desegregation, 1954-1971
Kevern Verney (Edge Hill) Long is the Way and Hard: The NAACP in Alabama, 1913-1915

11.00-11.30 Coffee K foyer

11.30-1.00 Session F

Panels

1. 19th c. Philadelphia looks Outside: Business and Morals
John Killick (Leeds) The Decline of Philadelphia ‘s Foreign Trade
George Conyne (Kent) Philadelphia Quakers & the Civil War

2. Europeans on Americans
Ioana Luca (Bucharest & Linacre, Oxford) Romanian Lands on American Reality: Andrei Codrescu’s Imaginary (M)Otherlands
Kathryn Nicol (Edinburgh) Cultural Appropriations and Cultural Hegemony: Contemporary Scottish Writing and Representations of American Culture

3. Colonial Governance and Ethnicity
Emily Blanck (Rowan) The Battle over Thomas Jeremiah: South Carolina Revolutionaries vs. the Royal Government
David Watson (Dundee) Proclamation? What Proclamation? The British Army, Colonial Governors and Native Americans after the Seven Years’ War

4. Blackness Across the Waters
Jennifer Lewis (Bath Spa) ‘Something out of Nothing’: The Inscription of Female Pleasure in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse
Heidi Slettedahl MacPherson (Central Lancashire) Transatlantic Blackness: (Self)Constructions of the Other in Neila Larson’s Quicksand

5. Realism and Imperialism
Lane Crothers (Illinois St.) Salsa, American Popular Culture and the Limits of Cultural Imperialism
Richard Lock-Pullan (Birmingham) Religion and Realism in US Security: The Legacy of Neibuhr?

6. American Indians: Memory and Healing (II)
Chair: Rebecca Tillett (East Anglia)
Native Studies Research Network, UK

7. Anglo-American Literature and Film
Vernon Williams (Abilene Christian) The Documentary Film & the Anglo-American Home Front in East Anglia, 1942-1945
Paul Woolf (Birmingham) The American Dream of English Aristocracy, from Sentimental Fiction to Reality Television: Susan Warner’s Queechy (1852) and the Women’s Entertainment Network’s American Princess (2005)

8. Looking at the Nixon Years
David Sarias (Sheffield) All the President’s Conservatives (1968-1974)
Will Kaufman (Central Lancashire) What Was So Funny in Nixon’s America? Vonnegut’s Jailbird and the limits of satire

1.00-2.00 Lunch Eliot Hall

2.00-3.30 British Association for American Studies Annual General Meeting KLT 1 Brabourne

3.30-4.00 Tea

4.00-5.30 Session G

Panels

1. Hate and Fear
Peter Knight (Manchester) Enemy Without, Enemy Within: Conspiracy Theories since 9/11
Christopher McKinlay (Glasgow) & John McKinlay (Abertay Dundee) The Duality of Hate & Patriotism: Hate Terrorism & the Politics of Identity in the American Radical Right

2. Constitutional Matters
Emma Long (Kent) ‘And What’s the Evil You See?’: School prayer before Engel and Schempp
Bill Merkel (Washburn) The New Contextual History of Marbury vs. Madison

3. Matters Post-Modern
Benjamin Bird (Leeds) The Capitalist Schizophrenic: The Postmodern Consciousness in Don DeLillo’s Libra
Polina Mackay (Independent Scholar) William Burroughs’ Women
Tessa Roynon (Warwick) The Story of Margaret Garnier: Toni Morrison’s Opera as Resistance or Submission

4. Race and Memory
John Moe (Ohio St.) Civil Liberties and Ordinary Racism: The Klan, Images of Prejudice and the Continuity of American Race Problems
Alan Rice (Central Lancashire) Making Visible the Formerly Invisible: Memorials in Britain & their Black Atlantic Resonances
John Smylie (Independent Scholar) Fire on the Bluff: Reporting and Memorials in Music of the Natchez fire of 1940

5. Mothers, Family and Work
Eveline Thevenard (Paris IV) The Family Policy Debate in the US: Toward Paid Leave?
Kirsten Swinth (Fordham) The ‘Problem’ of the Working Mother

6. Elastic Identities : Embodying Race, Place and Americanness
Kandice Chuh (Maryland) Bodies in Motion: The Circum-Pacific logic of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Fiction
Nicole King (California-San Diego) Malleable Plastic Surfaces: Corporeality and ‘Race’ in Caribbean/American Literature
Karen Shimakawa (NYU) On Walking & Stumbling: Inhabiting the ‘Chinese-American Body’

7. The U.S.-Mexican Border
Neil Campbell (Derby) Ruben Martinez and the ‘non-border’
Elizabeth Jacobs (Rothermere, Oxford) Mexican & Mexican-American Women on the Border
Martin Padget (Aberystwyth) Recent Representations of the Border

8. Topics in Urban Film Culture
Hamilton Carroll (University College Dublin) Detroit Confidential: 8 Mile & the Vicissitudes of Race & Class or the Epistemologies of Eninem’s Closet
Dennis Klein (Kean) Jews and Jersey: the Origins of the Motion Picture Industry
Brian Neve (Bath) Both Ends of the Telescope: Art Film, Psychology & Semi-documentary in Elia Kazan’s Independent Work on the American South

6.30-7.30 Journal of American Studies Lecture: Michael Bérubé (Penn State University) KLT 1 Brabourne

8.00 Dinner Eliot Hall

9.30 Disco Mungo’s, Eliot College

Sunday, 23 April

7.30-9.00 Breakfast Eliot Hall

Registration (all rates include the Conference fee):

Residential rates:

Residential Conference Fees

BAAS member standard room on campus £200.00
BAAS member en-suite room on campus £255.00
Non-BAAS member standard room on campus £240.00
Non-BAAS member en-suite room on campus £295.00
BAAS Postgraduate standard room on campus £100.00
BAAS Postgraduate en-suite room on campus £155.00
Non-BAAS Postgraduate standard room on campus £140.00
Non-BAAS Postgraduate en-suite room on campus £195.00.

Non Residential Fees

BAAS member – Full Conference £160.00
Non-BAAS member – Full Conference £200.00
BAAS Postgraduate – Full Conference £100.00
Non-BAAS Postgraduate – Full Conference £140.00
BAAS member – Day Delegate Fee £28.00
Non-BAAS member – Day Delegate Fee £40.00
BAAS Postgraduate – Day Delegate Fee £15.00
Non-BAAS Postgraduate – Day Delegate Fee £22.00

Dinner (Day Delegates only) £20.00
Late Payment Fee (for bookings received after 10th March 06) £20.00

Obituary: Stuart Stanley Kidd (1947-2005)

Stuart Kidd, rumpled, slightly hunched, gregarious, articulate, witty, generous, courteous (especially with women) — one of a kind. He had one particular defining characteristic announced by a glint in the eyes: he loved to debate and analyse, rigorously, provocatively and at times hilariously. A conversational evening with Stuart was no easy ride; it would be challenging but genial and thoroughly worthwhile.

Postgraduate work at Keele University on the New Deal yielded the valuable and lifelong influence of David Adams. The career of an academic historian now beckoned. In 1985 Stuart contributed an essay on collectivist intellectuals and national planning for Nothing Else to Fear: New Perspectives on America in the Thirties which Steve Baskerville and I edited. Three years later he wrote “Refining the New Deal “ for the Journal of American Studies, a major retrospective focus on the subject which I was grateful to draw upon when I taught his Thirties course at Reading in the 1990s during his sabbatical. He was then undertaking the research that would, in 2004, produce FSA Photography, the Rural South and the Dynamics of Image – Making 1935 – 1943, a monograph which David Nye pointed out allowed us to “see this famous collection anew” and helped us to understand “the South’s reluctant modernity ”.

Stuart’s congeniality was regularly in evidence at BAAS conferences but increasingly he came to value the professional opportunities (and friendships) afforded by EAAS meetings. He was a prime mover in the creation and cultivation of its Southern Studies group. To that project the brought the same enthusiasm he gave to visiting Las Vegas or Hilton Hotels or to the music that joyously flooded the air at Reading or Shaftesbury. He once took an interest in Johnny Cash so he just went out and bought all the CDs of the singer’s late period! To his son Daniel he described his taste as “sentimentalism and jaded idealism”. There was however no sentimentalism as he faced his final illness with steadfastness, mental toughness and humour. One of his last works was the essay, “Muhammad Ali: Southerner”.

Like a number of British historians of the USA he had his roots in the Midlands, the Potteries to be precise. But to sum up Stuart I have to turn to Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish and one of his definitions: mensh: someone of consequence, someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. As in, “Now, there is a real mensh!”

Ralph Willett
University of Hull

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

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

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.

Letters to the Editor

S.T.A.M.P. – Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project Lancaster

I have written about the Lancaster STAMP project in previous issues of the BAAS newsletter. I thought members might be interested to know that we have succeeded in raising a fantastic and intriguing memorial in the last few weeks.

Slave Trade Memorial Unveiled

Lancaster was the fourth largest slave port in Britain and around 200 voyages left the city in the eighteenth century. Between 1750 and 1790 alone Lancaster merchants were responsible for the forced transportation of approximately 25,000 Africans across the Atlantic and into slavery in the West Indies and the Southern States of America. The Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project (STAMP) was inaugurated in September 2002. The aim of the project is to make sure that future generations have local spaces where they can effectively remember those whose lives were blighted by the Slave Trade. This partnership between the City Council, Museums Service, County Education Service and the campaigning group Globalink with myself from University of Central Lancashire as academic advisor led to a grant from the Millennium Commission and from the Arts Council in the North-West as well as numerous small grants from local and county councils (total c. £60,000) for an art work on the quayside to commemorate the lives of those 24,000 and more slaves shipped on Lancaster slavers in the eighteenth century. The project has made links to continuing issues of global inequity and poverty by highlighting issues of Fair Trade/Slave Trade.

STAMP has worked with a number of artists, schools and community groups to increase public awareness of the slave trade and has developed a series of commemorative events and performances from 2003-2005 which culminated in a permanent memorial to the Africans who were transported on board Lancaster ships, which was unveiled in October 2005 on Columbus Day. With the city’s Litfest, we have distributed thousands of copies of Dorothea Smartt’s specially commissioned poem Lancaster Keys to schoolchildren in the County – each copy representing one of the enslaved taken in Lancaster ships. The public artist for the project Kevin Dalton-Johnson was appointed in early 2004. His previous powerful sculpted works have addressed issues of contemporary racism and black Atlantic history and his design for the monument continued in this vein. We were all very excited about having the first specifically designed permanent memorial artwork to enslaved Africans at a British quayside site. In fact we were granted permission to site the memorial in a prime spot with wonderful historical resonances on the quayside itself in the shadow of the recently completed Millennium Bridge. Dalton-Johnson describes the resonances of his sculpture thus: “The piece – because it’s not angst-ridden or exotic – has a serenity about it. I wanted to memorialise the slaves that were involved in the slave trade in a very positive way, almost like showing my respect to them, which is what a memorial can be. Hence the reason why you’ve got the very clean and clear acrylic blocks, because I really wanted it to be quite positive in that respect. I wanted it to be a beautiful piece to look at, as a way of showing my respect to the slaves. You could have had a black figure there, but to me that wouldn’t show the beauty of the people that lost their lives in the slave trade.”

The statue was unveiled on Columbus Day in the early evening. The American Embassy generously sponsored the visit of our special guest Professor Preston King whose exile from America had included over a decade in the Politics department at Lancaster University. The ceremony itself was a really exciting event with over 170 guests both local and from places as far afield as Nottingham and London. After words from the city mayor and the artist, our honoured guest, Preston King poured a libation on the statue and a small wicker boat, designed and made by Trevor Leat, was floated down the Lune with burning African herbs on board to commemorate the people taken from Africa by Lancaster ships. After the ceremony there was a reception in the Judges’ Lodgings with drumming by local schoolchildren and African food addressed by the Director of the Millennium Commission, the Council Leader Ian Barker and Preston King. The accompanying photographs show a dynamic new memorial. We hope you like it and are able to visit it soon.

For more information contact:
Dr. Alan Rice
Academic Consultant to STAMP, Dept. of Humanities
University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE arice@uclan.ac.uk

EAAS News

EAAS 2006 Conference

The EAAS conference in 2006 will take place in Nicosia, Cyprus from 7-10 April. Up to the minute information about registration and the full list of conference workshops, papers and parallel lectures is available on the EAAS website – at www.eaas.info There are some special offers for airfares from Cyprus Airways – details of which are on the website.

The EAAS newsletter No. 55 is also available on the web and lists numerous calls for papers at conferences across Europe as well as calls for contributors to various journals. Please be sure to visit the EAAS website for the most up-to-date information about American Studies in Europe.

To all EAAS members planning to attend the Nicosia Conference:

The bank account data given in the EAAS Newsletter (No. 55) for the payment of registration fees is not right. The number of the account to be used, which is in Euros, is the following:

Bank: Cyprus Popular Bank
Bank address: Hilton Area Branch, Number 64 Makarios Avenue, 1077 Nicosia, Cyprus
Account holder University of Cyprus
Account number 116-33-0020566
Swift code BIC:LIKICY2N
IBAN number CY40 0030 0116 0000 0116 3302 0566

EJAS Online

The test issue of the European Journal of American Studies is now on line at http://ejas.revues.org and can be consulted there. The search engine that accompanies it on the “revues.org” site where it is housed, however, will only function beginning tomorrow night. To all of you, who have made this adventure possible, my heartiest gratitude. I truly believe it opens a new era in the work of our association and dearly hope all of our members will find in EJAS a good opportunity to publish their very best research work. Please spread the word, within EAAS and outside, and encourage everyone to participate in the success of our Journal: it aims at being every European Americanist’s home. All details concerning participation and submissions can be found on the site. Soon, a contact address for the journal will appear on the site. For the moment, mine will serve. This issue, such as it is, was prepared hastily, in order to take advantage of a wonderful opportunity, and is of course not without its defects and shortcomings. It was considered necessary to have something to start from and the contents of this issue are as general as we could make them at short notice. They constitute in no way a definition of the Journal’s ulterior editorial policies and orientations. At the Board Meeting of the Cyprus Conference, in April 2006, the editorial committee will be constituted and elected. It will meet soon after and begin shaping the work to be published in 2007.
To one and all, a happy New Year with EJAS !

Marc CHENETIER
Université Paris 7-Denis Diderot
Institut Universitaire de France
President, European Association for American Studies
30 rue Pouchet
75017-Paris
Tel/fax : 33 (0)1 48 56 15 54
e-mail : chenetier@eaas.info

A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature

By Martha Brogan with the assistance of Daphnée Rentfrow
September 2005

This summary was written by Kathlin Smith

Technology is transforming scholarship, and while technology’s impact has been less extensive in the humanities than in the sciences, recent years have seen a blossoming of innovation by digital humanists. In A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature, the author describes achievements in digital American literature and explores priorities and concerns of digital practitioners in the field. The publication is based on a preliminary report prepared for The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2004.

Most of the report—more than 100 pages—is devoted to an extensive review of digital resources and projects in American literature. They are organized into six categories: quality-controlled subject gateways, author studies, e-book collections and alternative publishing models, reference resources and full-text collections, collections built around a particular area of interest, and teaching applications.

In a section that precedes the resource descriptions, Brogan summarizes the findings of her interviews with more than 40 scholars, librarians, and practitioners to learn how well digital resources serve scholars of American literature and what is most needed to advance digital scholarship. The interviewees, while acknowledging the wealth of recent innovation, expressed a range of observations and concerns about how the field is responding to the emergence of digital scholarship.

Resistance to change: Humanities scholars have tended to resist change in how they do their work and to view digital media as peripheral to their scholarship, said a prominent humanist. He credits visionary librarians, professional societies, and their supporters in the philanthropic world with leading the transformation of the study of literature.

Need for organizational leadership: Many interviewees felt that scholarly and professional organizations in American literature have not exerted strong enough leadership in bringing digital scholarship into the discipline. Brogan examines what three important scholarly associations for American literature—the Modern Language Association of America (MLA), the American Studies Association, and the American Literature Association—have done to advance digital scholarship in the field.

Lack of common agenda: The field of American literature is fragmented and uncoordinated, said interviewees. There is a critical need for scholars, practitioners, publishers, and funding agencies to agree on priorities, standards, best practices, and a strategic plan. The Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES) project, which is creating “a publishing environment for integrated, peer-reviewed online scholarship,” is cited as a model for such a community of practice for scholars in nineteenth-century British and American literature.

Paucity of tools: Most humanists find it hard to articulate what tools they need beyond information filtering and navigational devices. Several notable projects are, however, available or under development. Among them are the NINES tools, the NORA project, the NITLE Semantic Engine, and DLF Aquifer. When fully realized, these tools are expected to support mainstream scholarly work.

Insufficient peer-review process: Faculty members expressed a range of opinions about the impact of digital scholarship on the promotion-and-tenure process in the humanities. Many forms of digital scholarship appear without peer review but some, including articles in leading journals indexed by MLA’s international bibliography, are now peer reviewed, and other formal peer-review mechanisms are starting to emerge.

Concern about preservation: The ephemeral nature of digital products is a concern of many scholars and scholarly publishers. The report describes three initiatives related to American literature that are addressing this concern. The Electronic Literature Organization’s Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination Project is educating digital scholars about what they can do at the point of creation to help ensure that their work remains viable. The University of Virginia Library’s Model for Sustaining Digital Scholarship is developing an institutional framework to support a full array of digital scholarship services. Services provided by digital object repositories and the DLF Registry of Digital Masters are critical to ensuring that digital scholarship remains accessible and fit for long-term use.

Rights restrictions: Several interviewees identified copyright as the biggest obstacle to advancing digital scholarship in American literature. Twentieth-century American literature is largely off-limits for digital projects because of copyright restrictions. It is often complicated to obtain permission to use literary manuscripts of any period for print, let alone digital, publications. Finally, it can be difficult to obtain permission to access or reuse original digital source files. Brogan cites the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) led by the University of Michigan as “the only wide-scale initiative aimed at releasing digital master files from proprietary control to unfettered use by its members.”

Need for sustainable business models: Interviewees expressed concern about the expense of large-scale digital efforts. “Publishers and librarians alike look to models such as the TCP as the only economically viable way to produce high-quality, thoroughly edited and encoded text. Even this public-private cooperative, which hinges on purchasing the corpora first, is beyond the reach of many academic libraries,” Brogan writes. Scholars worry that this could create new classes of information haves and have-nots.

Dearth of specialists: The field needs more specialists who combine disciplinary expertise with knowledge of new technologies. “Increasingly, all humanists will need a basic understanding of how technical decisions inform the presentation and longevity of digital content,” Brogan writes. She cites a few programs designed to meet these needs.

The digital pioneers in American literature are asking questions about how the new technology is affecting analysis itself, rather than focusing only on its scope, speed, or convenience. What are the new genres and forms of publication appropriate to the digital age? Brogan concludes, “In their efforts to answer tough questions, these seasoned digital leaders are substantiating the ways in which new media are transforming the study of literature.”

More About this Report

A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature
Martha L. Brogan with the assistance of Daphnée Rentfrow.
September 2005. ISBN 1-932326-17-0. 176 pages.

Co-published with Digital Library Federation. Report text is available free at http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub132abst.html or at http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/brogan0505. Print copies can be ordered at the first URL for $30 per copy plus shipping.

ESRC Society Celebrates Six Month Success for Online Research Resource

A major online project designed to encourage wider access to funded social and economic research has attracted almost a quarter of a million unique visitors in its first six months of life.

WWW.ESRCSOCIETYTODAY.AC.UK – launched in May 2005 by the Economic & Social Research Council – provides academics, students and researchers with a valuable, free digest of social sciences research available, planned and in progress.

Covering funded research on everything from crime, ageing and social exclusion to education, finance and environmental policy, the website also cross-searches material from a range of other national and international sites including the Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG), the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and the UK Data Archive.

Crucially, material is presented in a number of different formats – ranging from brief news stories and plain-English summaries, to full research papers and datasets for those who need them. An expanding series of Facts and Figures sheets are also on offer, which give top-line statistics and bullet-point information on a range of key topics and incorporate helpful charts, tables and downloadable presentation slides.

ESRC Society Today editor, Cormac Connolly, says: “The real benefit for academic users is the website’s powerful Autonomy search and personalisation features, which can be accessed by registering on the site.

“Autonomy familiarises itself with your interests, requirements – and even behaviour – allowing you to save your favourite searches and run them again at the press of a button. Registration also means that you can specify particular topics to be alerted to by email as soon as relevant new content is available.

“Work on ESRC Society Today is continuous and we are adding new content to the site and refining usability on a daily basis. Our aim is that ESRC Society Today will become the first port of call for all academics looking for the latest social and economic research,” says Connolly.

For further information visit www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk
http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk or contact Cormac Connolly at the ESRC on
01793 413 079

November 2005
Issued on behalf of the Economic and Social Research Council by Harrison Cowley.

‘America Actually’: Report of the 50th Anniversary Postgraduate Conference

University of Sheffield, 19th November 2005

The 2005 BAAS Postgraduate Conference was enormously popular, attracting over 72 delegates, including 60 postgraduate students. As always, the conference succeeded in providing a supportive and informal environment within which young academics could present their work.

The conference provided a forum for some interesting research within American Studies. Scholars attended from across the UK, but also from Switzerland, Romania, Florida, New York, and Chicago. This ensured variety not just in academic discipline, but also in attitudes and opinion. Dr Graham Thompson (University of Nottingham) offered a stimulating and well-received plenary examining the current state of American Studies in the UK. The panel sessions sparked some intense debate around many issues, including international foreign policy, race, Hurricane Katrina, and Iraq. Papers ranged from an exploration of hypertext fiction to a discussion of Eminem’s lyrics and phenomenological conventions in the work of Paul Auster.

The aim of the conference was to provide a stimulating and welcoming environment for postgraduates to present their research and receive helpful feedback, and the lively discussions after each panel were a highlight of the day, often continuing into coffee breaks. The workshop on developing and using WebCT software in the classroom, led by Dr Bob McKay (University of Sheffield), allowed delegates to explore new pedagogical methods for teaching American Studies. The publishing workshop was led by Dr Holly Farrington (Open University), Dr Hugh Wilford (University of Sheffield) and Dr Shirley Foster (University of Sheffield) and offered practical advice to postgraduates on the politics of publication, editing, writing reviews and negotiating book contracts. Throughout the day, Dr Liz Rosen, editor of US Studies Online, was also available to answer questions about submitting articles for publication.

The organisers would like to thank the British Association for American Studies and the US Embassy in London for their financial support, and continuing encouragement of UK postgraduate work in American Studies.

Anne-Marie Evans and Elizabeth Boyle,
University of Sheffield

Travel Award Reports

James Burton, University of Nottingham

I would like to express my sincere thanks to British Association of American Studies for awarding me a 2005 Short-Term Travel Award. The award made possible a research visit to The Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, which is supported through the Academy Foundation (the educational and cultural arm of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences). My thesis examines cinematic representations of the Vietnam War era (1963-1975) produced during the period of the ‘hot’ Culture Wars (1987-1995) in the context of a fluid and negotiated cultural memory. I argue that the consumption of popular films becomes part of a vast intertextual mosaic of remembering and forgetting that is constantly redefining, and re-imagining, the past. Therefore, essential to the support of my thesis is an examination of the ways in which promotional materials produced by the studios were used to market the films, as is evidence of the films’ reception in American popular media.

The materials held by The Margaret Herrick Library proved invaluable. Climbing the Kirk Douglas staircase to the Cecil B. DeMille reading room, I entered one of the world’s most extensive and comprehensive research collections on motion pictures. Visiting the library in person was essential because its collections are not available online or through inter-library loan. As well as being able to peruse extensive files of magazine and newspaper clippings – articles which are usually difficult to access because the period on which I focus falls before the online archives of many publications begin – I was able to access unpublished production information, including several files of unapproved, and therefore unpublished, press notes that shed a telling light on the artistic ambitions of the filmmakers and the commercial aims of the studios.

The library was staffed by extremely professional librarians who shared their intricate knowledge of the Library’s holdings and the idiosyncrasies of its filing systems. The library’s twenty-copy-a-day limit proved to be the only frustration of my research experience. An additional benefit of my visit was the chance to converse with the many different scholars researching at the Library at the time, several of whom I’d met previously at conferences and who made diverting lunch companions.

This extended visit also provided me with the opportunity to investigate the culture of Los Angeles, something that I’d always reflexively considered a contradiction in terms. Highlights included a superb Basquiat retrospective at the MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), two outstanding exhibitions – the mind-bending installations of Tim Hawkinson and a survey of the work of the influential photographer André Kertész – at the LACMA (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art), as well as a rare opportunity to see Richard Lester’s 1968 masterpiece Petulia at the American Cinematheque introduced by the film’s producer. A further, if logistically convoluted and lengthy, side trip enabled me to visit the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, CA. This proved especially interesting since the Library was at the centre of a concerted campaign against the representation of the former President in Oliver Stone’s 1995 film. The ‘official’ version of Nixon’s life as presented by the Library provided excellent material for my examination of the contrived controversy that surrounded the release of Nixon which forms a central part of the final chapter of my thesis.

I would once again like to thank BAAS for providing me with this excellent research opportunity. I have returned invigorated and feel that the research that I have carried out has influenced and shaped my work to an unexpected extent. The materials gathered have provided the solidifying glue for my thesis and I am looking forward to putting them to the fullest possible use.

Patrick Flack, St Catharine’s College, Cambridge

In the early summer of 2005 I made a research trip to Detroit, Michigan. This was done as part of my PhD thesis on race relations in Detroit in the early inter-war period, and I am extremely grateful to BAAS for the Short-Term Travel Award that supported my trip.

Naturally, the bulk of my time was spent working through the archives and in particular in the very pleasant reading room of the Burton Historical Collection in the Detroit Public Library. The Burton Collection contains both the papers of Detroit’s mayors, and a number of sociological studies made about the city’s African-American community during the 1920s, each of which proved to be very fruitful resources. In particular they show that reactions to African-Americans were far from uniform across the city – an African-American family moving into the neighbourhood, for example, could cause a small-scale riot in one district but have few obvious effects elsewhere. I hope to use a significant portion of my PhD to explain these differing responses.

Apart from the Burton Collection, I spent some time in a number of other archives and libraries, including the Purdy-Kresge Library of Wayne State University, the Walter P. Reuther Library, the Archives of the Archdiocese of Detroit, and the Bentley Historical Collection at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I am indebted to all of the help I received from the librarians and archivists in these collections.

As well as my research, another important aspect of my time in Detroit was the opportunity to experience the city itself first-hand. Although I was, of course, conscious of the problems that the city faced – and, in particular, the level of de facto segregation – I was nonetheless struck by seeing it up close. In particular, my daily commute into the city centre took me across the boundary between the Detroit itself and the suburbs, and the transformation from poverty to affluence over the space of one block was remarkable. Moreover, the contrast between the dilapidation of much of the city centre and the ‘Dynamic Detroit’ that I was studying was very pronounced, and encouraged me to ask whether the seeds of today’s problems can be found in the inter-war period, or whether there were untaken opportunities for the city to develop differently.

However, the physical state of the city was not a reflection on its inhabitants, who were uniformly friendly, pleasant and helpful to a fault. From the staff at libraries and archives, who went out of their way to answer my queries, to my landlords, who were helpful beyond the call of duty, I was discovered friendly faces at every turn. During my stay I was invited to attend the annual meeting and dinner of the Boston-Edison Association. As well as being an extremely pleasant evening, this was an interesting experience for two reasons. Firstly it was fascinating to see how the phenomenon of the neighbourhood association – which in the 1920s had been the foundation stone of residential segregation – was now a progressive force for integration. The attendance was both interracial and genuinely committed to improving their district. Furthermore, the guest speaker was Ella M. Bully-Cummings, the current Detroit Chief of Police, and the first woman to hold that position. She gave a very interesting insight into the state of crime prevention in what is still one of America’s most dangerous cities, as well as some cause for optimism that things may be changing for the better.

To conclude, therefore, my time in Detroit was a great success, providing me with substantial amount of source material for my PhD, giving me an insight into the workings of modern Detroit, and giving me a chance to meet a wide variety of people. I am extremely grateful to BAAS for the support they provided for this visit.

Catherine McGowan, University of Edinburgh

As the fortunate recipient of the Peter Parish BAAS Short-Term Travel Grant I was able to spend three weeks in the United States in October and November 2005 conducting research into the American Convent Narrative between 1830 and 1860.

My thesis will examine representations of convents in the United States before the Civil War, and will pay particular attention to first-person accounts of convent life, whether avowedly fictional or purportedly real. The convent tale was a staple of anti-Catholic rhetoric, an opportunity to disseminate nativist rhetoric in the more palatable guise of a true-life confession or a thrilling tale. While the narratives published under the names of Maria Monk (Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery, 1836) and Rebecca Reed (Six Months in a Convent, 1835) are the most famous and most studied of the narratives, there are many other examples, in a variety of genres, which testify to the extraordinary hold the imagery of the captive nun and the convent had on the public imagination. The purpose of my trip was to study the very many of these texts which are not available in the UK.

The first week of my trip was spent in Washington DC. My first stop was Georgetown University, which has a very useful collection of materials relating to mid-nineteenth century nativism. I spent the rest of the week at the Library of Congress. Most of the texts I wished to consult at the Library were extremely rare and fragile – many were pamphlets and broadsides of the kind that sold well but were not often carefully preserved. I therefore had the pleasure of working in the Rare Books and Special Collections reading room, where I was often the only visitor and, as a result, was extremely well looked after.

I spent the second week of my trip in Boston where the weather was less clement; but I still warmly welcomed. I was able to visit several libraries in order to locate rare texts – the Boston Public Library, Boston College, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Andover-Harvard Theological Seminary Library, and the Massachusetts Historical Society Library. It was a whistle stop tour but well worth it as I was able to finally consult works I first heard of six years ago while researching for my Masters degree!

While in Boston I took the opportunity to visit Bunker Hill, the site of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, which was burned by an enraged mob in 1834 following the circulation of rumours (without foundation) suggesting that the nuns were imprisoned and ill-treated. This was the convent described by Rebecca Reed in her narrative and it was fascinating to be in the place where these events occurred.

My final week was spent in New York and I worked in the New York Public Library, Columbia University and the New-York Historical Society, where I spent more time with pamphlets, broadsheets and newspapers of the period.

The librarians I met with were all extremely helpful and I was made very welcome. My visit to the US was a wonderful experience and I have made great progress in my research. I look forward to visiting again as soon as possible. The opportunity to travel there was particularly welcome as I am studying part-time while working full-time. I have returned with many new ideas and renewed energy for my project. I would like to thank my employer, Chest, Heart and Stroke Scotland, for enabling me to take time off.

The financial support of the BAAS made my trip possible and I am very grateful for the assistance I have received.

Yvonne Ryan, University of East Anglia

Receiving this year’s John D Lees award from BAAS was very much appreciated not least because of the validation it bestowed on my choice of thesis subject, the leadership of Roy Wilkins, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), America’s oldest and biggest civil rights organization. Although Wilkins led the organisation for almost 25 years, my thesis focuses particularly on the years between 1955, when Wilkins became head of the Association, and 1968, by which time the civil rights coalition had disintegrated.

My plan was to spend the bulk of my time poring over the files containing the NAACP papers and the Roy Wilkins papers at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, then spend a few days looking through the Walter and Poppy White papers at Yale University. However, given the scope of the papers available in Washington, I revised my plan to spend more time there exploring the fruits of the NAACP’s extraordinary bureaucracy.

Because of his position, Wilkins features in most examinations of the civil rights movement but any reference to the NAACP leader is invariably in the context of other civil rights leaders or events. In my research at the Library of Congress, I paid particular attention to the response of Wilkins and the NAACP to the challenges posed by the rise of non-violent direct action, in the hope that my thesis can offer a reassessment of a man whose role in the movement has been largely neglected. Wilkins’ navigation of the complex internal politics within the NAACP’s head office, the often tense relationship between the NAACP and the LDF, and between head office and its local branches, the wary alliances between Wilkins and the other civil rights leaders, and Wilkins’ increasingly important rapport with the White House were also particularly important areas of focus my research. I also found the material relating to the alignment (or otherwise) of the civil rights and anti-war movements, Vietnam, and the rise of Black Power to be a particularly interesting avenue of research.

Thanks to an unexpected detour to New York, I was able to spend more time on studying this period while looking through the archives at the Museum of Television and Radio in Manhattan. As the rise of the civil rights movement coincided neatly with the proliferation of television and the news media, which at least during the early years of the movement, helped in raising awareness of the violence and intimidation black Americans faced on a daily basis. Although the museum did not possess a great deal of material available on Wilkins, I was able to watch some documentaries and panel discussions that Wilkins participated in, which was helpful in building up an impression of a man who is still an elusive character.

Without the help of BAAS and their generous travel award, I would not have been able to take this time to exploring the Library of Congress archives and I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude for their help. I would also like to thank my supervisor Professor Adam Fairclough who has been endlessly patient and encouraging.

David Watson, University of Dundee

BAAS was generous enough to give me a grant of £500 to travel for research in America. The research is for my PhD dissertation, which is on the subject of relations between Native Americans and British soldiers in the period after the Seven Years War. With this money I was able to afford a return plane ticket to American, where during over the summer I was able to visit three separate archives, all of which contain many documents concerning the period unavailable in Britain. First I went to Ann Arbor to study the Gage papers at the Williams Clements Library. Gage was the Commander in Chief from 1765 to 1774, and his letter books contain a lot of information of the attitudes and actions of troops concerning Native Americans. One of the startling things that I discovered while researching at the Clements, was that in attempting to keep the peace on the frontier one of the main obstacles for Gage was not racism within the army but a lack of co-operation from civil authorities. Indeed Gage grew so frustrated with the attitude of those who were meant to be assisting him that he advocated, but did not order, the killing of those who had murdered Native Americans without trial, as he knew such trials were unlikely to ever produce a guilty verdict. In the Gage papers I also found a list of all the army officers who had served as commanders at the frontier posts, which will be invaluable in further research.

After this I traveled to the David Library in Pennsylvania where I stayed for a month examining various records – in particular those of colonial governors, British officers and a large collection of documents concerning Native American diplomacy.

Finally I traveled to Philadelphia to the History Society of Pennsylvania, which houses many documents concerning the colonial frontier just prior to the revolution. There I looked at the letters of George Croghan, Indian trader and William Johnson’s deputy and also letters of various other Indian traders. These letters revealed the completely corrupt nature of some British frontier commanders, in particular the officer in charge at Fort Chartres, who used the isolation of the post to make himself de-facto ruler of the area and it’s inhabitants. I am extremely grateful for to the BAAS for making it possible for me to spend the summer conducting research in America.

The Future of Interdisciplinary Area Studies

Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, University of Oxford, 6-7 December 2005

A conference on the future of area studies is very timely, particularly in the lead up to the RAE where American Studies is positioned in sub-panel 47 with other Anglophone area studies. The recent conference organised by Roger Goodman from the Institute of Japanese Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford, sponsored by the AHRC and ESRC, took a broad look at the historical emergence and future possibilities of a variety of area studies disciplines, their interrelationship, and links between research, training, social policy and public groups. With speakers representing different areas – from Middle Eastern Studies and South Asian Studies to Chinese Studies and Latin American Studies – much of the conference focused on issues relating to advanced language proficiency and interdisciplinary research in non-Anglophone cultures, pressing issues also raised at the Midwest Modern Language Convention in Milwaukee in November. Given this emphasis, although many of the sessions related tangentially to North American Studies, the American Studies community had a fairly marginal presence at the conference.

The only academic speaker from the UK American Studies community was James Dunkerley, Director of the Institute of the Study of Americas at the University of London, with five other representatives from Oxford, Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham, and the Eccles Centre, totalling around 8% of the delegates. Where American Studies stands apart from other area studies disciplines is in relation to recruitment, with the estimate that there are 27 single honours programmes in American Studies amongst 40 UK providers of the subject at undergraduate level, outweighing all other disciplines represented at the conference. Dunkerley spoke about the plurality of undergraduate experiences of studying American Studies in the UK, with some institutions emphasizing alignments with other national traditions (Canada), non-Anglophone areas (Latin America), and the impact of the US on other global cultures. He focused particularly on the way in which recent journals, such as the Journal of Transatlantic Studies (Edinburgh University Press, launched in 2003) and the Journal of Intercultural Communication Research (Routledge, to be launched in 2006), suggest that the American Studies community is regenerating itself from within, with new formulations beyond the nation state model, and with many young postgraduates finding academic jobs in the field or within related disciplines.

Other speakers of note included David Ludden from the University of Pennsylvania and John Coatsworth from Harvard University, who spoke about the rise of area studies from a US perspective. Ludden linked the historic development of area studies during the cold war to US foreign policy and the ways in which future paradigms for area studies seem wedded to government strategies for filling in knowledge gaps about potentially influential and/or volatile cultures. Coatsworth focused on the generation gap of area studies scholars in the US, brought about by lack of support during the Nixon administration in the 1970s, a federal funding stream which was not to be re-established until the 1990s. The prominence of centres and institutes in US research universities suggest that area studies groups have been developing in the interstices of departments for some time, such as the Center for International Development at Harvard University, the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University, and the Center for Critical Theory and Transnational Studies at the University of Oregon.

A talk from Colin Bundy, Director of SOAS, raised some important theoretical questions that impact directly on American Studies. Among the issues Bundy raised are three in particular: first, the manner in which multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary studies often get confused or elided without a clear intellectual or pedagogic reason for using specific terms; second, the way in which area studies are often hostage to changing national priorities, with many governments having an instrumental approach to investment in particular areas and languages, going through 10 to 15 year cycles of feast and famine; and, third, the difficulty of finding a middle ground for area studies between, on the one hand, the celebration of diverse intellectual energies and, on the other, the tacit sense that the concept of area studies might have outlived its use.

More practical sessions included a report on the Demographic Review of the Social Sciences carried out by David Mills from Birmingham (sponsored by the ESRC and soon to be released) focusing on ‘rendezvous disciplines’ such as criminology, business studies and area studies. The indications from this report are that the age profile of the American Studies community contains a greater proportion of younger academics than other areas. An informative presentation by John Canning from the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies at Southampton (www.llas.ac.uk) outlined on-line teaching resources and future projects sponsored by the Subject Centre. There were also talks from AHRC and ESRC representatives about funding opportunities and an interesting session from such user groups as Oxfam, Financial Times, and Rolls Royce. The consensus of this session was that if a user group requires specialist knowledge they would go, where possible, to the country of origin. Telephoning Washington is obviously much easier than extracting detailed information from Beijing, Kabul or Pyongyang, which puts a premium on certain area specialisms, but rather sidelines the UK American Studies community when it comes to offering a public service.

On a more positive note, the Americanist delegates at the conference felt that American Studies in the UK is ahead of other area groups in many respects: it has a strong national organisation, has a successful track record of raising trans-disciplinary research funding (such as the recent Three Cities project at Nottingham and the current Beyond the Book project at Birmingham), and has long been premised on interdisciplinary practice.

Martin Halliwell,
Centre for American Studies, University of Leicester

Conference and Seminar Announcements

2006 American Indian Workshop

Place in Native American History, Literature and Culture
American Studies Department
School of Humanities
Swansea University
29-31 March, 2006

The latest research on the interrelationships between place and Native American history, literature and culture will be presented at the 2006 American Indian Workshop. Paper presentations and plenary sessions fill the three-day agenda. A buffet and performance of Welsh Oral Tradition from The Merlin Theatre Company is scheduled for the evening of the 29th March as well as a conference dinner at The Mermaid Restaurant, Mumbles for the evening of 30th March (the costs of these events are included within the conference fee).

Attendees are invited from across disciplines. It is envisaged that the conference theme will bring together research from American Studies, American history, geography, sociology, anthropology and English Literature. Researchers working in Native community development and within the museum communities are also welcome.

Keynote speakers include Alan Trachtenberg (Yale University), Deborah Madsen (University of Geneva), Bruce Johansen (University of Nebraska) and David Murray (University of Nottingham). Performance of Welsh Oral Tradition from the Merlin Theatre Company. Optional delegate’s 3-hour round trip to the Gower Peninsula including Worm’s Head and Rhossilli beach [the UK’s first designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty].

Please register by 20th February 2006
Please send or email your completed registration form to:

Anne Edwards
Email: a.edwards@swan.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1792 295755
School of Humanities,
Swansea University,
4th Floor,
Vivian Building,
Singleton Park,
Swansea
SA2 8PP

American Modernism: Cultural Transactions

22-23 September 2006, Institute for Historical and Cultural Research, Oxford Brookes University

American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (22-23 September 2006) is a two-day event where a number of professorial speakers from the U.K. and a plenary U.S.-based speaker will discuss the manifestations and perimeters of modern American literary and popular culture. The event aims to assess the impact and the magnitude of transatlantic influences, address questions pertaining to the rise and domicile of the literary avant-garde and examine issues surrounding race, gender and sexuality in the period. In short, it aims to assess the U.S.’s current place in the global landscape in light of its modernist cultural transactions

American Modernism: Cultural Transactions was conceived under the IHCR’s focus group in the Cultures of Modernism. The conference aims to bring together scholars of international standing to engage in a series of dialogues that address the cogency of the term with specific emphasis upon their own research. Invited speakers (tbc) include: Professor Hermione Lee (Oxford), Professor Janet Beer (Manchester Metropolitan), Dr Paul Giles (Oxford), Professor Martin Halliwell (Leicester), Professor Mick Gidley (Leeds), Professor Steven Mattthews (Oxford Brookes), Dr Mark Whalan (Exeter), Professor Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway) and Professor Ron Bush (Oxford). Each dialogue will last for one hour (including questions) and the conference will commence with a plenary discussion of the difficulties inherent in the term ‘American Modernism’ by confirmed speaker Professor Cassandra Laity (Drew), co-editor of the journal Modernism/modernity.

The first afternoon of the conference will be dedicated entirely to postgraduate research and work in the field of American Modernism. There will be a publishing workshop, a talk on funding opportunities for postgraduate researchers and a series of research-focused panel discussions. Thus, the organisers would welcome paper abstracts (300 words) and short biographical details listing name, contact address, e-mail and institutional affiliation. Please send abstracts to Dr Catherine Morley catherinemorley@brookes.ac.uk or Dr Alex Goody agoody@brookes.ac.uk

The conference is open to all BAAS members and the general public. Please contact the organisers at the above e-mail address for registration.
Conference Fee: £30 (waged) and £15 (unwaged/PG).

Faulkner and Twain

A Conference Sponsored by the Center for Faulkner Studies
Southeast Missouri State University
Cape Girardeau, Missouri
October 19-21, 2006
Deadline for proposals: April 30, 2006

This “Faulkner and Twain” conference invites proposals for twenty-minute papers on any topic related to Faulkner and/or Twain. All critical approaches, including theoretical and pedagogical, are welcomed, as well as papers on special collections of Twain and Faulkner. We are particularly interested in inter-textual approaches and papers treating such topics as the river, the frontier, humor, race, and history. Proposals for organized panels are also encouraged.

In addition to the paper sessions, the conference will include a keynote address by a noted scholar, a dramatic presentation based on the works of Faulkner and Twain, exhibits from the university’s Faulkner and Twain collections, and an historic tour of the local area.

Expanded versions of papers dealing with both authors will be considered for possible publication in a collection of essays. Southeast Missouri State University Press has expressed an interest in such a collection.

E-mail a 250-word abstract by April 30, 2006, to:
cfs@semo.edu

Inquiries should be directed to Robert Hamblin at rhamblin@semo.edu
or Peter Froehlich at pfroehlich@semo.edu

Inaugural International Seminar: Engaging the “New” American Studies

Department of American and Canadian Studies and the Centre for US Foreign Policy, Media, and Culture
The University of Birmingham
Thursday 11 May, Friday 12 May and Saturday 13 May 2006

The first in a series of annual international seminars, this is designed to bring together leading scholars and top postgraduates from around the world to discuss “America” in historical and contemporary contexts.

This event will be linked to a “partner” International Seminar at the University of Southern California, being held this year in April 2006.

Plenary guest speakers (tbc): John Carlos Rowe (Director Critical Theory Institute, University of Southern California); Jane Desmond (Director, Institute for United States Studies, University of Iowa); Sheila Hones (University of Tokyo); et alia.

Day One links American Studies with issues of history, politics, international relations and globalization. It will focus on the topic “US Hyper-Power?”

Day Two and Day Three will explore the topic “Engaging American Studies” organised around two main strands — a Politics/International Relations strand and a Cultural Studies/History/Literary-Textual strand. The central focus is provided by papers engaging with the issue of how the “new” American Studies impacts on the fields of enquiry being explored. However, papers on a very broad range of topics will be countenanced.

The UK Government has awarded us some extra funding this year to run this inaugural event, and we expect partners, scholars, and postgraduates to participate from North America, Europe, the Middle East, China, and Japan.

We warmly invite you to come to this event, either to deliver a paper or just to participate.

A SELECTION OF THE BEST PAPERS WILL BE PUBLISHED IN THE ON-LINE
E-JOURNAL 49th PARALLEL: http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/

Costs for graduate students would normally be £8.00 per day (which includes registration, coffee, tea (and other light refreshments) and a buffet lunch. Alternatively students can enroll for all three days for £19.

Payment on the day (late registration): £10 per day or £25 for three days.

For accommodation contact Sara Wood: s.k.wood@bham.ac.uk

REGISTRATION PROCEDURE: email Sara Wood s.k.wood@bham.ac.uk
detailing:

1. Full name
2. Contact Address
3. Contact email
4. Payment in advance: £8.00 per day or £19 for three days.
(Payment on the day (late registration): £10 per day or £25 for three days).

Email Sara Wood s.k.wood@bham.ac.uk to request a payment form.

PROPOSAL FOR A PAPER: email Eva Rus exr320@bham.ac.uk

1. Full name
2. Contact Address
3. Contact email
4. Institutional Affiliation
5. Proposal: 400 word proposals outlining the paper you propose to deliver. Each paper will be scheduled for 15 minutes.

This cfp lasts until Friday 24 March 2006.

Institute of North American Studies

The Department of North American Studies, part of the larger Institute of North American and European Studies, is hoping to create links with other universities with American Studies programs

The Department of North American Studies, part of the larger Institute of North American and European Studies, was founded in January 2005. The Department brings together a diverse collection of professors and lecturers from a wide variety of disciplines within the University of Tehran. This multi-disciplinary approach encompasses History, Literature, Politics, Economics, and Cultural Studies to produce innovative research and analysis and to provide students with a broad base of knowledge and skills for their future careers.

The Department of North American Studies has established a fruitful partnership with
the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham,
United Kingdom, and we are hoping to create links with other universities with American Studies programs. As the department is the first of its kind in the country, we are hoping that sister programs within the American Studies Association might be able to assist us by sending audio and video material as well as books on American literature (including literary texts), history, culture, politics, and Philosophy.

Seyed Mohammad Marandi
Head of the North American Studies Department
University of Tehran
mmarandi@ut.ac.ir
Tel: 0098-21-66965065
Fax: 0098-21-66965066
P.O. Box: 14155-6468
Web site: inaes.ut.ac.irinaes.ir

This message is posted on behalf of on behalf of the American Studies Association’s
International Initiative. For further information contact, the International Initiative Project Director, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, sfishkin@stanford.edu
or the Project Coordinator, Kate.Delaney@covad.net

Rethinking the Iberian Atlantic

20-22 April 2006
University of Liverpool

The Atlantic has, since the 1990s, become established as the principal site of cross-cultural encounter between Europe, Africa, and America. Reflecting the increasing awareness of the ‘world as a whole’, recent research into multiple different ‘Atlantics’ tests the boundaries of established national and disciplinary research frames. Studies of the many separate ‘Atlantics’, however, do not easily communicate with one another. Their dialogue is one that is riddled with problems, yet at the same time promises exciting prospects for future research. We would like to reflect on and facilitate this dialogue, inviting scholars to take a long and deep view of the Atlantic, and, in doing so, to consider whether and how the Atlantic paradigm remains relevant in the 21st century.

Rethinking the Iberian Atlantic is the first in a series of colloquia and research seminars that offer the opportunity to explore the common ground shared by different and diverse approaches to the historical and cultural study of the Atlantic. Our starting point is the question of whether we can – or should – talk about an ‘Iberian Atlantic.’ How might such a space be located within the widening framework of Atlantic Studies, and what might it mean to scholars from different disciplines and traditions working on Iberian Studies in the widest sense? How might research into specific Iberian experiences of the Atlantic – whether cultural, historical, political, social or economic – contribute to, confirm, or challenge the hegemonic narratives of Atlantic Studies, from which the Iberian perspective is so often absent? By considering such questions, and encouraging contributors to identify the unresolved problems that obstruct the dialogue between the many approaches and research narratives that fill the Atlantic space, we hope to facilitate the identification and definition of future agendas for research.

Speakers include: Catherine Davies (Nottingham University), Roberto Ignacio Diaz
(University of Southern California), Felipe Fernandez – Armesto (Tufts), Eliga Gould
(University of New Hampshire), Alistair Hennessey (University of Warwick), Richard
Kagan (Johns Hopkins University), Bill Marshall (University of Glasgow), Diogo Ramada Curto (European University Institute, Florence).

For more information, please contact the organisers:
Dr Harald Braun
School of History
University of Liverpool
Liverpool L69 3BX
UNITED KINGDOM
e-mail: h.e.braun@liv.ac.uk

Dr Kirsty Hooper
School of Modern Languages
University of Liverpool
Liverpool L69 7ZR
UNITED KINGDOM
e-mail: kirsty.hooper@liv.ac.uk

For registration (forthcoming), see our website:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/iberianatlantic/index.htm

Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford

Hilary Term Events

Weds 8 Feb 4.00 pm
American History Research Seminar
Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University and University of Cambridge: “Lady Frances Berkeley and the Politics of Gendered Power in Seventeenth-Century Virginia”

Thurs 9 Feb 4.00 pm
Seminar in American Politics
George Edwards, Texas A&M University and Nuffield College, Oxford “Policy and Polarization: The Revolutionary Presidency of George W. Bush”

Fri 10 Feb 9.00 am
Presidential Power Reconsidered: Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon
Nigel Bowles

Tues 14 Feb 11.00 am
The Social Origins of Women’s Rights Movements in the US, 1776-2000. Kathryn Kish Sklar

Weds 15 Feb 4.00 pm
American History Research Seminar
Beth Salerno, St. Anselm University: “Women and the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1860”

Thurs 16 Feb 4.00 pm
Seminar in American Politics
Colin Provost, University of Oxford
“When Is AG Short for Aspiring Governor? Institutional Structure, Policymaking Dynamics and Ambition in the Office of State Attorney General”

Tues 21 Feb 11.00 am
The Social Origins of Women’s Rights Movements in the US, 1776-2000. Kathryn Kish Sklar

Weds 22 Feb 4.00 pm
American History Research Seminar
Darlene Clark Hine, Northwestern University: “African American Women and Community Life in the Twentieth Century”

Thurs 23 Feb 4.00 pm
Seminar in American Politics
Paul Martin, University of Oxford “Bureaucracy, Production and Dissent: The Institutionalization of the United States Supreme Court, 1860-2000”

Thurs 23 Feb 4.00pm
The 2005 Fortenbaugh Lecture Via Videolink from the University of Virginia.
Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia
“The Progress of Our Arms: Whither Civil War Military History?”

Tues 28 Feb 11.00 am
The Social Origins of Women’s Rights Movements in the US, 1776-2000. Kathryn Kish Sklar

Weds 1 Mar 4.00 pm
American History Research Seminar
Tom Dublin, SUNY Binghamton and RAI “Editing an Online History Journal: The Women and Social Movements website”

Thurs 2 Mar 4.00 pm
Seminar in American Politics
Marc Stears, University of Oxford “The American Liberal Tradition Revisited”

Thurs 2 Mar 5.00 pm
American Literature Colloquium
Alex Houen, University of Sheffield
“Allen Ginsberg and the Vietnam War”

Tues 7 Mar 11.00 am
The Social Origins of Women’s Rights Movements in the US, 1776-2000. Kathryn Kish Sklar

Weds 8 Mar 4.00 pm
American History Research Seminar
Dorothy Sue Cobble, Rutgers University: “The Long Women’s Movement for Social Justice”

Thurs 9 Mar 4.00 pm
Seminar in American Politics
Patricia Hurley and Kim Hill, Texas A&M University: “An Agenda for the Study of Representation.”

For further details about the American History Research Seminar please contact: Richard.Carwardine@history.oxford.ac.uk

For further details about the American Politics Seminar please contact: George.Edwards@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

For further details about any other events please contact Cheryl Hudson on 01865 (2)82710 or at academic.programme@rai.ox.ac.uk, or go to the RAI website www.rai.ox.ac.uk

Salzburg Seminar American Studies Alumni Association (SSASAA)

Redefining America: Race, Ethnicity and Immigration
7-10 September 2006

Keynote Speaker: Emory Elliott, University Professor of the University of California and Distinguished Professor of English, University of California Riverside; President-Elect, American Studies Association Ronald Clifton, Adjunct Professor of American Studies, Stetson University, Deland, Florida

Deborah L. Madsen, Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Geneva

Ruben Rumbaut, Professor of Sociology, University of California Irvine (via video conference – status pending)

In the last thirty years, millions of people from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa have migrated and immigrated to the United States, contributing to remarkable social, political and cultural transformations for both the new arrivals and the communities and regions in which they have settled. Economic shifts, social tensions, and political conflict have often accompanied these population changes.

At the same time, the cultural production of the new immigrants often mediates the social pressures of change as they often bring with them not only family but a variety of goods, styles of dress, religious practices, forms of art and expression, and perspectives on all aspects of human experience that daily transform the cultural fabric of their communities and of the United States. This symposium will focus on how these factors relate to current social, political and economic dynamics in the United States and their implication for cultural change and America’s role in the world. Discussion will be invited on how the literature, film, music, art, and other forms of cultural production mediate or not the conflicts and tensions produced by such rapid immigration and social changes.

The 2006 SSASAA symposium is open to all Salzburg Seminar alumni interested in the field of American Studies, as well as any scholar working actively in the area of American Studies. The symposium will consist of presentations by distinguished scholars of American Studies as well as theme-based discussion groups. Additional events include a barbeque, receptions, a concert in Schloss Leopoldskron, and a gala dinner on the final evening.

Payment information: The fee for the symposium is 500 Euro for a single 800 Euro for a double room. If the total payment is made by March 1, 2006, the fee is 475 Euro for a single and 760 Euro for a double. The fee includes accommodation and meals for three nights, tuition and fees and social events, but does not include travel expenses. Limited financial aid is available for partial scholarships to help cover the symposium fee. This need should be stated at the time of registration.

Credit cards are accepted (payment in Euro only)

In order to reserve a space, a completed registration form and a 100
Euro deposit (refundable until July 1) is required.

Space is limited and reservations will be confirmed in the order in which they are received. For further information about the SSASAA symposium, contact SSASAA leader Marty Gecek, mgecek@salzburgseminar.org

A Strained Partnership: European-American Relations and the Middle East from Suez to Iraq

Zurich/Switzerland, 7-9 September 2006
Convened by the Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) Andreas Wenger, Victor Mauer, Daniel Mvckli

In association with The Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP).

Divergent views on the justification and legitimacy of the Iraq War in 2003 have caused a deep rift in transatlantic relations from which the Western Alliance has yet to recover. However, as remarkable as this crisis has been in terms of its intensity and consequences, it merely represents the latest in a whole series of intra-Western controversies over the Middle East. In fact, the issue of how to deal with the Middle East has constituted a major source of European-America n tension since the beginnings of the transatlantic partnership in the late 1940s. The Suez Crisis of 1956, the October War in 1973, and the recent Iraq War constitute only three of the most prominent examples of what appears to be a dominant pattern of allied conflict about the right kind of policies and approaches towards the Middle East. What is more, as most of the major security risks today relate in some way or other to the “crisis crescent” of the Southern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf region, the Middle East is bound to stay at the forefront of attention of Western policy-makers and will remain a key determinant of European-American relations for the foreseeable future.

Against this background, the conference aims at placing the current transatlantic strain over Iraq into a wider perspective. Its main objective is to trace the Western debates regarding the Middle East since 1948/49 and to identify the major causes and constellations of allied d discord and cooperation over time. We seek to determine essential elements of continuity and change concerning European and US interests, threat assessments, and policy preferences, relating to either the region at large or individual key issues such as Gulf security or the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The conference hopes to bring together historians and political analysts with expertise on particular incidents and topics regarding allied conflict and cooperation over the Middle East. Papers should either deal with a relevant case study or cover the evolution of intra-Western perceptions of a given Middle East issue over time. Authors are urged to avoid too narrow approaches. They should apply a multilateral perspective to their analysis and put their specific findings into the bigger context of the overall conference theme. While intra-European differences regarding the Middle East are important and may be addressed, the main focus should be on the European-American dimension. Please note that the conference is not about the Middle East as such, but rather about its significance for transatlantic relations.

Possible topics to address include:

I. Gulf security and transatlantic relations
– The allies and the Gulf during the early Cold War
– The 1970s and 1980s: Western responses to the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq
War, and the growing regional presence of the Soviet Union

– Operation Desert Storm 1990/91: A brief moment of unity?
– Dual containment (of Iran and Iraq) and its discontents: The 1990s
– The Iraq War 2003: The Alliance at the crossroads
– Dealing with Iran and its nuclear program

II. The Arab-Israeli conflict: What role for Europe?
– The allies and the Middle East conflict during the early Cold War
– The Six-Day War 1967: Realignments within the West
– The October War and the Oil Crisis, 1973/74: Kissinger, Europe, and the Middle East
– European-US differences over the Arab-Israeli conflict in the later 1970s and the
1980s
– The Peace Process in the 1990s: European-US commonality and divisions
– The Middle East Quartet: A new role for Europe?

III. NATO and the Middle East: The evolving out-of-area debate
– European colonial interests and US East-West prerogatives – the early Cold War
period (e.g., NATO and the defense of the Middle East 1948-55, the Algerian War, the
Suez Crisis 1956, Lebanon/Jordan 1958)
– US claims to leadership and calls for burden-sharing – from the 1960s to the end
of the Cold War
– From a non-policy to pragmatic consensus? NATO and the Middle East in the 1990s
– NATO and the War on Terror in the Middle East – the early 21st century

IV. Other key themes in long-term perspective
– The evolution of European and US concepts for regional order
– Energy and security: Diverging oil dependencies and allied policies vis-à-vis the
Middle East
– The West and the military balance in the Middle East: Arms sales and arms control
– WMD and Western counter-proliferation policies

The deadline for paper proposals is 28 February 2006. Proposals should include a title, a one-page outline, and a short CV of the author. There will be about 20 papers/speakers. Authors will be notified whether their proposal has been accepted by the end of March 2006. Draft papers will have to be submitted by 13 August 2006, to allow for their distribution to all the participants prior to the conference.

At the conference itself, authors will summarize their papers in oral presentations of up to 15-minute duration, strictly enforced by the chairperson of each session, thus allowing enough time for substantive discussion stimulated by the papers.

A publication of the conference papers is envisaged. Participants will receive a financial contribution to cover their transport and accommodation costs for their stay in Zurich.

Please submit proposals by e-mail, if possible, or send by airmail to:

Daniel Mvckli
Senior Researcher
Center for Security Studies
ETH Zurich WEC
CH-8092 Zurich
Switzerland

Transatlantic Conflict and Consensus: Culture, History, and Politics

The Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies issues a call for papers for its fourth biennial conference on Transatlantic Studies. The conference, entitled “Transatlantic Conflict and Consensus: Culture, History, and Politics”, will be held October 25-28, 2006, on the campus of Teikyo University Holland, Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Along with presentation of accepted papers, the conference will feature speakers representing the American view of transatlantic relations, a continental European view of transatlantic relations, and an academic overview of the discussion.

Organizing and sponsor institutions of the conference include the Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies; Gloucestershire University, UK; and The University of South Dakota, USA. Contact Dr. Neil Wynn at nwynn@glos.ac.uk or Dr. Tim Schorn at tschorn@usd.edu, or see the conference website, for additional information.

TSA Annual Conference, 2006

Deadline for proposals: 12 April 2006

The 2006 TSA annual conference will be held at the University of Dundee on June 12-15, 2006. Proposals for individual papers or for panels should be sent by April 12, 2006, to Alan Dobson, chair of TSA, or David Ryan, Secretary of TSA, at
a.p.dobson@dundee.ac.uk
or david.ryan@ucc.ie

This year we are centralizing the submission of proposals, but we would ask all those who normally recruit for History, IR, Literature and Culture, Race and Migration, Planning, Economics, Regeneration and the Environment, please to do so as per normal. Panel sessions will consist of three 20-minute papers, followed by 30 minutes of discussion.

The plenary speakers will be: Josef Jarab, a senator from the Czech Republic, recipient of the first Fulbright Woodrow Wilson Freedom Award in recognition of his work in promoting the understanding of America in Europe, a prolific writer, eminent scholar, president of the European Association for American Studies, 2002-04. He will give a paper on ‘European American Studies: A Potential Not Fully Used for the Enhancement of Transatlantic Interests and Understanding.’

Robin Boyle, Professor of Urban Planning at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A., a leading authority in his field with a range of publications. He will give a paper on ‘Learning from New Orleans: The Condition of the American City (and the Lessons for Europe).’

John Dumbrell, Professor of Politics, University of Leicester, England, one of the leading specialists in Britain on U.S. foreign policy and Anglo-American relations (TBC).

We encourage delegates to submit their papers to The Journal of Transatlantic Studies for consideration for publication after the conference.

There will be a number of small bursaries available, mainly to help young scholars and research students.

There will be an afternoon civic reception at Verdant Jute Works, one of the most impressive industrial museums in Europe.

At the end of the conference, the option is provided of a half-day trip to historic and beautiful Glamis Castle, childhood home of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, birthplace of Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret, legendary setting for William Shakespeare’s famous play, Macbeth, and home of the Earls of Strathmore and Kinghorne since 1372. Departure from the conference centre will be at 2.00 p.m, Thursday, July 15, with return in the early evening. Free transport, reduced entry charge and tea in the 16th century kitchen – cost is £18.00 per person.

For details of conference registration, please contact Alan Dobson at
a.p.dobson@dundee.ac.uk

University of Cambridge, American History Seminars

Lent Term 2006

Meetings will take place on Mondays at 5.00 in the Latimer Room, Clare College

6 February 2006
Iwan Morgan (Institute for the Study of the Americas)
Co-existing with the Other Red Peril: Ronald Reagan and the Budget Deficit

13 February 2006
Daniel Geary (University of Nottingham)
“Becoming International Again”: C. Wright Mills and the Global New Left

20 February 2006
Samuel Webb (University of Alabama at Birmingham)
A Southern Liberal Fights For Survival: Senator Lister Hill and the World War II Conservative Backlash

27 February 2006
Patricia Sullivan (University of South Carolina) & Lucy Hackney
Freedom Writer: the life and letters of Virginia Durr

6 March 2006
Ben Marsh (University of Stirling)
Sericulture on British America’s Southern Frontier

13 March 2006
Dominic Sandbrook (Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford)
The Ford/Carter Years

New Members

Oliver Belas is a PhD student, studying African-American detective and science fiction. His work focuses on the relationships between literary genres and stereotypes and his approach may be generally classified as that of a cultural historian.

Caroline Blinder is a Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at Goldsmiths College, London. Her current research focuses on the intersections between American photography and documentary writing. She is writing on Let Us Praise Now Famous Men (editing a critical anthology on this work), Paul Strand’s phototextual collaboration, the photographer Weegee’s ‘Naked City,’ and Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank’s relationship.

Helen Bralesford is based at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include Environmentalism, Eco-Feminism, 20th Century Literature and Women’s Studies.

Mark Brown is a Lecturer at the University of Derby and also teaches American Literature and Film at the University of Keele. His monograph Paul Auster: Towards a Poetics of Place is forthcoming with Manchester University Press. His research interests include urban cultures, focusing primarily on Auster and New York City. He uses the discourses of cultural geography to explore the ways that authors represent the contemporary urban condition.

Adam Burns is a postgraduate student working on American history at the University of Edinburgh. His work examines lynching in the South during the McKinley to Taft era. He obtained his BA in American Studies form the University of Birmingham.

Jacqueline Cahif is a postgraduate student at the University of Glasgow. Her interests include gender and social history. Her PhD research examines prostitution in late 18th and early 19th century Philadelphia.

Kathryn Davies is studying for an MPhil in American history. She spent one year as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill which inspired her Masters research. Her ongoing research is based on a reassessment of the Notting Hill race riots.

Jane Drabble is an MPhil student at the University of Birmingham. Her main interests are film and political and social structures. Her research will involve examining the presentation of drug addiction on film since 1945.

Julie Hall is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway. Her interests include segregation and the civil rights movement in the US, as well as North American children’s literature.

Zoe Hyman is currently undertaking an MPhil in American history at the University of Sussex. Her research is based on truth and reconciliation in the United States.

Roger Johnson holds a BA in Art History from the University of Sussex and an MA from the Institute for the Study of the Americas. He has recently started a PhD at Sussex. His dissertation examines the public perception of Ronald Reagan’s presidency and his place in American history.

Andrew Jones is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas in Austin. He received an MA from the University of Glasgow in 2005 (American Studies) and a BA from Sheffield in English Language and Literature. His interests include postmodern architecture and poetry, vernacular landscape photography and urban studies.

Matthew Jones is Chair of American Foreign Relations at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include US nuclear history, US relations with Asian states and societies, Anglo-American relations, and the relationship between race and foreign policy.

Garry Maciver is a based at the University of Cambridge. His interests include mid-twentieth century drama and literature of the American South.

Alex Miles is a PhD candidate at Salford University. His research focuses on contemporary US foreign policy and, in particular, the policies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush towards rogue states. He is a graduate of the University of Keele.

Tatsushi Narita teaches American literature and American Studies at Nagoya City University. He serves on the Executive Council of the International American Studies Association and is the founding president of the Nagoya Comparative Culture Forum (NCCF). He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, working with Professor Walter J. Bate and Ronald Bush. His main interest is in the development of ‘Transpacific’ American Studies (TPAS).

Kathryn Nicol is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include contemporary literature, nation, ethnicity and gender.

Ross Nicolson is a PhD candidate at Pembroke College, Oxford. His work examines Richard Nixon and young voter mobilisation.

Donna Pemberdy is a doctoral candidate in the Institute of Film Studies at the university of Nottingham where she is currently researching masculinity crisis narratives in contemporary American film.

Julie Sheridan is writing her PhD dissertation at Trinity College Dublin on the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. She holds a BA and an MA from University College Dublin and is the Postgraduate Representative for the Irish Association of American Studies (IAAS).

J.E. Smyth is a Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Warwick. His research interests centre on issues in American historiography and Hollywood cinema. His work has appeared in Rethinking History, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio & TV and Film Quarterly.

Max D. Stites is researching a PhD dissertation on Charles Dickens, Hunter S, Thompson and the American Dream. His interests include Victorian Studies, literary journalism, the New Journalism and mid- to late-twentieth century American literature.

Mark Straw is a doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham. His work explores the notion of disclosure and trauma in contemporary cinema.

David Wall completed an MA in American Studies at Nottingham and then undertook a PhD in American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His doctoral thesis was entitled ‘Subject to Disorder: Carnival and the Grotesque Body in Antebellum Literature and Culture. He was a lecturer at Bowling Green State for eight years and returned to the UK permanently in 2002. His current position is Coordinator of the HE Cultural Studies programme at the Batley School of Art and Design. His current research is focused on Hollywood, art and the discourses of genius and madness.

Caroline Welsh is a postgraduate student at the University of Glasgow.

Jenny Woodley is undertaking a PhD at the University of Nottingham. She is researching the cultural campaigns of the NAACP, looking at its promotion of positive images and its challenge to negative depictions of African Americans. Her Masters research examined the NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign.

Thomas Wright is a postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge. His interests include US urban history, nineteenth-century literature and transatlantic literary relations.

Lynne Cheryl Yarnevich is based in Kansas City. She is a 2003 MA graduate of the Institute of United States Studies at the University of London.

Members’ Publications

Lincoln Geraghty will publish “Living with Star Trek: American Culture and Star Trek Fandom” (IB Tauris) in 2006.

Members’ News

Lincoln Geraghty has been appointed Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of Creative Arts, Film and Media at the University of Portsmouth.

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 a major library, seminar rooms, and offices for Fellows. The Institute was opened in 2001 by former US President Bill Clinton.
We are now inviting scholars to apply for fellowships to commence from September 2006. We offer fellowships for up to one year; however appointments may be awarded for shorter time periods.

No stipends are offered, but new 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 £500. 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 282 710
Fax: +44 1865 282 720
Email: assistant.director@rai.ox.ac.uk
Website: www.rai.ox.ac.uk

Newberry Library Fellowships in the Humanities, 2006-07

The Newberry Library, an independent research library in Chicago, Illinois, invites applications for its 2006-07 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, 2006; applications for most short-term fellowships are due March 1, 2006. For more information or to download application materials, visit our Web site at:
http://www.newberry.org/research/felshp/fellowshome.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

American Fiction Of The 1990s CFP

Abstracts are invited for a collection of essays on American fiction of the 1990s, which has been commissioned by Routledge. Primary authors and texts should be mostly those taught, well known, award-winning, literary (the collection is designed for senior-level undergraduate courses). Essays may focus on a single text or author or may group texts or authors under a coherent, relevant topic. Essays will be assigned to one of the following themes, which form the organizing sections of the book: Geographies, Ethnicities, Memories, Sexualities, and Technologies. What are the distinguishing features and exciting achievements of American fiction of the 1990s with regard to such categories? Contributors are encouraged to set American fiction in its cultural, literary-historical, and/or theoretical context. Send abstracts (300-500 words in length), accompanied by the contributor’s affiliation and a list of select publications, as a Word attachment or write for further information to Jay Prosser: j.d.prosser@leeds.ac.uk

Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature

Call For Proposals

We are looking to commission authors for the following five titles for this new and rapidly growing academic series published by Edinburgh University Press.

African American Literature
Native American Literature
Popular Fiction
Postcolonial Literature
Women’s Fiction

For further information about the series please contact: Professor Martin Halliwell, Centre for American Studies, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH. Email: mrh17@le.ac.uk

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World

Series Editors: Allyson M. Poska and Abby Zanger

In the past decade, the study of women and gender has offered some of the most vital and innovative challenges to scholarship on the early modern period. Ashgate’s new series of interdisciplinary and comparative studies, “Women and Gender in the Early Modern World,” takes up this challenge, reaching beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Submissions of single-author studies and edited collections will be considered.

Proposals should take the form of either
– a preliminary letter of inquiry, briefly describing the project; or
– a formal prospectus including: abstract, table of contents, sample chapter (other than the introduction), estimate of length, estimate of the number and type of illustrations to be included, and a curriculum vitae.

Please send three copies of either type of proposal (one to each of the series editors and one to the publisher) to the addresses below:

Professor Allyson Poska
Dept. of History
The University of Mary Washington
1301 College Avenue
Fredericksburg, VA 22401-5358

Professor Abby Zanger
Dept. of History
East Hall
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155

Erika Gaffney
Editor, Ashgate Publishing Co.
101 Cherry Street, Suite 420
Burlington, VT 05401

BAAS Membership of Committees

BAAS Committee

BAAS Officers

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

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

Dr Heidi Macpherson,* Secretary, Department of Humanities, Fylde 42, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE
Tel: 01772 893039
Fax: 01772 892924
E-Mail: heidi.macpherson@baas.ac.uk

Executive Committee (after 2005 AGM)
In addition to these three officers, the current committee line up of BAAS is:

Ms Kathryn Cooper, (Co-opted), Development Subcommittee, Loreto 6th Form College, Chicester Road, Manchester, M15 5PB
Tel: 0161 226 5156
Fax: 0161 227 9174
E-Mail: kath.cooper2@virgin.net

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,* School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred’s College, Winchester, SO22 4NR
Tel: 01962 827363
E-Mail: Jude.Davies@wkac.ac.uk

Ms Clare Elliott,* Postgraduate Representative, Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ
E-Mail: clare_baas@yahoo.co.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 Jay Kleinberg, (Ex-Officio), Editor, Journal of American Studies, School of International Studies, Brunel University, Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH
Tel: 0181 891 0121
Fax: 0181 891 8306
E-Mail: jay.kleinberg@baas.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

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

Dr Martin Padget,† Department of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth SY23 3DY
Tel: 01970 621948
Fax: 01970 622530
E-Mail: mtp@aber.ac.uk

Mr Ian Ralston, (Ex-Officio), Chair, Library & Resources 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 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,* School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred’s College, Winchester SO22 4NR
Tel: 0196 282 7370
E-Mail: Carol.Smith@wkac.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

Professor Tim Woods, Department of English, Hugh Owen Building, Penglais, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales, SY23 3DY
Tel: 01970 622535
Fax: 01970 622530
E-Mail: tim.woods@baas.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:
Dr Ian Scott (Chair)
Ms Kathryn Cooper
Professor Richard Crockatt
Dr. Jude Davies
Ms Clare Elliott
Professor Simon Newman
Mr Ian Ralston

Publications:
Ms Carol Smith (Chair)
Professor Jay Kleinberg
Dr Heidi Macpherson
Professor Ken Morgan (Editor of BRRAM)
Dr Catherine Morley
Professor Tim Woods

Conference:
Dr Sarah MacLachlan (Chair)
Dr Will Kaufman
Dr Martin Padget
Dr Graham Thompson
Dr Jenel Virden
Dr George Conyne (Kent Conference Secretary, 2006)
Dr George Lewis (Leicester Conference Secretary, 2007)

Libraries and Resources:
Mr Ian Ralston (Chair)
Ms J Hoare (Treasurer) (Cambridge University Library)
Secretary’s position is currently vacant
Ms K Bateman (Eccles Centre)
Dr Jude Davies (BAAS representative)
Professor Philip Davies (Eccles Centre)
Mr D Foster (American Studies Centre, Liverpool John Moores University)
Dr Kevin Halliwell (National Library of Scotland)
Matthew Shaw (British Library)
Ms J. Shiel (John Rylands University Library of Manchester)

Notice of BAAS AGM 2006

Agenda:

1. Elections: Treasurer, postgraduate member (2 year term, non-renewable), 3 committee members, 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 Libraries and Resources Sub-Committee
8. Report of the Representative to EAAS
9. Any other business

At the 2006 AGM, elections will be held for three positions on the Committee (three year terms), for the Treasurer of the Association (three year term), and for the Postgraduate Member (two year term, non-renewable) and for any offices that fall vacant before the AGM. Current incumbents of these positions 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 Saturday 22 April 2006. Nominations should be in 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 they can be posted in a prominent location and available for the membership to read before the AGM. Those standing for elections are expected to attend the AGM.

Dr. Heidi Macpherson
BAAS Secretary
Department of Humanities
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
United Kingdom
Tel. (01772) 893041
heidi.macp@baas.ac.uk

Editorial

As incoming editor it is a particular pleasure to welcome you to the latest edition of American Studies in Britain in this, the fiftieth year of the British Association for American Studies. The celebrations kicked off at this year’s annual conference at Robinson College, University of Cambridge, and will draw to a close at the 2006 event at the University of Kent. When BAAS was founded, the international importance of the United States was never more apparent, but the pioneering scholars who established the Association were still taking something of a professional gamble. American Studies was then in its infancy: many historians questioned whether the United States even had a history while American literature still occupied a liminal position on many literature courses.

Half a century later, we can see just how far-sighted the first pioneers were. Even allowing for fluctuations in student numbers and tastes, the study of the United States remains phenomenally popular. Secondary school pupils read The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird and write about the civil rights movement. At dozens of third-level institutions, courses on American literature, history and culture are over-subscribed. The news that Michael O’Brien had won the Bancroft Prize for 2005, American history’s most prestigious award, came as a terrific boost to BAAS in its jubilee year, and set the tone for an exceptionally vigorous and friendly conference at Cambridge. Although this award was above all a tremendous personal achievement, it does reflect the strength of British scholarship on the United States.

While BAAS has never been more successful, its role has also never been more important. Go into any bookshop in the country, and you will find shelves groaning under the weight of polemics either attacking or defending the United States. Turn on the television or the radio, and you will hear heated discussions on America’s place in the world. The vital importance of American Studies in Britain has rarely been more striking, and it is a tribute to the strength and depth of our organisation that in universities across the country there are so many scholars working on so many diverse issues. So in this, our fiftieth year, we pay tribute to the founders, who built BAAS into the thriving and collegiate organisation that we know today.

To celebrate the success of the Association in its jubilee year the Executive Committee elected to launch a series of travel awards, which will be open to senior BAAS members: the Founders’ Awards. These awards will complement the already successful BAAS Short Term Travel Awards which are offered annually to our thriving postgraduate community. Named after the founders of BAAS, the awards offer assistance for short-term visits to the United States during the year 2006-07. They are open to BAAS scholars in the UK who need to travel to conduct research, or who have been invited to read papers at conferences on American Studies topics. It is intended that the grants will be awarded for the study of subjects where the principle aim is the study of American history, politics, society, literature, art and culture. The closing date for applications for these prestigious awards is December 15, 2005. You will find an application form for the Founders’ Awards at the back of this issue of ASIB and further details on the BAAS website: http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site

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

BAAS Annual Conference: Cambridge, April 14-17, 2005

Chair’s Report

Following my election as Chair of the British Association for American Studies in April 2004, my first months seemed to be dominated by media reports about the closure of American Studies programmes and the alleged unpopularity of the United States amongst British undergraduates. Along with other members of BAAS I spoke or corresponded with journalists from the Financial Times, the Guardian and other publications, and against my better judgement I began to worry about the state of American Studies in Britain.

These worries faded quickly. The restructuring of undergraduate provision by university administrations, and the rising cost of undergraduate degrees (especially those including an additional year spent abroad) have contributed to perceptions of a weakening of American Studies in Britain, and some commentators were rather too hasty in their presumption that opposition to the policies of the United States government had translated into a decline in the popularity of American Studies.

American Studies in Britain is stronger than ever, and this 50th anniversary conference bears witness to the strength and depth of our vibrant research culture and teaching provision. The organisation has 600 members (including 194 postgraduates). The quality of the work done by these scholars is recognised by funding bodies, and my cursory review of the websites of the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council showed that American Studies projects secured awards totalling almost £350,000 over the past year. Success in American Studies has been rewarded by British universities, and over the past year a number of BAAS members have been promoted to chairs and professorships: Trevor Burnard at Sussex, Rob Singh at Birkbeck, Iwan Morgan at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, Roberta Pearson at Nottingham, Mark Jancovich at East Anglia, and Jon Roper at Swansea. Perhaps most impressively, Michael O’Brien (Cambridge) has been named as one of three joint-winners of this year’s Bancroft Prize in American History, and has been short listed for the Pulitzer Prize for his two-volume Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860.

BAAS continues to play a vital role in encouraging excellence on American Studies research and teaching. The annual conference provides a venue for the presentation of research by postgraduate students, young scholars and more experienced academics, and the resulting exchange of ideas and information is the lifeblood of our subject community. At the conference BAAS awarded ten research and travel awards worth £7,500; the Ambassador’s Awards for the best essays by a school student, an undergraduate and a postgraduate; the BAAS Postgraduate Essay Prize, and the inaugural BAAS Book Prize. Ian Scott and Carol Smith coordinated the judging of entries for all of these, and they and the judges were impressed and heartened by the range and quality of American Studies research in Britain.

One of the most important tasks facing the BAAS Executive Committee is to preserve and enhance the excellence of this research community. We approach this by representing American Studies as best we can out with our subject community, and by supporting teaching and research within. We spent a good deal of time over the summer approaching major scholars and preparing nomination forms for the relevant sub-panels for RAE 2008, spurred on by the appointment of former BAAS Chair Professor Judie Newman as chair of one of the fifteen Main Panels. Since then the Executive Committee has been consulted by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Higher Education Funding Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and I am grateful to my colleagues for their work in developing responses to consultations on a variety of issues relating to our discipline, such as the transition of the AHRB to Research Council status, and possible strategic programmes to be sponsored by the new AHRC.

On behalf of the Executive Committee and all BAAS members I would like to thank the Cambridge hosts and organisers of the 50th anniversary conference, especially Dr. Sarah Meer, Professor Tony Badger, and Mrs. Ann Holton, who have worked so very hard and have been so extremely generous in making this such a memorable conference. At the conference we were joined by honoured guests including Mr. David T. Johnson, Chargé d’Affaires at the United States Embassy; Professor Marc Chénetier, the Chair of the European Association for American Studies; and Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, President of the American Studies Association. And fifty years on from the very first BAAS conference, founding committee member William Brock joined us along with other early members. The life and blood of this conference are the academic papers given by members and guests, the spirited discussions over tea, coffee and wine, the exchange of ideas and the ready collegiality that make this a favourite conference, and our fiftieth anniversary meeting has been an invigorating event.

Another important part of BAAS’s work involves publication. With the support of Joe Mottershead at Cambridge University Press, and under the gentle care of editor Jay Kleinberg and Associate Editor Susan Castillo, the Journal of American Studies is thriving. Edinburgh University Press’s Nicky Carr continues to guide and support the BAAS paperback series, co-edited by Carol Smith and myself. An exciting new initiative is taking BAAS back to its earlier publication history, by developing new materials for use by schoolteachers: this will be a web-based digital resource, making it easily available to teachers and students across the UK. Meanwhile, under Graham Thompson’s expert care the BAAS website has become a much-used and increasingly valuable resource, and our newsletter American Studies in Britain has continued to thrive.

On a less explicitly academic front, members of BAAS regularly provide a public face for BAAS and American Studies in Britain. The presidential election in November prompted a flurry of media interest, and members of the Executive Committee provided expert opinions on this and a variety of issues, and we spoke with and to national newspapers, national and local radio and television, and even the British Forces Broadcasting Service.

Like any good ‘State of the Union’ address, the message here is a triumphal one. It is my firm belief that teaching and research amongst the members of Britain’s American Studies community are of the very highest quality. The members of the BAAS Executive Committee work very hard on behalf of the subject community, and we are grateful for those who support our efforts on your behalf. I would like to express my gratitude to a number of people and organisations. Dan Sreebny, Minister Counsel for Public Affairs, and Dennis Wolf, Cultural Attaché, have both reached the end of their terms at the American Embassy in London. Together with Sue Wedlake, Cultural Affairs Assistant, they have been very good and generous friends to BAAS. In addition to supporting local conferences, they have subsidised postgraduate attendance at this conference; they have helped fund short-term travel awards, and they have supported the Ambassador’s Awards. We wish Dan and Dennis well in their next postings, and offer them our most heartfelt thanks.

But most of all I want to thank the members of the Executive Committee for their tireless work on your behalf: Heidi Macpherson as Secretary; Nick Selby as Treasurer; Carol Smith as Vice-Chair and Chair of the Publications Sub-committee; Ian Scott as chair of the Development Sub-committee; Tim Woods as chair of the Conference sub-committee; committee members Jude Davies, Clare Elliott, Sarah MacLachlan, Catherine Morley, Martin Padget, Graham Thompson, and Peter Thompson; and ex-officio committee members Jay Kleinberg, Ian Ralston, Kathryn Cooper, George Conyne, Ken Morgan, Jenel Virden and Sue Wedlake.

Minutes of 2005 BAAS AGM

The 2005 AGM of BAAS was held on Saturday 16 April at Robinson College Cambridge at 3pm. There was a short delay to the meeting because of overrunning sessions, but the meeting became quorate at 3:30 and elections commenced.

Elections:
Secretary Heidi Macpherson (to 2008)*
Treasurer Graham Thompson (to 2006)†
Committee Richard Crockatt (to 2008)
Jude Davies (to 2008)*
Will Kaufman (to 2008)
Catherine Morley (to 2007)†

*Not eligible for re-election
†Fulfilling an unexpired term

The Treasurer began his report by circulating copies of the draft audited accounts, which he asked the AGM to approve. There were no questions about the accounts. Phil Davies proposed that we accept the accounts, Martin Padget seconded the motion, and it was carried unanimously. NS then offered a short report about his five years as Treasurer. When he was first elected, BAAS had 450 members. This year, the total number of members has hit 600 (though there are a significant number who have yet to amend their standing orders and so are not considered fully paid up members until they do so). NS humorously suggested that his experience showed that neither banks nor academics were infallible in relation to finances, but he also noted that he had enjoyed his five years as Treasurer and wished his successor well.

Thanks were extended to NS for his work over the last five years and he received a round of applause. NS also wished to record his and BAAS’s thanks to Margo Hunter at the Hook Centre in Glasgow for her administrative support, particularly in relation to the maintenance of the database.

The Chair provided a report of his activities in his first year as Chair as well as the current state of American Studies. He noted in particular that the first few months of his tenure appeared to be dominated by media reports about declining interest in American Studies. His experience, however, suggested that the picture was much more positive, and he offered the following evidence of the health of the discipline:

The organisation has 600 members, almost a third of which are postgraduate students.

A review of the websites of the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council revealed that BAAS members secured awards totalling almost £350,000 over the past year.

Over the past year a number of BAAS members have been promoted to chairs and professorships: Trevor Burnard at Sussex, Rob Singh at Birkbeck, Iwan Morgan at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, Roberta Pearson at Nottingham, Mark Jancovich at East Anglia and Jon Roper at Swansea. The Chair asked for any omissions to this list to be notified to him for incorporation into next year’s report.

Michael O’Brien (Cambridge) has been named as one of three joint-winners of this year’s Bancroft Prize in American History, the most prestigious prize for US History, for his two-volume Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860.

The Chair noted that one of the most important tasks facing the BAAS Executive Committee is to preserve and enhance the excellence of the American Studies research community. The Executive has responded to this overarching task this year in a number of ways, including:

Offering STAs, essay prizes, and the new BAAS Book Prize. The entries for these competitions testify to the quality of research by students and academic staff, as well as the health of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in American Studies and its constituent disciplines.

Supporting the Annual Conference as well as regional and postgraduate conferences around the country.

Contributing to discussions and nominations for the American Studies and Anglophone Area Studies panel (Unit 47) for RAE 2008. The Officers of BAAS met in the summer to discuss possible nominations, and recommended a number of scholars to this panel and to cognate panels. Former BAAS Chair Professor Judie Newman was appointed Chair of one of the fifteen Main Panels. The membership of Unit 47, chaired by Professor Paul Cammack of MMU, includes many BAAS members and several of BAAS’s nominees (panel members include Professor Chris Bailey (Newcastle); Dr. Susan Billingham (Nottingham); Professor Susan Castillo (Glasgow); Professor Richard Godden (Sussex); Professor Mark Jancovich (UEA); Professor Scott Lucas (Birmingham); Dr. Heidi Macpherson (UCLAN); Professor Anthony McFarlane (Warwick); Dr. Jonathan Munby (Lancaster); Professor Simon Newman (Glasgow); Dr. Diana Paton (Newcastle); Professor Peter Stoneley (Reading); Professor Helen Taylor (Exeter); Dr. Betty Wood (Cambridge) and Professor Tim Woods of Aberystwyth).

Contributing to discussions and consultation documents by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Arts and Humanities Research Board (particularly in their transition from AHRB to AHRC).

SN has himself attended meetings for subject area heads and learned society heads on BAAS’s behalf, including one for the AHRB held at the Globe Theatre. SN reported that one third of proposals for new interdisciplinary initiatives had come from BAAS or BAAS members, and that nearly 90 million pounds sterling is now available through what will be the AHRC.

SN offered his thanks to colleagues for their work in these areas, particularly to Ian Scott and Carol Smith for organizing the judging of the many prizes now offered. In relation to the 2005 Conference, SN thanked the Cambridge hosts and organisers, especially Professor Tony Badger, Dr. Sarah Meer, and Mrs. Ann Holton, who had worked very hard and had been so generous in making it such a memorable conference. SN noted that honoured guests at the Conference included Mr. David T. Johnson, Chargé d’Affaires at the United States Embassy; Professor Marc Chénetier, the Chair of the European Association for American Studies; and Professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, President of the American Studies Association, as well as William Brock, one of the original founders of BAAS.

SN reported that another important part of BAAS’s work involves publication. With the support of Joe Mottershead at Cambridge University Press, Editor Jay Kleinberg and Associate Editor Susan Castillo, the Journal of American Studies is thriving. Edinburgh University Press’s Nicky Carr continues to guide and support the BAAS paperback series, co-edited by Carol Smith and the Chair. The Executive is supporting a new initiative, a web-based digital resource, developing new materials for use by school teachers. Graham Thompson has ably edited American Studies in Britain, and the BAAS website has become a much-used and increasingly valuable resource; indeed, a Google search for American Studies lists the BAAS website as its first hit, which is testament to GT’s hard work in this area.

The Chair also noted that members of BAAS regularly provide a public face for BAAS and American Studies in Britain. The presidential election in November prompted a flurry of media interest, and members of the Executive Committee provided expert opinions on this and a variety of issues, speaking with and to national newspapers, national and local radio and television, and even the British Forces Broadcasting Service.

The Chair closed by thanking a number of people and organisations, including Dan Sreebny, Minister Counsel for Public Affairs, and Dennis Wolf, Cultural Attaché, who have both reached the end of their terms at the US Embassy in London; Sue Wedlake, Cultural Affairs Assistant at the Embassy; members of the Executive Committee for their tireless work on behalf of the American Studies community, particularly Heidi Macpherson as Secretary and Nick Selby as Treasurer, both of whom have been on academic leave during the year but continued to commit significant time to BAAS; Carol Smith as Vice-Chair and chair of the Publications Sub-committee; Ian Scott as chair of the Development Sub-committee; Tim Woods as chair of the Conference sub-committee; and committee members Jude Davies, Clare Elliott, Sarah MacLachlan, Catherine Morley, Martin Padget, Graham Thompson and Peter Thompson; and ex-officio committee members Jay Kleinberg, Ian Ralston, Kathryn Cooper, George Conyne, Ken Morgan, Jenel Virden and Sue Wedlake. Final thanks were extended to Phil Davies, the former Chair, who remains an invaluable resource for the entire community, but especially for the Executive Committee itself.

Conferences:
Tim Woods offered a verbal report on the business of the Conference Subcommittee, noting that its principal focus is on organizing and overseeing the annual conference, a task made more complex over the last year because the 2005 conference inaugurates the 50th anniversary celebrations. A vote of formal thanks was again offered to Tony Badger and his colleagues, particularly Sarah Meer, Ann Holton, and the many others, including postgraduate students, who worked behind the scenes to help the conference run smoothly. TW offered additional thanks to Simon Newman and Jenel Virden for helping to read submissions for panels and proposals. The conference itself was stimulating, with a large number of papers and delegates and excellent plenary lectures by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Shelley Fisher Fishkin; the Eccles Lecture by John Dumbrell directly following the meeting was expected to be just as stimulating. TW noted in particular the number of long-time members who had made a special effort to attend this 50th anniversary conference.

TW reported that the next BAAS conference, which rounds out the 50th anniversary celebrations, will be held at the University of Kent at Canterbury 20-23 April 2006. A Call for Papers was produced for the conference pack and was announced at the reception hosted by Kent. Thanks were offered to the Vice Chancellor of the University of Kent at Canterbury for funding the reception on the first evening of the conference.

TW reported that the 2007 conference will be held at the University of Leicester and the 2008 conference will be held at the University of Edinburgh. Negotiations are well underway for the 2009 conference, and the successful applicant will be announced shortly.

Publications:
Carol Smith was unable to attend the AGM but congratulations were extended to her and to Jude Davies on the birth of their daughter Rosa. The Secretary read out CS’s written report.

BRRAM:
Thanks to the General Editor Prof. Ken Morgan, this has been a busy and fruitful year for the collaboration between Microform Academic Publishers (MAP) and BAAS. Recent developments include:
1. The final set of reels of the Liverpool Customs Bills of Entry has been released (140 reels in total).
2. The Jamaican Papers in the Slebech Collection has just been released (with a short introduction by Prof. Morgan) (12 reels).
3. Dr. Vassie has contacted the Merseyside Maritime Museum about microfilming the recent deposit of Davenport Papers.
4. Contracts are being exchanged between Dr. Vassie and the British Library to microfilm the Edward Long Papers, one of the most important sources for eighteenth-century Jamaica. Prof. Morgan will be the Special Editor for this project.
5. Dr. Vassie is liaising with Dr. Carolyn Masel (formerly of the University of Manchester) about publishing a further instalment of material on the English supporters of Walt Whitman.

Dr. Roderick Vassie is our new contact with MAP and brings new ideas and an enthusiastic interest to the project. As part of this, BAAS members will soon be able to receive a 10% discount on all orders placed directly with MAP. BAAS and MAP are keen to extend the range, and members are encouraged to contact Prof. Morgan or CS if they know of interesting projects which might be useful for this series.

EUP-BAAS Series EUP continue to be pleased and supportive of the BAAS paperback series. Sales remain strong and all titles continue to be co-published in the States. Dr. Mark Newman’s The Civil Rights Movement was published in 2004. Newly commissioned and or in the process of research/writing during 2004/5 are books on Native American Literature, Immigration to America and African American Visual Arts. In production now and the next to be published is The Civil War in American Culture by Dr. Will Kaufman. The editors will consider and advise on any ideas and are particularly looking for titles covering the short story, the city and any aspect of American music and television.

JAS Over the last year, the journal has continued to publish outstanding national and international scholarship in the American Studies field, which thanks to our new relationship with CUP, BAAS members now receive as part of their annual subscription to BAAS. One highlight this year was the special issue on black civil rights. Three editorial board members, Prof. Hart, Prof. Tallack and Prof. Badger, have all served their allotted time with sterling work and have been thanked on your behalf; new members are in the process of being approved. The Editor and Associate Editor are also coming to the ends of their 5-year terms of office. BAAS members are invited to contact Prof. Jay Kleinberg and Prof. Susan Castillo to discuss these posts and consider applying. Further details about applications will be published in the ASIB and are available in the conference packs.

ASIB/WEB SITE It was reported that there had been a delay in publication of the last ASIB because the printers had had a series of break-ins. Thanks were extended to Graham Thompson and Clare Elliot for remedial action such as notification of the problem and publication of the newsletter on the BAAS website. Apologies were offered for this delay. It was also noted that BAAS would be seeking a new editor for ASIB. This will be advertised electronically. Further thanks were offered to Graham for his editorship, and to Clare Elliott for taking over the mailbase so effectively.

US STUDIES ONLINE Thanks were offered to Dr. Catherine Morley for her successful and vibrant editorship of US Studies Online. Following the electronic advertisement of the position, it was offered to and accepted by Elizabeth Rosen for a period of 18 months in the first instance. She and CM will complete the handover after Easter.

BAAS Book Award It was reported that in the first year of the BAAS book prize, there were 9 eligible entries. We have an outstanding winner, Professor Richard King, from a strong field as was ably outlined by Phil Davies at the Conference Banquet. Thanks were extended to the Judges, Prof. Davies, Prof. Castillo and Prof. Lucas for the exemplary process they instituted in addition to the many other calls on their time.

Development:
Ian Scott offered a short report on the activities of the Development Subcommittee, noting that it had been an extremely busy year, coordinating all of the prizes and awards, including the new awards announced in 2004, as well as those to be launched in 2005. IS offered thanks to Sue Wedlake, Dan Sreebny and Dennis Wolf from the US Embassy, for helpful guidance and financial assistance to make the awards possible. In the coming year, new STAs were to be launched which would be open to all members, in addition to the postgraduate STAs currently available. The number of applications for awards this year was extremely healthy and of a high quality, which required the Executive to seek additional judges both from within and outside the Executive Committee. IS noted that he is interested in hearing from BAAS members who would be happy to sit (anonymously) on judging panels for any of the awards that BAAS offers. A formal call will go out later this year in relation to the prizes, announcing a new closing date of the end of January so that all awards can be coordinated in the same time frame and announced at the Conference. IS would like all members to continue to encourage their students to apply for funding and prizes, and thanks were offered to institutions and individuals who supported the awards.

IS noted that the Development Subcommittee has been able to offer financial assistance to a whole series of initiatives over the last year, including one-day conferences, colloquiums, and symposiums and regional activities. IS named a representative selection, including the Eccles Centre conference on the US Election, the American Studies Centre Schools’ conference on elections at Liverpool, the “Becoming Visible” symposium, BAAS Northwest events (one in conjunction with Caribbean Studies in the North), and SASA seminars, as well as the annual BAAS postgraduate conference, this past year held in Birmingham. Next year’s event will be at Sheffield, and the conference organizers, Anne Marie Evans and Elizabeth Boyle, were already undertaking publicity for it. IS offered particular thanks to Clare Elliott, the BAAS postgraduate representative, for her hard work in disseminating information to this important constituency.

IS reported on the chief initiative of the last 12 months, the Schoolteachers’ Initiative. He reminded the AGM that at the banquet, BAAS had presented its inaugural Ambassador’s School Essay Prize. This is a very important prize to encourage young scholars in the field, and is one element of BAAS’s plan to foster links with schools and colleges up and down the country. BAAS has received funding from the US Embassy to support the Schoolteachers’ Initiative, which is built around a web-based portfolio of events, information and material to encourage American Studies interest at this level, particularly at A level. IS asked members to contact him if they have any ideas of how to contribute to this initiative, or if they had materials that might be of use.

IS reported that he had succeeded Jude Davies on the Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies Advisory Board, and urged members to contact him with any concerns they may have. He will offer a fuller report on the LLAS activities next year when he has been able to attend more meetings.

Libraries and Resources:
Ian Ralston was unable to attend the AGM because of illness, but provided an emailed report which the Secretary delivered on his behalf. HM reported that the main emphasis for the work of BLARS this academic year has been on the re-launch of the former Libraries Newsletter, now entitled Resources for American Studies. The journal will be in a larger format with a wider range of reviews and articles that will be of value and interest to librarians, lecturers and postgraduate students. Thanks were offered to the US Embassy for the support they provided in order to make this possible. Colleagues who felt that they could contribute an article or review of a new database or other form of electronic resource, or a hard text review, were urged to contact the magazine editor, Dr. Matthew Shaw at matthew.shaw@bl.uk

HM also reported, on IR’s behalf, that there has been one significant change to the membership of the committee this year. After many years as Secretary of BLARS, Richard Bennett resigned due to personal reasons. On behalf of all the Committee, sincere thanks were recorded to Richard for all the work that he undertook. To date, the post of Secretary remains vacant. It is hoped that this will be resolved at the next meeting in May.

EAAS:
The EAAS representative Jenel Virden reported that in the two days before the Conference, the EAAS committee had been meeting at Clare College, Cambridge. JV reported that the proceedings from the Bordeaux Conference, entitled “The Cultural Shuttle: The United States in/of Europe” had just been published.

EAAS business over the year included making decisions on requests from various national associations to join EAAS. An Israeli association was offered the opportunity to become an Associated Member (but not a full member because Israel is not in Europe). Associations in Georgia and Bulgaria have been asked to provide further information on their requests before they can be confirmed. EAAS finances are strong, and under the care of the Treasurer, Hans-Jürgen Grabbe, a new and more transparent review of the accounts has now been undertaken.

JV announced that EAAS offers travel grants to postgraduate students for intra- European and transatlantic travel. This year, awards went to two Polish students and one Romanian student, in amounts from 450-2500 euros. BAAS postgraduates are eligible to apply for these grants and should be encouraged to do so. Further information is available on the EAAS website, www.eaas.info.

The website has been improved and updated, with a new logo. It remains an important resource, especially since the EAAS Newsletter is now published solely in electronic format on the website. Although this has not been without its problems, the next issue is due out shortly and will contain information about the panels for the 2006 EAAS conference. EAAS is considering a proposal to put a European American Studies journal on line as well, and a search for an on-line editor is commencing.

The next EAAS conference will be held in Cyprus, 7-10 April 2006, and the following year, JV will attend a meeting at Wittenberg on BAAS’s behalf. The 2008 conference will be held in Oslo.

AOB:
1. Phil Davies (Eccles Centre) reminded delegates that the Eccles Lecture followed the AGM and that his colleagues from the British Library would be present to answer any questions delegates may have, including Matt Shaw, the editor of Resources for American Studies.
2. A member drew the AGM’s attention to the CFP for the SASA conference, which will be held on 8 November 2005 at the University of St. Andrews. Postgraduates were particularly invited to attend.
3. Alan Rice (UCLAN) updated members on the AMATAS project, which is now in its final year, having been taken into the English Subject Group this year. There were three conferences over the year, with the last one in Warwick on pre-20th century literature. The final AMATAS event is a book launch of the Issues in Americanisation volume edited by George McKay, Jude Davies and Neil Campbell. This will be held at Preston on May 13, just before the joint BAAS Northwest/Caribbean Studies in the North seminar to be held between 12:30-6:00pm. This is a free event, with Professor James Dunkerley from ISA and others speaking. Contact Alan Rice on arice@uclan.ac.uk for more details.
4. Alan Rice also updated members on the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project, which raised £60K in Lancaster. The memorial will be unveiled on July 11, and a message about this will go out on the mailbase. Anyone who is interested should contact Alan Rice. A dedication ceremony follows in October.
5. Clare Elliot (BAAS Postgraduate Representative and mailbase coordinator) announced that there is a sign-up sheet on the notice board for members who would wish to receive information through the mailbase.

The AGM concluded at 4:15pm.

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 Movment, 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

Letters to the Editor

What follows is a response to an observation made by Dick Ellis on an ASA list-serve to the assertion: ‘I know that programs in Britain, for example, have seen a drop in enrollments due to the U.S.’s actions in Iraq. In light of previous editorials and letters to the newsletter, ASIB thought it might be of more general interest and Dick Ellis kindly agreed to its publication. He has very slightly adapted his list-serve posting.

With respect to falling enrollments in the UK on American Studies courses, the story is more complex than anti-US/Americanism in the light of Iraq. The Iraq adventures are probably a contributory factor to a fall in enrollments, which so far has not (yet) become massive. But other factors need to be weighed.

Firstly, I think it is important to guard against seeing responses to the US in ‘monolithic’ terms. Much more often people’s responses in the UK (and, I believe, elsewhere) are congeries of mixed feelings, involving:
— attraction/repulsion to the mythic stress US culture places on freedom, individual expression, self-reliance and even at times an anarchic celebration of the self and (sometimes) an accompanying preparedness to voice dissent — and media expressions of these mythic traits;
— attraction to diversity and its problematic cultural expressions and social consequences;
— attraction/repulsion to celebrity and its excesses;
— attraction/repulsion to consumer(choice)ism;
— mistrust of/attraction to US/American soft-power;
— fear of US/American hard-power interventions (the imperial turn) and their consequences;
— dislike of the US’s poor environmental policies;
— doubts about the status of US/American democracy in the face of corporate influence (especially financial influence);
— mistrust of US fundamentalism and its various expressions (use of capital punishment; absence of gun-control; anti-abortionism).

In other words I think popular cultural responses in many countries (including the UK) still buy into exceptionalist discourses — not wholly without justification — and this complicates things. The US/America continues to trade successfully on its dialogic cultural capital (desire/disillusion). By and large I’d say many young UK residents, as they newly become more and more independent consumers, still find this US imaginary headily seductive, though more fearful about the possibility of rape — sometimes decisively so (if you can bear this metaphor).

Secondly, one needs to bear in mind the recent and continuing introduction of student fee increases in the UK. Most US/American Studies courses in the UK require a fourth year of study in the US from students and this makes their debt larger at the end of their course. Some students are put off by this; others still want to go to the States.

Thirdly, one needs to bear in mind the dire under-funding of universities and colleges in the UK (and everywhere?). Like all Area Studies courses, American Studies is interdisciplinary, making it expensive to run (think of journal subscription costs alone). Frequently also American Studies is not taught in individual, ‘stand-alone’ departments, but by ad hoc ‘teams’. This makes it quite cheap to shut American Studies programs down (with, for example, the American Literature specialist redeployed to teach American Literature courses in the English Department, as part of an Anglophone Literature provision). Several UK American Studies programs have closed down in this way. Students who cannot leave their home area then cannot take American Studies (and so numbers fall).

Fourthly, one needs to bear in mind what might loosely be called the ‘crisis’ in ‘Area Studies’ (here viewing American Studies as an Area Study). The ASA’s increased emphasis on internationalisation/ism is in part a response to this. In an increasingly global world where the US economy and US corporations are simply less dominant though still often influential or formative, globalization (from above AND below), its compression of distance and its facilitation of exchange (such as digital exchange) are regarded as more important as a set of intellectual issues. Courses addressing these sorts of issues are, simply put, rivals. Area Studies can seem too wedded, by virtue of their very labels, to ‘place’, and so less attractive
(even outmoded). What Area Studies are going to do about this constitutes the ‘crisis’.

So: yes, Iraq and its ugly spin-offs like Abu Graib, Guantanamo and Homeland Security, BUT — and it’s a very big BUT — in a way, enrollments, though falling, are bearing up surprisingly well.

R. J. Ellis 29 July 2005

Background References

Albrow, Martin (1997) The Global Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Barber, Benjamin R. (1995) Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Ballantine.
Bauman, Zygmunt (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Beck, Ulrich (1997) Vad Innebar Globaliseringen? Missupfattningar och Mojliga
Politiska Svar. Gothenberg: Daidalos. Rpt. as What Is Globalization?, trans. by
Patrick Camiller, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.
Cheah, Pheng (1998) ‘Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in
Transnationalism’. In Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds. (1998) Cosmopolitics:
Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fiskin, Shelly Fisher (2005) ‘Crossroads of Culture: The Transnational Turn in
American Studies’, American Quarterly 57.1 (March): 17-58.
Friedman, Thomas (1999) The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Giddens, Anthony (2002) Runaway World. London: Profile Books.
Gillman, Susan, Kirsten Silva Gruesz and Rob Wilson (2004) ‘Worlding American
Studies’, Comparative American Studies 2 (3): 259-270.
Hall, Stuart (1997) ‘Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities’, in King,
Anthony D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary
Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
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Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Press.
Herod, Andrew, Gerard Ó. Tuathail, and Susan M. Roberts Eds. (1998) An Unruly World?
Globalization, Governance and Geography. London: Routledge.
Kroes, Rob, Robert W. Rydell and Doeko F.J. Bosscher, eds (1993) Cultural
Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe. Amsterdam: VU
University Press.
Kennedy, Liam and Scott Lucas (2005) ‘Enduring Freedom: Public Diplomacy and U.S.
Foreign Policy’, American Quarterly 57.2 (June): 309-334.
Lenz, Günther (1999) ‘Toward a Dialogic of International American Cultural Studies’.
Amerikastudien 44.1: 5-23.
Lott, Eric (2000) ‘After identity, politics: the return of universalism’. New Literary History, 31: 665-680.
Ong, Aihwa (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen (2004) Globalization or Empire? New York and London: Routledge.
Ritzer, George (1998) The McDonaldization Thesis: Explorations and Extensions. London: Sage Publications.
Robbins, Bruce and Pheng Cheah eds (1998) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond
the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rosenau, James N. (2003) Distant Proximities: Dynamics beyond Globalization. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Rowe, John Carlos (2002) The New American Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Roy, Arundhati (2004) An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Schueller, Malini Johar (1998) U.S. Orientalism: Race, Nation and Gender in Literature. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Smith, Neil (2005) The Endgame of Globalization. New York and London: Routledge.
Soja, Edward (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical
Social Theory, London: Verso.
Spivak, Gayatri C. (1993) Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York and London: Routledge.
Stead, William T. (1972) The Americanization of the World: Or the Trend of the Twentieth Century. New York and London: Garland.
Sumida, Stephen (2003) Where in the World is American Studies? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association. American Quarterly 55.3: 333-352.
Trask, Haunani-Kay (1999) From a Native Daughter: Colonization and Sovereignty in Hawaii, Hawaii: Hawaii University Press.
Twitchell, James B. (1999) Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Yue, Ming-Bao and Jon D. Goss (1995) ‘Introduction to de-Americanizing the ‘Global’: cultural studies interventions from Asia and the Pacific’, Comparative American
Studies 3.3 (Winter): 251-266.

Reflections on American Studies: The 50th Anniversary Conference of BAAS

The 50th Anniversary Conference of BAAS was a perfect opportunity for a look back at how it was founded and how it has developed over the last few decades. To the Association’s great credit it offered considerable space at the Conference for a productive meeting of old and new perspectives, of looking back but also looking forward, of reflexive and reflective reasoning and argument on where BAAS in particular and American Studies in general have come from and where it might be going. In order to understand why the discipline is the way it is, we as historians should have the capacity and the maturity to discuss all the factors that have acted on it over time. Three panels in particular addressed BAAS’s history and the intellectual and political background to American Studies as a post-war phenomenon in European academia. Several papers were given from those who were involved in the Association’s early years and subsequent expansion, such as Michael Heale, Owen Dudley Edwards, and Louis Billington. Others, including Howard Temperley and David Adams, were also in attendance to offer their views.

The panel entitled American Studies as a Cold War Project contributed to this process of re-evaluation. The intention of the three speakers on the panel – Inderjeet Parmar, Ali Fisher, and myself – was to look at the political, economic, and strategic interests that lay behind the promotion of American Studies. Inderjeet examined the socio-economic and political identity and aims of the major American Foundations which provided much of the financial support for promoting the discipline within European higher education. Ali focused on the delicate processes of negotiation that took place between on the one hand those in USIA and the Foundations and on the other hand the academics who would eventually found BAAS. I gave an analysis of the development of American Studies in the Netherlands and how its promotion by USIA and US Foundations coincided with periods in the 1960s and the 1980s when the United States regarded the country as a key ally.

On the face of it this would appear to have been a straight-forward series of papers on intellectual history during the Cold War, albeit with a critical edge. However, it would be an understatement to say that our presentations provoked some sharp reactions from the floor during question time. One senior colleague responded that he felt as if his integrity as a free-thinking intellectual was being directly questioned by Inderjeet’s apparently determinist argument. I received a prolonged and determined salvo from another BAAS veteran accusing me of demeaning to the point of slander the reputation of Dutch historian J.W. Schulte Nordholt (the words ‘prostitute’ and ‘dirty money’ were used). Clearly, even though others had also given critical takes on American Studies during the Conference, we had crossed an invisible line that all of a sudden made it very personal. This result was unfortunate and deserves some further reflection.

Any study of the history of American Studies has to analyse at some level the role and interests of the American actors involved in this process. The kind of patronage we examined in our papers is well documented and offers an interesting perspective on the role and influence of US public diplomacy in the academic world. Whether we like it or not, this promotion was carried out with a purpose: To ensure that the United States had an informed audience abroad whose understanding of the interests and motives of that country could be explained sympathetically through the media and/or education to local audiences. As is the case with any country’s public diplomacy programme, the promotion of American Studies was politically motivated and related to particular long-term strategic objectives. The assumption from the American side was that these well-meaning activities should necessarily lead to such positive results. Embassy correspondence often included this assumption when referring to the disbursement of Fulbright grants, for instance.

In presenting these positions, we were not questioning the legitimacy or integrity of American Studies as a subject, or its practitioners, in Britain or any other country. What we wanted to argue was that the discipline did not begin or develop in a political vacuum, and that the 50th anniversary of BAAS was a good time to reflect on these origins. Ideas are never free-floating, they are developed and transformed in a broad political, economic, and socio-cultural context. On the other hand, ideas are also based on traditions and personal experiences which have a longer gestation period. It is one thing to demonstrate, as we did, the underpinnings of US support for American Studies. It is quite another to jump to the conclusion that this means everyone involved in that process were dupes of a grand propaganda campaign in support of US foreign policy. That we certainly did not and would never say. We investigate the relevant links, but we also respect the level of autonomy that is present in intellectual work. I can categorically state that the research Inderjeet, Ali and myself have carried out over recent years has always gone against this simplistic and determinist version of intellectual history during the Cold War.

In effect, what foundations do well is to establish the large structures and networks – academic infrastructure – in areas of academic enquiry identified as vital to American national interests; they select key existing institutions for investment, as well as particular scholars and/or groups of scholars for research leadership; fund research and publication projects and programmes; fellowships, seminars and conferences for training and dissemination of a school; and professional societies for developing academic community cohesion, interchange and career development. The resulting network is extremely attractive to much of the best scholarly talent, doctoral candidates, and university administrations. It is designed to produce – within broad boundaries – knowledge and scholarship that is appreciative, understanding and supportive of US power and influence, though it does not always do so. The network, however, maximises opportunities for the production of US-friendly knowledge.

Perhaps part of the misunderstanding lay in our presentation, that we did not sufficiently outline our conclusions based on the evidence we delivered. But the impression of those of us on the panel, and confirmed by others who were also present, was that the three papers complemented each other perfectly: Inderjeet on the identity and interests of US elites, myself on the projection of those interests abroad, and Ali on the subtleties of negotiating those interests in another country. There was definitely enough there for a solid debate afterwards. Let us be perfectly clear – there is no Inquisition here. We don’t all need to suddenly display our philanthropic grants around our necks. In the past I have been the grateful recipient of a Netherlands-America Foundation award for archival research in the US, which from a determinist perspective should mean my work supports the agenda of a group of powerful New York Republicans; while Inderjeet has received grants from George Soros’s Central European University for a project on the role of US foundations in combating anti-Americanism. However, if we move away from such simplistic determinism, we can sustain a worthwhile debate and reflection on how patronage has operated in the academic realm, and in relation to American Studies in particular. If the beginnings of that debate at the Conference were awkward and painful, let us hope that this has broken the ice for more sober reflection. To that end, the three panellists are currently writing a joint article based on our presentations which we hope to submit for consideration for publication to the Journal of American Studies.

On a final note, on behalf of the three of us I would like to thank the organisers of BAAS 2005 for a great event. For myself, my first visit to a BAAS conference, it was certainly a memorable one, and I hope the first of many.

Giles Scott-Smith, Roosevelt Study Center, Middelburg, The Netherlands

EAAS News

Newsletter
The latest newsletter is out now. Issue number 54 May 2005 is available on-line only at http://www.eaas.info This has the latest news on the upcoming 2006 conference in Cyprus.

Cyprus Conference 2006
The EAAS conference will be held in Nicosia, Cyprus from 7-10 April 2006. The workshops have been selected and announced in the newsletter. Anyone wishing to present a paper needs to apply to the appropriate workshop chair by 1 September 2005 with an abstract and proposal. PLEASE see the on-line newsletter for full details of workshops and workshop conveners at http://www.eaas.info

e-journal
The French education and research authority is running a web site with academic electronic journals and the EAAS hopes to start a new, fully refereed e-journal. It will include 1 to 2 issues per year and the EAAS board is currently looking for an international editorial team, including chief editor. Articles will be anonymously double referred and written in English. Anyone interested in applying for the editorial board or for the editorship should contact Marc Chenetier by 15 October at marche@paris7.jussieu.fr or chenetier@eaas.info

AS Network Book Prize
The American Studies Network of EAAS is running their bi-annual book prize in time for the 2006 EAAS conference in Cyprus. Anyone who has published a book in 2004/05 and wants to enter the competition should send three copies of the book, in English, to Prof. Zbigniew Lewicki, American Studies Center, Warsaw University, Al Niepodleglosci 22, 02653 Warszawa, POLAND by 1 December 2005.

EAAS-L
The EAAS mailing list is available to any subscribers to circulate information on conferences, research or anything pertaining to American Studies. The EAAS-L is moderated by Jaap Verheul, Utrecht University, The Netherlands and anyone wishing to contribute to EAAS-L please send your messages to eaas-l@mailman.let.uu.nl and to subscribe to EAAS-L fill out the form available at http://mailman.let.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/eaas-l

BAAS Member Publications
Any member of BAAS who wishes to have their recent book or article publications advertised in the EAAS newsletter should send full publication details to the BAAS rep, Jenel Virden, at J.Virden@hull.ac.uk and I will be sure to include it in the next EAAS newsletter.

News From Centres

AMATAS

Over the last eighteen months the FDTL Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies (AMATAS) project having secured additional funding from HEFCE has taken its expertise into the English Subject Area. With the dedicated support of the English Subject Centre, the project ran three mini-conferences in London (October 2003), Bristol (March 2004 and Warwick (September 2004). The project team would like to particularly thank Pete Rawlings at University of the West of England and Stephen Shapiro from University of Warwick for their intellectual support and dedication which meant that the events were a great success. Paul Giles, Richard Ellis, George McKay, Jude Davies, Neil Campbell, Will Kaufman, Heidi Macpherson, Susan Manning and Wil Verhouven from the Netherlands were keynote speakers who contributed excellent ideas that talked about the importance of the intercultural and the transnational in the teaching of English and for the first time the project made substantial contributions relating to the pre-twentieth century period. Overall, the project in its Transferabilty phase made contact with a further 22 institutions and encouraged networking between sometimes isolated academics working on ideas somewhat marginalised within their own institutions.
The AMATAS project continues to have an impact through other organisations, networks and curricula. The book Issues in Americanisation and Culture (eds. Campbell, Davies and McKay) published by Edinburgh University Press in the Transferability phase is already a key text in Cultural Studies, American Studies and English courses at first year level at University College, Winchester and University of Central Lancashire. Transferability. The team showcased it and Neil Campbell’s excellent Landscapes of Americanisation book to new and appreciative audiences during Transferability. Also, the website now includes new resources on teaching Literature through the intercultural and the transnational.
The website will continue to be hosted on the University’s website and under its own URL www.amatas.org until the end of 2007. The LLAS subject centre has agreed to host the website from the end of the project and we will hand it over during 2007.
End users will be able to gain access to project products and expertise through the American Studies team in the Department of Cultural Studies at UCLAN. Dr. Alan Rice will be the contact person and will coordinate responses to end users who want copies of the Landscapes of Americanisation book or have other queries about the project.

In conclusion, I would like to thanks all those in BAAS and throughout the American Studies community who have been so fundamental to the undoubted success of the project over its nearly five year lifespan from our external evaluators Deborah Madsen and Dick Ellis, through partners Neil Campbell, Jude Davies and Alasdair Spark, those at the LLAS and English Subject Centres (especially Ben Knights and Siobhan Holland), collaborators Scott Lucas, Steve Mills, Stephen Shapiro and Pete Rawlings and others too numerous to mention.

Dr. Alan Rice
Project Manager AMATAS
Reader in American Cultural Studies
Department of Humanities
University of Central Lancashire
Preston
PR1 2HE
arice@uclan.ac.uk

American Studies Centre (JMU) Annual Report 2004-2005

This academic year has proved to be yet another busy and also productive time for the ASRC and once more indicates the healthy state of the study of the USA in the UK, particularly at secondary school level.

ASRC Conferences and Lectures:
The topic for the annual ASRC schools conference, held at the Maritime Museum in Liverpool on October 13th, was the 2004 Presidential Election. As with previous Election themed conferences, requests for places far exceeded those available. A capacity audience of 200 A level American Government and Politics students were presented with lectures by Dr.Eddie Ashbee (Center for the Study of the Americas, Copenhagen Business School) on the Electoral Process and the 2004 Election; Dr. Niall Palmer, (Brunel University) on the Role of the Media in Presidential Elections and Dr.Jon Herbert (University of Keele) on Foreign Policy and the 2004 Election. The final session was to involve presentations of the Republican and Democrat platforms, followed by a debate between representatives from Republicans Abroad and Democrats Abroad. However, due to last minute problems, the Republican representative was unable to attend. Despite this, Chris Hansen for the Democrats gave the audience an informed and invaluable outline of the issues and policies of the Kerry camp. The questions that followed from the floor again indicated the high level of interest and knowledge of the students. This active interest again bodes well for the future of this A level study of the US.

Prior to this event, the ASRC in late September, in conjunction with Liverpool Museums, welcomed back the Native American performer and educator, Dennis Lee Rogers. This was the second visit Dennis has made to Liverpool in recent years and as with his previous visit a mixed audience of students and others interested in Native American issues and culture were presented with a full and varied day. On this visit Dennis brought with him the endorsement and full support of the Navajo Nation Elders to act as an Official Ambassador. After presenting an illustrated lecture concerning life on reservations and the problems faced by Native Americans, Dennis then spoke of the rich variety of Native cultures. In the afternoon session and after changing into traditional dress, Dennis sang a selection of Navajo songs and then gave a performance of Navajo dance. A full report of this event will be carried in the September issue of American Studies Today.

The ASRC also acted as host for a lecture from visiting US Professor, Donald Miller of Lafayette College. Well known for his writings on World War Two, Professor Miller delivered a riveting lecture entitled ‘World War II and American Memory’ to a packed audience of staff, students and guests. Rather than focusing on the machines or strategies of war during his lecture, Professor Miller instead examined the impact of the fighting on the bomber crews of 8th US Airforce, other US and Japanese military personnel and civilians caught up in the conflict. The result was an illuminating discourse, which while debating the moral and military justifications for events such as dropping the a-bomb on Hiroshima, never lost sight of the human cost of the War.

Two other events involving ASRC staff are worthy of brief note. Resources Co-ordinator David Forster and Director Ian Ralston took part in the inugural American Studies Alumni conference at the Salzburg Seminar in Austria. Not only did it provide a welcome opportuntiy to return to the splendid surroundings of the Seminar, but also to establish contacts with American Studies colleagues from across the world and renew old contacts. Ian Ralston also presented a paper on European Persepctives of American Motorcycle Culture at the American Popular Culture Association annual conference in San Diego California.

ASRC Web site (ARNet) and American Study Today magazine:
This year has seen a substantial increase in the number of hits to the ASRC web site. The period June 2004 to early June 2005 saw a total of nearly 3 million recorded hits. The busiest month was April (2005) when close to 64,000 were recorded. Work on developing the site continues. The hard copy magazine, American Studies Today (now also available in PDF format on the ASRC web site) continues to grow and is being sent this year to a record number of subscribers.

Requests and student visits to the ASRC:
The level of information and research support requests received by the ASRC remains at the high levels of previous years. These have again included contacts from the media, particularly the BBC. Although the number of external groups visiting the ASRC for study days has declined very slightly, the number of requests for ASRC staff to present lectures at schools involved with the study of the US has increased. This may again be due to the logistical problems many schools face over ‘out of school’ visits.

Pam Wonsek:
This year has, however, been marked by the sad loss of one of the ASRC’s greatest supporters and friends. Pam Wonsek, Deputy Chief Librarian at Hunter College (CUNY) and a senior member of the ASRC’s US based Advisory Panel, died after a short illness in May. Pam had been an active supporter of the ASRC’s work for nearly ten years. She had contributed to both ARNet and American Studies Today, most notably with her excellent article on the use of the Internet for American Studies research. She will be greatly missed by all who knew her as a true internationalist and a person of immense generosity and fun.

2005-2006:
The Schools Conference for the academic year 2005-6 will again consider the American political scene. The specific topic areas were agreed on after close consultation with teachers of American History and US Government in order to directly address the needs of their students. Issues surrounding the Imperial Presidency, Special Interest Groups, Voting Behaviour, and Congressional Powers will be looked at by John Dumbrell (Leicester), Jon Herbert (Keele), Eddie Ashbee (Copenhagen) and Colleen Harris (Manchester).

Finally, the ASRC would like to thank all of those who have supported our work this academic year. This not only applies to all our conference speakers, but also to The British Association for American Studies (BAAS), The Public Affairs Office of the US Embassy (in particular Dennis Wolfe and Sue Wedlake) and to colleagues and students at Liverpool John Moores University and Liverpool Community College.

Ian Ralston (ASRC Director). June 2005
Email: i.ralston@livjm.ac.uk
Web site: www.americansc.org.uk

Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford: News, Events and Plans

When a professor from another English university was giving a talk at the Rothermere American Institute in Oxford last year, he joked that the building seemed so empty of students he was tempted to transport it back to his own institution, where it could be put to more immediate pedagogical use. Since the RAI does not run an undergraduate programme in American Studies, there is probably a fair amount of uncertainty in BAAS circles about how exactly the RAI envisages its role in relation to the subject in Britain, so it may be worth trying to clear up some of these misconceptions.

The RAI’s mission is to provide a hub for research in American history, politics and literature, linked to teaching at the postgraduate level. The Vere Harmsworth Library, which has taken over the American collections formerly held in Rhodes House as well as adding new materials, is housed within the Institute and provides a comfortable workspace for scholars. The traditional faculty structure at Oxford is one factor inhibiting the development of an interdisciplinary American Studies programme, but, more compellingly, we feel that American Studies as an academic framework predicated upon the idea of a geographically bounded area, a discrete and independent national domain, has diminished relevance in a twenty-first century era of internationalisation and globalisation. There are fewer and fewer American Studies programmes in the United States, for example, although as a method, a discourse which inflects and illuminates other disciplines, the subject is clearly as vibrant as ever. There are many existing institutional models for work in American Studies that cuts across different disciplines: Harvard, for example, currently organises its American Civilization programme around collaboration between faculty in different departments, and the RAI is moving towards something like this arrangement, which will, we hope, also have the advantage of giving postgraduate students more intellectual flexibility and versatility in the job market. We have also been discussing with Oxford’s newly-established School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies how the RAI might contribute in the future to a different kind of area studies involving collaboration with, for example, the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, the African Studies Centre and the various other area studies centres in Oxford.

The role of the RAI, then, is to complement, facilitate and enhance postgraduate teaching and research. The American politics seminar, convened by Des King, meets regularly at the RAI, and the faculty held a conference at the RAI last year on “Political Parties in the U.S. Senate,” with many speakers brought over from America. The History Faculty currently offers a one-year Master’s programme (M.St.) in the History of the United States, which features, among other attractions, a seminar in early American history held jointly by videoconference with the University of Virginia. Taking place at 5pm in Oxford and 12 noon in Charlottesville, this seminar allows students on both sides of the Atlantic to share the transatlantic expertise of Peter Onuf, Peter Thompson, and other early Americanists (the technology is remarkable; John Elliott said that he thought someone was rustling papers on the table beside him, but it turned out to be somebody in Virginia!). Along the same lines, the English Faculty will be inaugurating a one-year Master’s course in English and American Studies for the 2006-2007 academic year, which will enable students to take regular courses in English, options in American literature and to write a dissertation which spans English and American Studies in any topic from 1550 to the present day. There will also be a core course in American Studies methods taught by a visiting professor from the United States; Sacvan Bercovitch from Harvard has expressed interest in teaching this course for the first year, although this has not yet been confirmed. More information and details about the application process are available by e-mailing the Assistant Director of the RAI, Laura Lauer: assistant.director@rai.ox.ac.uk

One of the advantages of the RAI is that, because of its ring-fenced trust funds, it is able to run these academic programmes independently of funding to university departments. Despite the proximity of their acronyms, the RAI is fortunate in not having to bother about the RAE, and it is surely healthy for American Studies in Britain to have at least one academic centre where state-sponsored rules of bureaucratic assessment, honed by the usual threats from university administrations, do not apply. Over the past year, the RAI has hosted a conference on the United States and Global Human Rights, with speakers including Michael Ignatieff (Harvard), Zygmunt Bauman (Leeds) and McCarthur Prize recipient Gay McDougall. We have also continued our series “Transatlantic Dialogues in Public Policy,” featuring prominent speakers from the U.S. and the U.K. debating political issues such as homelessness, reproductive health, higher education and the “special relationship.” The latter debate was joined by former Conservative cabinet minister John Redwood and former U.S. presidential candidate Gary Hart, who himself recently completed a doctorate in political science at Oxford under the supervision of Alan Ryan; the book resulting from Hart’s thesis, Restoration of the Republic: The Jeffersonian Ideal in 21st Century America, was published by Oxford University Press in 2002. The annual Esmond Harmsworth lecture in American Arts and Letters was given this year by Joyce Carol Oates, who gave a memorable and unusual address on 19th May on the writer’s craft, emphasising in particular the value of hatred as a spur to literary creativity. Oates also gave a seminar on her own work during the morning of her visit, when postgraduate students from all over the U.K. and Ireland had a rare opportunity to interrogate the author about her work. Among many other events was a conference organised in collaboration with Timothy Garton Ash and the European Studies Centre on “Europeanisation and Americanisation,” discussing whether they were fundamentally the same thing or “rival projects”; this conference (which by mischance clashed with the BAAS conference in Cambridge) featured former editor of the Observer Will Hutton, the Minister for Europe, Denis McShane and cultural historian David Ellwood. Anat Pick, a former postdoctoral fellow of the RAI who now works at the University of East London, also organised a lecture series on “posthumanism,” with contributions from Neil Badmington (Cardiff), Cary Wolfe (Rice), Erica Rundle (Yale) and several other speakers.

The major event for the upcoming autumn term (10-12 November) will be an international conference on “The Reagan Years,” considering the historical, political and cultural legacy of the Reagan presidency. We feel that now is a good time to reconsider the Reagan decade, as it passes gradually from living memory into the realms of history. Keynote speakers will include Tom Wolfe, New Journalist and author of the famous 1988 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (and also, incidentally, the holder of a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale); Jack Matlock, appointed by Reagan as the last American ambassador to the Soviet Union; and Dan Rather, the recently retired CBS News anchor, who was a major participant in the events of that era as well as a commentator on them.

The RAI has only been open four years, and the next stage in its evolution will involve integrating its programme more systematically within the academic structure of Oxford University and the wider world of international American Studies. There is much work still to do, but it seems likely that American Studies in the twenty-first century will be a radically different kind of enterprise to what it was in the second half of the twentieth, and the challenge for everyone involved in the subject, not just in Oxford, is going to be to think through ways in which the conception of area studies can be reconfigured within a post-national framework. As a matter of policy, the RAI’s library and general events remain open to the public, and further details on the RAI’s academic schedule, as well as its programme of postdoctoral and senior fellowships, are available on the website: www.rai.ox.ac.uk>.

Paul Giles, Director
paul.giles@rai.ox.ac.uk

S.T.A.M.P. Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project, Lancaster

Lancaster was the fourth largest slave port in Britain and around 200 voyages left the city in the eighteenth century. Between 1750 and 1790 alone Lancaster merchants were responsible for the forced transportation of approximately 24,950 Africans across the Atlantic and into slavery in the West Indies and the Southern States of America. The Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project (STAMP) was inaugurated in September 2002. The aim of the project is to make sure that future generations have local spaces where they can effectively remember those whose lives were blighted by the Slave Trade.

This partnership between the City Council, Museums Service, County Education Service and the campaigning group Globalink with myself from University of Central Lancashire as academic advisor has led to a grant from the Millennium Commission and from the Arts Council in the North-West as well as numerous small grants from local and county councils (total c.£60,000) for an art work on the quayside to commemorate the lives of those 24,000 and more slaves shipped on Lancaster slavers in the eighteenth century. The project has made links to continuing issues of global inequity and poverty by highlighting issues of Fair Trade/Slave Trade. STAMP has worked with a number of artists, schools and community groups to increase public awareness of the slave trade and has developed a series of commemorative events and performances from 2003-2005 which will culminate in a permanent memorial to the Africans who were transported on board Lancaster ships, to be unveiled in October 2005 on Columbus Day. With the city’s Litfest, we have distributed 24,950 copies of Dorothea Smartt’s specially commissioned poem Lancaster Keys to schoolchildren in the County – each copy representing one of the enslaved taken in Lancaster ships. After a training day for teachers and artists in May 2004 led by Dr. Hakim Adi and Professor David Richardson, we have facilitated a series of free art and performance workshops in primary and secondary schools in Lancaster and its environs on the topics of slavery, racism and global poverty caused by these legacies using a range of local North-western artists that aim to leave a legacy and build knowledge in the local community about its past. At the moment the local Maritime museum is hosting an exhibition based on the students’ work produced for the project.

Various community groups have also been involved including vulnerable young people in the care of Lancashire County Council who helped with casting the memorial itself. We appointed a lead artist coordinator Suandi from Black Arts Alliance in Manchester in 2004 and the public artist for the project is fellow Mancunian Kevin Dalton Johnson. His powerful sculpted works have addressed issues of contemporary racism and black Atlantic history and his designs for the monument are dynamic and intriguing. We are all very excited about the possibility of having the first specifically designed permanent memorial artwork to enslaved Africans at a British quayside site. In fact we have been granted permission to site the memorial in a prime spot with wonderful historical resonances, just outside the Maritime Museum, the eighteenth century Customs House building in Lancaster. The project has already raised awareness of the issues of slavery and its aftermath prompting a series of letters in the Lancaster Guardian as planning permission was sought and granted at the City Council in early 2005.

The statue will be unveiled and there will be a Civic reception on Columbus Day (October 10) in the early evening. The American Embassy has generously sponsored the visit of our special guest Professor Preston King. It is especially pertinent that Professor King is our guest of honour as he taught at Lancaster University in the 1990s during his four decade exile from the United States that only ended with a Presidential Pardon from President Clinton in 2000. His involvement in the Civil Rights and global human rights movement together with his local connections make him a uniquely qualified individual to speak at the inauguration of the memorial (see http://www.law.howard.edu/publicaffairs/stories/kingpardon.htm#story ). Any BAAS member able to be with us on the 10th October (from 16.30) at this unique event is welcome. Please do contact me at the address or on the email below as we need numbers so that we can provide enough African food for all!!! The next BAAS newsletter should have a photograph of the memorial and pictures from the dedication event.
Dr. Alan Rice
Academic Consultant to STAMP
Dept. of Humanities
University of Central Lancashire
Preston
PR1 2HE
arice@uclan.ac.uk

Exhibition Review, Impressionism Abroad, Royal Academy, London, Until 11 September 2005

David Brauner, University of Reading

Anyone who has visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (as I have been fortunate enough to do twice in the past three years) will have been struck both by the richness of their collection of French Impressionist paintings and by the range of work by their American contemporaries that demonstrates their influence. Those who have also seen the Isabella Gardner Museum, and the Fogg Museum just across the river in Cambridge will probably have realised that the enthusiasm of Bostonians for Impressionism was truly something of a historical phenomenon. The ‘Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting’ exhibition aims to pay tribute to, and contextualise this phenomenon, charting the relationship between Boston collectors and artists and the French painters whose work they championed.

For a non-specialist like me, the paintings in this collection seem to fall fairly neatly into three main categories: those by famous, canonical French Impressionist painters (Degas, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir – and that honorary Frenchman, Sisley); those by their equally canonical, if not quite so popular, predecessors (Boudin, Corot, Daubigny, Diaz De La Pena and Millet); and those by their rather lesser known American contemporaries and disciples (Benson, Breck, Bunker, Cole, Hale, Hassam, Hunt, Major and Perry). There is, however, one figure who eludes/elides these definitions. As this exhibition makes clear, John Singer Sargent is by no means the only American artist to have experimented with Impressionism, but he was one of the first, and certainly the most successful. There are many pleasant discoveries to be made in this exhibition among the American Impressionists: Denis Miller Bunker’s The Pool, Medfield celebrates the American landscape in a much subtler, but at the same time more vibrant manner than the overblown, strained attempts at sublimity of earlier American artists such as Frederic Church and Thomas Cole ; Lila Cabot Perry’s Open Air Concert is compositionally unusual and striking; and Childe Hassam’s urban scenes are delicate and evocative. However, the finest American paintings on view here are, predictably enough, the Sargents.

Fishing for Oysters at Cancale, painted when Sargent was just twenty-one, is an astonishingly accomplished painting: the handling of the light and the water, the daring prominence of the sky (that occupies nearly half the space of the canvas), the deftness of the composition, all attest to Sargent’s precocious talent. However, Sargent was of course most famous for his society portraits. It’s a shame that there is only one example in this exhibition, Helen Sears, which is hung next to Manet’s breathtaking Street Singer (arguably the finest painting in the whole exhibition) and inevitably suffers slightly from the comparison. Nonetheless, it’s easy to see why Sargent was such a prolific and successful painter of this genre: every brushstroke in this painting is both boldly free and carefully restrained at the same time. Impressive as both these paintings are, however, it is the other two Sargents in the exhibition that occupied me longest, because of what I see as their symbolic resonance for the exhibition as a whole. Both are paintings of artists at work in the French countryside; both feature an additional female figure, seated some distance from the painters. In the famous work Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood, however (borrowed from the Tate Britain), the French Impressionist is depicted, sitting down, in the act of painting, his work-in-progress in full view; the female figure, though her features are indistinct, appears from her attitude to be looking either at Monet or at Sargent, or both. In contrast, Denis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot shows the American Impressionist standing back from his canvas (which is facing away from the viewer of Sargent’s painting), deep in (troubled?) thought; the female figure is sitting by the riverside with her back to him, ignoring both Bunker and Sargent. Moreover, the light and colour in the painting of Monet are characteristically Impressionist, whereas the palette of the painting of Bunker is darker, its green and brown hues reminiscent more of the ‘Barbizon’ paintings of Corot et al than of their successors.

It is possible, I think, to see in these paintings an allegory of the relationship between the French and American Impressionists. For with the notable exception of Sargent, in the end this exhibition confirms that the Americans were never quite able to emerge from the long shadows cast by their French counterparts. Most American Impressionism is clearly inspired by, but never quite matches the inspiration of, the French Impressionists: the French painters were the masters (often literally, since many of the Americans studied under them) and the Americans the pupils. You only have to look at Monet’s Meadow with Haystacks near Giverny alongside Lilla Cabot Perry’s The Old Farm, Giverny, for example, to notice the crucial differences. Their representations of the sky are particularly revealing: whereas Perry’s is a static, flat block, detached from the rest of the painting, simply filling in space at the top of the canvas, Monet’s is part of the landscape: dynamic, animated, full of variations of texture and tone. Such differences are also evident in the juxtaposition between the ‘Barbizon’ painters and the Impressionists. Although their devotion to landscape painting undoubtedly paved the way for the Impressionists in the sense of legitimising their subject matter, what struck me during this exhibition was not the affinities between the two schools, but rather the disjunction between the sombre realism of the earlier painters and the exuberant painterliness of the later ones. My favourite painting from the ‘Barbizon’ school in the exhibition was in fact not a landscape painting at all, but Corot’s beautiful portrait Woman with a Pink Shawl, which seems to me closer in spirit and execution to Degas’ unfinished Ballet Dancer with Arms Crossed than any of the landscapes of his contemporaries are to those of Degas’ peers.

Overall, then, this is a fascinating exhibition, which serves as a useful introduction to American Impressionism for the uninitiated, but the real gems on view here are by the French Impressionists and Sargent and it makes a more persuasive case for the prescience of Bostonian collectors of Impressionism than for the brilliance of its practitioners.

Lisa Rull, University of Nottingham

The sunlight that hides the story
Initially, many works now associated with French Impressionism were considered radical and incomprehensible by both critics and the public alike. Yet now an exhibition of works associated with this 19th century style practically guarantees a crowd-pleaser. On a drizzly summer’s morning in London, the thought of wallowing in colourful flecks of sunlight, water and landscape certainly drew early crowds to the doors of the Royal Academy. But once inside, you could sense that viewers were potentially entering into a somewhat unfamiliar and perhaps unexpected narrative: one they were not entirely able or willing to acknowledge.

The clues for both this mix of expectations and some of their confusion are present in the exhibition title, even as this same title proves itself inadequate to conveying the nuances of the display: “Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting.” The magnet of “Impressionism” is there, but the subtitle of “Boston and French Painting” suggests broader concerns. Certainly, the descriptor ‘French Painting’ is far more accurate than just ‘Impressionism’, including as the show does work by earlier painters with much darker palettes such as Corot, Millet and a curiously odd landscape processional by Diaz in the manner of Theodore Rousseau. But what this exhibition is truly about is the cultural development of American bourgeois taste. It is about the transatlantic journey of 19th century art and those ‘figures of agency’ – artists, pupils, enthusiasts, advisers, and collectors (many of these roles frequently overlapping) – whose journeys ultimately shaped one particular public collection: The Boston Museum of Fine Arts [BMFA].

Purchasing the catalogue, the emphasis on agency is clearly expressed in positioning the biographical notes on the collectors ahead of those of the artists exhibited. (Though in some instances – especially Joseph Foxcroft Cole, William Morris Hunt and Lilla Cabot Perry – they could easily be present in either list). Yet the narrative of how the “open minded, quietly sophisticated, well travelled and well heeled Bostonians” (13) developed their private and public taste is boldly made throughout the entire display. Indeed, the largest interpretation/information panel of the show is situated to face towards the entrance and is dominated by a potted history of the BMFA, along with photographs of its buildings and displays in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As with that august institution, the art on show here at the Royal Academy may be mostly French, but the principal narrative attempts to focus on the development of taste, the creating of a new type of import/export relationship between and amongst artists and ‘agents.’

Thus, for any scholar interested in questions of patronage, particularly of American taste and sensibilities (certainly anyone who has enjoyed the work of T.J. Jackson Lears or Lawrence W. Levine), this exhibition attempts to capture these historical relationships. Whilst art historians may squabble over the artistic merits of those American artists influenced by French Impressionism, it is hard to deny the important cultural role played by American ‘figures of agency’ in establishing and encouraging the shift away from prizing Old Masters.

Nevertheless, as a style of painting popularly perceived to be entranced by the play of light upon surfaces, walking through the exhibition it was hard to escape the feeling that many visitors correspondingly experienced the show almost completely as surface. For all that the curator and organisers apparently wanted to focus on questions of ‘agency,’ the paintings draw the crowds: more particularly, the familiar talents of Monet and other French Impressionists. Focusing on the images of beguiling European landscapes, ‘agents’ and ‘agency’ became adjuncts rather than integral to understanding both the images and how audiences came to be looking at them.

So it is Monet who decorates the catalogue front cover, poster, gallery guide, and brochure, just as he came to dominate the collections of Boston’s finest homes (and thus ultimately the BMFA). The most often repeated line from reviews and discussion of the show was that in 1892, Monet was so well appreciated in the Boston region that all twenty-one paintings for his first one-man exhibition in the US, in Boston, came from local collections (28). All through the exhibition, it is Monet and his pals who draw the longest pauses of contemplation and discussion, despite an attempt by the audio tour guide to proportionally comment on American and European images. Yes, there were fine examples of work by familiar names such as John Singer Sargent and Childe Hassam, but Philip Hale’s sickly green Pointillist vision of a “French Farmhouse” (c.1893) diminishes many of the better negotiations with French influences. Ultimately Monet’s brightness casts a shadow over many of the other works, especially the Americans, from under which the bold attempt to tell a different story about agency struggles to establish proper roots.

Without the headphones, and aware of the distance between exhibition experiences and curatorial intentions, it was still fascinating to move through the display observing how the captions tried to emphasise the curatorial focus on agency and relationships rather discussing the techniques or content of the artworks themselves. Of course, this sometimes verged on the perverse, as with the caption for Dennis Miller Bunker’s “The Pool, Medfield” (1889). The catalogue discussed Bunker’s application of French techniques, yet the short exhibition caption spoke solely about the life and work of Arthur T. Cabot, who purchased the work in 1912. There was no mention of Bunker, or his application of “the vocabulary of modern French painting to his native landscape” as cited by the catalogue (108). For me, this conflict between the different levels of commentary and the images presented encapsulated the idea there were two exhibitions taking place here. Although at times the curatorial narrative of agency was clearly entwined with the images, it was hard to resist the feeling that many visitors were just too seduced by the play of light to take in nuances of shade within that vision or their dissemination within Boston society.

Travel Award Reports

Anne-Marie Evans, University of Sheffield

Centennial Conference for The House of Mirth sponsored by the Edith Wharton Society, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York, 23-25th June 2005.

It was not without some trepidation that I boarded the plane to JFK on 22nd June in order to participate in a conference celebrating and exploring one single novel, Edith Wharton’s bestseller, The House of Mirth (1905). This naturally meant that everyone attending would not only be Wharton scholars but also experts on this one particular text and it was both disconcerting and exciting to meet the critics whose work constitutes much of current Wharton research.

Marist College is situated on the beautiful banks of the Hudson River and this idyllic and peaceful setting provided an ideal backdrop to the conference, with the famous Mills Mansion (reputedly the base for Wharton’s Bellomont) only a few miles away. My paper was in the first panel on the first day, and examined the relationship between Wharton’s novel and Ellen Glasgow’s little known New York text, The Wheel of Life (1906). Using the original reviews of the text, I argued that there was a correlation between the two novels in terms of each author’s differing exploration of consumerism and female autonomy. By placing their heroine within the dangers of the growing cult of consumerism, Wharton and Glasgow are able to critique and condemn materialist culture, frequently utilising the language of the financial marketplace, while the New York landscape provides a hedonistic backdrop to each novel, allowing an assessment of urban consumerism and its gendered implications. Traditionally neglected from sustained academic attention, Glasgow’s The Wheel of Life provides a useful comparative lens through which to re-assess, re-read and reconsider The House of Mirth.

The question and answer session was extremely useful and I was pleased to see my research met with interest. I was asked some stimulating questions on issues such as, for example, female individualism and the rise of the New York department store and the differing critical perceptions of heroine Lily Bart. The feedback I received afterwards was encouragingly positive and I feel my project has hugely benefited from this experience. I was lucky to hear some fantastic and thought provoking papers during the rest of the conference, examining The House of Mirth in terms of the racial issues it debates, the pedagogical implications of its role in the classroom and (particularly intriguing)Wharton’s potential influence on Sex and the City. Delegates were also able to listen to a presentation by two off-Broadway directors who have recently adapted the novel for the stage, and there was also a showing of Terence Davies well received 2002 film adaptation starring Gillian Anderson. Before going, I was unsure how successful a conference exploring one single text could be but the opportunity to study Wharton’s text in-depth and from different perspectives was truly invaluable. I would like to record my thanks to BAAS for making this trip possible.

Holly Farrington, Middlesex University

Thanks to a generous short-term travel grant from BAAS I was able to travel to the United States and attend the 35th annual Popular Culture Association conference in San Diego, California, from 23rd-26th March 2005, where I gave a paper on the jazz musician Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong. I was also able to travel on to New York, where I visited both the Schomberg Centre for Research into Black Culture in Harlem, and the Louis Armstrong House and Archives in Queens. Having completed a Ph.D in July 2004 in jazz autobiography (“Bringing me to where I am”: Jazz Autobiography in Context), I am currently doing post-doctoral research into the jazz aesthetic in twentieth-century American culture. This was my first visit to the US and I would like to thank BAAS for allowing me this amazing opportunity.

The PCA conference was undoubtedly the largest conference I had attended, with over 2000 delegates and 555 panels in total. There were delegates from all parts of the US, a select few from the UK, and even some who had made the journey from Thailand. The conference organisers are to be congratulated for their ability to run twenty panels at the same time, and for a perfectly managed program which typically began at 8am and ended at 9.45pm with no lunch or dinner breaks! Panels were diverse and the selection I was able to attend offered a fascinating insight into this new and fast-moving field.

My paper, which was entitled ‘”Little more than a round of Vaudeville antics”? Louis Armstrong as Cultural Icon’, ran on Thursday in the 4.30-6pm slot, when thankfully I had finally recovered from my jetlag. Our panel, which included papers on Keith Partridge (David Cassidy’s alter-ego) and fan magazines, was entitled ‘Celebrity Culture: Creation, De-creation and Re-creation of Celebrity’, and all papers were well-received. I explored Armstrong’s status as a icon, discussing his public and private personas, and the reflection of these personas in his three autobiographies. Following all three papers, the panel and audience engaged in an enlightening discussion on celebrity culture and iconicity.

After leaving San Diego, I travelled to New York, where I was able to fulfil a long-desired dream and visit Louis Armstrong’s former house, now a museum, in Queens, one of the suburbs. Armstrong lived there with his fourth wife Lucille from 1943 until his death in 1971. I spoke at length with Michael Cogswell, the director of the house and archives, and also met a couple from Leicester who had actually been to an Armstrong concert when he visited the UK in 1956.

I also visited the Schomberg Centre in Harlem where I was able to add the finishing touches to an article on the jazz bassist Charlie Mingus and the Beat poet Kenneth Patchen recently submitted to the Journal of American Studies for consideration. The Center has outstanding collections on African-American culture, literature and music, including sound recordings of Mingus’s band accompanying various poets from the jazz-poetry era of the 1950s and early 60s.

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to BAAS for allowing me to undertake such an exciting and valuable trip.

Sinéad Moynihan, University of Nottingham

I was delighted to receive the Ambassador’s BAAS Short-Term Travel Grant in support of my PhD research, especially in this special year of the Association’s fiftieth anniversary. My dissertation explores narratives of passing, particularly recent narratives of racial passing. In my first year, I was fortunate to discover the novels of Robert Skinner, a little-known New Orleans-based writer of crime fiction, whose work now forms a key part of my thesis. The travel grant enabled me to travel to Louisiana to accomplish three main goals related to my research on Robert Skinner: an interview with the author, delivering a paper on his work at the Louisiana Historical Association Annual Meeting and carrying out socio-historical research into New Orleans of the 1930s, the setting for Skinner’s novels.

The interview with Robert Skinner took place at his office in the library of Xavier University, New Orleans on 16 March 2005. I spent two-and-a-half hours in the author’s company, discussing in detail his six novels. We explored, in particular, his literary influences and his reasons for setting the novels in the 1930s. This interview will be invaluable for enhancing my chapter on Skinner. I also hope to publish it as an interview article, since no scholarly work on Skinner exists yet. He was very helpful and assured me that he would be happy to cooperate further if necessary. As University Librarian, Skinner was able to introduce me to Xavier’s archivist, Lester Sullivan, who has delivered and published several papers on Louisiana’s Creole identity. With Sullivan’s help, I located some useful resources in the library’s Special Collections.

I then travelled to Lafayette for the annual meeting of the Louisiana Historical Association, where, on a panel devoted to New Orleans in fiction, I delivered a paper on Robert Skinner’s novels. I was delighted to be able to introduce Louisiana scholars to Skinner’s work, especially given that one of the other presenters on my panel spoke about William Faulkner, a highly canonical writer. None of the Louisiana specialists I met had heard of Robert Skinner. The commentator for the panel was Barbara Ewell, co-editor of Louisiana Women Writers: New Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography. She made some helpful insights into my work, and also pointed me towards an Alice Dunbar-Nelson short story of which I wasn’t previously aware. I also had an opportunity to meet, and listen to the papers of, several important Louisiana scholars, including Alecia P. Long, author of The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920, a work of particular relevance for my own research.

The last week of my trip was spent researching and gathering resources to enhance my chapter on Robert Skinner. My key areas of focus were: Louisiana’s unique racial history (specifically, the changing definitions of the term “Creole” over time), crime in New Orleans in the 1930s and, more generally, New Orleans as a literary setting. I took the St. Charles streetcar uptown to spend time at Tulane University’s Louisiana Collection and at Loyola University’s Special Collections, respectively. I also found the Historic New Orleans Collection, located on Chartres Street in the French Quarter, particularly useful.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the judging panel of the BAAS STA competition for awarding me the Travel Grant. The trip was intellectually stimulating, and has provided me with ample material for further exploration of Robert Skinner’s oeuvre.

Neil Sparnon, Anglia Polytechnic University

SAC got all the glory. Not only did the Strategic Air Command have the biggest and most expensive aircraft, the heaviest bombs and that cigar chomping, publicist’s dream, Curtis E LeMay to keep it in the spotlight, even the satire it inspired has become part of the academic mainstream. Stephen Twigge and Len Scott’s Planning Armageddon is underscored with quotes from Peter Sellars’ Dr Strangelove, ‘The film illustrates and illuminates many key issues on the command and control of nuclear weapons’ claim their Gibbonesque footnote. At the height of their power, from the mid1950s to the early 1960s, SAC aircraft dominated the military thinking of the US and its allies. In the event of hostilities, and crucially, before their outbreak, the primary mission of US forces was to safeguard SAC’s ability to deliver the Emergency War Plan – everything else was secondary.

However the primacy of the Strategic Air Command was often at the expense of other United States Air Force (USAF) units, in particular those assigned to tactical operations. These forces lacked SAC’s political and financial leverage when establishing overseas bases and consequently were less able to insulate themselves from the regions in which they were located. Not only was their impact upon these regions more pronounced as a result, but the potential for local issues to affect their operations directly, was greater.

The east of England, East Anglia, is a good example of such a region. Considering it too vulnerable for its major forces, by 1952 SAC had virtually deserted it for safer, especially constructed, bases around Oxford. In its stead, came tactical, atomic armed forces intended to support NATO on the European battlefield. Though between 1952 and 1954 these were NATO’s only atomic capable forces, their history is one constant shortage and compromise.

The Peter Parish award enabled me to explore this interaction more fully at the archive of the USAF at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama. Concentrating on the papers of their senior commanders and the unit histories of USAF forces based in the region, I sought to piece together how, for example, East Anglia’s housing shortage affected USAF and NATO atomic alert status, local sensitivity to noise and compulsory land purchase affected safety, training regimes and ultimately operational capabilities, and how the USAF monitored and responded to the political temperature of the region in which it was based.

Through this interaction, the research has also explored the extent to which the USAF viewed Britain in regional terms, each with its own set of factors that affected operational considerations. By identifying these factors, the research delineates how the experience of USAF forces in each was different, and how, in turn, the Cold War experience of each region was unique.

My thanks to the BAAS for this award, without which I would have been unable to travel, and to my Director of Studies, Dr John Pollard, for his good offices and assistance. Especial thanks to my Virgil for this trip, Dr Alexander Lassner of the USAF’s Air University at Maxwell for his untiring support, endless patience and what hope will be, enduring friendship.

Inaugural BAAS Book Prize

Presentation by Chair of Judges, Professor Philip John Davies, April 2005

I have to declare an interest. The judges and the entrants in this first contest for BAAS’s ‘book of the year’ are generally well known to each other. It seems to me that can hardly be avoided in BAAS. This is an association that draws its members to its conferences. This year I note that the conference presenters come from about fifty UK institutions, two dozen states of the Union, and a dozen other nations. Within BAAS networks for the sharing of research, teaching and friendship inevitably form.

My fellow judges, Susan Castillo and Scott Lucas, joined me in the pleasure of reading these entries from our colleagues. I thank Susan and Scott for their engagement, concentration, care, efficiency and for the commentaries from which I have borrowed extensively, and entirely without attribution, in the rest of this presentation.

The constant debate as to whether American Studies is best seen as multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, driven by a focus on the centre, or by incursions from the periphery, help maintain our community in seemingly endless and remarkably innovative exchange. Personally, I have fantasised that one day there will emerge a unified theory of American Studies that will somehow encompass the concepts in the Federalist Papers, hiking down the Grand Canyon, the music of Gwen Stefani and the conversations I remember with the surviving IWW member I met in a theatre kitchen in Helena, Montana. Until that happens these books by our colleagues provide ample evidence of the ideas and creativity that provide the foundation and the growth of our field.

On to the books.

We were pleased to read Mark Newman’s Edinburgh University Press book, The Civil Rights Movement, one of two fine volumes entered into this competition from a BAAS member who is a former winner of the American Studies Network Prize, and who gives here an expert overview of the political and social forces of the time he covers.

I found it a particular delight to receive Tatiana Rapatzikou’s Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson, published by Rodolpi, as a BAAS Short Term Award made a small contribution to the production of this interesting perspective on cyberpunk, fantasy and the gothic, some elements of which we have seen being built at earlier BAAS conferences.

Brian Jarvis’ Cruel and Unusual: Punishment and US Culture, a Pluto Press publication, moves across the centuries of American nationhood and across a genuinely interdisciplinary landscape in his far-ranging and thoroughly engaging analysis of the place of punishment in US culture.

The Southwest finds its author this year in Martin Padget, with Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840-1935, a volume in which the University of New Mexico Press have managed a quality of production that complements most successfully a narrative that celebrates as well as analysing and providing insight. I liked particularly the reported exchange between Indian Agent Leo Crane and a Hopi elder, when Crane was worrying about the safety of tourists gathered at the edge of a small dance plaza, by a dangerous drop. In abbreviated form: the elder said, ‘these people are your friends, and you do not want them hurt.’ ‘No,’ said Crane, ‘they travel … and come to see your dance.’ ‘Didn’t you send them letters?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well,’ continued the elder, ‘I didn’t send for them. Why should we care about it? Let them fall off.’ Still a tourist in American culture myself, I can’t help but sympathise with the Hopi position.

Issues in Americanisation and Culture, another Edinburgh University Press publication, edited by Neil Campbell, Jude Davies and George McKay, is a collection containing real quality. Comments on Americanisation operate in this volume to open up possibilities in political culture – in particular the concept of the ‘negotiation’ of America.

Mark Newman’s second entry, Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi, from the University of Georgia Press is a fascinating and carefully researched study. Simultaneous with its scholarly value, this work has an immediacy that reminds the reader just how important these issues were, and remain.

Addressing another period of southern history, and overlapping issues, Emily West’s Chains of Love: Slave Couples in ante-bellum Louisiana, from the University of Illinois Press, is a considerable piece of scholarly research, adding both to our intellectual and emotional understanding of the life-sapping oppression of slavery, and the day to day resistance of humanity.

The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years, by Jonathan Bell, and from Columbia University Press, provides new perspectives on the Cold War period, linking the reshaping of the domestic policy landscape in the context of the contemporary foreign policy and conservative opportunism.

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press, The Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America, by Marina Moskowitz is a meticulous, solidly researched, and finely produced book. It brilliantly puts together social class, material culture and circuits of distribution into a history of the emergence of the American middle class.

By the end of the first page of Acknowledgements I was already gripped by Richard King’s book, published jointly by the Woodrow Wilson Center and Johns Hopkins University Press, Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940-1970. From the start, he quietly begins to address core texts, and to indicate his considered re-reading of them. King offers an in-depth analysis of the intersections between the discourses of modernism and concepts of race.

This is, in the words of one of my fellow judges, ‘spectacularly good … an amazing study.’ The book offers a powerful argument that is not only significant in the examination of race in recent American history but also invaluable in its contribution to the critique of culture and the intellectual in America after World War II. As another judge said, ‘this is the clear pick.’ The opinion was unanimous.

I am so pleased to invite a former Chair of BAAS to receive this first ever prize for the best book published in 2004 by a BAAS member: Professor Richard King.

BAAS Book Prize 2005

The British Association for American Studies (BAAS) is delighted to announce the second annual book prize. The £500 prize will be awarded for the best published book in American Studies this year. To be eligible for the 2005 BAAS Book Prize, books must have been published in English between 1 January 2005 and 31 December 2005 and authors must be members of BAAS. The prize winner will be announced at the annual meeting of the British Association for American Studies at the University of Kent 20-23rd April 2006. Authors or publishers may submit books, three copies of which should be sent by 1st Dec 2005 to:

Carol Smith
Chair, BAAS Publications Sub-committee
BAAS Book Prize
Faculty of Arts
University of Winchester
Winchester SO22 4NR

Conference and Seminar Announcements

Cartooning The USA

America Through The Pen Of Political Cartoonists
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Conference Centre at the British Library, 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM

Lecture: ‘Cartoons & the War on Iraq’
Professor Chris Lamb (College of Charleston) author of Drawn to Extremes: The Use
and Abuse of Editorial Cartoons in the USA

Panel: ‘The Political Cartoonist in the USA’
Kevin ‘KAL’ Kallaugher (Baltimore Sun, The Economist), winner of the 2004 Thomas
Nast Award, & Matt Davies (Journal-News, White Plains, NY), winner of the 2004
Pulitzer prize for editorial cartooning & the first Herblock Prize for editorial
cartooning, discuss their work and the role of US editorial cartoonists commenting
on politics in 21st century America.

Presentation: ‘Drawing on the Collection: Political Cartoons at the British Library’
Dr Matthew Shaw (US Curator, British Library) introduces an exhibition of political
cartoons taken from the collections.

Panel: ‘Looking Across the Atlantic Through Political Cartoons’
Dr Allen McLaurin (University of Lincoln) ‘America Through British Eyes: the 1940s’
Professor Colin Seymour-Ure (University of Kent) ‘Views of America since Watergate’

Panel ‘UK Political Cartoonists Observing America’
Martin Rowson (The Guardian, & other publications), winner of the Cartoon Arts Trust
political cartoonist award in 2003, and Peter Brookes (The Times), winner of British
Press Cartoonist of the Year award 2002, discuss their work and the role of UK
political cartoonists commenting on contemporary US politics

Pennsylvania Gazette, 9 May, 1754.
Frequently described as the first political cartoon published in an American
newspaper, this cartoon is, with the editorial which it accompanied, generally
believed to be the work of Benjamin Franklin. The editorial exhorted the British
colonies – from right to left, New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina – to unite against French aggression from the
Western interior. Benjamin Franklin’s 2006 tercentenary will be marked by events
and exhibitions throughout America. http://www.benfranklin300.com/.

An exhibition on Franklin is scheduled at the British Library in Spring 2006
Registration £15 (£10 students) includes buffet lunch.
E-mail eccles-centre@bl.uk eccles-ceentre@bl.uk> or phone +44 (0)20 7412
7757 for a registration form.
Closing date for registration Friday, October 7, 2005.

International Conference on Chicano Literature

CALL FOR PAPERS
Date for proposals: January 30th, 2006

The organization of the V International Conference on Chicano Literature issues a call for papers to be presented at the conference, to be held at the Institute for North American Studies-University of Alcalá, Spain, from 22-25 May 2006.

Proposals should be 300-500 words and should include the information requested below. Proposals should be sent by January 30th, 2006, to Rosa María García-Barroso (congreso.chicanos@iuien-uah.net) or by fax (34) 91 885 5285.

Both individual proposals and organized panels are welcome. Presentations should be limited to 15-20 minutes. Selected papers will be published. Notification of accepted proposals will be made 20 days after the proposal is received. Definite acceptance hinges on registration. Participants registering after February 20th, are not guaranteed a slot on a panel.

The languages of the conference are English and Spanish.

The theme of the conference will be “Interpreting the Nuevo Milenio”.

Required information

Name :
Organization :
Street Address/P.O.Box :
City :
State/Province/ZIP :
Day Phone/Fax :
email :
I will need audiovisual equipment for my presentation (yes/no):
Indicate which:
Do you need an invitation letter? (yes/no):

Send this information with proposal to congreso.chicanos@iuien-uah.net or by fax to 34 91 885 52 85

Transatlantic Conflict and Consensus: Culture, History, and Politics

The Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies issues a call for papers for its fourth biennial conference on Transatlantic Studies. The conference, entitled “Transatlantic Conflict and Consensus: Culture, History, and Politics”, will be held October 25-28, 2006, on the campus of Teikyo University Holland, Maastricht, The Netherlands.

The organizers welcome submissions covering the gamut of transatlantic conflict and consensus from the fields of literature, sociology, history political science, journalism, cultural studies, and others. The conference organizers hope to engender a multidisciplinary discussion of transatlantic relations.

Submit proposals in English online at www.transatlanticstudies.org. Each submission should include a 500-word proposal of the paper that is to be considered for presentation and a 200-word biographical sketch of the author(s), along with other relevant information requested on submission form.

The deadline for submitting proposals is 1 February 2006. Rolling acceptance will be practiced, but authors will be notified the status of their proposal no later that 1 April 2006. Update information, including registration details, will be available on the website. The lingua franca of the conference is English.

Along with presentation of accepted papers, the conference will feature speakers representing the American view of transatlantic relations, a continental European view of transatlantic relations, and an academic overview of the discussion.

Organizing and sponsor institutions of the conference include the Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies; Gloucestershire University, UK; and The University of South Dakota, USA. Contact Dr. Neil Wynn at nwynn@glos.ac.uk or Dr. Tim Schorn at tschorn@usd.edu, or see the conference website, for additional information.

The United States in the 1980s: the Reagan Years

10-12 November 2005

The Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, will host a three-day interdisciplinary conference examining the subject of the United States in the 1980s. The conference will address the historical, cultural, economic, legal, and social impact of the 1980s upon both U.S. and international culture. Whilst focusing upon Reagan’s America, the conference looks beyond the presidency and the administration to examine wider literary, social, cultural and economic phenomena.

Plenary speakers include Tom Wolfe, Dan Rather and Jack Matlock. Godfrey Hodgson will screen documentary reportage of interviews with the Reagans and the conference will close with a roundtable discussion chaired by Professor Michael Heale.

The conference is free and open to the public though advance registration is required.
A £10 charge applies for lunch at Mansfield College, Oxford.
Full details of the conference, including a provisional programme can be found at www.rai.ox.ac.uk
To register please e-mail Ruth Parr at academic.programme@rai.ox.ac.uk

New Members

John Armstrong is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow. His research interests are in late twentieth century American poetry.

Bruce Baker is lecturer in American History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research interests are in the social and cultural history of the American South between the Civil War and the Cold War. His past research has focused on folklore, racial violence, Reconstruction and labour organisation.

Alice Bell is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield. Her interests include modern and contemporary literature, hypertext fiction, literary theory, possible worlds theory and postmodernism.

Jennifer Black is a PhD student at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. Her thesis is entitled ‘Women and Politics in South Carolina, 1938-1960’ and her research interests are focused on the local chapters of the League of Women Voters.

Jacob M. Blosser is a PhD candidate at the University of South Carolina where he is completing a dissertation on transatlantic latitudinarian Anglicanism in the long eighteenth century. He is a 2005 Gilder Lehrman/John D. Rockefeller Fellow at the Colonial William Foundation and a 2004 Andrew W. Mellon at the Virginia Historical Society.

Lane Crothers is Professor of Politics and Government at Illinois State University. His research interests include American political culture and political leadership, globalization, American popular culture, and right-wing social movements.

Tara Deshpande is a PhD student at the University of Leeds. Her research interests lie in the concept of nationhood in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, with a particular focus on gothic literature.

Mark Ellis is a senior lecturer at the University of Strathclyde. His research focuses upon American race relations in the 20th Century.

Jeffrey Farley is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow. He is currently researching Black Music (mainly jazz) and Culture in America and Europe.

Ali Fisher is a postgraduate student at the University of Birmingham. His research interests lie in the development of American Studies in Europe and in the state-private network within the cultural Cold War.

Phoebe Godfrey is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M International University. Her interests include American social history in the 1950s, desegregation and the current obscenity laws in Texas. Her writing addresses intersections of race, social class, gender and sexuality/faultlines of power and control.

Afron Jones completed a Masters in US History and Politics at the University of Keele in 2003. He is interested in African-American history, electoral behaviour and voting rights.

Matthew Jones is Chair of American Foreign Relations at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include US nuclear history, US relations with Asian states and societies, Anglo-American relations, and the relationship between race and foreign policy.

Kim Lasky is a DPhil student at University of Sussex researching exchanges between poetry and criticism with an emphasis on contemporary US poets including Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Charles Bernstein.

Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec is a doctoral student at the University of Paris VII where he works on comparative slavery and slave resistance. His thesis will examine runaway slaves in Louisiana, South Carolina and Jamaica from 1800-1815.

Catherine Maddison is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. Her research analyses African-American activism and political strategies in the post civil rights era through case studies of community leaders in Charlotte, North Carolina and Washington DC.

John Matlin is a retired solicitor who graduated from Brunel University in 2004 with an honours degree in American Studies. He is currently taking an M.Res degree at Brunel that will lead to a PhD. He is researching into the Citizen’s League, a Minnesota state institution which is non-partisan and promotes civic responsibility and good governance.

Keith W. Olson is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His primary research interest is in twentieth century US presidential history. In 2003 he published Watergate: the Presidential Scandal that Shook America. His current book project examines Eisenhower and civil rights.

Daniel Owen is a graduate of the University of East Anglia in American history and politics. He is the author and publisher of Oval Office 2008 and an occasional contributor on U.S. affairs for LBC radio in London.

Jonathan Pearson is a lecturer in American history at the University of Durham. He is currently researching the development of the presidential library system and presidential memorialisation and commemration.

Maeve Pearson is a postdoctoral research fellow in American literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, having completed her doctorate at Queen Mary, University of London, in 2004. Her main area of interest is on representations of theories of childhood, particularly in their evolution through utopian socialism and communitarianism in nineteenth-century America. She is currently writing a book on Henry James and the Work of Childhood.

Scott Provon is a postgraduate student at Kings College, London. His research interests include eighteenth-century travel writing and landscape.

Laura Sandy is a PhD student at the University of Manchester. Her doctoral research examines the economic and social role of overseers on the slave plantation in eighteenth-century Virginia and South Carolina.

Dan Scroop is a lecturer in American history at Liverpool University. He is interested in twentieth-century US history, especially the New Deal, liberalism and the politics of consumerism.

Claire Spinks is a student at Middlesex University. Her particular interests include matters of foreign policy, social and welfare issues and environmental policy.

Fionnghuala Sweeney is a lecturer at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool.

Donna Marie Tuck is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. She is researching slave narratives and neo-slave narratives. She is also interested in the work of Louisa May Alcott and contemporary Southern literature.

Kevin Yuill is a senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Sunderland, having completed a PhD in American Studies at Nottingham University in 2001. A book based on his doctoral research, entitled Civil Rights in an Age of Limits: Nixon and the Origins of Affirmative Action will be published this year as part of Rowman and Littlefield’s Intellectual Culture Series. He is now researching the 1924 Immigration act and its importance in establishing racial divisions in the United States.

Members’ Publications

Martin Halliwell has two books to be published this October: The Constant Dialogue: Reinhold Niebuhr and American Intellectual Culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 370 pp.) and Transatlantic Modernism: Moral Dilemmas in Modernist Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 270 pp.) He is series editor of Twentieth-Century American Culture for Edinburgh University Press, which will be launched at the BAAS Conference held at the University of Leicester in April 2007

Members’ News

Dr. Sylvia Ellis has been appointed Reader in American History at the University of Northumbria. Her recent book, Britain, America, and the Vietnam War (Praeger, 2004), was awarded Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2004.

Martin Halliwell was appointed to a Personal Chair in American Studies at the University of Leicester in April 2005 and will act as Director of the Centre for American Studies for a three-year term from August 2005.

Winterthur Research Fellowship Program

Winterthur Museum & Country Estate 2006-2007 Research Fellowship Program.
Residential fellowships available for scholars pursuing topics in American history and art, decorative arts, material culture, and design.
NEH senior scholar grants, Lois F. McNeil dissertation grants, and short-term grants will be awarded, with stipends of $1500 to $3333 per month.
Application deadline: January 16, 2006.
Contact Katherine C. Grier, Director,
Research Fellowship Program, Winterthur Museum,
Winterthur DE 19735
kgrier@winterthur.org.

BAAS Teaching Assistantships

Applications are invited for the BAAS Teaching Assistantship in American History at the University of New Hampshire and the BAAS Teaching Assistantship in American Literature at the University of Virginia. Candidates will normally be final year undergraduates, but applications will also be accepted from recent graduates.

A BAAS Teaching Assistantship consists of the award for two years of a Teaching Assistantship, which provides an income sufficient to cover living expenses, plus remission of tuition fees, while the recipient of the Teaching Assistantship pursues graduate study for an M.A. Teaching duties take up approximately half of the working time of a Teaching Assistant, consisting of taking about four tutorial groups for discussion sessions each week and marking essays and exams.

Applications will be received by a BAAS panel, which will draw up a short list for an interview in early December. The recommendation of the panel needs to be ratified by the University of New Hampshire and the University of Virginia. The successful candidates will then be accepted, without the necessity of the very elaborate and expensive process that is involved in applying directly to an American university for a Teaching Assistantship. The successful candidates would begin their studies at the University of Virginia and the University of New Hampshire in September, 2006, for the two years, 2006-2008.

Applicants should send the following by Friday, December 2, to Dr. Peter Boyle, School of American & Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD: (1) a curriculum vitae, (2) transcript of undergraduate work, (3) reason for applying (no more than 250 words), (4) two letters of recommendation (in sealed envelopes). Further details can be obtained from the BAAS web site at http://http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site

BAAS members are asked to encourage applications for the BAAS Teaching Assistantships from suitably qualified students.

The BAAS Teaching Assistantship programme was inaugurated in 2002. The first awards were made to Vicky Bizzell (University of Central Lancashire) and Steve Brennan (University of Birmingham), who successfully completed their M.A. in American Literature at the University of Virginia and in American History at the University of New Hampshire respectively in 2004. The current holders of the awards are John Havard (University of Leeds) and Michael Penny (University of Lancaster), who have completed the first year of their M.A. at the University of Virginia and the University of New Hampshire.

At the BAAS conference at Cambridge in April, 2005, three post-graduates in American Literature from the University of Virginia (Wilson Brissett, Swan Kim and Brian Roberts) and three post-graduates in American History from the University of New Hampshire (Edward Andrews, Venetia Guerrasio and Linda Upham-Bornstein) attended the conference and presented papers, at the invitation and expense of BAAS.
It is hoped that further schemes of cooperation between BAAS and the University of Virginia and the University of New Hampshire will be gradually developed.

Peter Boyle (University of Nottingham)

BAAS Membership of Committees

BAAS Officers

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

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

Dr Heidi Macpherson,* Secretary, Department of Humanities, Fylde 42, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE
Tel: 01772 893039
Fax: 01772 892924
E-Mail: heidi.macpherson@baas.ac.uk

Executive Committee (after 2005 AGM)

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

Ms Kathryn Cooper, (Co-opted), Development Subcommittee, Loreto 6th Form College, Chicester Road, Manchester, M15 5PB
Tel: 0161 226 5156
Fax: 0161 227 9174
E-Mail: kathcooper@cwcom.net

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,* School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred’s College, Winchester, SO22 4NR
Tel: 01962 827363
E-Mail: Jude.Davies@wkac.ac.uk

Ms Clare Elliott,* Postgraduate Representative, Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ
E-Mail: clare_baas@yahoo.co.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 Jay Kleinberg, (Ex-Officio), Editor, Journal of American Studies, School of International Studies, Brunel University, Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH
Tel: 0181 891 0121
Fax: 0181 891 8306
E-Mail: jay.kleinberg@baas.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

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

Dr Martin Padget,† Department of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth SY23 3DY
Tel: 01970 621948
Fax: 01970 622530
E-Mail: mtp@aber.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 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,* School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred’s College, Winchester SO22 4NR
Tel: 0196 282 7370
E-Mail: Carol.Smith@wkac.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@amstuds.hull.ac.uk

Professor Tim Woods, Department of English, Hugh Owen Building, Penglais, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales, SY23 3DY
Tel: 01970 622535
Fax: 01970 622530
E-Mail: tim.woods@baas.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:
Dr Ian Scott (Chair)
Ms Kathryn Cooper
Professor Richard Crockatt
Dr. Jude Davies
Ms Clare Elliott
Professor Simon Newman
Mr Ian Ralston

Publications:
Ms Carol Smith (Chair)
Professor Jay Kleinberg
Dr Heidi Macpherson
Professor Ken Morgan (Editor of BRRAM)
Dr Catherine Morley
Professor Tim Woods

Conference:
Dr Sarah MacLachlan (Chair)
Dr Will Kaufman
Dr Martin Padget
Dr Graham Thompson
Dr Jenel Virden
Dr George Conyne (Kent Conference Secretary, 2006)
Professor Martin Halliwell (Leicester Conference Secretary, 2007)

Libraries and Resources:
Mr Ian Ralston (Chair)
Ms J Hoare (Treasurer) (Cambridge University Library)
Secretary’s position is currently vacant
Ms K Bateman (Eccles Centre)
Dr Jude Davies (BAAS representative)
Professor Philip Davies (Eccles Centre)
Mr D Foster (American Studies Centre, Liverpool John Moores University)
Dr Kevin Halliwell (National Library of Scotland)
Mr J Pinfold (Rothermere Institute)
Matthew Shaw (British Library)
Ms J. Shiel (John Rylands University Library of Manchester)

Memories of BAAS Cambridge 2005 – 50th Anniversary Celebrations

http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/images/cambridge/cam1.jpg” alt=”Simon Newman, Anthony Appiah and Tony Badger”>

Simon Newman, Anthony Appiah and Tony Badger

http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/images/cambridge/cam2.jpg” alt=”Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Jay Kleinberg”>

Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Jay Kleinberg

http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/images/cambridge/cam3.jpg” alt=”Richard King and Philip Davies”>

Richard King and Philip Davies

http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/images/cambridge/cam4.jpg” alt=”Shelly Fisher Fishkin”>

Shelly Fisher Fishkin

http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/images/cambridge/cam5.jpg” alt=”Overview of Dining Hall, BAAS Cambridge 2005″>

Overview of Dining Hall, BAAS Cambridge 2005

http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/images/cambridge/cam6.jpg” alt=”Members of BAAS Executive Committee”>

Members of BAAS Executive Committee

Editorial

One change that many BAAS members will have noticed in the last six months is that, while it’s true their subscription fee has risen, they do now receive a shiny hard-copy of the Journal of American Studies. The decision to include the journal in the subscription fee was discussed at last year’s AGM (the minutes are included in this issue of the newsletter) and was passed by the membership with little objection, so putting an end to the endless discussions of the BAAS executive committee which have been ongoing for the past few years. The change not only confirms the link between BAAS and JAS, which has been important since the journal’s foundation, but puts BAAS on the same footing as many other professional organisations which have their own journal. In addition, of course, there is the added benefit of no longer having to read articles and reviews on a screen or download and print them off onto wads of A4 paper that quickly get dog-eared, misfiled or lost in a pile of other printed documents which you always mean to read but which end up stuck on the corner of a table.

For all the promise of digitisation, the journal article and the review are the ancestors of a form of intellectual activity that predates screen technology. I’ve tried loading documents onto my ipod to read on the bus or train but, after the initial buzz of finding that this does actually work, the long haul of trying to read a few thousand words turns into such an effort that I’m back to the music fairly quickly. The hard copy of the journal, on the other hand, makes little demand on the space in my bag, can be opened and closed much more quickly than navigating through even the most efficient of Apple designs, and rests much more easily on the eye. And when you need it again, there it is neatly located in year order on your shelf.

Of course, for the delivery of material to hundreds of students, electronic access comes into its own. Who would want to be without JSTOR or Project Muse? As university libraries are no longer willing to support the hard copy journal, for new journals (like US Studies Online) electronic production keeps start up costs at a minimum and provides the opportunity for fledgling projects to reach a wide audience. BAAS members now have the best of both worlds.

Graham Thompson
School of American & Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham NG7 2RD

E-mail: graham.thompson@nottingham.ac.uk

Cambridge Conference, April 15-18, 2004

Notice of BAAS AGM 2005

Agenda

1. Elections: Secretary, 3 committee members, 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 2006-2008
5. Report of the Publications Sub-Committee
6. Report of the Development Sub-Committee
7. Report of the Libraries and Resources Sub-Committee
8. Report of the Representative to EAAS
9. Any other business

At the 2005 AGM, elections will be held for three positions on the Committee (three year terms), for the Secretary of the Association (three year term), and for any offices that fall vacant before the AGM. Current incumbents of these positions may stand for re-election if not disbarred by the Constitution’s limits on length of continuous service in Committee posts.

The procedure for nominations is as follows: Nominations should reach the Secretary, Heidi Macpherson, by 12.00 noon on Saturday 16 April 2005. Nominations should be in 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. A ready-made form can be found at the back of this newsletter. 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 they can be posted in a prominent location and available for the membership to read before the AGM.

Dr. Heidi Macpherson
BAAS Secretary
Department of Humanities

University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
United Kingdom
Tel. (01772) 893039

hrsmacpherson@uclan.ac.uk

Costs and Registration

Fees for BAAS/EAAS/ASA Members

Fees for payment by cheque are in bold. Fees with added extra charges for credit card payments are given in italics in parentheses.

A. £335 (342.39) Standard conference fee

B. £225 (230.63) BAAS postgraduate/teacher standard conference fee

C. £213 (218.44) Non-resident delegate fee i. (excludes accommodation; includes dinner/banquet– according to availability)

D. £198 (203.20) Postgraduate/teacher non-resident fee (excludes accommodation; includes dinner/banquet – according to availability)

E. £135 (139.19) Non-resident delegate fee ii. (excludes dinner/banquet and accommodation)

F. £45 (47.75) Single day ticket (excludes dinner and accommodation)

G. £40 (42.67) Postgraduate/teacher single day ticket.

Fees for non-BAAS/EAAS/ASA MEMBERS*

H. £385 (393.19) Standard conference fee

I. £240 (245.87) Postgraduates/Teachers not members of BAAS standard conference fee

J. £243 ( 248.92) Non-resident delegate fee iii. (excludes accommodation)

K. £165 (175.35) Non-resident delegate fee iv. (excludes dinner/banquet and accommodation)

L. £75 (78.23) Single day ticket (excludes dinner and accommodation) SPECIFY DAY below.

*The cost of full BAAS membership is £41, or £13 for postgraduates. For details of how to join BAAS, please contact Nick Selby at N.Selby@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk.

Late Fee

If places are available after 1 March (enquiries after that date by email only), we may accept late bookings on payment of an additional £20 late fee.

A registration and booking form is available at the conference website:
http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/administration/baasconf.asp

You can also find a copy at the back of this newsletter.

Any queries about the conference can be addressed to:

Enquiries, suggestions and comments about the conference should be made to:

Dr Sarah Meer
Selwyn College
Cambridge, CB3 9DQ

E-Mail: sm10003@cam.ac.uk

Provisional Programme

THURSDAY 14 APRIL 2005

1.30-4.30 Registration (Delegates may take Cambridge tour bus from Robinson, or watch Jonathan Fineberg’s film ‘Imagining America’ – British premiere) Tea.

4.45 -5.00 Welcome Address

5.00-6.00 Keynote Address: Kwame Anthony Appiah

6.00-7.00 2006 Reception (University of Kent)

7.00– Dinner

8.00 Bar

FRIDAY 15 APRIL 2005

7.00-8.45 Breakfast

9.00-11.00 PANEL SESSION 1:

A. Gender and Meaning in American Culture

Mike Chopra-Gant (London Metropolitan University) – The law of the father, the law of the land: power, gender and race in The Shield

Bill Osgerby (London Metropolitan University) – Giving ‘Em Hell: Masculinity and meaning in the American ‘True Adventure’ pulp of the 1950s and 1960s

Sinead Moynihan (Nottingham) – Textual Transgressions: representations of Brandon Teena

Craig McClain (University of New Mexico) – Gay Rodeo: carnival, gender and resistance

B. American Photography and Cultural Memory

Richard Crownshaw (Manchester Metropolitan University) – The recycling of American memory and photography

Guy Westwell (London Metropolitan University) – The production and reproduction of memory in Flag Raising on Iwo Jima (Joe Rosenthal, 1945)

Caroline Blinder (Goldsmiths College) James Agee’s Manifesto of Photography

C. 2004 Elections Roundtable

David Waller (University College of Northampton) – Chair

Mark Rozell (George Mason University) – the role of religious belief in the presidential election

Peter Ubertaccio (Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts) – the historical context of the 2004 elections

Ross English (University of Reading) – the extent to which the congressional elections have remained dominated by ‘traditional’ local issues

Philip Davies (De Montfort University) – US election campaigns

D. Black Studies and the Transnational

Nicole King (University of California, San Diego) – Blackness and American Exceptionalism

Sarah Silkey (University of East Anglia) – Ida B Wells and Transatlantic Reform: Rethinking the British Anti-lynching campaigns

Magdalena Zabrowska (University of Michigan) – Babylonia revisited or James Baldwin at Pasha’s Library and other Turkish locales

Fionnghuala Sweeney (University of Liverpool) – Atlantic Modernity and the Politics of Historical choice

E. Nature and Politics in Early Transatlantic Texts

Clare Elliott (University of Glasgow) – Transcending the Natural by reading the Leaves: textualizing Nature

Kathryn Napier Gray (University of Plymouth) – Visualising and exhibiting Early America’s natural world

Susan Castillo (University of Glasgow) – Decay and Ruin in the New World? Views of American Nature in Goldsmith

Susan Klepp (Temple University) – A ‘Louse Rampant’ or the Radicalization of William Moraley Returned from the Colonies to Newcastle upon Tyne

F. Power and Anxiety: Modernism and After

Leslie Shimotakahara, (Brown University) – The Regional Designs of American Modernism: Willa Cather’s Collaboration with Frank Lloyd Wright

Sarah Cain, (Newnham College, Cambridge) – American Nervousness: Modernist Poetry and Paranoia

Sue Currell, (University of Sussex) – Science, sanity, and the Tyranny of Words: Streamlining Language in the Interwar Period

Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast) – ‘What can be done in the face of so much power?’ Conceiving of power and resistance in Kesey, Burroughs and Doctorow

G. Black Social and Cultural Organizations

Edward Andrews (University of New Hampshire) – ‘Outcasts in a Strange Land’: Emigration, Education and the Changing Nature of Black Benevolent Societies in Newport, Rhode Island, 1780-1824

Zoe Trodd (Harvard University) – “Why don’t you get acquainted with your race?” “The Bookshelf”, The Forgotten Readers of Chicago and The Making of Black Middlebrow Culture in the 1920s

Kate Dossett (Leeds University) – Black Nationalism and Interracialism in the YWCA

Elizabeth Jacobs (King’s College, London) – Women, Civil Rights and the Sex Caste System

11.00-11.30 Tea and Coffee

11.20-1.00 PANEL SESSION 2:

A. Music and Post-war Culture

Brian Ward (University of Florida) – Imaging the American South in Postwar British Popular Music

Adrian Smith (University of Nottingham) – Appalachian Culture

B. Revisiting the Founders: literature and politics in post-war Britain

Michael Heale (Lancaster University) – Atlantic stepping stones: fashioning American history in post-war Britain

Mick Gidley (Leeds University) – Writing America: Marcus Cunliffe’s literary histories

Owen Dudley Edwards (Edinburgh University) – Denis Brogan’s American Politics

C. Feminism and the Law

Emma Long (University of Kent) – Making Lemonade from Lemon: the Burger Court’s contribution to the Establishment Clause debate

Mary C Dagg (University of Kent) – Burger v Rehnquist: furthering the Conservative agenda?

Heidi Macpherson (University of Central Lancashire) – “Mother Knows Best”: tracking guilt in feminist law and literature

D. Southern Literature

Jonathan Ellis (University of Reading) – Corresponding Worlds: Flannery O’Connor and Letter Writing

S Bradley Shaw (University of Bergen, Norway) – “The Displaced Person” in a Gray Flannel Suit: O’Connor’s A Good Man is hard to Find 50 Years Later

Rachel McLennan, Glasgow University, Pick up and Unpack: Figuring (Out) Southern Female Adolescence in Jill McCorkle’s The Cheerleader and Ferris Beach

E. Alternate Histories: speculation and variation in Philip Roth, Carol Shields and Lorrie Moore

David Brauner (University of Reading) – “The Other side of silence”: ‘Alternate Histories’ in the fiction of Carol Shields

Alison Kelly (University of Reading) – ‘Writing anew’: reshuffled identities in Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams

Catherine Morley (Rothermere Institute) – Altered visions of the American past: Philip Roth’s The Plot against America

F. Censorship, War and History

Jenel Virden (University of Hull) – Questionable Fictions: The Army Chief of Chaplains and literary censorship in World War II

David Eldridge (University of Hull) – Hollywood censors history

Ian Scott (University of Manchester) – “Why we fight” and “Projections of America”: Frank Capra, Robert Riskin and theories of World War II censorship and propaganda

G. Conflict in Native American Culture

Ruth Maxey (University College, London) – Racialising White America: Literary Strategies of Physical Othering in Contemporary Indian American Writing

Dean Rader (San Francisco University) – Engaged Resistance in American Indian Art, Literature and Film

Rebecca Tillett (Plymouth University) – Seeing with a ‘ New and Different Eye’: Interactions of Culture and Nature in Contemporary Native American Literatures

H. Foreign Policy

S Bennett ((Aberystwyth) – The US Senate as Foreign Policy Actor: the advice and consent role in the foreign policy process

Matthew Jones (Nottingham University) – Limited War in Asia, Nuclear Weapons and Race: a neglected aspect of the challenge to massive retaliation, 1956-61

Carl Pedersen (Copenhagen University) – William Appleman Williams and US Foreign Policy in the 21^st Century

I. Race and the South 1730-1870

William H Boulware (Homerton College, Cambridge) – Interracial Leisure Relations, Cultural Links, and Lowcountry Identity, 1730-1775

James Campbell (University of Portsmouth) Race, Slavery and Law in the Antebellum South

Nicola Clayton (Sheffield University) ‘The Most vital and important of the whole question of Reconstruction’? The Antislavery Movement and the Land Issue in the South, 1861-1870

1.00-2.00 Lunch. Group Meetings (to be arranged).

2.00-4.00 PANEL SESSION 3:

A. The Early American Republic: Recent Scholarship

Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (Paris 7 – Denis Diderot) – The American Revolution, radical historians and the French connection

Pierre Gervais (Paris VIII) – The political nature of American Corporations 1790-1830

Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec (Paris 7 – Denis Diderot) – The lost world of Jean-Michel Fortier: Louisiana dreams of a French Colonial Empire 1800-1803

Monica Henry (Paris 7 – Denis Diderot/Paris XII) – In the aftermath of the Monroe Doctrine: the Panama Congress, 1826

B. Influences: Pound and Eliot

Lee M Jenkins (University College Cork) – “The riddims of St Louis”: T S Eliot and Caribbean Poetry

Tatsushi Narita (Nagoya City University) – The young T S Eliot, the composition of The Man who was King and Transpacific American Studies

Roxana Preda – Between social credit and fascism: the economic correspondence of Ezra Pound

Brendan Cooper (Downing College) – ‘Finches and Fairies’: John Berryman and Mr Eliot

C. The Uses of Presidency

Edward Ashbee (Center for the Study of the Americas, Frederiksberg) – The Bush administration, ‘healthy marriage’ and compassionate conservatism

Birgitte Madelung (Copenhagen Business School) – Monumental Presidencies: the uses of collective memory

Jesper Lohmann (Copenhagen Business School) – George W Bush and Immigration

Niels Bjerre-Poulsen (Copenhagen Business School) – A Charismatic Leader or just one of us? – The strategic use of stereotyping in American presidential elections

D. African/American Literature

Jennifer Blanchard (College of William and Mary) – Passing as brothers and sisters in the fictions of Chesnutt, Hopkins and Twain

Ali McConnon (M.Phil Cambridge 2004) – From Drenched in Light (1924) to Isis (?): Zora Neale Hurston’s Changing Perception of the Harlem Renaissance

Kaleem Ashraf (University of Sheffield) – Representations of the Creole in Wright

Stephanie Brown (Ohio State University) –“The same, really the same”: Postwar authenticity and the “Raceless” African-American novel

E. Black Political Organizations

Lee Sartain (Edge Hill College of Higher Education) – “Leaders who persevere”: Mrs D J Dupuy and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1929-1944

Kevern J Verney ( Edge Hill College of Higher Education) – A rising wind: Walter White, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Second World War, 1939-1945

Nick Sharman (University of Melbourne) – The media and ‘The Movement’: New York Times coverage of the Chicago Eight conspiracy

4.00-4.30 Tea and Coffee

4.30-6.30 PANEL SESSION 4

A. Desegregating Sport

John C Walter (University of Washington) – Integrating the American Bowling Congress: the case of Buffalo, New York, 1947-1950

James Rigali (University of Washington) – The role of Hubert H Humphrey and the National Committee for Fair Play in Bowling in desegregating the American Bowling Congress

Julian Madison (Southern Connecticut State University) – The changing political climate in post-war America and the desegregation of sports

Ian Ralston: (John Moores University, Liverpool): comment

B. Punishment and History

Robert Perkinson (University of Hawaii at Manoa) – An Empire of punishment

Greg Grandin (New York University) – Empire’s Workshop: how Hobbes met Kant in Central America

Corey Robin (City University of New York) – Fear: History of an Idea, Politics of a Practice

Douglas Dennis (Louisiana State Penitentiary) – Fear and loathing in a Louisiana prison

C. The Verbal and the Visual after World War II

Catherine Martin (University of Sussex) – The verbal and the visual in post-World War Two American poetry

Christina Makris (University of Sussex) – The metaphorical relationship between the verbal and the visual in experimental American poetry

John Fagg (University of Nottingham) – All roads lead to Rockwell: representational painting, Modernism and the fear of cliché

Patrick Walsh (Passau) – Anti-Modern Painters in Very Modern Times: Looking at Grandma Moses and Thomas Kinkade

D. Politics and Detective Fiction

Cindy Hamilton (Manchester Metropolitan) – The hard-boiled formula, historical consciousness and the politics of marginality: Sara Paretsky and Paula L Woods

Jennifer Terry (University of Durham) – “Always outnumbered, always outgunned”: Circumatlantic Connections in the ‘Detective’ Fiction of Walter Mosley and Patrick Chamoiseau

Paul Woolf (University of Birmingham) – Prostitutes, Paris and Poe: the sexual economy of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

6.30 -7.30 Journal of American Studies Plenary Lecture (Shelley Fisher Fishkin)

7.30-8.15 (CUP) Reception

8.15 Banquet Dinner (Prizes and Awards).

9.30 Bar

SATURDAY 16 APRIL 2006

7.00-8.45 Breakfast

9.00-10.30 PANEL SESSION 1

A. Mark Twain

Peter Messent (University of Nottingham) – Mark Twain, Manhood, the Henry H Rogers Friendship and Which was the Dream?

Peter Stoneley (University of Reading) – Mark Twain’s Aquarium

T J Lustig (University of Keele) – Mark Twain, Matthew Arnold and ‘Civilization’

B. Studying American Studies

Louis Billington (University of Hull) ­ Pioneering American Studies: ten years of the Bulletin 1956-1966

Elena Maragou (American College, Athens?) – American Studies in the context of European anti-Americanism: the example of Greece

Ann Schofield (University of Kansas) – The post 9/11 crisis in American Studies and the American Studies curriculum

C. Rituals and Order: Communities, Violence and Authority in the Early Americas

Simon Middleton (University of East Anglia) – Chair

Thomas J Humphrey (Cleveland State University) – Traditions of power and authority: rough music and crowd violence in Colonial New York

Susan Branson (University of Texas at Dallas) – From public to private: sentimentality, masculinity and the demise of public executions in the early nineteenth century

Cécile Vidal (University Mendès-France) – French Louisiana (1699-1769): a violent Frontier Colony?

D. Encounters – Native American Strategy towards US Indian Policy

Sam Maddra (University of Glasgow) – Courts of Indian Offenses: ‘Making thousands of Indians criminals’

Jacqueline Fear-Segal (University of East Anglia) – Surveillance, concealment and resistance at the Carlisle Indian School

Claudia Haake (University of York) – Problems removed? Delaware responses to removal and its long-term consequences

E. The Air War in Europe and Japan

Wilfred Wilms (Union College, NY) ­ Combatting the non-combattant: America remembers the Air war in Europe and Japan

Diederik Oostdijk (University of Amsterdam) – “For a saving grace, we didn’t see our dead”: Howard Nemerov’s troubled wartime poetry and memory

Ian Copestake (Goethe University, Frankfurt) – “All bombs. No ammunition. No gunners. All Payload. All Fire”: Fatal Narratives of Redemption in James Dickey’s To the White Sea

F. Limited International Visions

Gabor Berczeli (Kodolanyi Janos University College) American and British Military Statesmen’s Vision of a Post-war International Order at the time of World War I

Brian Roberts (University of Virginia) – Tropical Constitutions/Call for Occasional Revolutions: James W Johnson and US Foreign Policy Down By the Caribbean Sea

Binoy Kampmark (Selwyn College, Cambridge) A Consistent Legacy? Precedents behind US reservations behind establishing an International Criminal Court

G. Ethnicity in the Era of Transnational Studies

Dalia El-Shayal (Cairo University) – ‘Know Thyself’: The Quest for a Japanese/American Identity in Philip Kan Gotanda’s Ballad of Yachiyo

Yan Ying (Nottingham University) – The (Un)becoming Body: Food, Ethnicity and Sexuality in Eating Chinese Food Naked and The Barbarians are Coming

Swan Kim (University of Virginia) Spy in the Era of Transnational Studies: Watne Wang’s Chan is Missing and Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker

10.30-11.00 Tea and Coffee

11.00-12.30 PANEL SESSION 2:

A. Public Diplomacy and US Foreign Policy

Liam Kennedy (University College Dublin) – Virtual diplomacy and information wars

Scott Lucas (University of Birmingham) – The limits of soft power

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (University of Edinburgh) – Justice or security? An FBI dilemma

B. Gender and Aging in Twentieth Century America

Jay Kleinberg (Brunel Business School) – Inventing the matron: middle age as a separate life cycle stage for US women

Eileen Boris (University of California, Santa Barbara) – Old before her time: the sexuality of Age Discrimination

Marjorie Julian Spruill (University of South Carolina) – “No grandmother clause”: Gender and generations in 1970s America

C. Civil Rights and Black Power

Catherine Maddison (Cambridge University) – ‘DC Citizens Still in Chains!’: the Free DC Movement and the limitations of civil rights strategies in an urban setting

Devin Fergus (Vanderbilt University) – Black Power in the Age of Watergate, 1972-1978

Zoe Colley (University of Dundee) – The unseen freedom struggle: the Black Panther Party and the politicization of African American prisoners, 1966-1975

D. The West and American Culture

Martin Padget (University of Wales) – Excessive Consumerism in Literature of the New Southwest

Stephanie Palmer (Bilkent University) – Smart Blockbusters, superficial reviews: environment, labor, and the family in The Day after Tomorrow

John Beck (University of Newcastle upon Tyne) – A Tour of the Monuments of Postminimalism

E. Late Eighteenth-Century Letters

Sarah Wood – Refusing to RIP: or, The Return of the Dispossessed: adaptations of Rip Van Winkle in the Ante- and Post-Bellum Eras

Matthew Pethers – Legal Fictions: Charles Brockden Brown and the emergence of literary discourse in late eighteenth century America

Keith Pacholl (State University of West Georgia) – “Raising human nature to its highest degree of exaltation”: the influence of Periodical Literature upon American religious culture in the eighteenth century

F. Conspiracy and Conflict in Nineteenth-century America

Linda Upham-Bernstein (University of New Hampshire) – “Men of Families”, the Intersection of labor conflict and race in the Norfolk Dry Dock Affair, 1829-1831

Thomas Ruys-Smith (University of East Anglia) – Independence Day, 1835: the Murrell Conspiracy and the Vicksburg Hangings

Jeffory A Clymer (University of Kentucky) – The 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing and the Rhetoric of Terrorism in America

G. “I’m here to Save your Ass, not kiss it”. Flight Attendants in the Spotlight

Kathleen Barry (University of Cambridge) – Pink-Collar Feminism in full bloom: flight attendants’ activism in the 1970s

Drew Whitelegg (Emory University) – All that is Solid’s up in the Air: constructing the world of flight attendants

Bobbie Sullivan (Independent Research Psychologist) – Nothing will ever be the same again: how flight attendants in the US coped with 9/11

H. Telling Race

Joan Bryant (Brandeis University) – Narrating Life and Death: Black Execution Tales as Moral Autobiography

Gary Holcomb (Emporia State) – Being ‘primitive and proletarian at the same time’: Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille

R J Ellis (Birmingham) – Was Huck a Woman as Well as Black? Carried down the river by Harriet Spofford

12.20-1.30 Lunch. Group meetings (to be arranged).

1.20-2.30 PANEL SESSION 3:

A. American Studies as a Cold War Project

Inderjeet Parmar (University of Manchester) – American Foundations, the State and the promotion of American Studies in the Cold War: BAAS et al as a Cold War Project

Giles Scott Smith (Roosevelt Study Center) – The True Atlanticists: Dutch-American cooperation in the development of American Studies in the Netherlands

Ali Fisher (University of Birmingham) – Sought by the US Government, Facilitated by Philanthropy

B. Federal, State and Local Power in the Civil Rights Struggle

John Kirk (Royal Holloway) – The African American Struggle for Freedom and Equality and the Federal Government: an Arkansas New Deal Case Study

George Lewis (University of Leicester) – Southern Resistance meets the Southern Strategy: Virginia segregationalists and the Campaign in the North, 1958-1968

C. The Role of the Artist and Cultural Production in the Formation of Nationhoods

Reina Alejandra Prado (University of Southern California) – Ni Una Mas! Politicizing the performance space and meditations of violence in the work of Raquel Salinas

Cam Vu (University of Southern California) – Profane nation: literature and the arts in the crafting of a Postcolonial Nation

D. Postbellum Literary Instabilities

Lucy Frank, Warwick University, Suturing the Nation: Mourning in Postbellum America

Owen Robinson, Essex University, City of Exiles: George Washington Cable’s Unstable Narratives of New Orleans

E. Gender, Sexuality and Ageing

Katie Otis (UNC, Chapel Hill) – When I’m Sixty-Four: the American sexual revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s, retiree style

Christina R Nelson (UNC, Chapel Hill) – “Her pendulous abdomen and enlarged thighs”: re-forming the irregular older female body through foundations and corsetry in the US, 1900-1970

F. Jazz

Jeff Farley (Glasgow University) – Understanding Miles Davis

Holly Farrington (Middlesex University) – ‘I improvised beyond him…ahead of time’: Charles Mingus, Kenneth Panchen and the jazz aesthetic in twentieth-century American literature

G. Expansionist America

Antonis Balasoupouls (University of Cyprus) Spectral empires: US Science Fiction and Expansionist Geopolitics, 1889-1899

Don Doyle (University of South Carolina) – Manifest Destiny, Race and the Limits of Expansion

2.30-3.00 Tea and Coffee

3.00-4.30 BAAS AGM

5.30-6.30 Eccles Centre Lecture (John Dumbrell)

7.30-8.00 Reception

8.00 — Dinner

9.00 — Bar and BAAS disco

SUNDAY 18 APRIL 2004

7.00-8.45 Breakfast

9.00-11.00 PANEL SESSION 1:

A. American Fiction and the Saddleback of Time

Peter Rawlings (University of the West of England) – Fraternal Temporization: William and Henry James on Time

Peter Kuryla (Vanderbilt University) – “Hashish-Intoxication” and Marijuana Blues: Tetrahydrocannabinol and Time in William James and Ralph Ellison

Sam Halliday (Queen Mary, University of London) – Music, Time and the “Radio-phonograph”: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Ben Williamson (University of the West of England) – Undead Time and Edgeless Space in Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves

B. Revisiting The Black Atlantic

Alan J Rice (University of Central Lancashire) – Gravesites, Performance and Memorials: Black Atlantic sites and the politics of remembrance

Lisa Merrill (Hofstra University, NY) – Captured in the Dark: the construction and reception of nineteenth-century performances of gender, race and nationality

Rachel Van Duyvenbode (University of Sheffield) – Food for thought: Kara Walker’s ‘Grub for Sharks’ (Liverpool Tate 2004) and the aesthetics of Diaspora art

Richard Steadman-Jones and Duco Van Oostrum (University of Sheffield) – “One Village”: Roots of an African Identity in Experience and Language on the Middle Passage

C. Violence and Violations: Seizing the Law

Leslie Harris (Emory University) – Black women defending themselves: rape, domestic violence and the courts during New York’s Emancipation Era, 1785-1827

Jean Yellin (Pace University) – Harriet Jacobs and the legal betrayal of Reconstruction

Jean Pfaelzer (University of Delaware) – Chinese resistance to violence and vigilantes in the nineteenth century: rewriting the Letter of the Law

D. Hollywood and other Genres

Lois Banner (University of Southern California) – Cecil Beaton shoots Marilyn: gender and glamour in the Twentieth Century

Laura Rattray (University of Hull) – Cinematic licence: Horace McCoy and Hollywood

Chalermsri Chantasingh (Silpakorn University) – The strategies of the American Pop Culture Industry in establishing historical veracity: from The King and I (1951) to Anna and the King (1999)

E. Conflict and Society in the late Eighteenth Century

Steven Park (University of Connecticut) -‘Fire in the Hole!’: The burning of the HMS Gaspee and a longer view of colonial maritime resistance

Kirsten Phimister (Edinburgh University) – Religion and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Virginia

William Van Vugt (Calvin College) – ‘I scarcely Know Myself’: The British Meet the Natives in the Early Ohio River Valley

Zoltan Vajda (Szeged University) – Jefferson on the Character of an Unfree People: The Case of Latin America

W Merkel (Columbia University) – Thomas Jefferson, slavery and the law 1770-1800

F. Poetic Challenges

Jon Thompson (North Carolina State University) – William Carlos Williams and Violence

John Armstrong (University of Glasgow) – “The Fourth World”: Ed Dorn’s ‘Othering’ of a Poor White Space

John Wrighton (Aberystwyth) – Jerome Rothenberg and Gary Snyder: po(e)thical practice Nick Selby (University of Glasgow) – Rattling Lyric Frames: Lisa Jarnot’s poet(h)ics

11.00-11.30 Tea and Coffee

11.20-1.00 PANEL SESSION 2:

A. The Anglo-American Special Relationship

Peter Boyle (University of Nottingham) – Eisenhower and 10 Downing Street

Sylvia Ellis (University of Northumbria) – Lyndon Johnson and 10 Downing Street

B. The Varieties of Post-World War II American Social Thought

Richard King (University of Nottingham) – Philip Rieff: Freud: the Mind of the Moralist and The Triumph of the Therapeutic

Dave Greenham (Nottingham Trent University) – Freud and his influence on Norman O Brown

Joel Isaac (University of Cambridge) – The Culture of Epistemology: theories of knowledge and the Sciences of Man in Postwar America

C. Transatlantic Constructions of Memory in the Wake of War

Jane E Schultz (Indiana University) – Performing Modesty: war, commemoration and the sexual politics of publicity

Samuel Graber (University of Iowa) – “A Tribute from Strangers”: Stonewall Jackson’s British Face

Linda Kauffman – How does one reconcile the repression of memory with the memory of repression?

D. Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Cultural History

Martha Sledge (Marymount Manhattan College) – Alphabet for Sale: The Anti-Slavery Alphabet and Abolitionist Rhetoric

Daniel McInerney (Utah State University) – The Art – and Science – of Memory in Antebellum Mnemonics

Marlon B Ross/K Ian Grandison (University of Virginia) – Razing the Dead: Interment and American Spatial Ideology at Jefferson’s Monticello

E. Classifying Society in the Twentieth Century

Douglas C Baynton (University of Iowa) – Defectives in the Land: Disabled Immigrants in the American Imagination, 1882-1924

Venetia Guerrasio (University of New Hampshire) – “For the Promotion of Medical Science”: a Quantitative Analysis of Pennsylvania’s Dissection Subjects, 1901-1925

Cheryl Hudson (Vanderbilt University) – “Citizenship by Racial Division”: the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, 1919-1922

Stephanie Lewthwaite (University of Nottingham) – “Making Americans”: Cultural Pluralism and Assimilation in Mexican Los Angeles, 1914-1933

F. Modern American Government

Iwan Morgan (Institute for the Study of the Americas, London University) – President Bill Clinton and the Balanced Budget

Dean Williams (Edinburgh University) – ‘Law and Order or Social Improvement’ The Department of Justice in American Life, 1967-72

G. Faith and Form

Wilson Brissett (University of Virginia) – Psalm-Singing and the Practice of Beauty in Early America

Amy Morris (University of Cambridge) – “Holy harmony” or “crotchets of division”?: the equivocal style of the 1640 Bay Psalm Book

Tom Rogers (University of Sheffield) – The Dispossessed of Christ: conflicts of faith and form in the early poetry of John Berryman

Jacob M Blosser (University of South Carolina) – Anglican Happiness: the formulation and dissemination of transatlantic religious identity in Colonial Virginia

H. Narrative, Identity, Postmodernity

Alan Gibbs, Nottingham University, Making Funnies: Repetition, Evasion and Procrastination in American Postmodernist Trauma Narratives

Rachel Lister, University of Durham, Reinventing the Self: Female Identity and the Postmodern American Short Story

Lene Schott-Kristensen (Roskilde University)- The Face of the Other in Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude

1.00-2.00 Lunch

Conference Ends

Minutes of 2004 AGM

The 2004 AGM of BAAS was held on Saturday 17 April 2004 at Manchester Metropolitan University at 3pm.

Elections:

Chair
Simon Newman (to 2007)

Committee
Sarah MacLachlan (to 2007)
Carol Smith (to 2007)*
Graham Thompson (to 2007)*
Martin Padget (to 2006)
Catherine Morley (to 2005)

Postgraduate member
Clare Elliot (to 2006)

*Not eligible for re-election.

The Treasurer circulated copies of the draft audited accounts. NS reported that the funds in the accounts are currently in good health financially, due to membership subscriptions, generous donations to STA and generous grants from the US Embassy for this conference and previous ones; the Embassy subsidizes postgraduate and teacher fees, and NS offered thanks to the Embassy for their generosity. Because BAAS is a charity, is it not allowed to be run for profit. NS cautioned members about the rise in internet fraudulent claims and noted that BAAS had experienced a number of attempts to defraud us this year, but they were unsuccessful. NS reported that membership is currently at 547, of which 174 are postgraduates. PD reported that six years ago, BAAS had a total of 440 members. Jay Kleinberg moved to approve the accounts, and George Conyne seconded the motion; the motion carried unanimously.

NS reported that he had on additional item of business to consider, and asked the AGM to consider a proposal to link BAAS membership and subscriptions to the JAS. NS outlined the current situation, which was that members can subscribe to JAS at a discounted rate of £30/year. CUP have offered BAAS an opportunity to fold subscription into our membership for £15/year from 2005, and would offer the remaining 2 issues of 2004 free to members if the proposal was carried. There would be a reduction for those members who currently subscribe. This would make membership £41 for full members, £28 for postgraduates who want to subscribe, and £13/year for those postgraduate who chose not to subscribe. Unwaged or retired members would pay £28, and any other membership rates would go up accordingly (ie, £15 on top of current rates). Professor R J Ellis reminded the AGM that there had been links before, but NS noted the previous arrangement was an opt-out situation, which effectively made BAAS a business partner, and this contravened Charity Commission regulations. If JAS subscription is included in the rate, it is rather a membership benefit. This rate would be held for 3 years, just as BAAS has held the rate of £26 for three years. Jenel Virden commented that the Executive Committee had discussed the proposal very thoroughly and felt that it put BAAS more into line with other professional organizations. The proposal was passed unanimously.

NS asked members to make sure renewal requests are dealt with promptly. He is looking into whether it was possible to move to a system of direct debits, but this was previously prohibitively expensive.

The Chair provided a comprehensive report of the year’s activities for American Studies as a discipline. He noted that when he was first elected chair of BAAS, his immediate task was to counter a QAA proposal to define American Studies as a sub-area of English literature. BAAS lobbied the QAA so successfully that John Randall told PD that the number of responses to the placing of American Studies exceeded the total number related to other subjects covered in the consultative document. BAAS has also taken a leading role in the wider area studies subject discipline, working with the LTSN for Language, Linguistics and Area Studies and the new umbrella organization UKCASA. Currently, planning for the next RAE is underway, and PD reported that once again, American Studies needs to be ready to defend its own position and work in cooperation with the Area Studies community where our common interests lie. However, there are many contexts in which UK Americanists work, both within and outside of American Studies departments; the American Studies community has a virtual quality, and BAAS has played an active role in expanding these virtual links.

Over the past year, BAAS has taken an active role in national consultations, including the Roberts Report; the British Academy’s consultation on emerging and endangered subjects; HEFCE’s call for ring-fenced funds (BAAS’s joint bid was shortlisted but did not make the final cut), and the AHRB’s call for nominations to its Peer Review College.

PD reported a number of media contacts over the last year. Enquiries dealt with by the BAAS executive, or passed to other BAAS members with expertise, came from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsnight, The Malay Straits Times, various BBC local radio stations, Radio Telefis Eirean, BBC 24, BBC Radio Four, various independent programme makers, BBC Online, Radio Five Live, THES, CNN, Newsweek, the Press Association, and local newspapers in the UK

The past year has also seen the first ever visit of a Congress to Campus programme, a 4 day event in London and Leicester. A new American Studies postgraduate conference was added to the growing list of successful postgraduate meetings, when the Institute of US Studies hosted a one-day event in October 2003, which was also attended by one of the visiting Congressmen. The Scottish Association for the Study of America continued to develop its programme of events, and there are plans to re-launch the Northwest branch of BAAS.

BAAS nurtures American Studies in many ways. In 2002 the BAAS conference hosted the executive committee meeting of the International American Studies Association, which went on to hold a very successful conference in Leiden, Holland, in 2003, and has already announced a 2005 conference in Ottawa. In 2003 the BAAS conference hosted a series of panels organised by the Transatlantic Studies Association, which has since advertised its own independent conference in the summer of 2004.

PD pointed out that not all news regarding American Studies over the past year has been positive. Though the total number of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in American Studies has remained stable at around 50, this disguises changes. Growth has been balanced by decline, and is fragile in some places.

BAAS members have, however, had considerable success in the past year, and PD announced a number of promotions, appointments, and awards. Richard Godden received a Professorship at the University of Sussex; Edward Ashbee has become Associate Professor of American Studies at Copenhagen; Deborah Madsen has taken up a Chair in Geneva; Matthew Jones has been appointed to a Chair at Nottingham; Liam Kennedy was chosen to fill the Chair in Dublin; Peter Stoneley is now Professor at Reading; John Dumbrell has moved to a Professorship at Leicester University; Tim Woods has been elevated to Professor at Aberystwyth; and Heidi Macpherson has been promoted to Reader at Central Lancashire. Des King has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy; Janet Beer became Chair of the Council of University Deans of Arts and Humanities; Philip Davies was elected to the Pilgrims, and to the chair of the UK Council of Area Studies Associations; and Esther Jubb and Andy Wroe became the new Chair and Vice Chair of the American Politics Group. Richard Carwardine became the first UK scholar to win the Lincoln Prize, America’s most generous award in the field of US history, for his book Lincoln. Simon Newman’s book Embodied History shared the 2004 American Studies Network prize for the best American Studies book published in Europe, with Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’s Cloak and Dollar picked out as another excellent entry in this year’s competition.

PD also noted the passing of several important American Studies colleagues over the last year, including Kate Fullbrook, Richard Maidment, Philip Taylor, and Esmond Wright.

PD reported that BAAS supports its members in a number of ways, and this year, has awarded 10 STAs, 2 BAAS Graduate Teaching Assistantships, 2 Ambassador’s Award essay prizes, and the BAAS postgraduate essay prize; the total value of these prizes amounts to between £45,000 and £50,000. There is the possibility of further teaching assistantships at other US universities, and PD thanked the members of BAAS who had volunteered their time anonymously as judges, as well as the Arthur Miller Centre at the University of East Anglia for the Arthur Miller Prize; and to the Universities of Virginia and New Hampshire and Peter Boyle, for the Graduate Assistantships. He also noted that this year, the Eccles Lecture has joined the established Journal of American Studies / Cambridge University Press Lecture in recognising a scholar of special distinction. A number of invited schoolteacher fellows have been able to attend the conference, supported by the US Embassy. The United States Embassy in London have been good friends to BAAS, and to American Studies in the United Kingdom.

PD finished his report by acknowledging the growth of BAAS over the 6 years of his tenure as chair. The conferences have expanded, information flow is improved (through the website, e-list and ASIB); publications with BAAS connections are of high quality (the Journal of American Studies, the British Records Relating to America in Microform continues, the BAAS paperbacks series at EUP and US Studies Online), and membership has increased to around 550 with potential for further growth. He also publicly acknowledge the support of the 31 BAAS members who have served on the Executive Committee during his tenure (Janet Beer, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Kasia Boddy, Hugh Brogan, Susan Castillo, Kathryn Cooper, Judie Davies, Dick Ellis, Mick Gidley, Paul Giles, Richard Gray, Richard Hinchcliffe, Jay Kleinberg, Allan Lloyd Smith, Heidi Macpherson, Mike McDonnell, Vivien Miller, Catherine Morley, Simon Newman, Ian Ralston, Ian Scott, Nick Selby, Carol Smith, Douglas Tallack, Graham Thompson, Peter Thompson, Jenel Virden, Iain Wallace, Andy Watts, Karen Wilkinson, and Tim Woods) and the conference organizing teams at Glasgow, Swansea, Keele, Oxford, Aberystwyth, and Manchester, as well as many others who offer their service less publicly.

The Secretary provided an update on last year’s debate about restricting STA awards and other prizes to members of BAAS. After a long correspondence with the Charity Commission, it was found that BAAS could favour applications from BAAS members without needing to change the Constitution, but that any further restriction would invalidate one of our main tenets as a charity. It was thus decided that the phrase “Preference may be given to BAAS members” would be inserted into the guidance notes.

Conferences: Tim Woods reported that the principal business of the Conference Subcommittee is to oversee forthcoming conferences. He offered a formal vote of thanks to Sarah MacLachlan and the team at MMU who organized the 2004 conference. It was one of the largest conferences BAAS has ever had, with several plenaries, and many papers of a wide range of interest. Next year’s conference will be at Robinson College, Cambridge, 14-17 April. There is a CFP in the conference handbook. The 2005 conference will be a major affair for BAAS, and a special subcommittee has been established , with Jenel Virden working closely with the Conference subcommittee to prepare for the 50^th anniversary event. The 2006 conference will be held at Kent, with George Conyne organizing it; details have yet to be finalized. Beyond that, there have been expressions of interest for 2007 and 2008, again with details yet to be finalized. News will then be distributed via BAAS website and other means.

Publications: Janet Beer reported that it has been a busy hear for the Publications Subcommittee. Ken Morgan continues to work hard as the editor of BRRAM, and is hoping to contract a project on the Civil War. Further installments of Liverpool Customs Bills of Entry are being released over the course of the year, and two projects currently receiving attention are the Nathaniel Phillips Papers and the Edward Long Collection. Some additional manuscripts have been deposited at the Merseyside Maritime Museum that supplement the existing BRRAM on the Davenport Papers—the records of a Liverpool slave-trading firm. These are currently being catalogued, though it may take another year before it is complete. The market for series is mainly based on standing orders in US, which are declining slightly. Ken Morgan would welcome suggestion from BAAS members on how to increase the profile of BRRAM and suggestions for future projects. JB reported that the EUP BAAS series is flourishing. Carol Smith and Simon Newman are the joint editors and they work well with Nicola Carr. EUP is happy with current sales figures and co-publishing agreements. There are books under contract on the Civil Rights Movement, immigration, and the Civil War, amongst others. Members with interests in literature, cultural studies or film should contact CS in the first instance, whilst members with interest in politics, history or the social sciences should contact SN. Alternatively, members can approach EUP directly if they wish, but the editors do offer good advice to prospective authors. JB also reported on the ASIB and the website, both of which have Graham Thompson as editor and both of which are thriving. GT welcomes any suggestions for articles about American Studies topics in the ASIB. The website had some server difficulties this year, but nonetheless averages 160 unique visitors a day, and close to 200 per day in the run up to the conference. The Newsletter is the most popular resource (48% of visitors), and the second most popular part of the site is the US newspaper database (13%). The website conforms to priority one requirements of the new disability guidelines, and GT will review further changes this summer. JB offered her own thanks to GT and the AGM offered applause for GT. JB reported that JAS will be delighted that the membership has decided to include subscriptions. There are currently around 100 articles a year being submitted, and the editors would welcome more. There are also a number of books for review, and a list of available books is on the website. JB noted that the new editor of US Studies on line is Catherine Morley, and that a special issue was devoted to the Glasgow postgraduate conference held in November. Finally, JB announced that this was her last report as Publications Subcommittee chair, because she was standing down from the committee, but that she enjoyed working with the association, from 1997 as treasurer, and then from 2000-04 as an Executive Committee Member. JB urged members to put themselves forward for the Committee, as it was a wonderful opportunity to be involved with American Studies.

Development: Simon Newman reported that the Development Subcommittee had also had a busy year, particularly in relation to government agendas. The subcommittee had responded to HEFCE’s invitations to contribute to the Roberts Report, and will now be responding to the set up of RAE panels. In addition, the subcommittee has administered BAAS’s prizes and awards, and SN offered thanks to all those who do the judging. The subcommittee has worked hard on a new School Teachers Initiative, which had support of the US Embassy and the State Department. Kath Cooper, the teacher’s representative, Ian Scott, and Ian Ralston have been instrumental in this project, which includes working on resources for school teachers teaching American Studies. The subcommittee also advises the Executive on providing financial support for regional or postgraduate conferences, or schools’ conferences; members are advised to contact SN for more information. The subcommittee is also very involved in plans for the 50^th anniversary celebration, with JV as the main contact person. A number of events are planned for the upcoming year.

Libraries and Resources: Ian Ralston reported on the success of the US newspapers database, and offered thanks to Kevin Halliwell and GT for their work. The subcommittee is looking for ways to continue to develop. IR reported on the upcoming “Cultural Artefacts and American Studies” conference, which will be held June 15^th at the Rothermere Institute. IR has copies of the booking form and GT will post details on website; information is already available on the American Studies and STAR websites. There will be sessions from colleagues on a Native American photograph project, the immigrant experience, slavery, and theme parks as artefacts, and IR thanks the Embassy for making the conference possible. IR also reported that there is a proposal to make the BLARS Newsletter an annual newsletter, rather than a biannual one and to extend the content to make it directly valuable to a wider readership. IR noted the resignation Duncan Heyes and has made plans to contact his replacement to serve on the subcommittee.

EAAS: JV reported that the Prague conference had been a success, and that EAAS currently has a total of 4300 members from 19 other associations plus BAAS. EAAS is committed to European editions of national association journals, which are available to all members of EAAS at a reduced rate. This year’s edition is from the French association, and the title of the special issue is “Stemming the Mississippi”; JV has details, but they can be ordered for 9 euros. Future editions are planned from the journals connected with the Turkish and Italian associations. JV urged members to become familiar with the EAAS website and use it as a first point of call. It has recently been revamped and improved and is accessible on www.eaas.info. EAAS may be increasing the number of its member associations; this is currently under review, along with its statutes. The 2006 conference will be held in Cyprus, from 7-10 April, in order to launch its new American Studies programme. There are competing bids from Oslo and Moscow for the 2008 conference. The 2004 conference had 373 registered participants, but only 36 postgraduates. This conference marked the 50^th anniversary of EAAS and many references were made to the 1954 Salzburg conference. Next year, the EAAS Board meeting is at Cambridge just prior to the BAAS conference (EAAS meets every year, but have a conference every other year). The new president of EAAS is Marc Chenetier of France and the new Treasurer is Hans-Jurgen Grabbe of Germany, who will serve until 2008. JV reported that the EAAS Grants for postgraduate scholars received matching funds of $12,000 from Fulbright, DC. The Graz conference proceedings are now out, priced 20 euros, and entitled “Nature’s Nation Revisited.” Finally, JV reported on the EAAS newsletter, which has had distribution problems this year. JV promised to write a full report in ASIB on the matter.

AOB:

1. Alan Rice had two items of other business. He reported that the AMATAS project received continuation money from HEFCE, to carry on until October into English subject area. AMATAS has had two min conferences this year, one at Senate House and sponsored by the English Subject Centre, and one at UWE in Bristol; a final conference is scheduled for September 10^th in Warwick and will concentrate on pre-1865 transatlantic panels. AR has plans to put information on literature and the transatlantic on the AMATAS website over the summer.

2. AR also reported on the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project in Lancaster (STAMP). Lancaster was the 4^th largest slave port in Britain. STAMP has received £60,000 from the Millennium Commission for a memorial; they are about to commission artists and will send workshops into schools; This is an exciting dynamic project. AR distributed bookmarks on the project.

3. SN offered his thanks to Phil Davies, the outgoing chair, publicly noting how hard he has worked for the interests of members. This was followed by a sustained round of applause, and the AGM closed.

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 Movment, 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.

Letter to the Editor

Your latest editorial points to a recent if cyclical decline in American Studies in UK universities, suggesting this may be accounted for by a trend back to “traditional” disciplines offered to A-level students, and not by any advance of anti-Americanism amongst British students, as put forward by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian.

Perhaps what you say is borne out by our recent experience in Historical Studies at Bristol. Last year we experienced a remarkable surge of interest in student numbers amongst 2^nd-3^rd-years for US outline history from post-Reconstruction to the 1990s, and our American special units have also done well. Indeed, we had to lay on additional seminars to fit everyone in. We alternate this unit each year with USA TILL 1877, so in the present year the American history we are teaching is not modern. All the same, we had more than the expected numbers and an additional seminar had to be put in place.

I do think the current interest in or fascination with the history of the United States may very well have something to do with 9/11 and with George W Bush, the most controversial president in years, though this does not wholly account for the popularity of the earlier period. But rather than detecting anti-Americanism amongst our students, I tend to find them biased against Bush and his administration whilst sensibly not mixing these feelings up with the country as such. Indeed, in one of my seminar groups nearly half had spent periods of time or gap years in the US and had come away fascinated as well as enthusiastic about the warmth and hospitality of ordinary Americans they had met. The proportion of undergraduates spending some time in the United States would appear to increase year by year, which might also help explain their interest in its history.

Quite why we should find US history so popular here, while the more interdisciplinary American Studies fares less well generally (we do incorporate cultural and literary elements into our teaching), I cannot imagine, unless it is because, as you suggest, A-level students are not being given the opportunity to assess the possibilities of interdisciplinary studies, or simply that whilst interest in history per se remains constant, or is even on the increase, interest in interdisciplinary approaches is more difficult to sustain.

Brian Miller

EAAS News

The EAAS newsletter has now officially gone ‘on-line.’ From now on any BAAS member can access the EAAS newsletter at the website: http://www.eaas.info

I encourage BAAS members to check the website regularly for all official deadline notices for EAAS conferences, book awards, travel awards, etc. It just is not possible to get all the deadlines coordinated in such a way for them to appear in full detail in the BAAS newsletter, ASIB.

As noted above the website is at http://www.eaas.info. The webmaster is Hans-Jurgen Grabbe at grabbe@eaas.info and the newsletter itself is produced by EAAS vice president Gulriz Buken and she is reachable at buken@eaas.info as well.

The most recent news is the establishment of an EAAS archive at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. Walter Hoelbling and Hans-Jurgen Grabbe helped to set up the archive and they are currently asking that any past member of EAAS who has any relevant information please forward it to the archive at:

Zentrum fur USA-Studien
Stiftung Leucorea, EAAS-Archiv
Attn: Ms. Angelika Krieser
Collegienstr. 62
06886 Lutherstadt Wittenberg
Germany

Conference

The 2006 EAAS conference is scheduled to be held in Cyprus. The deadline for submission of workshop proposals for the 2006 EAAS conference has already passed (31 January 2005). The next deadline associated with the conference is for submission of individual proposals of papers to workshop chairs. The names of chairs and list of workshops will be produced in the May 2005 ASE (American Studies in Europe) newsletter on-line at the above web address. It will then be necessary for any workshop paper proposals to be submitted to workshop chairs. Information about this and inquires can be addressed to Ole O. Moen, Secretary General, at moen@eaas.info

Other EAAS deadlines include the submission of applications to the travel grants of EAAS by March 1, 2005. Look on the website for forms and information about applications. There are two travel grants on offer. One is for Transatlantic Grants to universities in the United States for from 3 to 8 weeks for PhD students. The other is an Intra-European grant for study at American Studies Centres or Universities in Europe for postgraduate students doing an MA or PhD by research. Please consult the website for details.

Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Website

You may be aware that the ESRC currently has two websites – www.esrc.ac.uk and www.regard.ac.uk. From April, these two sites will be combined to produce a new broader resource for social science research called ‘ESRC Society Today’.

As well as featuring all the information from the previous websites, ESRC Society Today will offer academics, students and researchers free access to a wealth of social science research. It will include all ESRC-funded research, and act as a gateway to other online resources such as Social Science Information Gateway and Social Science Research Network. It will include early findings, full texts and original data sets, and allow users to take part in online discussion fora. In short, ESRC Society Today is set become a major new online resource and will benefit users from across the academic spectrum.

Travel Award Reports

Paul Edwards, University of Nottingham

I would like to thank the British Association for American Studies for awarding me a 2004 short term travel grant, which I used to fund research into the Victor Gruen Collection at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Gruen was an Austrian born architect and planner, who did the majority of his work in America between 1950 and 1968. He is perhaps most famous as the founder of the shopping mall, but also undertook a variety of urban planning and environmental projects. My own research focuses on the work of Victor Gruen as part of an intellectual and cultural history of the origins of the American shopping mall.

As a side trip on my way to D.C., I presented on the built work of Gruen at the American Studies Association conference in the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Atlanta. With its spectacular lobby ascending the complete height of the hotel and interior balconies leading to the rooms, it called to mind Fredric Jameson’s famous discussion of the “post-modern” Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles. Indeed, the Hyatt Regency shares the same architect as the Bonaventure, John Portman. At least it proved relatively straightforward to find my way in. The conference itself was as impressively huge in size with more than 3,000 delegates. I attended a number of interesting debates including a fascinating one on the impact of (British) Cultural studies on the field of American studies, managed my own presentation with a measure of coherency despite suffering jetlag, met a wide range of “Americanists” from various fields and even visited the house in which Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind.

However, the real work began when I arrived in D.C. Unfortunately, rather than the monumental, turn-of-the-century, faux-Renaissance Thomas Jefferson Reading Room (which all the tourists go to see) my work was done in the Manuscript Division of the James Madison Building, completed in 1980. After negotiating the daily security checks, along with their interminable waits, I spent 10 days sitting in a darkened room examining the extensive papers of Victor Gruen. Amongst interesting correspondence were letters from Jane Jacobs and J.K. Galbraith as well as a wide-range of material concerning the construction of Gruen’s most famous shopping malls, including the first “cluster” shopping complex at Northland in Detroit and the world’s first indoor shopping mall at Southdale in the suburbs of Minneapolis. All of this added greatly to my knowledge and understanding of the work of Victor Gruen as well as adding fascinating insights into his thinking and approach to the architecture profession. For his help whilst there I would like to thank most especially Patrick Kerwin, a reference librarian in the Manuscript Division.

While in D.C., I took advantage of the (free) sites to catch up on my constitutional history and American art, where the George Bellows paintings at the National Gallery of Art were particularly impressive viewed in person. On my one voluntary afternoon off from the archives, I attended a fascinating seminar organised by the American Studies department at George Washington University, on “Race, Uneven Development and the Geography of Opportunity in Urban America,” where I met several American urbanists, who added to my knowledge of the intricacies of U.S. housing policy. All of my experiences whilst in the States added greatly to my appreciation of urban issues both contemporary and historical and, along with the material obtained from the Gruen Collection made for a successful trip. Once again, I would like to express my gratitude to the British Association for American Studies for making such a trip possible.

Mariko Iijima, Oxford University

From 1^st September to 1^st December 2004, I stayed in Hawaii to do fieldwork and to obtain literary sources at University of Hawaii, Manoa for my PhD thesis. Thanks to your financial and academic support, my research turned out to be very productive and successful. I am sure that the research in Hawai‘i made me ready to start writing the thesis for the completion of my PhD degree.

My PhD thesis entitled ‘Twice Migrant: The Japanese Coffee Farmers in Kona, Hawai‘i’ examines the formation and transformations of the Japanese community in the coffee-producing district of Kona, the Island of Hawai‘i. Because of a great influence and prosperity of both sugar and pineapple industries, most research on the social and immigration history of Hawai‘i have focused on these two industries. Despite the fact that the Japanese and other immigrant groups have been engaged in the Kona coffee industry for more than 100 years, little research has conducted on the industry and its society partly because of its small-scale production of coffee.

There were two main purposes for my visit to Hawai‘i. First one was to obtain resources at the Hamilton Library at University of Hawaii, Manoa. The Hamilton holds an excellent collection on the Hawaiian coffee and the Kona community. I found some books and documents which had not been used for academic research and I am very much excited about analyzing them for my thesis. Also, it had a large collection of the local newspapers and magazines, which carries the articles focusing on the industry and the society in Kona in various perspectives such as business, agriculture, and culture.

In addition, during my 2-month stay at University of Hawaii, I had an opportunity to deliver a paper at Department of Ethnic Studies. Since most of the audience was interested in the race and ethnicity in the Hawaiian Islands, they raised interesting questions and constructive comments. These questions and comments were very much to the point, which would be very help for the revision of my thesis. Besides, some of the professors offered to give me more advice for the rest of my thesis.

The other purpose was to do fieldwork in Kona. I spent one month there and interviewed around 20 coffee farmers. Half of them are called old-timers, who are the descendants of the Japanese immigrants arrived to Kona at the beginning of the 20^th century and the other half are called new-comers, who are mainly made up of the retired people from the US mainland. From the interviews with them, I found out that there was a political, economical, and ethnic separation between the old-timers and new comers. This discovery was crucial in writing my thesis, which specifically focuses on the transformation of the Japanese community in the 20^th century. Therefore, I decided to add a new chapter describing the recent demographic change caused by the influx of the US mainlanders, ‘new-comers’ brings several important changes in the coffee industry and community in Kona.

During my stay in Kona, at the beginning of November, I had an opportunity to attend the Kona Coffee Cultural Festival. The Festival, which last 10 days, is organised by local farmers in order to promote the Kona coffee and to introduce the history of the coffee farmers. Interestingly enough, a great majority of the organisers were the Japanese old coffee farmers. They are keen on the preservation of their life style on coffee farms and proud of their history and culture at their host land. Through the observation of the Festival, I saw the active presence of the Japanese in the cultural and social sphere, albeit their decreasing population. This is also to be an interesting and important topic that I would like to explore in my thesis.

I can conclude that my research trip to Hawaii was ended with a great success because I obtained not only useful information but also inspiring ideas for my thesis. I believe that the success is not to be achieved without the support from the British Association of American Studies. Again, I would like to express my warmest gratitude for your support and encouragement.

Congress to Campus UK—2004

The ‘Congress to Campus’ programme had never left the USA before the 2003 visit to the UK, organised by the Eccles Centre for American Studies. That visit was successful enough to gain mention in the Congressional Record, and to prompt the US-based programme to plan Congress to Campus visits to other international locations, starting with Germany, based on the UK model.  They also made a very successful return visit to the UK.

This year the visiting former Congressmen – Jack Buechner (Republican – Missouri; President of the US Association of Former Members of Congress) and Dennis Hertel (Democrat – Michigan) – met audiences made up of A-level students, undergraduates, postgraduates, teachers, diplomats and government officials.  The week-long programme brought them into contact with a total of around 750 people, providing a very effective series of events to a wide variety of audiences interested in US politics.  The visiting congressmen donated their time, and support was received from the US Embassy, the British Association for American Studies, The Eccles Centre for American Studies, and each of the institutions hosting part of the week.

Over 150 A level students and their teachers attended a day-long conference at the British Library in which the two former Members of the US Congress were teh central particpants.  The imminence of the US election heightened interest, and prompted energetic debate between the visiting speakers, their audiences and panels of participating British academics. The topics covered included the US presidency, the operations of the US congress, the importance of the Supreme Court, and the significance of foreign policy in this election year.

Professor Philip Davies of the Eccles Centre and the visiting former Congressmen spoke at conferences organised along similar lines, and held at University College, Northampton, and at De Montfort University, Leicester. They also gave presentations at the University of Leicester, Nottingham University, and were the main speakers at a dinner discussion in London sponsored by the Europe-Atlantic Group.

Philip Davies

BAAS in the North West

Following the creation of the BAAS North West Group in the summer a programme of research seminars has been organized for the academic year 2004-2005. The first of these, a paper by Will Kaufman (University of Central Lancashire) on ‘Paddy’s Lamentation: Ireland and the American Civil War’ was held at the University of Manchester on Wednesday 13 October. In a lively talk examining historical representations of Irish Americans in popular culture and their attitudes towards race and slavery Will focused on a variety of source materials, including film, literature and music and brought the latter to life with a rendition of popular ballads of the time. Wine and light refreshments organized by Ian Scott (University of Manchester) with the help of funding from BAAS rounded off a highly enjoyable evening.

After this successful beginning two further events are already planned for 2005:

From 5.30-7-00pm on Wednesday 23 February Mike Morris and a team of fellow research students working under the supervision of Ian Ralston at John Moores University will be screening their film documentary ‘The Cunard Yanks’ in Lecture Theatre 5 of the Geoffrey Manton Building at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).

From 1.00-6.00pm on Friday 13 May a joint BAAS North West/Caribbean Research Seminar in the North (CRSN) half-day seminar on The Americas will be held in The Adelphi Conference Room at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN). Provisional speakers/papers include:

James Dunkerley (Institute for the Study of the Americas) ‘Americana: Some Reflections on Time and Modernity in the Americas’.

George McKay (UCLAN) ‘Caribbean Jazz Musicians in Britain’.

Charles Forsdick (Liverpool) ‘Transatlantic and Pan-American Visual Images of Toussaint L’Overture’

Many thanks to Sarah MacLachlan (MMU) and Alan Rice (UCLAN) respectively for their work in organizing the above, and also to BAAS for its continued funding contributions.

For further details of either event contact:

Kevern Verney
History Department
Edge Hill College of Higher Education
St Helens Road
ORMSKIRK
Lancashire
L39 4QP

E-mail: Verneyk@ehche.ac.uk

Conference and Seminar Announcements

Nationalism and National Identities in the Americas

A symposium of the 52nd International Congress of Americanists Seville, Spain July 17-21, 2006, sponsored by A R E N A: Association for Research in Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Americas

ARENA, a new international organization, invites proposals for a symposium focusing on nationalism and national identity in the Americas. Our symposium will be open to a wide range of subjects and methodologies involving all nations of the Americas, but we are especially interested in comparative, transnational approaches to subjects of particular relevance to the formation of nations in the Americas:

The Americas and the trans-Atlantic exchange of ideas and models

Independence and liberation movements

Nation-building and state construction: integration, unification, ethnic autonomy, and secession

Nationalism and national identity in multi-ethnic immigrant nations

Nationalism as a plural and contested identity

The American nations of the New Millennium: plurality, sexual diversity, multiculturalism, democracy and recognition

Deadline: February 21, 2005 (preliminary round).

Final Deadline: September 15, 2005.

Send proposals of 500 words (English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French) and a curriculum vitae to: ARENA@sc.edu

Coordinators:

Don H. Doyle, University of South Carolina, USA don.doyle@sc.edu

Natividad Gutiérrez Chong, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, nativid@servidor.unam.mx

Marco Antonio Villela Pamplona, Universidade Federal Fluminense e Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. pamplona@rdc.puc-rio.br

For further information on ICA 52, see: http://www.52ica.com/index.html For further information on ARENA, see: http://www.cas.sc.edu/arena For Spanish and Portuguese versions of this announcement, see:

http://www.cas.sc.edu/arena/CFPSPANISH.htm or http://www.cas.sc.edu/arena/CFPPORTUGUESE.htm

2005 Annual Conference of the Society for the History of Technology

The Society for the History of Technology will hold its annual meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, November 3-6, 2005. This year’s SHOT meeting is co-located with the History of Science Society. We hope members of both societies will take advantage of this opportunity to explore topics that cut across disciplinary boundaries in ways that could benefit both HSS and SHOT scholarship. Please note that applicants should submit proposals to one organization (SHOT or HSS) only.

Conference web site:

http://shot.press.jhu.edu/Annual_Meeting/Annual_Meeting_Main_Page.htm

The Program Committee is seeking proposals for both individual papers and complete

panels. In particular, the committee welcomes proposals from those new to SHOT who

believe that an engagement with history can help their own work, regardless of discipline.

The deadline for proposals is March 15, 2005.

Because the 2004 meeting was held outside the U.S., those who participated at SHOT-Amsterdam are eligible to participate at Minneapolis.

SHOT proposal rules exclude multiple submissions, i.e. submitting more than one individual paper proposal, or proposing both an individual paper and a paper as part of a session. You may both propose a paper and comment on or chair a session.

Themes:

The Committee wants to make clear that proposals on any topic are welcome. This year we are particularly interested in attracting proposals that focus on the following themes, all broadly

defined:

1. Theory, Methodology, and Historiography

2. Technologies of the Everyday: Users and Use

3. Food Technology or Technology and Food

We are interested in session proposals that team established and younger scholars, or scholars who would not ordinarily work together; we especially would like proposals that included scholars from disciplines and sub-disciplines not ordinarily partnered with History of Technology. Multinational, international, and cross-institutional sessions are also desirable.

Again, papers and sessions that take advantage of the co-location with History of Science Society are encouraged.

We also are seeking individual paper proposals for “works in progress” sessions from both junior and senior scholars (including graduate students, chaired faculty, and independent

scholars) who would benefit from a less formal presentation, no formal comment, and greater than normal audience participation. Please indicate specifically if you are submitting a proposal for these sessions.

The committee wants to encourage non-conventional sessions, that is, presentation formats that vary in useful ways from the typical three/four papers with comment. For example, session in which there is no formal comment; sessions at which the presenters do not read their papers but give less formal presentations followed by extensive audience participation; workshops, roundtable discussions, or other “experimental” arrangements. If any special requirements are anticipated, please include that in the proposal, though these should be kept to a minimum.

Paper abstracts, whether part of a panel or individual submission, should clearly indicate the specific topic, argument(s) made, and evidence base used. Panel abstracts should clearly state how individual papers contribute to the session’s overall theme.

Panel proposals that are sponsored by any SHOT Special Interest Group should clearly indicate this.

Proposals for individual papers must include:

1) a one-page abstract;

2) a one-page curriculum vitae.

Proposals for complete sessions must include:

1) a description of the session’s theme;

2) a list of the presenter’s names and paper titles;

3) a one-page abstract and one-page c.v. for each of the presenters;

4) a one-page c.v. for the commentator (if any), chair, and session organizer (if s/he is not one of the session’s panelists).

This year, submissions to the SHOT Annual Meeting will be handled electronically; please see http://www.shotprogram.org for submission procedures and instructions.

Labor, Solidarity and Organizations

Twenty-Seventh Annual North American Labor History Conference Wayne State University, October 20-22, 2005

The Program Committee of the North American Labor History Conference invites proposals for sessions and papers on “Labor, Solidarity and Organizations” for our twenty-seventh annual meeting. 2005 marks several milestones in labor history, most notably the centenary of the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World. In addition, 2005 is the one-hundreth anniversary of the 1905 Russian Revolution and the sixtieth anniversary of the 1905 Russian Revolution and the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II. All of these events represent milestones for labor movements and organizations that strongly shaped modern working-class experiences.

In order to mark these events, the North American Labor History Conference invites papers that will explore the history, impact and meaning of these events–the founding of the IWW, the 1905 Revolution and the ending of WWII–as well as the broader process of unionization and organization.

The program committee encourages comparative and interdisciplinary scholarship from a range of national and international c ontexts, the integration of public historians and community and labor activists into conference sessions, and the use of differing sessions formats (workshops, roundtable discussions, and multimedia as well as traditional panels). It encourages sessions that address the theme from perspectives of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality.

Please submit panel and paper proposals (including a 1-2 page abstract and brief vitae or biographical statement for all participants) by March 1st,

2005 to:

Professor Janine Lanza, Coordinator, North American Labor History Conference Department of History, 3094 Faculty Administration Building

Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202

Phone: 313/577-2525; Fax: 313/577-6987

Email: aol605@wayne.edu

The North American Labor History Conference is sponsored by the Department of History, the Walter Reuther Library, the College of Liberal ARts, and the College of Urban, Labor, and Metropolitan Affairs, Wayne State University, and the Labor and Working Class History Association.

Contesting Public Memories

An Interdisciplinary Conference, Syracuse University, October 7th-9th, 2005 (tentative date- to be confirmed in January 2005)

The “Contesting Public Memories” conference seeks to expand the broad interdisciplinary conversation about public memory. Conference organizers invite submissions focusing on the dynamic interplay between and around public memories. While the conference theme is designed to be broad and inclusive, our sense of the contention of public memories includes: efforts to resist, resurrect memories, or redefine memories, etc. This broad theme, in turn, is organized around three sub-themes: Place, Event, Person. Within these sub-themes, we envision topics ranging from theoretical to practical, and from global to local. The conference is organized by faculty from a wide-range of disciplines, including: African American Studies, Architecture, Art, Communication Studies, English, Geography, History, Latino/ Latin American Studies, Philosophy, Religion, and Writing.

(Tentative) Scheduled Plenary Speakers:

Urvashi Butalia, Univ. of New Delhi, author of The Other Side of Silence

Robert Hariman, Northwestern University, author of Political Style

John Lucaites, Indiana University, author of Crafting “Equality”

Vera Schwarcz, Wesleyan University, author of Bridge Across Broken Time

Carrie Mae Weems, Artist in Residence at Syracuse University.

Contesting Public Memories also plans to feature a Carrie Mae Weems exhibition entitled, “In Desperate Pursuit: The Failure of Memory” and a screening of films by Bill Morrison with live musical performance of Michael Gordon’s score.

The conference will include plenary sessions and competitive panels. For possible inclusion in these panel sessions, abstracts of approximately 400 words should be submitted by April 1, 2005 to:

Kendall R. Phillips
Conference Organizer
Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY 13244-1230
USA

kphillip@syr.edu

For more info see our website: http://vpa.syr.edu/crs/memories.htm

For planning purposes, those intending to submit a proposal are encouraged to contact the Conference Organizer as soon as possible.

For info on SU’s 2001 Framing Public Memory conference, visit the Univ. of Alabama Press website: http://www.uapress.ua.edu/NewSearch2.cfm?id=132476

New Members

Nicola Adcock is a postgraduate student at the University of Central Lancashire and her research interest are Chinese American women writers and Dr. Seuss.

Henrietta Aitken is a postgraduate student at St. Hilda’s College Oxford. Her research interest is early Cold War culture and politics.

Kaleem Ashraf is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield where he is working on the representation of the creole in the fictional dialogues of Richard Wright.

Victoria Blunden is a PhD student at the University of Sussex.

James Burton is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. He is writing his doctoral thesis on cinematic representations of the Vietnam War-era produced suring the period of the culture wars (specifically 1988-1995).

Rachel Cohen is a PhD student at Brunel University.

Martin Dines is a PhD student at Kingston University working on gay suburban narratives in American film, fiction and activist literature.

Marta Vizcaya Echano recently submitted her doctoral thesis at the Univesrity of York. Her main area of interest is US ethnic literature.

Sam Edwards is a PhD student at the University of Lancaster currently researching the American commemoration of the Second World War.

Patrick Flack is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge currently working on race relations in early inter-war Detroit.

Natalie Goldstraw is a postgraduate student at Keele University. Her research interests are American modernist literature, especially William Faulkner.

David Gooblar is a PhD student at UCL. He is writing his dissertation on the fiction of Philip Roth.

Alex Goodall is a final year PhD student at the University of Cambridge working on a thesis entitled “Aspects of the Emergence of American Anticommunism, 1919-1949”.

Benjamin Goose is a student at Wisbech Grammar School and is applying to universities to undertake a degree in American Studies.

Karen Heath is an MPhil student at the University of Cambridge where she is working on George Bush and the Right, 1988-92.

John Hensley is a doctoral candidate at St. Louis University. He is also Curator-Archivist for the Winston Churchill Memorial and Library at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. His research interests are race, class and gender in popular culture and visual culture.

Katie Howell is currently studying for a joint honours American Studies and History degree at Brunel University.

Neanat Imam teaches American Studies at Jahangirnagar University in Bangladesh and researches in the fields of ethnicity, ethnic politics and twentieth century American theatre.

Cathia Jenainati is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Warwick. Her research interests are mainly in the fields of French feminist literary theory, contemporary Canadian writing in English and French and nineteenth and twentieth century US writing by women.

Deirdre Johns is a PhD student at the University of Exeter where she is working on twentieth century African American women’s protest writing during the 1950s and 60s.

Joseph Kennedy is undertaking doctoral work on F.O. Matthiessen’s writing of national identity at the University of Sussex.

Emma Kimberley is a PhD student at the University of Leicester researching the relationship between painting and contemporary American poetry, focusing especially on the work of Mark Doty, Jorie Graham, Charles Wright and Mark Strand.

Nicole King is a lecturer at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests include black US literature and culture, Caribbean literature, postcolonialism and black diaspora studies.

Rachel Lister is a PhD student at Durham University. Her research interests are the modern American short story, gender and ethnicity, regionalism and form.

Alan Lowe is an MA student at Manchester Metropolitan Uni versity. His research interests include the Civil War period and William H. Seward.

Sarah Megson works in Quality Assurance at the University of Kent and hopes to begin a PhD in the next few years. Her main areas of interest are American political and social history.

Catalina Neculai is a postgraduate Research Fellow at The University of Warwick working on a doctoral project tentatively entitled “Urban Regime Transformation and Cultural Production in New York City, 1970s-1990s”.

Robert Phillips is a postgraduate student whose primary research interest is in Jack Kerouac and his literary companions.

Steven Pope is Senior Lecturer in American history at the University of Lincoln. His current research interest is leaisure travel and motoring in the US and Britain from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Sarah Roberts is a PhD student at Oxford Brookes University and is working on H.D. and the muse.

Yvonne Ryan is a PhD student at the University of East Anglia. The subject of her thesis is Roy Wilkins and the NAACP.

Adrian Smith is a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham working on the folk music, authenticity and the Left.

Simon Turner is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham where he is working on the cultural reception of the Vietnam War.

Sue Tyrell is a postgraduate student at Keel University working on the cultural and political context of the plays of Tennessee Williams.

Molly Vaux received her PhD from the City University of New York where she completed her thesis on American novelists’ self-representation through their prefaces.

Denise Wells is a research student at University College Winchester working on a project titled “Thatcher, Reagan, Work and Identity”.

Paul Williams is a graduate student at the University of Exeter currently exploring the cultural ramifications of the threat of nuclear war in British and American representations.

Jacqueline Wilson is a PhD student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, working on Chinese American women writers.

Members’ Publications

Sylvia Ellis, Britain, America, and the Vietnam War (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004) ISBN 0-275-97381-6, $74.95 Cloth

John A. Kirk, Martin Luther King, Jr. (Pearson/Longman, 2004)

Hazel Moffat, Your AffectionateBrother, Francis Ogley Thompson: A Yorkshire Emigrant’s Letters from Canada and the USA 1857-1864 (Doncaster: Buttercross Books, 2003). ISBN 1-903833-39-6

Members’ News

Multicultural American Literature by A. Robert Lee has been selected as a winner of the twenty-fifth annual American Book Awards for 2004.

Simon Newman has been awarded a British Academy Research Readership for 2005-2007, for the project “The transformation of working life and culture in the British Atlantic World, 1600-1800.”

BAAS Membership of Committees

BAAS Committee

BAAS Officers

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

Dr. Nick Selby,* Treasurer, Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ
Tel: 0141 330 8596
Fax: 0141 330 4601
E-Mail: N.Selby@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Dr Heidi Macpherson, Secretary, Department of Humanities, Fylde 42, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE
Tel: 01772 893039
Fax: 01772 892924
E-Mail: heidi.macpherson@baas.ac.uk

Executive Commitee (after 2004 AGM)

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

Ms Kathryn Cooper, (Co-opted), Development Subcommittee, Loreto 6th Form College, Chicester Road, Manchester, M15 5PB
Tel: 0161 226 5156
Fax: 0161 227 9174
E-Mail: kathcooper@cwcom.net

Dr. Jude Davies, School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred’s College, Winchester, SO22 4NR
Tel: 01962 827363
E-Mail: Jude.Davies@wkac.ac.uk

Ms Clare Elliott,* Postgraduate Representative, Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ
E-Mail: clare_baas@yahoo.co.uk

Professor Jay Kleinberg, (Ex-Officio), Editor, Journal of American Studies, School of International Studies, Brunel University, Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH
Tel: 0181 891 0121
Fax: 0181 891 8306
E-Mail: jay.kleinberg@baas.ac.uk

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

Ms. Catherine Morley, School of Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane Campus, Headington, OX3 OBP
E-Mail: catherine.morley@baas.ac.uk

Dr. Martin Padget, Department of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth SY23 3DY
Tel: 01970 621948
Fax: 01970 622530
E-Mail: mtp@aber.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 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,* School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred’s College, Winchester SO22 4NR
Tel: 0196 282 7370
E-Mail: Carol.Smith@wkac.ac.uk

Dr. Peter Thompson, St. Cross College, St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LZ
Tel: 01865 278498
E-Mail: peter.thompson@stx.ox.ac.uk

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

Professor Tim Woods, Department of English, Hugh Owen Building, Penglais, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales, SY23 3DY
Tel: 01970 622535
Fax: 01970 622530
E-Mail: tim.woods@baas.ac.uk

[* indicates this person not eligible for re-election to this position. All co-optations must be reviewed annually]

BAAS Sub-Committee Members

Development:
Dr Ian Scott (Chair) 
Dr. Jude Davies
Ms Clare Elliott
Ms. Catherine Morley
Professor Simon Newman
Dr. Peter Thompson
Dr Iain Wallace

Publications:
Ms Carol Smith (Chair)
Ms Kathryn Cooper
Professor Jay Kleinberg
Dr Heidi Macpherson
Professor Ken Morgan
Dr Graham Thompson
Dr Jenel Virden

Conference:
Professor Tim Woods (Chair)
George Conyne
Ann Holton
Dr Sarah MacLachlan
Dr. Sarah Meer
Dr. Martin Padget
Dr. Nick Selby

Libraries and Resources:
Mr Ian Ralston (Chair)
Dr Kevin Halliwell

Editorial

American Studies made it to the pages of The Guardian this week. Polly Toynbee’s “A degree in bullying and self-interest? No thanks” (August 25) was written in response to declining American Studies applications to universities this year and the prevalence of American Studies places available in clearing. There seems little doubt that American Studies is undergoing one of its cyclical dips in popularity, but whether, as Toynbee suggests, this is down to a more general anti-Americanism driven by Bush’s presidency, and in particular his foreign policy post-September 11, is open to question. After all, US foreign policy has hardly changed overnight. Vietnam? Nicaragua? Grenada? And might not the increased exposure of US politics and public awareness of US military campaigns actually provoke rather than deter interest in American society and culture? Rather than conservative American domestic and foreign policy, it might be conservative trends in UK secondary education that account for a reluctance to apply for American Studies courses. A bankrupt A-level system that teaches students how to pass exams in two or three narrowly defined subjects hardly stimulates an interest in the sort of interdisciplinary teaching and research that goes on in many American Studies programmes. The return of the traditional discipline (English, History and Politics have all seen increased applications over the past few years) is a trend that needs to be set alongside the drop in American Studies applications.

It’s also worth looking at some of the other subjects that have seen a decline in applications this year according to UCAS: Computer Science, down 18.1; Biology, down 2.4%; Genetics, down 13.2%. Should we apply Toynbee’s logic to these subjects: are students anti-computers or anti-nature? Hardly. And does it mean that the students applying to do American Studies are somehow pro-American, however that might actually be defined? Toynbee’s suggestion that the election of John Kerry might miraculously reverse the current American Studies trend is also a short-sighted one that labours under the belief that people in the UK are somehow the victims and unwilling beneficiaries of US and not UK domestic politics. The pro or anti-Americanism argument seems to me to unhelpfully perpetuate a way of thinking about America as potentially above, but almost always in reality, beneath contempt. People interested in American Studies should recognise this as an obfuscation that gets in the way of examining the kinds of education offered to A-level students in the UK and the educational choices they are presented with by the current system.

Graham Thompson
School of American & Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham NG7 2RD
E-mail: graham.thompson@nottingham.ac.uk

BAAS Annual Conference: Cambridge University 2005, Call for Papers

We are now calling for papers for the 2005 BAAS conference. Papers can be presented on any subject relating to the study of the United States of America. Poster sessions will also be held and proposals for these are positively encouraged and welcomed.

Cambridge University hosted the first BAAS conference in 1955. The Association returned there for its 40th anniversary conference in 1995. The University is particularly pleased to welcome BAAS for its fiftieth anniversary conference. While delegates will have the opportunity to explore the historic university town, the conference will be held in the centrally located, but modern, Robinson College, situated just behind the University Library, which was purpose-built with conferences in mind.

Proposals for 20-minute papers should be a maximum of 250 words with a provisional title. These will be arranged into panel groups. Panel proposals by two or more people, sharing a common theme, are also invited. Postgraduates, as well as senior scholars, are encouraged to submit proposals. Proposals should be submitted by 31st October 2004 to:

Mrs Ann Holton

Secretary to the Mellon Professor

Cambridge University

History Faculty

West Road

Cambridge, CB3 9EF

Tel: +44 (0)1223 335317

Fax: +44 (0)1223 335968

E-Mail: agh21@cam.ac.uk

Enquiries, suggestions and comments about the conference should be made to:

Dr Sarah Meer

Selwyn College

Cambridge, CB3 9DQ

E-Mail: sm10003@cam.ac.uk

BAAS Annual Conference: Manchester, April 15-18, 200

Chair’s Report

When I was first elected Chair of BAAS an immediate task was to respond to a QAA proposal to define American Studies as a sub-area of English. We worked together efficiently to prevent that error, and took a leading part in creating the Area Studies subject definition. Since then we have made sure that the Learning and Teaching Support Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies receives active input from American Studies. In its turn that has provided the opportunity to establish a new umbrella organisation, the UK Council for Area Studies Associations. This provides a valuable opportunity for American Studies to maximise its representation in the educational policy making process.

The Department for Education, and various bodies important to research and education, have indicated their interest in Area Studies, and the American Studies community can take full advantage of the opportunity to expand, and parallel, its independent efforts by participating fully in the Areas Studies section of the Learning and Teaching Support Centre and in UKCASA. As I leave the Chair of BAAS the planning for the next Research Assessment Exercise is getting underway, and once again it is clear that American Studies needs to be ready to defend it own position, and to work in co-operation with the Area Studies community, where common interests lie.

The membership of BAAS certainly does not consist solely, perhaps not even mainly, of colleagues working within American Studies teaching programmes, departments, or research groups. Americanists from many different contexts enjoy the meetings and communications made available by their membership of BAAS. The broad American Studies community does therefore have a virtual quality, and BAAS has actively expanded its use of new communications better to link together American Studies groups and individuals wherever they are. It remains my opinion that the continued existence of teaching and research centres in American Studies in about 50 universities and colleges in the UK is beneficial to the whole American Studies community, and to the pursuit of Americanist teaching and research initiatives nation-wide.

In the past year BAAS has represented the subject’s position in response to the national consultation on the Roberts Report; to the British Academy’s consultation on emerging and endangered subjects; to Hefce’s call for proposals on ring-fenced funds; and to the AHRB’s call for nominations to its Peer Review College. The closing date for the last of these has only just passed, but we trust that American Studies will be properly represented among the gatekeepers of AHRB funds. Our bid for ring-fenced funding was short-listed, but did not make the final awards; and initial indications of the next RAE arrangements suggest that the points made by BAAS were taken seriously, even if the proposed arrangements still need adjustment to serve the subject’s best interests.

The media continued to approach BAAS for input. Enquiries dealt with by the BAAS executive, or passed to other BAAS members with expertise, came from The Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsnight, The Malay Straits Times, various BBC local radio stations, Radio Telefis Eirean, BBC 24, BBC Radio Four, various independent programme makers, BBC Online, Radio Five Live, THES, CNN, Newsweek, the Press Association, and local newspapers in the UK. Topics included the state of American Studies, the nineteenth century US/Canadian border settlement, the State of the Union address, the US presidency, and the 2004 elections, but the biggest flurries of media activity were to do with the fallout, respectively, from the election of Arnold Schwarzeneger, and the Superbowl exposure of Janet Jackson’s right breast.

The past year saw the first ever visit of a Congress to Campus programme to a location outside the USA. School students in London and the Midlands, and university students from De Montfort, Leicester and Northampton, met two retired Members of Congress during a four-day long programme of events in London and Leicester. A new American Studies postgraduate conference was added to the growing list of successful postgraduate meetings, when the Institute of US Studies hosted a one-day event in October 2003, which was also attended by one of the visiting Congressmen. The Scottish Association for the Study of America continued to develop its programme of events, and certainly the one meeting that I managed to attend was a very well-attended and positive day. At this conference in Manchester plans are being made to re-launch the Northwest branch of BAAS, which will be another source of initiative in the subject.

BAAS nurtures American Studies in many ways. In 2002 the BAAS conference hosted the executive committee meeting of the International American Studies Association, which went on to hold a very successful conference in Leiden, Holland, in 2003, and has already announced a 2005 conference in Ottawa. In 2003 the BAAS conference hosted a series of panels organised by the Trans-Atlantic Studies Association, which has since advertised a good-looking programme for its own independent conference in the summer of 2004.

Not all of the news was good. While the total number of undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes in the UK has remained stable around 50, this disguises changes. The growth of American Studies in new locations has been balanced by decline at others, and the subject remains fragile in some places. The publicity generated by the imminent merger of the Institute of United States Studies into a new Institute for the Study of the Americas was not positive, but the appointment of new US Studies faculty into that new Institute signals real potential for the future, and we must look forward to the completion, shortly of the appointment process for the new positions. Certainly the American Studies Research Portal, generated by the IUSS, is a valuable project for the whole of American Studies.

Our colleagues have had considerable success in the past year. Richard Godden has taken up a Professorship at the University of Sussex, Edward Ashbee has become Associate Professor of American Studies at Copenhagen, Deborah Madsen has taken up a Chair in Geneva, Matthew Jones has been appointed to a Chair at Nottingham, Liam Kennedy has was chosen to fill the Chair in Dublin, Peter Stoneley is now Professor at Reading, John Dumbrell has moved to a Professorship at Leicester University, Tim Woods has been elevated to Professor at Aberystwyth, and Heidi Macpherson has been promoted to Reader at Central Lancashire. Given that John and Tim are recent BAAS conference organisers, perhaps their success should encourage future conference volunteers, or, since John has moved locations, perhaps it means we should ask him to do it again.

Des King has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy, Janet Beer became Chair of the Council of University Deans of Arts and Humanities, Philip Davies was elected to the Pilgrims, and to the chair of the UK Council of Area Studies Associations, and Esther Jubb and Andy Wroe became the new Chair and Vice Chair of the American Politics Group.

Richard Carwardine became the first UK scholar to win the Lincoln Prize, America’s most generous award in the field of US history, for his book Lincoln. Richard is unable to be with us this year, but I promised him that many of his colleagues would celebrate his win joyfully, and repeatedly, during this meeting. Simon Newman’s book Embodied History shared the 2004 American Studies Network prize for the best American Studies book published in Europe, with Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’s Cloak and Dollar picked out as another excellent entry in this year’s competition.

Some colleagues left us this year. Kate Fullbrook, Richard Maidment and Philip Taylor had all made serious and committed contributions to the field. Esmond Wright was one of the great American Studies pioneers. He was there at the beginning of BAAS, he authored works that influenced a generation of students and impacted on the general public, and he kept generating work that showed his love of this subject, and its source. In recent years he advised callers to let the phone ring for a long time because he could not move very quickly, but his writing showed him as lively as ever. I first met Esmond when he was great and I was new. I did not know that he was there until he identified himself to ask a question. I had given few, if any public lectures, had worked hard on this one, and was very anxious. A small group hung around afterwards to talk further, and I only knew someone was behind me when Esmond’s voice whispered ‘tour de force’. I still feel warm with gratitude at the memory.

At this conference BAAS is again supporting its members in many ways. The conference dinner sees the announcement of ten BAAS Travel Award recipients, two winners of BAAS Graduate Teaching Assistantships, the winner of the Arthur Miller Prize, the winners of the undergraduate and postgraduate Ambassador’s essay prizes, and the recipient of the BAAS postgraduate essay prize. The total value of these prizes amounts to between £45,000 and £50,000. After last night’s prizegiving I was approached by another enthusiastic potential US partner, and I hope that, as a result, BAAS will shortly be able to offer an additional Graduate Teaching Assistantship in the USA. Our field is full of talented individuals, and it is a privilege to be able to acknowledge this in part through these awards. I would like to thank all BAAS members who have donated to the Short Term Awards, and to encourage them to be ever more generous. Thanks are also due to the Arthur Miller Centre at the University of East Anglia; and to the Universities of Virginia and New Hampshire and Peter Boyle, whose sterling efforts have established and maintained the Graduate Assistantships.

This year the Eccles Lecture has joined the established Journal of American Studies/Cambridge University Press Lecture in recognising a scholar of special distinction. The sponsors of these lectures are valued members of the American Studies community. In addition this year a number of invited schoolteacher fellows have been able to attend the conference, supported by the US Embassy. The United States Embassy in London, led by Ambassador Farish, and former Ambassador Lader, along with their Minister Counsellors, Cultural Attaches, and the members of the Office of Public Affairs, have been good friends to BAAS, and to American Studies in the United Kingdom.

Over the past six years it has been a great pleasure to see BAAS develop so energetically. The annual conferences have expanded in terms of content and attendance. The website, the e-list, and American Studies in Britain have all grown in impact and quality. The Journal of American Studies has expanded in size, as well as getting a much more attractive cover. British Records Relating to America in Microform continues with a stream of new projects; the BAAS Paperbacks/Edinburgh University Press series builds strongly on its early foundations; and US Studies Online is a journal of quality. The Association has established a better membership database, and membership has grown to around 550 currently, with potential for further growth.

This growth has been achieved, and these initiatives have been led, by my colleagues:

Janet Beer, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Kasia Boddy, Hugh Brogan, Susan Castillo, Kathryn Cooper, Jude Davies, Dick Ellis, Mick Gidley, Paul Giles, Richard Gray, Richard Hinchcliffe,

Jay Kleinberg, Allan Lloyd Smith, Heidi Macpherson, Mike McDonnell, Vivien Miller, Catherine Morley, Simon Newman, Ian Ralston, Ian Scott, Nick Selby, Carol Smith, Douglas Tallack, Graham Thompson, Peter Thompson, Jenel Virden, Iain Wallace, Andy Watts, Karen Wilkinson, and Tim Woods—the thirty-one BAAS members who have served in the Executive Committee in the past six years.

In addition there were the conference organising teams in Glasgow, Swansea, Keele, Oxford, Aberystwyth, and those who, under the expert eye of Sarah MacLachlan, have given us this year’s conference in Manchester.

Others volunteer or allow themselves to be pressed to do work as subcommittee members, on editorial boards, as prize judges, and in the various ongoing efforts of the Association.

A large proportion of BAAS members at some time give their time and support in this way and they deserve the acknowledgement and thanks of everyone in the American Studies community.

The Association depends on that support, and I trust that BAAS will continue to build on this foundation in the future. For fifty more years, at least!

Philip John Davies

BAAS Requests

BAAS Database of External Examiners

The Secretary of BAAS, Heidi Macpherson, holds a growing list of potential external examiners. Individuals who would like to put their names forward for this list should email Heidi on hrsmacpherson@uclan.ac.uk and 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)

Individuals who provide this information thereby agree to have it passed on to universities who are seeking an external for American Studies or a related discipline. Individuals who wish later to be removed from the list should 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 may 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

Exhibition Review, Edward Hopper, Tate Modern, London, May 27-September 5, 2004

Emily Barker, University of Essex

My first encounter of the artist Edward Hopper was as an undergraduate beginning my course in English and American literature. I first approached the artist through a familiar route, that of Nighthawks (1942), an image that has undergone a variety of re-workings, situating different popular icons in the diner at night. These parodic reinterpretations have only served to contribute to the popularity and longevity of the image, and have contributed to Nighthawks becoming an American icon as much as the various representatives of popular culture situated in the scene. The popularity of the image, in itself or as a re-working has overtaken that of the artist and Hopper’s work as a whole has come to be represented by this particular painting.

For me, the image of three disconnected individuals in a diner at night seemed to conjure up everything I saw America to be represented by, a noir-esque time warp of the urban forties, of lonely diners, dark apartments and seedy motels, of dark suited men and richly dressed women. Shortly after finishing my degree, I made my own pilgrimage to America. I needed to see the reality of a land and people I had only built up from a world of imagination, but most of all I needed to understand why of all of them the Americas presented by Hopper was the one that took precedence over them all Our journey took us through the neon lit city streets and small town shop fronts rendered so richly in his work, sleeping in roadside motels, and sat dreamily in back street diners nursing coffee and watching passers by, becoming, it seemed to us, part of the mythology evoked by Hopper’s work, a mythology echoed in American literature and film that has produced a series of sustained images and motifs that remain etched on the imagination. Needless to say, the America of Hopper’s art, the America of my imagining and the American reality did not always fit together—and sometimes the closest we got to Hopper was in the various trips made to the major American galleries and the paintings themselves – but the pervasiveness of the images presented in Hopper’s work maintain their hold over my conception of America.

Nighthawks seems to encapsulate the prominent themes of American life and art, of alienation and isolation, insular reflection and self-obsession but also seemed to be able to address more universal concerns, of the loneliness of modern existence and ultimately, its futility. I remain struck by the ability of the artist to capture the very essence of its subject and at the same time be able to transcend this. A picture such as Gas (1940) presents a familiar image of a gas station, an icon of modern civilisation, symbolic of our concentration upon movement but at the same time, defamiliarizes it, placing it as a frontier of civilisation itself as it stands against nature. This tension operates throughout his work, and the colour contrast and eye for composition that has come to be labelled ‘Hopper-esque’ only serves to emphasise this. Hopper’s art rediscovered the significance of these everyday symbols of modern American life and used them to create an art form that was peculiarly American, of a particular space and time, but paradoxically, Hopper’s art has a quality of being outside time, of unreality. The figures in his paintings embody the loneliness and alienation of the interwar period and yet in their solitariness seem to be exempt from time passing, fixed and static, they seem unaware of what is happening both inside the picture and externally, in the movement of history. The pictures, whilst being distinctly of their time also exist outside it, as snatched images from another world.

This major exhibition of Hopper’s work is timely, both for me personally and for European interest in American art, not only because this exhibition is the first in Britain for twenty years but because it allows the Hopper’s work to be viewed as a collective whole, not just single images. As I viewed the exhibition, most of the paintings were very familiar to me, as images and separate works of art in their own right, but viewing them as a collection, arranged in chronological sequence, alongside pencil studies and sketches further conceptualises Hopper’s entire career and attempts to ground the paintings, both as part of an artistic thought process and as a development of that process—from his early Parisian work to later American scenes. Through the structure of the exhibition itself and the programme of interdisciplinary events that accompany it, involving literature, film and photography, the exhibition attempts further assess the continuing importance of Edward Hopper’s influence, both as an American artist and as an artist. Hopper’s continuing relevance seems to be located in this ambiguity; his work is both of the time and outside it, at once American and universal. We embroider our own narrative in the scenes, see ourselves as the observed figures inside the paintings and yet are aware of our position as an observer, complicit in our position outside. Further, as the exhibition seems to suggest, in this new period of uneasy watchfulness in American history, Hopper’s paintings seem to take on even greater significance; the figures in his paintings watch and wait endlessly, in lonely reflection, temporarily situated in the waiting room of modern existence, the action distant and far away.

Kasia Boddy, University College, London—“The Sex Comedy of Edward Hopper’s Office at Night (1940)”

Office at Night was, Hopper later recalled, ‘probably first suggested by many rides on the ‘L’ train in New York City after dark glimpses of office interiors that were so fleeting as to leave fresh and vivid impressions on my mind.’¹ By 1940, the glimpse – Virginia Woolf’s ‘match struck in the dark’ – was the well-established modernist route to truth.² That moment out of time was also, of course, as many critics have observed, like a frozen frame from a movie. Hopper was a keen movie goer. ‘When I don’t feel in the mood for painting,’ he once said, ‘I go to the movies for a week or more. I go on a regular movie binge.’ Although Hopper ‘hoped [the painting] will not tell any obvious anecdote, for none is intended’, most critics and several fiction writers have provided a back-story to ‘the glimpse’ constituted by the painting.³ After considering some of these interpretations, I want to make a case for reading Office at Night as a comedy.

In 1924 Hopper married Josephine Nevison, who subsequently became his most frequent model. The couple worked together in creating scenes, with Jo often adopting a name as well as a costume for her character. The secretary in Office at Night was called Shirley, and Jo remembered her as wearing ‘a blue dress, white collar, flesh stockings, black pumps & black hair & plenty of lipstick.’⁴ The preliminary drawings for the painting show Hopper presenting her in an increasingly voluptuous manner, which some have associated with the femme fatale of film noir, and others with ‘the organisation of sexuality’ within, and for, capitalism.⁵

In 1985, as part of a series of works ‘re-viewing’ familiar paintings ‘through a prism of contemporary concerns’, the English conceptual artist Victor Burgin turned his attention to Office at Night. Hopper’s painting became the ‘pre­-text’ for Burgin’s textual and pictorial exploration of the Lacanian ‘conflict of “Desire” and “Law”‘.

The ‘secretary/boss’ couple in Hopper’s painting is at once a picture of a particular, albeit fictional couple and an emblem, ‘iconogram’, serving to metonymically represent all such couples – all links in the chains of organisation of the (re)production of wealth.

For Burgin, the painting represents a moment when this economy is momentarily threatened (desire challenging law). He notes that the secretary’s body is twisted ‘impossibly, so that both breasts and buttocks are turned towards us’ and that her dress is ostensibly ‘modest’ but clinging and stretching ‘like latex rubber’. But, thankfully, a ‘moral solution’ is provided. The fact that man does not look at her but rather fixedly at ‘the strangely rigid piece of paper in his hand’ is intended to suggest that ‘if any impropriety were to take place here, then it would not be his fault’.⁶

Burgin’s series of seven photographic re-viewings position a woman model, dressed in a 1940s suit, in various poses, sometimes with Hopper’s painting visible in the background. In one, she stands next to a filing cabinet. The pose is presumably supposed to be more ‘natural’ – her body is not twisted, and her breasts are concealed by the open drawer of the filing cabinet. The model is not looking down, as she is in the Hopper painting, ‘conventionally connoting modesty’, or ‘directing a seductive or predatory look towards the man at the desk’. Rather she is gazing rather blankly into the middle distance in a manner reminiscent of Greta Garbo in the final shot of Queen Christina (1933), when she was reputedly told to think of nothing.⁷ Tits and bums have been replaced by Scandinavian severity and shapely legs in high-heeled shoes. If Hopper’s movie featured Jean Harlow, Burgin’s stars Garbo, or is it Lois Maxwell (aka Miss Moneypenny)?

Brian O’ Doherty, on the other hand, groups Office at Night with Hopper’s Conference at Night (1949) and New York Office (1962) as paintings of interiors which are ‘recognisably film noir’.⁸ Noir’s characteristic claustrophobia and chiaroscuro certainly seem to inform the later two paintings. Conference at Night positions its figures enigmatically among columns of light and shadow, while New York Office presents an almost abstract arrangement of blocks of colour, in which we look through a window (like a cinema screen) at a highlighted woman absorbed in her own drama.⁹ Perhaps Hopper was thinking of movies such as Phantom Lady (1944), where the secretary joins forces with the detective to find out who killed her boss, or The Dark Corner (1946), where Lucille Ball plays the secretary of a private eye framed for the murder of his ex-partner. We can easily imagine Hopper’s later paintings as stills from either of these films.

But Office at Night is different, and that difference becomes apparent when we try to insert the ‘glimpse’ into a narrative. The only movement in the painting comes from the swelling window blind. This suggests a breeze which, we surmise, has caused a piece of paper to fall on to the floor. Linda Nochlin, in an article on Hopper’s ‘imagery of alienation’, gives the conventional view. Modern commerce is ‘hollow’, the figures are ‘self-contained’ and ‘may never come together to talk, to make contact’. Nochlin argues that the question ‘whether the woman will stoop over to pick up’ the piece of paper is ‘unasked and unanswerable’.¹⁰ The paper, Rolando Perez maintains, will ‘stay on the floor halfway between his desk and her cabinet, timidly undisturbed, in this wounded and frozen intimacy.’¹¹

But do such these interpretations really capture the mood of Office at Night? If Hopper had wanted to signify a chasm of ‘frozen intimacy’ or ‘impending nothingness’, surely he would have left the space empty. The paper invites action. Is it so hard to imagine the secretary bending over and picking it up, perhaps while the boss peeks at her disarranged clothes? Or, perhaps they will both bend down at the same time, and there will be an awkward bumping of heads or fumbling of hands.

The boss sneaking a glance at his secretary as she bends over or reaches up (indeed the boss contriving such a scenario) was a recurrent joke in the Hollywood comedies of office life that were popular in the 1930s. These included Behind Office Doors (also known as Private Secretary, 1931, dir. Melville W. Brown), starring Mary Astor and Robert Ames; His Private Secretary (1933; dir. Phil Whitman), starring John Wayne and Evalyn Knapp; The Private Secretary (1935; dir. Henry Edwards), starring Judy Gunn and Barry MacKay; After Office Hours (1935; dir. Robert Z. Leonard), starring Clark Gable and Constance Bennett; and Wife vs Secretary (1936; dir. Clarence Brown), starring Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and Myrna Loy. Other sexy 1930s secretaries were played by Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel (1932), Bette Davis in Three on a Match (1932), and Glenda Farrell in Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935). In creating Shirley, was Jo Hopper, a keen amateur actress, basing her performance on any of these?

As many of the above titles suggest, Hollywood’s interest lay in working late and private secretaries, rather than in the girls in the typing pool. In Behind Office Doors, society girl, Ellen (Catherine Dale Owen) cannot believe that her fiancée, Jim (Robert Ames) is unaware that his private secretary, Mary (Mary Astor) is in love with him. This is partly because Mary does not dress in a sexy way, like ‘the other girls’ do to ‘make you notice’. ‘They can’t all crave me,’ Jim tells her. ‘No,’ she replies, ‘they just crave raises in their salary.’ Since Mary dresses plainly, he thinks of her only as ‘a machine’, until Ellen reminds him, ‘you did a lot of night work’.

In His Private Secretary, meanwhile, interviews are conducted for a new secretary in an office not unlike that in Hopper’s painting (it is wood-panelled with heavy furniture and a banker’s lamp on the desk). When an aggressively flirtatious candidate leans over the desk, and, with a knowing look, says, ‘I’m a very experienced secretary’, the chief clerk is shocked. ‘A little too experienced, I’d say. Aren’t there any ladies left in the world?’ His boss, Wallace (Reginald Barlow) goes on to hire a preacher’s granddaughter, who, unknown to him, is his estranged son’s wife (Evalyn Knapp). She behaves in a manner that he finds more appropriately wifely, gently scolding and cajoling him, and intuitively knowing when he has a headache. When Wallace asks her to work late, she calls her husband (John Wayne) and jokes, ‘I have a date with my new boyfriend, the boss!’

In this film, the secretary is not too pretty or too flirtatious to be discounted as a lady. She is also just deferential enough to allow her boss to think he is running the business. He admires her ‘initiative’, and indeed through her careful management, he is reconciled with his son and decides to invest $1 million in their future. She is not a conventional gold-digger (the film dismisses quite a few of those) but she is financially and socially astute. It is not clear who is in control. Behind Office Doors proposes that the company president and his private secretary constitute an equal partnership. When she leaves, he quickly finds that the business is falling apart. They reconcile and after a particularly good day’s work, marry.

Ellen Wiley Todd argues that the power relations in Office at Night are also slippery: although clearly following her boss’s orders, the secretary physically towers over him in the painting.¹² For Vivien Green Fryd, such confusion should be understood by reading the image in the context of changing working relationships in the 1930s. As ‘women in the middle classes gained greater control over their sexual interactions’ with men, she maintains, men admitted ‘that they could no longer easily tell a “loose” woman or a prostitute from a virtuous middle-class woman, who rouged her face, bobbed her hair, and dressed provocatively.’ The boss in Office at Night, she concludes, ‘understandably might be confused about her status, given her dress and demeanor – is she a hardworking employee or a femme fatale?’¹³ This confusion could be taken as part of an analysis of social changes, but, in Behind Office Doors and His Private Secretary, and perhaps also in Hopper’s painting, it was also a stimulus to comedy.

Sex comedies and film noir do not merely have very different moods, they also inhabit very different physical spaces. While Hopper’s later (noir) paintings present their offices as sparse, modern spaces, where high drama is possible and alienation likely, Office at Night depicts a cluttered room full of old-fashioned furniture.

In 1915 Vachel Lindsay published one of the first books of film criticism, The Art of the Moving Picture, which, as was common at that time, sought to compare film to other more established arts. One of these was sculpture. In a chapter entitled ‘Sculpture-in-Motion’, Lindsay conducted an experiment in which he cut up illustrations from moving picture magazines. One involved ‘as scene of storm and stress in an office where the hero is caught with seemingly incriminating papers’.

The table is in confusion. The room is filling with people, led by one accusing woman. Is this also sculpture? Yes. The figures are in high relief. Even the surfaces of the chairs and the littered table are massive, and the eye travels without weariness, as it should do it sculpture, from the hero to the furious woman, then to the attorney behind her, then to the two other revilers, then to the crowd in three loose rhythmic ranks. The eye makes this journey, not from space to space, or fabric to fabric, but first of all from mass to mass. It is sculpture, but it is of the sort that can be done in no medium but the moving picture itself.¹⁴

The scenario described by Lindsay is obviously very different from that which is presented in Office at Night, but Lindsay’s emphasis on the solidity of the furniture and his final description of the eye’s movement ‘first of all from mass to mass’ is suggestive of Hopper’s painting. In 1948 Hopper wrote that he had wanted ‘to try to give a sense of an isolated and lonely office rather high in the air, with the office furniture which has a very definite meaning for me.’ Gail Levin interprets this last remark as biographical – Hopper, she says, was remembering 1913-14 when he worked as an illustrator for System: The Magazine of Business.¹⁵

But perhaps he meant more. The office is notable first for its enclosed, claustrophic feel. The spectator/painter seems to be observing the scene from an impossible position, somewhere half way up the wall opposite to where the man and woman are. Hopper (and we) look down on the action rather uncomfortably. Only part of the desk on which the typewriter sits can be seen; the perpendicular wall is invisible with only its heavy wooden door visible; even the corner of the man’s desk is cut off. As in the case of Lindsay’s movie still, our eyes move from one heavy object to another. The sense of solidity is emphasised by the geometry of the painting. It consists largely of a series of rectangles, some of which overlap or interlock. These include the different planes of the desk, the panels on its front, the blotter and the papers and envelopes on it, the door (and the panels within it and on either side), the filing cabinet, its drawers and the labels on the drawers, the window frame, the blind, the umbrella stand and the rectangle of light upon the wall. Within this structure, a triangular structure is also apparent, as Burgin notes, ‘its base the bottom edge of the frame and its apex in the head of the woman’. In addition, the painting supplements the woman’s curves with a series of curving objects. The shape of her bottom is echoed in the curve of the chair and the umbrella handle, as well as the typewriter roller and the telephone receiver. The man at the desk is largely rectangular. His hairline and shoulders are aligned to the top of the lamp. The only suggestion of a curve comes at either end of his body: the top of his head and a rounded toe (highlighted) which peaks out from under the desk.

Our first glance at the painting (equivalent to Hopper’s ‘dark glimpse’ from the ‘L’) latches on to the woman’s sexiness and the way she dominates the room. Our subsequent attention, however, (what we would miss if we were on a passing train), explores the room which she inhabits. Our eyes move slowly around the room, gradually taking an inventory of its objects and noting their positions and different shapes (all those rectangles and curves). These two different ways of looking yield two separate narratives: an ambiguous narrative played out by the woman and man, and what I would suggest is a comic subplot concerning the furniture.

Hopper often used colour as well as shape to make connections between different objects (in Automat, 1927, for example, he linked the fruit in the bowl with the woman’s hat). Here the blue of the woman’s dress is picked up (and not far away) by a dash of blue in the umbrella stand. Is this her umbrella? If so, we then note that it is nestling up close to another one – a taller, black umbrella with a curved wooden handle (the handle whose shape links to her bottom, breast, shoulder and hair, and to his peeping toe). The man and women do not look at each other, but their umbrellas, it seems, are intimate.

Like many of his contemporaries, Hopper was interested in Freud, and in a letter written the year before painting Office at Night, he wrote that ‘so much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellect.’¹⁶ In his placing of the umbrellas here, however, Hopper seems to be working quite consciously, indeed humourously. Freud’s interpretation of the meaning of umbrellas is unsurprising. Along with other ‘elongated objects’ that are ‘up-standing’, such as ‘sticks’, ‘posts’ and ‘tree-trunks’, umbrellas are ‘symbolic substitutes’ for ‘the male organ’; furthermore, the opening of umbrellas is ‘comparable to an erection’.¹⁷

Early twentieth-century culture, newly alert to Freud, was full of umbrella references and jokes. In E.M. Forster’s novel, Howards End (1910), Leonard Bast, a clerk ‘at the extreme verge of gentility’, attends a concert with an umbrella that is, embarrassingly, ‘all gone along the seams’. Middle-class Helen Schlegel takes it by mistake, although she later describes it as ‘appalling’, and the drama enfolds from there.¹⁸ Katherine Mansfield wrote in her journal that she could ‘never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fateful forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.’¹⁹ If the umbrella is a substitute for the phallus, it is a rather inadequate one. An umbrella is not a tree-trunk (the natural phallus) or a sword (the heroic phallus); the umbrella is the phallus of the petit bourgeois, of the socially, and sexually, anxious white-collar worker.

In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud gives an example of a slightly different umbrella joke: ‘A wife is like an umbrella. Sooner or later one takes a cab.’²⁰ Boom boom. This is Freud’s explanation:

One marries in order to protect oneself against the temptations of sensuality, but it turns out nevertheless that the marriage does not allow of the satisfaction of needs that are somewhat stronger than usual. In just the same way, one takes an umbrella with one to protect oneself from the rain and nevertheless one gets wet in the rain. In both cases, one must look around for stronger protection: in the latter case one must take a public vehicle, and in the former a woman who is accessible in return for money.

The joke, he concludes, ‘has now been almost entirely replaced by a piece of cynicism. One does not venture to declare aloud and openly that marriage is not an arrangement calculated to satisfy a man’s sexuality . . . . The strength of the joke lies in the fact that nevertheless – in all kinds of roundabout ways – it has declared it.’²¹ An attachment to one’s umbrella, it seems, signifies both sexuality and a desire to be protected from that sexuality. In Office at Night, both the man and woman have brought umbrellas with them to work, to protect themselves from rain on the journey to and fro. In the painting, however, there is no sign of rain. It is presumably a hot night as the window is open wide. The umbrellas stand together in the stand, but even while they snuggle up, their very presence reminds us that their owners are not the kind of people to do anything reckless.

I want to finish with one last umbrella joke, from Howard Hawkes’s film, His Girl Friday, also from 1940. When sauve newspaperman Walter Burns (Cary Grant) meets his ex-wife’s fiancé, Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), he reaches over and shakes his umbrella instead of his hand, accidentally on purpose. ‘You always carry an umbrella, Bruce?’ he asks. ‘Well, it looked a little cloudy this morning.’ ‘Rubbers too, I hope?’ Walter persists, checking Baldwin’s feet. ‘Atta boy,’ he concludes, ‘A man ought to be prepared for any emergency.’ Walter’s comic routine is intended, of course, to reveal to his ex what a poor marital substitute she is getting. Baldwin is ‘in the insurance business’, a business that, Walter suggests, he takes home. Could Hildy really prefer a man who carries an umbrella and wears rubbers (an obvious condom joke) to Walter, famous for his ‘dimple’?

And could it be that the ‘suppressed narrative’ of Office at Night is less a Lacanian analysis of desire in capitalism or a noir exploration of existential angst than a sex comedy complete with potential fumblings and Freudian jokes?

1. Edward Hopper, statement attached to 1948 letter to Norman A. Geske, director of the Walker Art Centre which had acquired the painting that year. Quoted in Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p.324.

2. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), p.249.

3. Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, p.324. Rolando Perez, for example, imagines that although he has dreamt often of his secretary staying late, the boss is ‘held back’ from action by ‘having heard too many truths in the past’. The Lining of Our Souls: Excursions into Selected Paintings of Edward Hopper (New York: Cool Grove Press, 2002), pp.36-7. Laura Cummings proposes the story of a ‘stenographer who longs to comfort her unhappily married boss.’ ‘The Quiet American’, The Observer, 30 May, 2004, p.9.

4. Quoted in Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, p.325

5. Some of these preliminary drawings feature in Sheena Wagstaff (ed), Edward Hopper (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), pp.174-5.

6. Victor Burgin, Between (ICA/Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp.182-4; Passages (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Communauté Urbaine de Lille, 1988),p.79. For a discussion of the postmodernism of Burgin’s photographs, see Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism 2nd ed (London: Routledge, 2002), p.99, and Graham Clarke, The Photograph (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.20-22. 204.

7. Rouben Mamoulian, interview with Kevin Brownlow, quoted in Barry Paris, Garbo: A Biography (London: Pan, 1996), p.288.

8. Brain O’Doherty, ‘Hopper’s Look’, in Wagstaff (ed), Edward Hopper, 83-97 (p.90). Lucy Fischer compares Office at Night to a scene in Douglas Sirk’s 1959 Imitation of Life. ‘The Savage Eye: Edward Hopper and Cinema’, in Townsend Ludington (ed), A Modern Mosaic: Art and Modernism in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 334-56 (p.337).

9. We might also include Office in a Small City (1953) in this group. For a discussion of the difference between Hopper’s later office scenes and Office at Night, see Rolf Günter Renner, Edward Hopper, 1882-1967: Transformation of the Real (Köln: Taschen, 1990), pp.53-6.

10. Linda Nochlin, ‘Edward Hopper and the Imagery of Alienation’, Art Journal (Summer 1981), 136-141 (p.138).

11. The Lining of Our Souls, p.37.

12. Ellen Wiley Todd, ‘Will (S)he Stoop to Conquer? Preliminaries toward a reading of Edward Hopper’s Office at Night’, in Norman Bryson Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (eds), Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 47-53 (p.51). Todd compares the painting with Isabel Bishop’s depictions of office girls. The “New Woman” Revised: Painting and Gender Politics on Fourteenth Street (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), ch.7.

13. Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keefe (Chicago University Press, 2003), p.109. For more on the changing representation of secretaries, see Pamela Thurschwell and Leah Price (eds), Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (London: Ashgate, 2004).

14. Vachel Lindsay, The Moving Picture (1915) (New York: Modern Library, 2000), pp.71-72. Peter Wollen notes that Hopper and Lindsay had been classmates together at the New York School of Art. ‘Two or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper’ in Wagstaff (ed), Edward Hopper, p.77.

15. Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, p.324. See Gail Levin, Edward Hopper as Illustrator (New York: Norton, 1979), pp.17-22, and catalogue nos. 38-50, 53-67 and passim. One of the System drawing is reprinted ‘Two or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper’, p.72.

16. Edward Hopper, letter to Charles H. Sawyer, Oct.29, 1939, quoted in Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, p.277. On Freud’s reception in America, see Nathan G. Hale, Freud and Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 (Oxford University Press, 1971) and The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1917-1985 (Oxford University Press, 1995).

17. Sigmund Freud, 1909 amendment to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud trans. James Strachey, vol.5 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), p.354; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1915-16), Standard Edition, vol.15, p.154. The Freud concordance lists 20 instances of the word ‘umbrella’ or ‘umbrellas’ in the psychoanalysist’s work.

18. E.M. Forster, Howards End (1910) (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1921), pp.42, 45.

19. Katherine Mansfield, Journal entry, May 1917, in Letters and Journals ed C.K. Stead (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p.82. Robert K. Martin argues that Leonard’s umbrella should be read, in comparison with Tannhauser’s staff, and the sword that the Schlegel sisters inherited from their father, ‘as a sign of a reduced male potency’. ‘ “It Must Have Been the Umbrella”: Forster’s Queer Begetting’, in Robert K. Martin and George Piggford (eds) Queer Forster, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 255-275 (p.270).

20. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), The Standard Edition vol.8 (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), p.78

21. ibid, p.111.

R. J. Ellis, University of Birmingham—“Half Full or Half Empty: the Canvases of Edward Hopper at Tate Modern”

From the start, you know pretty well what you are in for in terms of how this exhibition has been curated (by Sheena Wagstaff of Tate Modern). The free mini-catalogue (text by Jane Burton, noteworthily described as ‘Curator: Interpretation’) handed out to you as you enter has been produced so that half of the torso of the single figure featured in the painting selected to adorn the cover has been cropped out. And as you enter the exhibition, on your left, emblazoned on the wall, in what amounts to the exhibition’s introductory epigrammatic paragraph, is Hopper’s verdict on ‘small town’ and ‘suburban’ America: ‘sweltering, tawdry’ places of ‘sad desolation’. And if these two clues leave you in any doubt, by the time you have reached the final room (Room 11) it must have all become clear—quite literally, for the last painting on the final wall as you leave the exhibition depicts an entirely empty room (Sun in an Empty Room, 1963). All the other paintings in Room 11 each depict only a single figure, except for one canvas, depicting two people clad in white (perhaps both pierrots, yet one of them maybe looking slightly nun-like?), standing upon an otherwise empty theatre stage (Two Comedians, 1966). That’s an average of exactly one person populating each painting displayed in Room 11. Yes, it’s all pretty bleak.

And if you move on towards the exit, you have to pass by a continuous loop showing of a video-recording of a documentary by Brian O’Doherty. He confirms the exhibition’s thesis volubly enough. Interviewing Hopper, he asks a question so heavily loaded it hardly clambers off the ground, prefaced as it is by the observation that many of Hopper’s critics have taken up a ‘psychological’ reading of his art, within which Hopper has been predominantly regarded as an artist treating in his paintings with loneliness and isolation (‘Edward Hopper painted American landscapes and cityscapes with a disturbing truth, expressing the world around him as … chilling, alienating, and often vacuous’, www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/).Quite plainly, Hopper’s construction as man and artist in this Tate Modern exhibition from start to finish seeks to confirm this kind of reading.

But is this reading satisfactory? In seeking to answer this question, I need to begin by offering some fairly old-fashioned art connoisseurship in return. It seems to me that Hopper’s particular strength as an artist is his ability to paint the effects of light, particularly the effects of light upon colour. Repeatedly, it is the balance of light and dark, brightness and shade that dominates his work. To enable this, his canvases repeatedly seem to be half-full of irregular, often punctuated, slabs of colour—lightening or darkening, subtly graded yet fairly uniform (sky, foliage, wall, street and [especially] window). Just for example, take the final canvas in the final room: presented within the exhibition (implicitly) as a study in loneliness and isolation (an empty room) it could instead be viewed as more about the full interplay between light and dark and the thresholds between them—a study in colour and its shifting levels of saturation on walls and flooring.

Looking at Hopper’s canvases, then, just does not make me think of loneliness and isolation, nor, for that matter, ‘small town’ or ‘suburban’ tawdriness and desolation (and, just by the way, very few of Hopper’s paintings obviously deal with small towns or suburbs—small cities, yes, or Cape Cod’s resort coasts, but rarely small towns, nor even suburbs; indeed more often than not, the urban scenes seem to derive from large cities like New York [at this point I’m reminded of Gatsby’s words on the telephone as things begin to unravel for him: ‘Well, he’s of no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small town …’]). Rather Hopper’s canvases bring to my mind careful balance and compositional poise (/pose). Which brings me to my title: Hopper’s canvases seem to me in a sense always half full. Now, making this claim can lead to a reading of his paintings that focuses upon how in a related sense he does indeed leave his canvases half empty—and hence susceptible to being read as studies in anomie and alienation—as Jane Burton does here (her evocative armoury uses such words as ‘seedy … unsettling … strange … black void … desolate … sinister … self-absorbed … loneliness … blue … foreboding … isolation … aloneness … isolated … devoid’), in a reading almost inevitably leading to the easy charge that Hopper is voyeuristic (and—of course—implicates the audience in his voyeurism). But how did Hopper respond to Brian O’Doherty’s’ suggestion that lonely isolation is what his art is about?

Well, his answer is not one of assent: ‘It may be true, it may not be true … it’s what the viewer makes of it’. I personally prefer this response over the one implicitly offered by the quote selected for positioning at the head of this Hopper exhibition. To me, Hopper’s figures are po[i]sed. They recurrently sit, stand or lie and look out. Repeatedly, as Burton does herself observe, there is for me a sense of expectation. In the rural scenes (scenes often offering up a tourist pastoral), it is an expectation of quiet and relaxation; in the cities often of imminent incident or event (at the theatre, the cinema, in the street or the office). If a reading of these moments of po[i]sed expectation is required, it is one invoking not isolation but the parameters of commodification—the busy exchanges of capital and currency and their uncertain outcomes—the flows of city life or of vacations from them (and produced by them). My eyes, then, are half-full when I look at Hopper’s paintings. And what I see is a painter who is good at exploring light, shade, and the liminal exchanges of color intensities between them. And I see a painter not particularly good at figure-painting, who, consequently, and unsurprisingly, usually places few figures in his canvases. But not always—think of Soir Bleu (1927)—conspicuously missing from this exhibition, and full of figures and interchange. But when he does carefully po[i]se his figures in his paintings, there is an air of imminence. Take—inevitably, I suppose—Nighthawks (1942). I remember well once hearing an academic explaining vehemently that there was an absence of exchange between these figures (despite the fact they are sat in a coffee bar). Yet surely there are patterns of contact. The man and woman are sat in such close proximity that they are almost touching—not quite, but so nearly that an intimate spatial exchange is established. And the white-costumed counterman is looking up, in a half-glance, busily surveying his customers. Sexual and commercial exchange is involved; currency is certain to be passed. It’s city life—not the dead urban world of hide-bound neo-pastoralists but one constantly (positively/negatively, +/-) pulsing. (I must admit that later in his life Hopper conceded of Nighthawks that ‘Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city’, but arguably he was bludgeoned into this concession by the near-ceaseless and nostalgic readings leveled at his work.)

Therefore my archetypal Hopper painting is Drug Store (1927). No figures populate this painting, for it is a night-time street scene (Hopper is weak at composing figures, remember, and he concentrates upon what he is good at). A shop window dominates: the display of commerce and currency that the city ceaselessly promises. On one side of the window-display stands a large glass jar full of green liquid. On the other, a matching jar of red liquid. Red/green; stop/go … the intermittent, pulsing currents of modernity in which we live and with which we negotiate: in (Marxist) alienation (not neo-pastoralist loneliness), where such a condition is always in process, full of expectations of change and exchange as well as emptiness, negotiating with commodity, and not simply possessed by it. And so Hopper in his very acts of composition layers bright (and dark) modern paints with their potential for both uniformity and subtle, controlled gradation. It’s a negotiation with the ever-improving technologies of modern oils to paint the saturations and intensities of the late modern world.

Mark Rawlinson, University of Nottingham

As you enter the gallery holding the retrospective of Edward Hopper’s work at Tate Modern you are confronted with a wall of welcoming text that begins: ‘More than any other artist, Edward Hopper has coloured our vision of America.’ The suggestion being that Hopper’s work is the axis on which our vision of America spins: no questions, just a statement of fact. It is difficult not to pause here, before one even begins looking at the paintings and drawings and ask; is this fanfare justified? Has Hopper really coloured out vision of America?

The works on display at Tate Modern are culled from those regarded as Hopper’s most significant and are arranged chronologically across twelve rooms whose aim, one assumes, is to chart the artist’s aesthetic and intellectual development. I say ‘assumes’ because by Room 12 it becomes very difficult to identify what exactly changes in these paintings between 1905/6 and 1966: subject-matter, technique, form, none of them undergo paradigmatic shifts. So, in truth, this more an exhibition about recognition; recognising the importance and influence of Hopper in terms of his ‘Americanness’ but also the translatability of this Americanness to a transatlantic audience. But as to what Americanness might be and how its translates, this exhibition leaves to the audience. Two questions come to mind. Firstly, does Hopper’s work deserve this level of recognition? And why, moreover, is it we seem to want Hopper’s America to be the real America?

Such questions appear far from the minds of either the exhibition’s curator or the multitudes of visitors milling around the exhibition. Instead questions have been fudged in favour of unsubstantiated assumptions but this will not diminish the exhibition’s popularity. If the success of this exhibition is to be judged purely on the numbers of paying visitors, then this exhibition will surely exceed expectations. But then again, perhaps not. Hopper remains one of the most popular artists of recent times and one cannot help but think that an exhibition of his paintings at one of the nation’s most popular art galleries was always going to be a (financial) success. Therefore it is no surprise to find that the exhibition’s exit leads visitors into what is best described as Room 13, where an extensive range of Hopper-ised products await mass consumption.

Cynicism aside, seeing Hopper’s work in the flesh allows us to explore the questions I posed earlier. This exhibition reminds us not only of how odd Hopper’s works actually are, in terms of their depiction of time, space and human relationships but how odd it is that people in their millions have hung these miserable pictures in their homes. The serial miserabilism that saturates these works has of course provided a rich buffet for critics of Hopper’s work to pick over—Hopper’s strained relationship with his wife; his deliberate isolationism—but critique based purely on biography or artistic intentionality can only help us understand Hopper’s vision to a degree.

These images seem full of dead air and emotionally numb individuals. They are painted fragments of time, moments that seem beyond stillness, which are more than silence, because nothing can actually move and nothing can make noise. How Sundays used to sound. But, despite this other worldliness, Hopper’s paintings produce a feeling of the strangely familiar that Freud defined as Unheimlich: the uncanny. Freud’s uncanny, in many respects, accounts for the repetition of theme, form and content in the artist’s work, too. But do the artworks collected for the Tate exhibition support or contradict this conception of Hopper, an artist ignored in America by Americans for much of his career.

Laid out from its beginnings to its end, one recognises a certain repetitive pulse in the work that echoes in practically every image on show. Although I do not believe it was the intention, the effect is to remind the viewer that Hopper lived through, and apparently, ignored, the advent and influence of Dada, Socialist Realism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop (to name a few) on wider American artistic sensibilities. In order to account for repetition, especially with reference to theme, the notion of alienation is scattered liberally across much of the critical literature on Hopper. But one has to ask what kind of alienation is Hopper painting? Surely, it is not enough to merely paint individuals staring out of windows to capture the social alienation of, say, poverty in America during the 1920s/1930s? When contrasted with the work of, say, Reginald Marsh, who captured more convincingly images of the alienated poor, Hopper’s works are all stylised alienation; romanticised paintings of gloomy introspection which suggest but do not convey emotional depth.

Where many scholars have seen this mono-thematicism as the dedication of the artist to his search for some kind quasi-divine vision, the truth is more mundane: Hopper had only a handful of ideas. The best of these is Hopper’s stated intention to paint light, perhaps the most convincing aspect of his work. Looking at the paintings and drawings on show, it has to be said that Hopper’s eye for light is delicate, knowing and convincing. He was not, however, the greatest painter of the human form. Hopper’s men and women sit awkwardly on chairs and stoops, they lean against walls and counters in the most unnatural of ways; their faces and bodies are often vague, unfinished or just wrong, for example, see A Woman in the Sun (1961).

When Hopper brings the elements of a picture together—whether an interior or exterior space, human form(s), perspective, etc.—things do not stand up to scrutiny; they become more like a plastic model formed by the impatient, gluey fingers of a child. Commentators take this awkwardness, this vagueness, this ungainliness as deliberate; these painterly aspects help convey exactly that emptiness, alienation at the heart of the American psyche; where the psyche of the individual and the crushing loneliness of the city converge. And I agree to an extent because bad painting does not necessarily equate with a bad artwork. But, there is more going on in Hopper’s work than many have been prepared to admit: for example, Why does Hopper’s work not ‘work’?

At only two points in the show are the more intriguing aspects of Hopper’s practice put before the audience, aspects which might account for the unfinished quality in Hooper’s work (that is, the abstraction of architectural details, not including text of shop signs, etc.). Both Nighthawks (1942) and Office at Night (1940) are accompanied by a series of preliminary sketches which spectators can then connect to the finished works. What one notices about these sketches is how much more competent and detailed they are in comparison to the finished paintings. But questions such as, ‘what happens in the interim between sketching and painting, and is this deliberate?’ or ‘why the inclusion of inaccuracy?’ fail to register because only these two works are contextualised in this way. An opportunity missed.

For those of us who like Hopper but always felt the scholarship on his work too narrow in its analysis, too often an exceptionalist view of twentieth century American artistic tradition, this show is disappointing. This is because of a withdrawal on the part of the Tate Modern from posing difficult questions, either in relation to the work or in its own biases and presumptions. The circuitous path of the show is never under pressure to prove the opening statement; Hopper has coloured our vision of America because this exhibition says so; it is museum-sanctioned legitimacy. To be critical is not to be dismissive Hopper’s work but subject the paintings to sustained critique because with Hopper it seems that what we cannot see is perhaps much more important and moving than what we can.

EAAS News

EAAS Conference – Prague

The biannual EAAS conference was held at Charles University in Prague from 2-5 April. The conference was well attended and a wide range of papers were delivered in the 26 workshops and 8 parallel lectures. The city itself was enchanting and our hosts were gracious. The EAAS conference is highly recommended. The proposed venue for the next conference, in 2006, is Cyprus. While the venue has not been confirmed as yet, the call for possible workshop will be going out soon. The theme for the 2006 conference is “Conformism, Non-conformism and Anti-conformism in the Culture of the United States.” As usual, anyone wishing to make a workshop proposal should consider how their topic fits within the broader theme of the conference. For further information please consult both the EAAS Newsletter and the EAAS website.

Newsletter and Website

As BAAS members may be aware there were some problems with the delivery of the EAAS newsletter last year. A discussion of these problems consumed part of the business of the board at its meeting in Prague. A new editor, EAAS Vice President Gulriz Buken has taken on the task of revamping the newsletter and overseeing its distribution. We are currently awaiting delivery of our copies (they may be to you by the time you read this!) but if any BAAS member has not received a copy of their EAAS newsletter then please consult the EAAS website. The website (www.eaas.info) has also been updated and upgraded and has a wide range of useful information including details of all the workshops at Prague and a fulsome explanation of the proposed theme for 2006.

EAAS Officers

Part of the business at Prague also included the election of a new President. The board was sorry to see the outgoing President Josef Jarab leave but welcomed the newly-elected President Marc Chenetier of the University of Paris. Both Josef and Marc have messages to the membership in the most recent newsletter. There is also a new Treasurer at EAAS, Hans-Jurgen Grabbe. Their addresses are:

Marc Chénetier
University Paris 7
Institut Charles V
10 Rue Charles V
F-75004 Paris, France
marche@paris7.jussieu.fr

Hans-Jürgen Grabbe
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Martin Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
D-06099 Halle, Germany
grabbe@amerikanistik.uni-halle.de

Publications

The latest EAAS conference proceedings have been published. These are the proceedings from the Graz Conference and are entitled “Nature’s Nation” Revisited: American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis, Hans Bak and Walter Holbling (eds.), VU University Press, Amsterdam. You can email Hans if you wish to order a copy on h.bak@let.kun.nl. In addition, the French Association has published a special edition of its journal with additional copies available for purchase. The theme of the issue is “Stemming the Mississippi” and includes a good selection of articles as well as a large, well-produced map section (European Issue 2, 98, December 2003). If anyone is interested in ordering a copy please contact Pr. Marie-Jeanne Rossignol on rossignol@paris7.jussieu.fr.

And finally, if anyone has any questions about EAAS please get in touch (J.Virden@hull.ac.uk). BAAS will be hosting the EAAS Board meeting next year during the conference at Cambridge.

News From Centres

AMATAS

AMATAS (Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies) is in its final incarnation (2003-4) taking the message of intercultural teaching, the Transatlantic and the affects of American power to the English academic subject. We had a successful launching event for this new phase of the project at the English Subject Centre at Royal Holloway in October 2003 during an event on Teaching American Literature, which included as speakers Paul Giles, Dick Ellis, Jill Terry, Neil Campbell, Bridget Bennett and Alan Rice. Participants heard lively debates about the difficulty of engaging students with earlier American literary texts and on widening out the curriculum. Jointly with the University of the West of England the project organised a conference in Bristol on March 10, Teaching Close Encounters? English and American Literary and Cultural Interactions. This event used Bristol’s interface with American history as historical slave-port and Civil Rights engine room (the local 1960s bus boycott in response to racism electrified local politics) to discuss Transatlantic resonances. We were fortunate to have local historian, Madge Dresser to provide this context which was given added lustre by Alasdair Pettinger’s discussion of American segregation on British ships in the 1840s and Jim Crow in the American military based in Britain in the 1940s. Other speakers included Susan Manning, Heidi Macpherson, George Mckay, Peter Rawlings and Jude Davies.

Our final event of the project will be at the University of Warwick on September 10 2004. The project has been concentrated on the post WWII period throughout most of its existence – this final conference will concentrate on Transatlantic Relations/Americanisation in the period 1620-1914 and is entitled Literary and Cultural Mappings Across the Atlantic: Teaching the Intercultural. Speakers include Wil Verhoeven from the University of Groningen, Helen Thomas from Exeter and local scholar, Stephen Shapiro. More details can be obtained from Stephen Shapiro at s.shapiro@warwick.ac.uk or from the project manager Alan Rice at arice@uclan.ac.uk . A full report will appear in the next issue of the newsletter. We hope over the next few months to be adding resources for the teaching of literature in a Transatlantic and intercultural manner to our website’s already extensive resources. Keep an eye on www.amatas.org and if you have materials/link ideas which might be useful for such a project please be in touch with the project manager. Thanks to all who have made the project such a success over the last 4 years.

Alan Rice

Project Manager

American Studies Centre Annual Report 2003-2004

This academic year has proved to one of the busiest since the ASRC was established in 1987 and indicates that despite some of the problems faced by American Studies at degree level, the overall picture, regarding the study of and interest in the United States remains extremely positive.

ASRC Conferences and Lectures

The ASRC annual schools conference took as its topic The United States and the Cold War. An audience of 200 students and teachers were presented with lectures by Dr.David Eldridge (University of Hull) on The Roots of the Cold War; Dr.Jenel Virden (University of Hull) on Senator Joe McCarthy and the Cold War; Dr.Martin Folly on Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis (Brunel University) and Professor John Dumbrell (University of Leicester) on Raising the stakes: America’s war in Vietnam. The day concluded with a lively question and answer session that also brought up the issue of the post Cold War nature of American foreign policy. The level of questions from students helps confirm the earlier made point regarding the serious study and interest that remains amongst young people of the US role in the world. Details of next academic years Schools Conference are contained at the end of this report.

The ASRC was also honoured to act as host for a guest lecture by Professor Dan T.Carter of the University of South Carolina. Perhaps best known for his Bancroft prizewinning work Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (later made into an award winning documentary) Professor Carter is one of the leading American academics on the history of the South and its politics. His 1995 work on George Wallace, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism and the Transformation of American Politics not only won the Robert F.Kennedy book prize, but was also the subject of his stimulating lecture to a packed audience of staff and students at JMU. During his visit, Professor Carter also visited the Trans-Atlantic Slavery Gallery at Merseyside Maritime Museum, where he was guided by the Gallery’s Keeper, Tony Tibbles, as well as taking in other sites of the city. Our thanks go to Sue Wedlake and Dennis Wolfe at the US Embassy for their help in making Professor Carter’s visit possible.

One of our regular visitors, CL Henson, former head of the Special Education Unit at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, again visited the ASRC. CL also spoke to a lively and informed audience of A2 American Politics students at Cheadle Hulme School in Manchester on the role of the BIA. The question and answer session quickly moved on to the forthcoming Presidential Elections and (again) confirms the earlier noted point that interest in US issues amongst students remains high and generally well informed.

ASRC Web site (ARNet) and American Study Today magazine

Although the peak monthly figure of hits to ARNet that was achieved in March 2003 of 42,000 was not matched this year, a figure of 37,000 hits was received in March 2004. The total figure since March 1998 to (early) June 2004 stands at 4,205,000. As noted in previous reports, the ASRC continues to develop and expand the content of the site thanks to the work of David Forster. The distribution of American Studies Today magazine now stands at over 700 posted to ASRC registered subscribers and 300 distributed at conferences and by other means. The hard copy magazine remains the ASRC’s most effective way of communicating directly with teachers in particular, despite the great success of the web site.

Requests and student visits to the ASRC.

As noted in last years report, the number of requests the ASRC receives via email has continued to grow. These have come not only from UK students, teachers and others, but also from abroad. This in itself proves the value of the ASRC web site through which the vast majority of requests have been channelled. Requests from the media for information and for contacts to colleagues able to contribute to TV, radio and press reports have also increased. These included ASRC Director, Ian Ralston, being interviewed by the London correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor for an extensive article on US Culture and its world wide impact, and Morag Reid and Dan Silverstone taking part in a BBC radio phone in on the situation in Iraq.

The number of visits to the ASRC by student groups for study days has also increased. These included Access and A2 students from Liverpool Community College, as well as students from a range of colleges/high schools from across the north west.

Perhaps though the most interesting request the ASRC dealt with this year involved uncovering the details of a wartime visit made to Liverpool by Eleanor Roosevelt. Following a request from Ralf Shepherd, a retired former telecommunications engineer who had installed a land line to an Admiralty building in 1942, the ASRC, with the help of Bob Clark at the National Archives and Records Administration in Hyde Park NY, was able to retrieve the details of the visit, as well as a copy of the original transcript of the BBC broadcast made by Mrs Roosevelt along with a copy of her ‘My Day’ newspaper column that dealt with her visit to Liverpool, Chester and other locations. At present the ASRC and the owners of the building where the broadcast was made from, are liasing with Liverpool City Council over the placement of a commemorative plaque. A more detailed report will be carried in this years issue of American Studies Today and soon after on the ARNet web site.

2004-2005

The schools conference for next academic year will take place at the Conference Centre of the Merseyside Maritime Museum on October 13^th. The topic will be the 2004 Presidential Election. The speakers will be Dr.Eddie Ashbee (Copenhagen Business School, Dr.Niall Palmer (Brunel University) and Professor John Dumbrell (University of Leicester). The final session of the day will involve a presentation of the platform of the Republican and Democrat candidates, (followed by a debate) by Thomas Grant (Republicans Abroad) and Chris Hansen (Democrats Abroad.) Our thanks go to BAAS and to the Public Affairs Office of the US Embassy for their invaluable support in making this event possible.

Earlier in the new academic year the ASRC, in conjunction with Liverpool Museums, will be hosting a ‘Day of Navajo Culture’ with the artist and educator Dennis Lee Rogers. Dennis visited and presented a similar session a number of years ago and it proved to be highly successful. Not only did it attract a wide-ranging audience, but also significant publicity for the ASRC in the Merseyside and the North Wales area. Details are available at www.americansc.org.uk/Conferences/Dennis.htm

ASRC Director Ian Ralston and Resources Co-ordinator David Forster, will also be taking part in the Salzburg Alumni Symposium ‘America in Our Time’ which will take place in early September. Previous Salzburg sessions have proved invaluable to the ASRC in terms of developing contacts with colleagues in Europe and further afield. Our thanks go again to the Public Affairs Office of the US Embassy for their support.

As noted in last years report, the ASRC still faces difficulties regarding staffing and opening hours. Whilst the situation this year has been helped by the work of Louise Hesketh, an American Studies student at JMU on work placement and also the extending of opening hours, the long-term situation remains problematic. US and UK Advisory Panel members will be informed with regards to any changes or progress in resolving these issues.

Despite this last point, this academic year has been one of the most productive and successful since the ASRC began its operations and we would like to thank all those who helped make this possible; in particular colleagues at Liverpool Museums, John Moores University and Liverpool Community College, BAAS, the Public Affairs Office of the US Embassy and all those who have otherwise contributed to the work of the ASRC and its conference programme.

Ian Ralston (ASRC Director). June 2004

Email: i.ralston@livjm.ac.uk

Web site: www.americansc.org.uk

Travel Award Reports

Marcus Cunliffe Travel Award

Leen Maes, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to BAAS for so generously awarding me the Marcus Cunliffe Award. This motivating contribution made my research trip to the United States in March 2004 a truly rewarding experience. The journey covered three major functions: the NEMLA conference in Pittsburgh, research in the Hillman library and an interview with Sherri Szeman. My doctoral research on the Holocaust and trauma theory in Jewish-American women’s literature was considerably consolidated and expanded by both the ideas and the people I encountered.

After numerous flight connections, plane delays, helpful stewards and security checks – who advised me never to wear shoes with laces in airports again – I arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The city was host to the Northeast MLA Convention, which addressed an array of different topics and included the panel on contemporary Holocaust fiction at which I spoke. There were two panels on trauma politics that proved to be especially useful to me as all the papers focused on issues surrounding the representation of trauma in various literary forms. The literary treatment of trauma was illuminated by readings which explored concerns of autobiography, cultural memory and the body, all of which are pivotal to my own research. The papers addressed trauma theory in the context of sociological, political and historical re-readings of texts and this interdisciplinarity provoked discussions, which illuminated both the shortcomings and the benefits of such an approach. My own paper concerning ‘Witness and the Imagination in Norma Rosen’s Touching Evil’ (1969) received extensive discussion which provided me with suggestions for further reading material and different psychoanalytic approaches, which I shall now follow up. The question session focused on the role of empathy and fantasy in Holocaust commemoration and the relationship between the individual and the collective. The discussion of the slight differences in defining the appropriation of trauma in the post-Holocaust era both affirmed and challenged my paper and will productively feed into the first chapter of my PhD on Rosen’s novel when I come to revise the material.

The conference moreover provided me with the opportunity to meet academics from related fields and numerous talks in coffee shops, pubs and restaurants not only broadened my perspective on Holocaust representation, but on Jewish-American art and literature in general. Numerous talks with Jan Campbell especially clarified feminist and psychoanalytic scholarship. Amy Colin and Barbara Burstin from the University of Pittsburgh’s Jewish Studies Program, who specialise respectively in Holocaust literature and the Jewish-American experience, shared their approaches to Holocaust memory which emphasised the importance of testimonial research.

Fortunately I had some time to explore the historically rich city of Pittsburgh. Three rivers come together in the city and the panoramic views on top of the Monongahela incline were spectacular. I found the Andy Warhol Museum with its temporary exhibition on “Image, Memory and Myth” a highlight as it dealt with issues of collective memory, historical truth and media in the context of the Kennedy assassination. A bus trip to Oakland revealed more of the city before I turned to the excellent holdings in Holocaust studies of the Hillman library at the University of Pittsburgh. An archive search of early and recent editions of Studies in American Jewish Literature and Shofar, produced new secondary literature on Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl (1989), a Holocaust short story that I analyse in the third chapter of my thesis. My search also provided invaluable references to lesser known American Holocaust fiction.

The second part of my visit took me from Pennsylvania to Ohio, where I met the author Sherri Szeman. The hills around Pittsburgh were replaced with the endless plains of the Midwest and infinite straight roads that eventually and unexpectedly did arrive at a destination. Szeman’s novel The Kommandant’s Mistress (1993) is a multilayered Holocaust novel with a complex structure that invites a traumatic reading. A four-day interview with the author provided me with material to consolidate my psychological interpretation of the novel and to engage with controversial aspects of her work, such as the juxtaposition of the perspectives of victim and perpetrator without authorial intervention. Her account of her composition of the protagonists as characters who occupy a status in between archetypal representations and individualised ‘survivors’ illuminated her methodology and her extensive historical research on the Holocaust. Szeman’s hospitality contributed to a relaxed and productive working environment in which I practised my interview skills. The preparation proved to be vital as this interview tended not to follow the neatly categorised outline I had anticipated. Intellectually, it was an intensive experience as a continual critical vigilance and enthusiasm was required in order to intervene when valuable material was alluded to but generalised, and to pause when sensitive topics needed to be encouraged to unfold. Although differences in opinion between the disciplines of creative writing and academic study did emerge when discussing both the novel and Holocaust representation, this dialogue demonstrated a challenging complementarity between both. The resultant ten hours of tape cover historical, psychological, structural, autobiographical and feminist issues of the novel and provided me with the material for an in-depth analysis that the scarce secondary sources could not have provided me with.

My research trip to the United States substantiated both the overarching argument of my PhD project and detailed analyses of various texts that I engage with. The conference, the library research and the interview have come at a time when the parameters of the thesis are more critically and self-reflectively being defined. The American experience moreover gave me an encouraging sense of my own development as a young academic. With the support of BAAS and the Marcus Cunliffe award, my trip to the US has proved invaluable and the research which I have carried out is extremely constructive for my work. Therefore, I would once again like to thank the board for their encouragement and support.

Other Travel Award Reports

Howard Cunnell, University of London

The 34^th Annual Popular Culture Association, 26^th Annual American Culture Association, and 26^th Annual South West/Texas PCA/ACA Conferences took place jointly in the beautiful Texas town of San Antonio, Texas, over four days from April 7^th to April 10^th 2004.

As you might imagine, this was a large conference, easily dwarfing any other I had previously attended; the Conference programme, published in a handsome book, ran to nearly 400 pages. There were six sessions each day, beginning at 8.00 am and running right through to 8.00 pm. Each session had, on average, thirty panels running simultaneously, and I was often spoilt for choice for interesting panels to attend. Panel and paper subjects were spectacularly diverse, ranging from Motorcycle Cycle Culture and Myth, to Chicana/o Literature, Film and Theory, The Grateful Dead to Pulp Literature. My own research interests, that include the Beat Generation and Counterculture, Masculinities Studies, and the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, were strongly represented.

The particular reason why I wanted to attend the conference, and applied to BAAS for a short-term travel award to do so, was because this conference was the first to include panels on Contemporary American Prison Writing, the subject of my doctoral research. Having worked in isolation for three years, it was an enormously rewarding experience to come into contact with other researchers in my field, exchange ideas (and bibliographies), socialise, and draw strength from one another. Writers and researchers attending included Brenda Kae Jones, a Creative Writing teacher at the Pendleton Juvenile Facility, who presented on the poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Scott Palmer, who presented on the Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier. My paper, on representations of masculinity in the fiction of Edward Bunker was, I am glad to say, well received, a validation that has given me the encouragement to complete the project.

Socialising and sightseeing in San Antonio was a wonderful experience. The bars and restaurants along the famous Riverwalk, and those in Market Square, were crammed nightly with talking heads; sightseeing highlights included the San Antonio Museum of Art, housed in the old Lone Star Brewing Co. building, a gallery that house the best collection of Mexican folk art I have ever seen, The San Antonio Cathedral, the oldest in the United States, and, of course, the Alamo, a shrine watched over by the Daughters of the Texan Revolution.

I am grateful to BAAS for awarding me the Malcolm Bradbury Award to help me attend this conference; it was an experience I will never forget. I have returned energised, and, happily, to a blizzard of e-mails from new friends.

Michelle Henley, University of Cambridge

I would like to thank BAAS for awarding me a travel award in respect of the year 2004. I was able to use the award to help fund a two-week trip to Philadelphia earlier this year.

This trip was necessary in order to complete the archival research for one of the two case studies in my PhD thesis which is a comparative study of pietism, gender and power in two German-speaking communities during the eighteenth century: the Salzburger Community of Ebenezer, Georgia and the Anabaptists of Ephrata Cloister, Pennsylvania. I am focussing on distinct gender roles in these communities prior to the Revolution and the revivalism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Whilst in Philadelphia I had a busy time using the resources at the following institutions: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library Company of Philadelphia, Germantown Historical Society, Temple University Library, Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania and the Free Library of Pennsylvania. It was at these institutions that I was able to gather archival, printed primary and secondary resources for my study of Ephrata.

Ephrata was a cloistered settlement in Pennsylvania formed from 1734 by radical pietists, almost exclusively German-speaking. The ways in which these German pietists conducted their lives was very distinct from more secular communities in the colony. Furthermore, power and influence could be exerted by poor men and women, of no status in secular society, in multiple ways, both within their community and within the household. The community at Ephrata was physically separated into three separate orders: the celibate Sisters and Brethren who lived in their own convents and the married Householders, who settled on farmsteads around them. Asceticism and celibacy defined life at Ephrata which make for interesting comparison with the more mainstream pietist community in Georgia, where marriage was the cornerstone of social order.

In addition to researching in Philadelphia, over the weekend I was also able to participate in the Annual Barnes Club Conference, hosted by the post-graduate body of Temple University. At this conference I presented a paper entitled, The Shaping of a Community: Power and Pietism in the Salzburger Community of Ebenezer, Georgia, 1734 to c.1775, which discussed the negotiation of power within this community, using gender, in particular masculinity, as a methodological tool to illustrate the multiple layers of power evident within this unique settlement in fledgling Georgia. The conference was very well organised, with speakers from the United States, Britain and Europe, commentators for each panel and faculty chairing all panels. Furthermore, the conference included professional development sessions including mock interviews by faculty members and publishing advice.

This trip to Philadelphia was essential to my research, and proved very fruitful. I am very grateful to BAAS for their financial support.

Mr. Andrew Fearnley, University of Cambridge

Firstly, I would like to thank the BAAS Committee for approving my application for a Short Term Travel Award. The award made possible a three-week research foray to the US, during which time I spent two weeks in Cleveland, OH, and one week in Washington, D.C. The trip was necessary for me to carry out my research on a settlement house in Cleveland, OH, The Neighborhood Association, and present some of my existing findings on this organization to various audiences in the city.

The Neighborhood Association, located in Cleveland, OH, was one of the most important settlement houses to be operating in the first half of the twentieth century. My thesis will consider this institution’s record towards race mainly during the years of the Depression, with a brief overview of its initial years from its establishment in 1915 through to its full-working capacity in 1927. The work began from an interest in ideas about ‘race’ in twentieth century America, and in particular the cultural institutions and developments that have helped to define and shape this concept. Although The Neighborhood Association was of considerable import to both local residents, both black and white, as well as of considerable national import (Eleanor Roosevelt twice wrote about it in her syndicated ‘My Day’ column; a young Frank Sinatra and an aged Charlie Chaplin both donated generously to its rebuilding programme in the 1940s; it gained reasonable coverage in Time and Life magazines) scholars have generally been oblivious to its existence. What first drew my attention to the institution, and the wider questions that I wished to ask of urban spaces and the interplay of race in them, was the curious fact that although Kenneth Kusmer had written a seminal work of urban history with Cleveland as his focus, A Ghetto Takes Shape (1976), the Neighborhood Association was largely absent from this work.

So, my own work is an attempt to tell an untold story. But in so doing it is also an attempt to provide a commentary on the wider debates on which individual aspects of the settlement’s past may touch. For instance, a chapter on the settlement itself and where it fits within the history of the city of Cleveland will also make an argument about the way in which urban historians have, since St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, remained rooted to the concept of ‘ghettos’ and ‘ghettoization’. Even the greatest branch of dissenters, those following the banner of Joe William Trotter, still toil within this conceptual framework, accepting the ‘ghetto’ as axiomatic.

My work then rests on a series of overlapping arguments: namely, that ‘ghettos’ are more about perceptions than realities; that cultural representations and recreational pursuits can be forums for political debates, especially among minority groups; that settlement houses, pace Judith Ann Trolander, were able to utilize the resources provided by both business-controlled Community Chests as well as Federal resources; that ‘racism’ is a malleable concept, but one not unique to a particular social group. Historians have certainly not been blind to the questionable racial attitudes of social reforms, but there is far from a deluge of work on the topic, and that which does exist is also quite poor. For instance, Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn has provided an important work on the attitudes of settlement workers between 1890 and 1945. In that work, Lasch-Quinn unfortunately tries to project what she correctly identifies as the indifference of the National Federation of Settlement workers to issues of race upon settlement workers more broadly. In addition, her work is marred by misquotations and poor scholarly apparatus, as well as an argument that is in its overarching qualities fundamentally flawed. It is this work which my own partly aims to revise.

With the travel grant I was able to spend two weeks in Cleveland, OH and once more utilize the manuscript sources based at the Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS). With this being my second trip to the WRHS (the first trip having taken place in November-December 2003), I was already acquainted with the archives, the staff and the nearby facilities of Case Western University. And such familiarity meant that I was able to arrange forums in which I could present some of my findings. In total I gave two, twenty minute papers, both of which were adapted from two current chapters of my thesis, and were presented before mixed audiences of students, scholars and residents.

The first paper I gave concerned a summer camp which the Association had constructed in 1933/34, and which prompted an angry response from local residents of the town. With the Neighborhood Association practicing an entirely interracial program, the local residents of Brecksville feared that a summer camp would bring an ‘invasion’ of African American adults to the area. The case is particularly interesting because of the counterpoint it brings to the on-going debate which the likes of Hirsch, Sugrue and Gerstle have initiated. The residents of Brecksville were affluent, trenchantly upper middle class, unquestionably ethnically white, educated, employed and, if anything, Protestant. And yet their racist views were not all that dissimilar from those groups traditionally associated with what Arnold Hirsch has provocatively termed ‘Massive Resistance in the North.’ Consequently, my paper set out the story in all its gruesome details, so that local residents could understand that the area is not entirely the paragon of racial-liberalism that it is commonly presumed to be.

Two days later I was granted the chance to present a second paper. This time I chose to speak on the controversy that arose when the Association’s main theatrical group, the nationally-renowned Gilpin Players, decided to stage the hugely provocative play, Stevedore. The play had been written in early 1934 by two amateur actors, Paul Peters and George Sklar, and was first performed at New York’s Civic Repertory Theater in April of that year. Stevedore told the tale of a group of African American dock workers from New Orleans who were discriminated against by their boss, set upon by a white mob and found their only friends in a bunch of white Communist agitators. In the view of the distinguished black intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois, the play was one of immense ‘strength, clearness and terrible earnestness, it brought tears to my eyes.’ The play evoked equal emotion from Cleveland’s black community when the Gilpin Players finally gave their own rendition of the script in February-March 1935. Unfortunately, it was not all positive. So, the paper which I gave sketched out the varying opinions which Cleveland’s black community voiced towards the play, and tried to unpick the reasons for such a spectrum of opinion.

Having pretty much exhausted all the relevant resources of the WRHS, I headed to Washington, D.C., and just in time to see the cherry-blossom come into bloom along the Potomac. The trip to Washington was essentially to tie up a few loose ends that had come out of my work on the Neighborhood Association, as well as to investigate an interesting discovery I had made during my initial phase of research the winter previous. Like all historians studying some aspect of twentieth-century race relations, mucking around with the records of the NAACP had been mandatory. During the few days that I spent in Washington, I initially worked to uncover links that existed between the Neighborhood Association and the local branch of the NAACP. I then subsequently turned my attention to looking at the relationship between the Cleveland branch of the NAACP and the National Office in New York, and in particular the private, but acrimonious, debate that came about when the President of the Cleveland Branch, David H. Pierce, began campaigning for the Association to re-orientate itself in a ‘left-ward’ direction. In light of the Scottsboro case, and the advances being made by Communist-affiliates in Harlem, as well as more mundane factors like the personal friendship that existed between Walter White and Pierce, the National Association took such charges very seriously, and a great deal of serious, and considered correspondence passed between the two. It is this project that I hope to turn my efforts to in the near future.

Once again, I would very much like to thank the BAAS committee for providing the funds which helped to make this trip possible.

Richard Ings, University of Nottingham

I am extremely grateful to BAAS for awarding me a travel award to study photographic archives in Harlem. The three weeks I spent in New York were crucial in developing my thesis, which argues that a critical reading of photographs can make a unique contribution to our understanding of the struggle for the legal and symbolic ownership of place within black urban life, specifically in Harlem in the first half of the twentieth century.

Lodged at the Urban Jem, a brownstone guesthouse, on Fifth Avenue and close to 125^th Street, I split my days between poring through photographs at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and exploring Harlem itself – or, to put it another way, between the represented and the ‘real’ spaces of the black city, between its past and its present life.

In one of several fortuitous encounters, I got to know Michael Henry Adams, an African American architectural historian, who took me on one of his personal tours of Harlem, retelling some of the extraordinary stories lying behind the brownstone frontages and arguing passionately about the need to preserve more of Harlem’s heritage. Although there are proportionally fewer landmarked buildings in Harlem than in the rest of Manhattan, history is better preserved in the fabric here, thanks largely to that same quality of neglect from the white world. While other parts of Manhattan have been regularly erased and replaced, the heart of Harlem has remained largely the same, its streets and its landmarks easily recognisable from photographs taken in the 1920s and 1930s.

The experience of walking through Harlem or going out for the evening to such legendary venues as the Apollo Theater or the Lenox Lounge was not that removed from leafing through the portfolios of photographs preserved at the Schomburg and discovering similar scenes there. To put it the other way round, Harlem seemed to lend itself to the same kind of photographic opportunity it always had: a figure loping along Lenox Avenue, dressed elegantly in a white homburg and a Cab Calloway zoot suit; a crowd gathering outside Harlem’s first Starbucks to see local hero Magic Johnson down a coffee and bagel; comic rapper Capone mocking the audience and the performers at Amateur Night at the Apollo; writers gathering for readings at the Schomburg Center; jazz players soloing in tiny, dark, joyful clubs.

The Schomburg Center issued me with a pass so that I could spend a few hours each day working steadily through portfolios of African American photographers active in Harlem up to the mid-1950s. As the whole photographic archive holds around 300,000 items, I felt I was just skimming the surface, but I did uncover a whole range of unexpected treasures – panoramic pictures of snow-filled streets by Harlem’s most well-known studio photographer, James VanDerZee; a small collection of pictures of nightclub entertainers taken in the 1920s by Eddie Elcha; the prodigious output of Austin Hansen for the African American press following the Second World War.

The Museum of the City of New York was equally helpful. I was presented with boxes of photographs to sift through and again I made discoveries: the inadvertent mapping of the different Harlems – Negro, Spanish and Italian – by Charles Van Urban, commissioned by a real estate agent in 1932 to photograph all the wooden buildings left in New York; a series of pictures documenting marches and parades in Harlem taken by another white photographer, Carl Van Vechten, who is generally known only for his portraits of African American writers, artists and musicians.

These researches would alone have made the trip worthwhile, but it was the chance encounters with people that made it vital. Being interrupted by a woman on the flight over who, on learning I was studying photography, told me of her friendship with members of the Photo League. Joining a small media studies class at NYU to hear Spike Lee talk informally but with quiet passion about the film I had just seen at the Magic Johnson movie theatre. Being invited by the president of the co-op to visit his apartment at 409 Edgecombe Avenue on Sugar Hill, overlooking Jackie Robinson Park, and being given an impromptu tour round a building that had housed most of the black political and cultural elite. Falling into conversation with a woman who had been a Black Panther worker in her youth. Being taken out for dinner by Professor Maren Stange and her family in Smith Street, Brooklyn, to talk black photography. Lodging for my final two nights at artist Lloyd Toone’s house, filled with his remarkable sculptures. Meeting Michael Adams’ vast society of well-connected friends, who invited me to meals, including a memorable Thanksgiving high up in an apartment block on Riverside Drive designed, like the famous landmark, the Hotel Theresa, by George and Edward Blum nearly a century ago.

My photographic research and this brief but intense immersion in the ‘Capital of Black America’ came together in one final encounter, engineered again by the bowler-hatted, cane-twirling Michael Adams. This time, it began in a nursing home and ended in the Spoonbread restaurant. Marvin Smith was one half of the M & M Smith Studio, established in 1940 next to the Apollo Theater. Born in 1910, he and his twin brother Morgan documented and celebrated Harlem and its leaders, both political and cultural right through to the 1950s when they went into television broadcasting. Their pictures filled the pages of the Amsterdam News and the People’s Voice, ushering in a golden age of black photojournalism, but they also, in one writer’s words, created a ‘black Hollywood’ in their studio, at a time when African Americans were either invisible or diminished to racial stereotypes by the white world. Morgan had died in 1993. Marvin now sat before me, as elegant as he had always been despite his age and dwindling health, answering my questions about his life as a photographer. Before we parted, he allowed me to take his picture and signed the recent monograph devoted to his and his brother’s work. In return, I am dedicating my thesis to him: Marvin P. Smith (1910-2003).

Aili McConnon, Downing College, University of Cambridge

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the British Association for American Studies for their generous short-term grant which contributed to a two week research trip in New York and Princeton, New Jersey to access many key research materials unavailable in the UK library system. My research trip allowed me to broaden the scope of my literary investigation of the connection between the images of hands, the ‘unspeakable’ and historic memory in Toni Morrison’s fiction and non-fiction and in the visual culture of nineteenth-century America.

Historically, slaves were classified as silent ‘hands’. In Beloved (1987), Morrison explores how slavery was particularly cruel to slaves’ actual hands and mouths. These body parts also come to symbolize agency and voice and Morrison uses specific hands and mouths to explore how slavery’s destruction of the family affected African-American identity. Morrison develops images of hands and mouths into tropes to convey the characters’ and contemporary American society’s struggle to balance remembering slavery and moving on. The character Beloved, an embodiment of the past who can both embrace and strangle, satisfy and devour, epitomizes (among many things) this struggle. Finally, hands and mouths concretize the many conflicting appetites—love, violence, joy and grief— circulating within the text. My research trip helped me to examine the images of hands and mouths in nineteenth-century history, culture and visual art—the actual context of the period in which Beloved is set. This research trip was immensely beneficial to my MPhil dissertation and has set valuable groundwork for my PhD dissertation expanding this project.

I spent half of my time at The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. Here I accessed many of the sources —posters, letters, newspapers, advertising cards, sheet music, photographs, movie frames, books, artifacts and mementos— of The Black Book. This text, which Morrison helped edit early in her career as a publisher, has received comparatively little critical attention. I had contacted the staffs of the General Research and Reference Division, the Photographs and Prints Division, and the Art and Artifacts Division prior to my trip; when I appeared, various people had already taken my project on board and working here was a pleasure. I had several particularly interesting days in the Art and Artifacts Division examining the use of hands and mouths in visual art, abolition coins and other anti-slavery artifacts.

At the Schomburg Center, I also discovered the ‘Lest We Forget: The Triumph over Slavery’ traveling exhibition created by the New York Public Library in conjunction with the UNESCO Slave Route Project to mark the United Nations General Assembly’s resolution proclaiming 2004 The International Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery and Its Abolition. Both this exhibition and its companion book, Jubilee: The Emergence of African American Culture, emphasized the contemporary relevance of The Black Book. Both The Black Book and Jubilee trace many examples of explicit and implicit manipulation of African Americans’ hands and mouths in order to celebrate African- American resistance and accomplishments despite this legacy.

I moved on to spend several fruitful days in the main New York Public Library, the Columbia University Library and the Princeton University Library, respectively. I accessed seventeen sound and video recordings of Toni Morrison’s commentary on her writing, and her discussion of the connection between literature, memory and history. These interviews provided useful insight into her work and her deliberate focus on the images of hands and mouths. In these libraries I was also able to access a more complete, and up-to-date selection of secondary source material on Toni Morrison’s writing. This has helped my dissertation engage in a dialogue with a much broader spectrum of Morrison critics.

The opportunity to expand my literature dissertation to incorporate a broader American Studies approach helped me, upon my return to Cambridge, to gain admission to an interdisciplinary graduate seminar offered through the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. I am most grateful to the British Association for American Studies for making this fruitful research trip possible. My two weeks researching were intense and sped by quickly. I hope that next year’s recipients have equally fascinating research experiences.

Elizabeth Rosen, University College London

Thanks to a generous short-term travel grant from BAAS and additional monies from the UCL graduate school and my department I was recently able to make a three week research trip to the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana. The Lilly Library is the repository for over 6.5 million manuscripts and 400,000 books, and includes a literature inventory to knock anyone’s socks off. The collection includes the principle archives of Upton Sinclair, Sylvia Plath, and Galway Kinnell, and papers, letters or manuscripts from Ray Carver, Nadine Gordimer, William Wordsworth, Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Fitzgerald, Pound, Hemingway, and on and on. It was a genuine pleasure to work amongst the words of such notables.

I was there for the Kurt Vonnegut collection. Vonnegut is a native son of Indiana and has designated the Lilly Library as the repository for his papers. I’m currently working on contemporary apocalyptic fiction and Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos is the basis of a chapter in my thesis. The plot of Galapagos is heavily dependent on Darwinism, and Vonnegut’s interest in anthropology is a long-standing one. Amongst other things in its collection, the Lilly Library has the author’s travel ephemera, his university notes from anthropology classes, and his many manuscripts in their various versions.

I was interested in exploring any notes which Vonnegut might have made on his own trip to the Galapagos Islands, and even more so in looking over the kinds of anthropology classes he took at university. I wanted to review his notes for these classes to see whether they would show any particular interest in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. I was also hoping that I would find a letter which naturalist Stephen J. Gould sent to Vonnegut after the publication of Galapagos praising the novel’s evolutionary scenario. Unfortunately these were all dead ends: the only notes from Vonnegut’s trip were in the form of an introduction he’d done for a special edition of the novel; the anthropology materials were mostly syllabi and reading assignments, and in any case were for social anthropology classes rather than physical anthropology; and Gould’s letter was not among the archived correspondence (nothing post-1997 has yet been archived by the library, and I wasn’t allowed access to the un-archived materials). Unexpectedly however, Vonnegut’s Master’s Thesis, entitled “Fluctuations between Good and Ill Fortune in Simple Tales,” yielded some interesting material since it contains the author’s theories about plot and narrative structure.

And in one of those fortunate archival experiences one can have when browsing, I happened to come across two collections of letters which proved useful. The first was a long correspondence between Vonnegut and Donald M. Fiene which confirmed the existence of the Gould letter. The second was the letters of editor/writer Gordon Lish who had long relationships with authors such as Ray Carver, John Barth, John Irving, and Don DeLillo. Since DeLillo’s novel Underworld is also of interest in my work on apocalyptic fiction, I was very happy to read the correspondence between the two men, and I can report that DeLillo is even funnier in his personal letters than in his fiction. In a strange twist, these DeLillo letters yielded far more interesting nuggets than the Vonnegut collection did.

My deepest thanks to BAAS for allowing me to experience the vagaries and wonders of archival work.

Conference Reports

The Criss Cross International Conference

Though the importance of jazz and related forms of music within African American culture, and within the broader spectrum of American culture is regularly acknowledged, its crucial role has not usually been adequately reflected in American Studies teaching or research, where literature or history tends to be the main point of entry. This is the case, even while it’s widely accepted that the musical and oral dimensions of African American culture are particularly important – if only because, given the suppression of other cultural expression and the exclusion of African Americans from literacy under slavery, music has been seen as containing and preserving the essence of African American culture, and even strategies of survival. The underlying importance of music means that it is constantly used and referred to in African American writing and painting, and in fact it could be argued that without a realization of this the reader or the viewer is often missing out on a great deal of the work’s meaning.

Aiming to demonstrate the central importance of African American music and to explore the many ways in which it inter-relates with other cultural forms we have been running a 3 year research project, Criss Cross: Confluence and Influence in 20^th Century African American Music, Visual Art and Literature based around a Research Fellow, Graham Taylor, with involvement from other members of the School of American and Canadian Studies.

As the culmination of our project we held the Criss-Cross International Conference from June 18^th to 20th at the University of Nottingham. We were delighted by the response to our call for papers, especially from the US, but also including Germany, Holland and Canada as well as Britain, and by the quality and range of the 39 papers which were presented over the three days. Particularly unusual, and welcome at a British conference was the high number of African American participants. Our speakers, like their topics, were diverse – a musicologist, art curator, or poet might appear with a literary or cultural critic, and the presentations offered a wonderful array of visual and musical illustrations – some performed live. As well as our main guest speakers, Robert O’Meally, Krin Gabbard, Paul Oliver, David Bailey, and Steven Tracy we had a reading from the distinguished African American poet Michael Harper, an evening concert featuring the British jazz trumpeter Byron Wallen, performing a suite in tribute to Langston Hughes, and a reception and private showing of an exhibition of the photographs of Horace Ove at the Nottingham Castle Museum.

Topics included blues and black aesthetics, jazz autobiographies and fiction, the paintings of Romare Bearden, Joe Overstreet and Jacob Lawrence, Duke Ellington, William Grant Still and the music of the Harlem Renaissance, advertising art for early blues, jazz and film noir, women and blues, minstrelsy, the poetry of Sterling Brown and Jayne Cortez, and the fiction of Morrison, Ellison, Gayl Jones and more. We intend to publish a selection of the papers.

Our project has involved not just documenting and tracing the relations between the different art forms, but exploring ways of talking about the relationships of influence and shared concerns across the art forms. This second aspect is more difficult, and our intention was that the conference would encourage participants to share interdisciplinary approaches, and discuss whether general terms like a blues or a jazz aesthetic had any real meaning or usefulness. While it’s fair to say that in this respect the conference raised more questions than there was time to answer, we hope to be able to address them in the many continuing dialogues across the Atlantic that have followed the conference, and in our subsequent publications. Our website at http://www.notttingham.ac.uk/american/research/crissscross gives more details of participants and papers, and of the Criss Cross project itself, and we would welcome hearing from anyone interested in the subject.

Elections on the Horizon: Marketing Politics to the Electorate in the USA and UK

In March the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library sponsored a one-day conference, ‘Elections on the Horizon: Marketing Politics to the Electorate in the USA and UK’. Sixteen panellists, from the UK and USA presented papers, and there were plenary presentations by Professor Gary Wasserman (Georgetown University) and Professor Bruce Newman (DePaul University). Inevitably there were a number of presentations addressing aspects of the 2004 US presidential election. Montague Kern (Rutgers University) and Dennis Johnson (George Washington University) each looked at developments in the primary and pre-primary stages of the US election season, with a particular look at the evidenced role of internet linkages from the very start of this year’s contest, while Peter Ubertaccio (Stonehouse College, Massachusetts) and Joseph Ben-Ur (University of Houston) each centred their papers on aspects of marketing the Republican Party in 2004.

Among the presenters concentrating on the UK, Dominic Wring (Loughborough University) addressed the marketing of New Labour, and Nigel Jackson (Bournemouth) looked at the contribution of electronic newsletter by UK political parties. Janine Dermody and Stuart Hanmer-Lloyd (Gloucestershire University) looked at the Labour Party’s relationship with young citizens, and Wendy Stokes (American International University, London) was concerned generally with UK political parties’ marketing to women.

Broad theoretical insights were offered by Robert Worcester (MORI/LSE) and Paul Baines Middlesex University), annd Darren Lilleker (Bournemouth University) and Ralph Negrine (Leicester University) who offered prospective models and retrospective hindsight in their analyses of political marketing. Issue marketing in the USA was introduced in papers by Conor McGrath (University of Ulster) and Kenneth Cosgrove (Suffolk University, Massachusetts), and comparative panels featured papers by Carl Stenberg (University of North Carolina) and Philip Harris (Manchester Metropolitan University) on campaign funding, and Robert Busby (Liverpool Hope College) and Barry Richards (Bournemouth University) examining marketing from the perspectives of candidates and citizens.

The conference attracted over 100 registered participants from the UK, Austria, Germany, Sweden and the USA. Almost 30 UK universities and several schools were represented, in addition to nine US universities, political parties, government, consultancy and the media. The proceedings will be published on the internet, and will shortly be accessible through the web page of the Eccles Centre (http://www.bl.uk/ecclescentre), and the authors are working towards publication in hardcopy of a selection of the papers.

Philip John Davies

Conference Announcements

“Points of Contact: The Heritages of William Carlos Williams”

Wednesday 27^th – Friday 29^th July 2005

Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Proposals are welcome from scholars wishing to participate in a round-table “seminar panel” to showcase their work-in-progress on topics relating to the writing of William Carlos Williams or on poets and artists influenced by him. The format of the conference will allow for participants’ papers (20-25 pages) to be circulated in advance of the meeting. At the meeting each participant will be allotted one hour within which time they will introduce their work for 10-15 minutes thus leaving ample time for questions and discussion. The meeting will take place on Thursday and Friday, with a reception and guest presentation to open proceedings on Wednesday evening. Guest speaker and respondent to the papers will be Peter Halter, Professor of American Literature, University of Lausanne, and author of The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams (1994).

Please send a 200 word outline of your proposed topic by December 19 ^th 2004 to Ian Copestake at copestake@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Northwest BAAS

Following the annual BAAS conference at Manchester Metropolitan University in April a North West group of BAAS has now been established.

The first event to be held by the branch will be at the University of Manchester on Wednesday 13 October 2004 when there will be a paper delivered by a guest speaker (details to be confirmed) followed by a branch meeting and a social gathering. All BAAS members and prospective members welcome.

For further details contact:

Kevern Verney

History Department

Edge Hill College of Higher Education

St Helens Road

ORMSKIRK,

Lancashire L39 4QP

E-mail: Verneyk@edgehill.ac.uk

US Foreign Relations

The Centre for Diplomatic and International Studies at the University of Leicester will be hosting a conference on March 23-24, 2005. If anyone is interested in offering a paper either on contemporary or on post-1960 US foreign policy, please contact:

Professor John Dumbrell

Dept of Politics

Leicester University

Leicester LE1 7RH

E-mail: john.dumbrell@le.ac.uk

Other Announcements

Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project (STAMP) – Lancaster

Lancaster was the fourth largest slave port in Britain and around 200 voyages left the city in the eighteenth century. Between 1750 and 1790 alone Lancaster merchants were responsible for the forced transportation of approximately 24,950 Africans across the Atlantic and into slavery.

Toni Morrison said in 1989 that there was “no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it.” The aim of the project is to make sure that future generations have places that they can effectively remember those whose lives were blighted by the Slave Trade.

This partnership between the City Council, Museums Service, County Education Service and the campaigning group Globalink with myself as academic advisor has led to a grant from the Millenium Commission and from the Arts Council in the North-West for an art work on the quayside to commemorate the lives of those 30,000 and more slaves shipped on Lancaster slavers in the eighteenth century. The project also aims to make links to continuing issues of global inequity and poverty by highlighting issues of Fair Trade/Slave Trade. STAMP will work with a number of artists, schools and community groups to increase public awareness of the slave trade and develop a series of commemorative events and performances from 2003-2005 culminating in a permanent memorial to the Africans who were transported on board Lancaster ships, hopefully to be unveiled in April 2005 during the City’s maritime festival. Already, with the city’s Litfest, we have distributed 24,950 copies of the specially commissioned poem Lancaster Keys to schoolchildren in the County – each copy representing one of the enslaved taken in Lnacaster ships. The STAMP project was publicly launched in November 2003 during the city’s Litfest with an event that brought together the historian Melinda Elder, the poet Dorothea Smartt and the artist Lubaina Himid. The event was a significant intervention into the cultural life of the city as the participants wrestled with the need to face up to the ghosts of Lancaster’s slave past. Himid’s contribution was a finely crafted polemic which detailed the difficulty of the memorial gesture in a culture where memorials are no sooner talked about then hijacked by a variety of interest groups whose political agendas are often hidden by discourses such as taste, historical verisimultude or civic pride. Her opening question highlights the difficulty of constructing memorial spaces in such a context.

The question you should ask first is Who are monuments for? Only when this has been asked and the many questions and claims, which will arise from this first question have at least been acknowledged, can anyone begin to talk about what this monument might look like, be like, achieve or change.

The living
The Dead
The ancestors
The descendants
The disciples
The friends
The winners
The losers
The city
The economy
The cultural historians
The artists
The future
The past

Himid’s interrogation of motive stands as a stark warning to memorial makers in this highly contested terrain. An artist such as herself who has designed several memorials of tremendous power and artistic merit over the last twenty years, none of which have been taken up by the former slave ports they were designed for, knows that there are still many obstacles to confront before Lancaster has a memorial that will work against its wilful forgetting. Her vision is that a significant and appropriate monument is possible despite these difficulties and that its primary need is to be able to reflect change. As she says:

The monument could be for the people of a city and its visitors to be able to learn to accept and give forgiveness. In which case it could relate to today, to the past, to the future and could work visually on several levels. There could be texts, there could be water, there could be structure, there could be movement, colour, and even growing, living things.

A monument needs to move, to move on, to help the people who engage with it to move on, it needs to be able to change with the weather, the seasons, the political climate and the visual debates of the day.

We need a memorial that conserves memory without being conservative. Such a task is daunting and humbling, but all involved in the project believe that our collective amnesia must be overcome by local gestures of remembrance (however small) that raise the collective consciousness of slavery’s ghostly presence that still haunts the British landscape.

Early in 2004, the project raised enough funding (£60,000) to enable it to move forward in its joint endeavour to hold workshops run by artists in local schools to raise awareness of Lancaster’s history of slavery and to commission an artist to design and construct a memorial on the quayside of the town outside the local Maritime Museum. We have appointed a lead artist coordinator Suandi from Black Arts Alliance in Manchester and the committee is pleased to announce the public artist for the project will be Kevin Dalton Harrison from Manchester. His powerful sculpted works have addressed issues of contemporary racism and black British history and his designs were dynamic and we are all very excited about the possibility of having the first specifically designed memorial to enslaved Africans at a British port. If you would like to keep abreast of this exciting project and to be involved or invited to the unveiling next Spring please be in touch with myself at the address below.

Contact Person:

Dr. Alan Rice
Academic Consultant to the STAMP project
Reader in American Cultural Studies
University of Central Lancashire
Preston
PR1 2HE
01772 893020

arice@uclan.ac.uk

Barra Foundation International Fellowships in Colonial and American History and Culture for 2005-2006

The Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania each year offer two one-month fellowships to support research in residence in their collections by foreign national scholars of early American history and culture living outside the United States. The fellowships are funded by the Barra Foundation, Inc.

These two independent research libraries, adjacent to each other in Center City Philadelphia, have complementary collections capable of supporting research in a variety of fields and disciplines relating to the history of America and the Atlantic world from the 17th through the 19th centuries, as well as Mid-Atlantic regional history to the present.

The Library Company, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731, was the largest public library in America until the latter part of the 19th century, and contains printed materials relating to every aspect of American culture and society in that period. It holds over half a million rare books and graphics, including the nation’s second largest collection of pre-1801 American imprints and one of the largest collections of 18th-century British books in America. A catalog of its rare books and graphics is available at www.librarycompany.org.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, now enriched by the holdings of the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, holds more than 18 million personal, organizational, and business manuscripts, as well 500,000 printed items and 300,000 graphic images concerning national and regional political, social, and family history. The Balch collections have added rich documentation of the ethnic and immigrant experience in the United States. A catalog of its library is available at www.hsp.org.

Together the two institutions form one of the most comprehensive sources in the nation for the study of colonial and U.S. history and culture. The Historical Society’s strength in manuscripts complements the Library Company’s strength in printed materials. The Library Company’s collections reflect the whole range of early American print culture, including books, pamphlets, and magazines from all parts of the country, as well as books imported from Britain and the Continent. The Historical Society’s archives richly document the social, cultural, and economic history of a region central to many aspects of the nation’s development. The Balch Institute collections bring the HSP new strength in documenting ethnic and immigrant history, with significant holdings of ethnic newspapers, records of benevolent societies and other local and national ethnic organizations, and personal papers of prominent leaders in ethnic and immigrant communities. Both collections are strong in local newspapers and printed ephemera; the print and photograph collections of both libraries are rich in images of the Philadelphia region and graphics by local artists. The two libraries combined have extraordinary strength in the history of women and African-Americans, popular literature, business and banking, popular medicine, philanthropy and reform, education, natural sciences, technology, art, architecture, German Americana, American Judaica, and a host of other subjects.

The stipend is $2,000,plus an allowance for travel expenses. Fellowships are tenable for one month at any time from June 2005 to May 2006. They support both post-doctoral and dissertation research. The project proposal should demonstrate that the Library Company and the Historical Society have primary sources central to the research topic. Candidates are encouraged to inquire about the appropriateness of a proposed topic before applying. The Library Company’s newly renovated Cassatt House fellows’ residence offers rooms at reasonable rates, along with a kitchen, common room, and offices with internet access, available to resident and non-resident fellows at all hours.

Deadline for receipt of applications is March 1, 2005 with a decision to be made by April 15. To apply send a brief résumé, a two- to four-page description of the proposed research, and a letter of reference to: James Green, Library Company, 1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107. For more information, telephone (215) 546-3181, fax (215) 546-5167, e-mail jgreen@librarycompany.org, or go to www.librarycompany.org.

Rethinking Pedagogical Models for E-Learning

‘Rethinking Pedagogical Models for E-Learning,’ is a major new research venture based at the University of Sheffield and funded by the LTSN Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. The project explores the methodological and pedagogical implications of the developments of new technologies, focusing in particular on existing forms of e-learning. A literature review considering forms of e-learning and American Studies is currently being compiled. Could anyone with information or suggestions on any form of e-learning used in

conjunction with American Studies, for example, virtual learning classrooms, discussion boards and distance learning, please contact Anne-Marie Evans at A.Evans@sheffield.ac.uk.

Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library 2005-06 Research Fellowship Program

Residential fellowships available for scholars pursuing topics in American history and art, decorative arts, material culture, and design. NEH senior scholar grants, Lois F. McNeil dissertation grants, and short-term grants will be awarded, with stipends of $1500 to $3333 per month.

Application deadline January 15, 2005. Visit www.winterthur.org, contact academicprograms@winterthur.org, or write to Gretchen Buggeln, Director, Research Fellowship Program, Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, DE 19735.

Members’ News

Richard J. Carwardine Wins 14th Annual Lincoln Prize

Historian Richard J. Carwardine of Oxford University today became the first British scholar to win the Lincoln Prize, the largest award in America in American History. For his original, analytical biography, Lincoln (Pearson Education Ltd.), Carwardine will receive first prize of $30,000 and a bronze replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ life-size bust, Lincoln the Man. Dr. Carwardine is Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford.

The book melds the earliest original sources and the latest historical scholarship to present a fresh perspective on Abraham Lincoln’s political career and rhetorical achievements. The narrative portrays him as a skillful politician blessed with a strong moral foundation, whose religious convictions helped him to frame—and justify—his decision to wage the war to preserve the Union and end slavery.

The Lincoln Prize was founded and is endowed by philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman. Through the institute that bears their name, Mr. Gilder and Mr. Lehrman, have amassed one of the nation’s largest private collections of American historical documents—recently placed on deposit at the New-York Historical Society. The Gilder Lehrman Institute creates and supports public and private history high schools, teacher education, curriculum development, exhibitions, and publications. Messrs. Gilder and Lehrman, together with Professor Gabor Boritt, Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, first established the prize in 1990.

“This is the biography of Lincoln the world has been waiting for,” commented Mr. Lehrman. “Richard Carwardine has drawn a powerful portrait that highlights Lincoln’s moral convictions and his political acumen, his respect for ideas and his mastery of public opinion. We are enormously pleased to honor this achievement with the 14^th annual Lincoln Prize.”

Added Professor Boritt: “Not since Lord Charnwood wrote his famous study in 1916, has a Lincoln biographer from England provided so much illumination of the 16^th president. Oxford don Richard Carwardine paints a fresh portrait, reminding us that the Lincoln story remains a work in progress, and that Lincoln’s influence—and his appeal to historians—and the public—has a much-deserved global prominence.”

“At the same time,” Professor Boritt continued, “the Prize recognizes the outstanding achievement, over a lifetime of research, editing, and writing, by John Y. Simon for The Grant Papers. Professor Simon’s devotion and expertise have created an indispensable resource for this and future generations.”

A three-member historians’ jury recommended the winners of the 2004 Lincoln Prize after examining 146 submissions this year: William J. Cooper, Jr. of Louisiana State University, Chair; John F. Marszalek, recently retired from Mississippi State University; and James L. Roark of Emory University. Final selections were made by the Board of Trustees of the Prize. The jury additionally named Steven Hahn, the Nichols Professor in American History at the University of Pennsylvania, as a finalist for 2003 for his book, A Nation Under our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press).

The panel noted: “Based on his own research in primary Lincoln material and a thorough immersion in pertinent secondary literature, Carwardine has provided a marvelous synthesis of Lincoln scholarship. The book will become required reading for all Lincoln scholars as well as for all students of the 1850s and the Civil War.”

Professor J.R. Pole

During BAAS’s fiftieth year at least one of our ‘founding’ members remains very active on the international scene. Professor J.R. Pole (Rhodes Professor [Emeritus], Oxford) may well be the first BAAS member to have one of his books translated into Mandarin: The Pursuit of Equality in American History (1993) will be published in Beijing early in 2005. Professor Pole is working on other projects, too. A revised version of the lecture on American Irony that he gave as a plenary at the Oxford BAAS conference in 2002 will appear in this summer’s edition of the literary magazine Raritan, and his edition of The Federalist (containing annotations on all the historical, literary and other references in the text) will be published by Hackett (Cambridge, Mass.) in November 2004.

Members’ Publications

Mira Duric, The Strategic Defence Initiative: US Policy and the Soviet Union (Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003) ISBN 0754637336.

Mark Newman, The Civil Rights Movement (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). ISBN 0748615938.

Mark Newman, Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi (University of Georgia Press, 2004) ISBN 0820325260

Martin Padget, Indian Country: Travels in the American Southwest, 1840-1935 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004) ISBN 0826330282.

Graham Thompson, The Business of America: The Cultural Production of a Post-War Nation (Pluto Press, 2004) ISBN 0745318088.

Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (University of Illinois Press, 2004) ISBN 0252029038.

New Members

Emily Barker is a PhD student at the University of Essex. Her research interests are crime and detective fiction, African American poetry and fictiond, and rap and urban culture.

Sarah Bennett is a PhD student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth where she is working on a project on the passage of treaties in the US senate.

Benjamin Bird is a PhD student at the University of Leeds where he is writing a thesis on Models of Consciousness in the Novels of Don DeLillo.

Rachel Byrd is a postgraduate at Keele University. Her main research interest is President Clinton’s foreign policy, particularly with regard to the middle east.

Carole Chapman teaches at Godalming College and has recemtly been awarded the Imperial War Museum’s Education Fellowship in Holocaust Studies for 2004-05.

Rachel Cohen is a PhD student at Brunel University.

Sally Connolly is a PhD student at University College London where she is currently writing up her thesis on A Genealogy of Poetry Elegies for Poets since 1939.

Brendan Cooper is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and is currently conducting research into religion and theology in the poetry of John Berryman.

Jane Dailey is Assistant Professor of History at John Hopkins University with research interests in nineteenth and twentieth-century US politics, the American South and African American History

Shelby Foster is a doctoral student at the University of Exeter where he writing on the Ku Klux Klan in literature and film.

Sarah Gamble is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh working on political subjectivity and queer masculinity in the novels of Jean Genet, the poetry of Mark Doty and the films of Gregg Araki.

Michael Gaughan is Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln. His research interests include modernism and modernity, postmodernism and the avant-garde, James Joyce, L.S. Vygotsky and dialogics.

Alex Houen is lecturer in Modern British and American Literature at the University of Sheffield. He recently published Terrorism and Modern Literature and is currently researching the literary avant-garde in American literature since the 1950s.

Rebecca Janicker is a postgraduate student at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests are gothic, horror and weird fiction and film, particularly H. P. Lovecraft, science fiction and fantasy.

Vassili Karali is a PhD student in the Department of History at the Univesrity of Edinburgh. She is working on a project titled Political Anglicism in the Eighteenth Century British Atlantic World.

Joseph Kennedy is a PhD student at the University of Sussex, working on the writing of national identity by F. O. Matthiessen in American Renaissance. His other interests include detective fiction and the university in English and American literature.

Richard Lock-Pullan is senior lecturer in Defence Studies at King’s College London. His primary areas of research are US foreign and defence policy, with an emphasis on military intervention policy.

Kim McNamara is a PhD student at the University of Sydney. Her research interests are popular culture, celebrity theory, urban theory, surveillance theory and film and television theory.

Nicola McClellan is a PhD student at the University of Leeds where she is working on the representation of poor whites in 1930s American texts.

Will Montgomery is a visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway and Queen Mary, University of London. His research interests are contemporary American poetry.

Catherine Nash is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham working on the impact of technology on the beat generation and in particular the work of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

Rachel Owens is Head of History at Prior Park College where she teaches American history options including foreign policy 1890-1991, domestic policy in the 1920s, civil rights 1877-1980 and domestic policy 1960-1988.

Anthony Parker is Director of the School of American Studies at the University of Dundee. His research interests are Scottish/American relations, principally in the eighteenth century, and ethnicity in America.

Jo Pawlik is a PhD student at the University of Sussex researching “The Other ’68: Movements in Californian Culture in Dialogue with French Philosophy”.

Steven Pope is Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Lincoln. His research focuses on sport and American culture, and leisure travel and motoring in the US and Britain.

Jarod Roll is a postgraduate student at Northwestern University where he is writing a dissertation on the social and political mobilisations of white and black labourers in the American South between 1890 and 1941.

Neil Schiller is a PhD student at Liverpool Hope University College. His research interests are Richard Brautigan and American counterculture fronm the Beats to the Hippies and beyond.

Adrian Smith is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. His primary research interest is the link between authenticity, politics and folk music.

Mark Storey is an MA student at the University of Manchester where he is specialising in twentieth century American literature, particularly representations of the small town.

Siohan Tooher is an MA student at the Institute of United States Studies.

Simon Turner is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham where he is researching the cultural reception of the Vietnam War.

Tony Wagstaff is a PhD student at The University of Leicester where is working on Lyndon Johnson’s Latin American policy.

T. C. Wales is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are Anglo-American intelligence history, Cold War history and Anglo-American Diplomatic History.

Sue Walsh is lecturer in English, American and Children’s literature at the University of Reading. Her particular areas of interest in American Studies are ideas of nature and constructions of the child and the animal in American literature.

Jeffrey Weinberg is a Legislative Attorney, Associate Professorial Lecturer at George Washington University and lecturer at the Catholic University of America. His research interests are the presidency, congress and legislation.

Russell White teaches American Studies at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. His research interests lie in African American popular culture.

BAAS Membership of Committees

BAAS Committee

BAAS Committee

BAAS Officers

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

Dr. Nick Selby,* Treasurer, Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ

Tel: 0141 330 8596

Fax: 0141 330 4601

E-Mail: N.Selby@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Dr Heidi Macpherson, Secretary, Department of Humanities, Fylde 42, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE

Tel: 01772 893039

Fax: 01772 892924

E-Mail: heidi.macpherson@baas.ac.uk

Executive Commitee (after 2004 AGM)

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

Ms Kathryn Cooper, (Co-opted), Development Subcommittee, Loreto 6th Form College, Chicester Road, Manchester, M15 5PB

Tel: 0161 226 5156

Fax: 0161 227 9174

E-Mail: kathcooper@cwcom.net

Dr. Jude Davies, School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred’s College, Winchester, SO22 4NR

Tel: 01962 827363

E-Mail: Jude.Davies@wkac.ac.uk

Ms Clare Elliott,* Postgraduate Representative, Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ

E-Mail: clare_baas@yahoo.co.uk

Professor Jay Kleinberg, (Ex-Officio), Editor, Journal of American Studies, School of International Studies, Brunel University, Kingston Lane, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH

Tel: 0181 891 0121

Fax: 0181 891 8306

E-Mail: jay.kleinberg@baas.ac.uk

Dr Sarah MacLachlan, Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University, Geoffrey Manton Building, Off Rosamond Street, Manchester, M15 6LL

Tel: 0161 247 1755

Fax: 0161 247 6345

E-Mail: S.MacLachlan@mmu.ac.uk

Ms. Catherine Morley, School of Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane Campus, Headington, OX3 OBP

E-Mail: catherine.morley@baas.ac.uk

Dr. Martin Padget, Department of English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth SY23 3DY

Tel: 01970 621948

Fax: 01970 622530

E-Mail: mtp@aber.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 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,* School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred’s College, Winchester SO22 4NR

Tel: 0196 282 7370

E-Mail: Carol.Smith@wkac.ac.uk

Dr. Peter Thompson, St. Cross College, St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LZ

Tel: 01865 278498

E-Mail: peter.thompson@stx.ox.ac.uk

Dr Graham Thompson,* School of American & Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD

Tel: 0115 9514269

E-Mail: graham.thompson@baas.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@amstuds.hull.ac.uk

Professor Tim Woods, Department of English, Hugh Owen Building, Penglais, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales, SY23 3DY

Tel: 01970 622535

Fax: 01970 622530

E-Mail: tim.woods@baas.ac.uk

[* indicates this person not eligible for re-election to this position. All co-optations must be reviewed annually]

BAAS Sub-Committee Members

Development:

Dr Ian Scott (Chair)

Dr. Jude Davies

Ms Clare Elliott

Ms. Catherine Morley

Professor Simon Newman

Dr. Peter Thompson

Dr Iain Wallace

Publications:

Ms Carol Smith (Chair)

Ms Kathryn Cooper

Professor Jay Kleinberg

Dr Heidi Macpherson

Professor Ken Morgan

Dr Graham Thompson

Dr Jenel Virden

Conference:

Professor Tim Woods (Chair)

George Conyne

Ann Holton

Dr Sarah MacLachlan

Dr. Sarah Meer

Dr. Martin Padget

Dr. Nick Selby

Libraries and Resources:

Mr Ian Ralston (Chair)

Dr Kevin Halliwell

Editorial

It’s that conference time of year again and this issue of ASIB contains details of conference registration, with a tear-out registration form at the back of the newsletter, along with a provisional programme. Manchester seems to have attracted a large number of papers and the programme looks as though it showcases the full multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of American Studies. Postgraduate students should note first of all the subsidy that has been arranged for them again this year, but also that there is limited availability. So apply early. This substantially reduces the cost and £150 for the full conference with all meals provided in the heart of one of Britain’s biggest cities represents excellent value.

A couple of conference-related matters. First of all, the BAAS website (http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site) will this year carry copies of paper outlines and these should be online by the time you receive this newsletter. I know this facility was promised in the corresponding ASIB last year but never materialised. Apologies for that. But the outlines have all been formatted and put into a database and now it’s just a case of setting up links. If you are giving a paper at Manchester and your outline does not appear on the website then please send the outline in the first instance to Sue Currell at sue.currell@virgin.net. If your outline is incorrect in any way or you want it amended then, again, please send any changes onto Sue.

Second, as you may be aware, it is now the responsibility of paper-giver to send in a report on their paper to the editor of ASIB in order that it can appear in the autumn issue. The number of people who sent in reports last year was quite low, but by not sending in your report you may be missing out on a chance to advertise your expertise in a particular area. Now that ASIB appears in electronic format, search engines will index it and throw up hits given the appropriate search criteria. So please send in your reports after the conference. Last year there was a facility on the BAAS website to allow this. In addition to the traditional methods of email and snail mail, this facility will be available again this year.

Graham Thompson
School of American & Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham NG7 2RD
E-mail: graham.thompson@nottingham.ac.uk

Manchester Conference, April 15-18, 2004

BAAS AGM

Agenda:

1. Elections: Chair, 3 committee members, postgraduate member, any other offices that fall vacant before the AGM
2. Treasurer’s report
3. Chair’s report
4. Amendments to the Constitution
5. Report of the Conference Sub-Committee, and Annual Conferences 2005-2007
6. Report of the Publications Sub-Committee
7. Report of the Development Sub-Committee
8. Report of the Libraries and Resources Sub-Committee
9. Report of the Representative to EAAS
10. Any other business

The AGM will be asked to consider an increase in membership rates to include subscription to the association’s journal, the Journal of American Studies. This is in order to bring us into line with other professional associations. The Treasurer will outline the membership benefits of such a proposal.

At the 2004 AGM, elections will be held for three positions on the Committee (three year terms), for the Chair of the Association (three year term), and for the postgraduate member (two year term, non-renewal) and for any offices that fall vacant before the AGM. Current incumbents of these positions (except the postgraduate member) may stand for re-election if not disbarred by the Constitution’s limits on length of continuous service in Committee posts.

The procedure for nominations is as follows: Nominations should reach the Secretary, Heidi Macpherson, by 12.00 noon on Saturday 17 April. Nominations should be in 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. A ready-made form can be found at the back of this newsletter. 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 they can be posted and available for the membership to read before the AGM.

Dr. Heidi Macpherson
BAAS Secretary
Department of Humanities
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
United Kingdom
Tel. (01772) 893039
hrsmacpherson@uclan.ac.uk

Costs and Registration

Fees: The standard conference fee includes registration, hotel accommodation and all meals including the Gala Dinner at the Town Hall on Friday evening. There is a reduced rate for shared hotel rooms. The fee for postgraduates is offered at a subsidised rate. The daily delegate rate excludes accommodation.

£ 230 BAAS Postgraduate Standard Conference Fee*
£ 330 Standard Conference Fee (BAAS members)
£ 350 Standard Conference Fee (non-BAAS members)

£ 150 BAAS Postgraduate Standard Conference Fee (shared accommodation)*
£ 250 Standard Conference Fee (BAAS members, shared accommodation)
£ 270 Standard Conference Fee (non-BAAS members, shared accommodation)

£ 50 Postgraduate Daily Delegate Fee*
£ 150 Daily Delegate Fee (BAAS members)
£ 170 Daily Delegate Fee (non-BAAS members)

£ 20 Late Fee (for payment made after 23rd January)

* Postgraduate rates are discounted by £100 (limited availability)

A registration and booking form is available at the conference website:
http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/administration/baasconf.asp

You can also find a copy at the back of this newsletter.

Any queries about the conference can be addressed to:

Dr Sarah MacLachlan
BAAS Conference Secretary
Department of English
Manchester Metropolitan University
Geoffrey Manton Building
Rosamond Street West
Manchester M15 6LL

Tel: +44 (0)161 247 1755
Fax: +44 (0)161 247 6345
E-Mail: s.maclachlan@mmu.ac.uk

Provisional Programme

British Association for American Studies Annual Conference, 2004

Manchester Metropolitan University, 15-18 April

THURSDAY, 15 APRIL

2.00-4.00 Arrival and key collection – Travel Inn Hotel

2.30-4.30 Registration – Reception, Geoffrey Manton Building, Manchester Metropolitan University (conference venue)

3.00-4.00 Walking Tour of Manchester
Terry Wyke (Manchester Metropolitan University)

4.45-5.00 WELCOME ADDRESS
Prof. Philip Davies, BAAS Chair

5.00-6.00 KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Prof. Bharati Mukherjee (University of California, Berkeley) – title tbc
(Sponsored by the English Department, MMU)

6.00-7.00 RECEPTION (Atrium)

7.00-LATE DINNER – Royal Naz Indian Restaurant, Rusholme

FRIDAY, 16 APRIL

7.00-8.45 BREAKFAST (Travel Inn)

9.00-11.00 PANEL SESSION 1

A. Negotiating Racial and Regional Boundaries
Christopher McKinlay (University of Dundee) – Who Were the Free Blacks? Freedom, Race, Power and Influence in Virginia
Gary Smith (University of Dundee) – Democracy For All? Kentucky Frontiersmen and the Issue of Black Slavery
John Howard (King’s College, University of London) – South by West: Sectional Alliances and National Belonging in Early Twentieth Century America
Henrice Altink (University of Glamorgan) – Solution or Source of the Problem?: Attitudes Towards Interracial Marriage in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries
Chair: tba

B. Looking Back: Americans in Europe
Finn Pollard (University of Edinburgh) – Travelling Between Two Worlds: Washington Irving and the Search for Homeland
Hywel Dix (University of Glamorgan) – Mark Twain: the Selective Tradition
Shirley Foster (University of Sheffield) – The Crowd as Other: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James on the British Populace
Bent Sorensen (Aalborg University, Denmark) – Images of Europe in Generational Novels
Chair: Theresa Saxon (Manchester Metropolitan University)

C. Contested Places and Spatial Transformations
Duncan White (Kingston University) – Placelessness: A New System of Space in the Work of Ben Marcus and Mathew Barney
Gregory Bush (University of Miami) – Parks and Urban Identity: Civic Activism in Miami, 1996-2001
Nissie Ellison (University of Oregon) – Putting the Woman’s Building in its Stylistic Place
Kate Holden (University of Huddersfield) – Domestic Redemption: the Significance of Home in Contemporary North American Fiction
Chair: tba

D. US Foreign Policy Since 1940
Mark Ledwidge (University of Manchester) – The African-American Foreign Affairs Community and the Formation of the UNO
Alex Thomson (University of Coventry) – Dealing with Apartheid: US Foreign Policy Towards South Africa, 1948-1994
Thomas C. Wales (University of Edinburgh) – No ‘Innocents Abroad’: The American Intelligence Network in North Africa, May 1941-November 1942
David W. McBride (University of Nottingham) – A Policy for Palestine? Examining American Interests Behind Truman’s Palestinian Policy
Chair: Dr Ian Scott (University of Manchester)

E. New York Stories
Louis J. Kern (Hofstra University) – ‘Seeing the Elephant’: Mortimer Neal Thomson and the Origins of Colloquial Humor in America
Christoph Lindner (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) – Silhouettes of New York: Reflections on the Modern Skyline
John Fagg (University of Nottingham) – ‘Framing Out’ and ‘Framing Off’ in the Work of Stephen Crane and George Bellows
Mark Brown (Keele University) – ‘Dis-alienating’ Paul Auster’s New York: Re-reading The New York Trilogy
Chair: tba

F. Speaking the Unspeakable: Cultural Trauma in America
Bridget Bennett (University of Leeds) – There is no Death: Abraham Lincoln and the Spiritualist Politics of Memory
Paul Burgess (University of Glasgow) – Censoring History: An Investigation of the Air and Space Museum’s Exhibition of the Enola Gay
Lincoln Geraghty (University of Nottingham) – A Network of Support: Coping with Trauma through the Star Trek Community
Simon Newman (University of Glasgow) – ‘It Don’t Mean Nothing’: Explaining the Inexplicable in Vietnam War Films and Fiction
Chair: Rick Crownshaw (Manchester Metropolitan University)

G. The Anxiety of Influence: Contemporary Poetry and the American Canon
Will Montgommery (Queen Mary College, University of London) – The ‘shock of poetry telepathy’ and Susan Howe’s Melville’s Marginalia
Rob Stanton (University of Leeds) – ‘By homely gifts and hindered words’: Reading Susan Howe Reading Emily Dickinson
Catherine Martin (University of Sussex) – How the Dead Prey Upon Us: Susan Howe and Robert Duncan
Sally Connolly (University College London) – The Offspring of Pound’s Pact: Contemporary Poetic Approaches to the Figure of Walt Whitman
Chair: Philip McGowan (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

H. New Perspectives on African American Women’s Writing
Jennifer Terry (University of Warwick) – Class, Race and Vacationing in the Fiction of Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall and Barbara Neely
Tessa Roynon (University of Warwick) – ‘Aesop Live’: Toni Morrison’s Engagement with the Classical Tradition
Owen Robinson (University of Essex) – ‘Unembellished Stories Told and Retold’: Narratives of History in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
Keren Omry (Goldsmiths College, University of London) – Paradise and Parataxis: Adorno and Free Jazz in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
Chair: Rachel van Duyvenbode (Sheffield)

11.00-11.30 TEA / COFFEE (Atrium)

11.30–1.00 PANEL SESSION 2

A. Warwork: Soldiering, Labour, and the Anglo-American Transition to Capitalism, 1759-1865
Peter J. Way (Bowling Green State University) – Class Warfare, Common Soldiers: The Army and the Making of Empire in the Seven Years’ War
Lawrence T. McDonnell (Independent Scholar) – Bloody Work: Toward and Beyond a Labour History of the American Civil War
Marc Egnal (York University, Toronto) – John Sherman: Leader of the Second American Revolution
Commentator: Christopher Clark (University of Warwick)
Chair: John S. Ashworth (University of Nottingham)

B. Grammars of Science: Henry Adams, Henry James and Neal Stephenson
Sam Halliday (Queen Mary’s College, University of London) – Electro-Historicism: Henry Adams, Nietzsche and the Laws of Thermodynamics
Peter Rawlings (University of the West of England) – Glossing over Chaotic Intervals in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew
Ben Williamson (University of the West of England, Bristol) – The Multiform Complexity of Things: Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon
Chair: tba

C. The Spectacle of the Black Body
Stephen C. Kenny (Liverpool John Moores University) – ‘A Few Days’ Rest Between Each Trial’: The Relationship Between the Slave Body and the Development of
Professional Medicine in the Old South
Angela W. Thibodeaux (University of California, Santa Cruz) – In Search of the Black Victorian: Black Women and the Transnational Phenomenon of Skin Bleaching
Kate Dossett (University of Leeds) – ‘Joy Goddess of the 1920s’: A’Lelia Walker and Marketing the New Negro Woman
Chair: Mark Whalan (University of Exeter)

D. War in Words: American Writers, American Conflicts
Liz Nolan (Manchester Metropolitan University) – ‘Writing a War Story’: Edith Wharton and World War I
Margaret Smith (Manchester Metropolitan University) – ‘Goodbye Americana, Hello American Real Time’: American Berserk in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
Theresa Saxon (Manchester Metropolitan University) – The ‘Mechanical Reverberations’ of Rhetoric: Henry James’s ‘The Beast in the Jungle’
Chair: Janet Beer (Manchester Metropolitan University)

E. Photography and Narrative Form
Natalie A. Dykstra (Hope College) – Entanglements: Narrative Uncertainty and the Portrait Photographs of Marian ‘Clover’ Adams
Elizabeth Linda Quinlan – Ethical Documentary or Aesthetic Experiment?: Walker Evans and the Famous Men photographs
Caroline Blinder (Goldsmith’s College, University of London) – American Alphabet: Paul Strand and Nancy Newhall’s Time in New England (1950)

F. Civil Rights in the 1960s
Clair Wardle (University of Pennsylvania) – ‘A Moral Issue’: President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Address, June 11 1963
Tom Kuipers (Roosevelt Study Center) – Commentary, Civil Rights and the Development of Neoconservatism
Dave Deverick (University of Nottingham) – Lyndon Johnson and the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Chair: tba

G. American Masculinities: Boxers, Cowboys and Cheats
Julie Sheridan (Trinity College, Dublin) – ‘A Good Clean Fight’: Masculinity and Hierarchy in Selected Works by Joyce Carol Oates
Luigi Fidanza (Manchester Metropolitan University) – Implications of Performativity in Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain and its Screenplay
Jamal Assadi (The College of Sakhnin for Teacher Education) – What Do Men Do When Their Wives Are Away?: Exorcists, Spirits and Actors in Saul Bellow’s The Victim
Chair: Lee Grievson (King’s College, University of London)

H. Musical Roots and Routes: Global Flows and the Territorial Imperative
Gillian A. M. Mitchell (University of Toronto) – The Regionalist Vision, National Identity and the Folk Music Revival Movement in the United States and Canada, 1958-1966
Simon Philo (University of Derby) – A Small Axe: Reggae’s Negotiations with America, 1962-76
Alex Seago (The American International University in London) – The Kraftwerk-Effekt: Towards an Analysis of the Deterritorialization of Pop Music in the 21st Century
Chair: Nicholas Gebhardt (University of Lancaster)

I. Mexican Migrant Workers and Film: Restoring Alambrista
Participants: David Carrasco (Harvard University), Albert Camarillo (Stanford University), José Cuellar (San Francisco State University), Daniel Grody (Notre Dame University) – titles tbc
Chair: Nick Cull (University of Leicester)
* A screening of Alambrista will be arranged.

1.00-2.00 LUNCH (Green Room)

2.00-3.30 PANEL SESSION 3

A. Religious and Racial Diversity in Early America
James Fog (University of Edinburgh) – From the Santee to the St. Lawrence: The Contrasting Missions of Charles Woodmason and Simon LeMoyne
Richard Middleton (Queen’s University, Belfast) – Chief Pontiac: Rebel Conspirator or Ottawa Freedom Fighter?
Vassiliki Karali (University of Edinburgh) – Anglicanism and the Formation of Loyalist and Patriot Groups at the Time of the American Revolution: A Focus on Virginia and New York, 1763-1776
Chair: tba

B. Sex and the South
Susan Castillo (Glasgow University) – Darker Hauntings: ‘Miscegenation’ and George Washington Cable’s Southern Gothic
Helen Taylor (University of Exeter) – Spectacular Secrets: Storyville in Focus
Artemis Michailidou (University of Athens) – Patriarchy and Incest in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo
Chair: Richard King (University of Nottingham)

C. Literatures of Consumption
Anne Gillingham (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) – Sister Carrie: The Poetics of Materialism
James Annesley (Kingston University) – Anis del Toro: Branding, Consumption and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction
Gary Blohm (University of Exeter) – Suppressed Subjectivities: The Politics of the Banal in Raymond Carver
Chair: Barry Atkins (Manchester Metropolitan University)

D. Constructing the Post-World War II Landscape: Urban and Suburban Views
Eric J. Sandeen (University of Wyoming) – City Surveillance: Aerial Photography and Urban Renewal in New York City in the 1960s
Paul Edwards (University of Nottingham) – Learning From the Mall: The Regional Shopping Center and American Post-War Urban Renewal
Nick Yablon (University of Iowa) – Architecture of Anxiety: Constructing the Fallout Shelter in 1960s America
Chair: Liam Kennedy (University of Birmingham)

E. Hybrid Interventions: Narrating the Border
Elizabeth Jacobs (The Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford) – Chicano/a Mixed Race Discourse and the Formation of Interracial Politics
Rebecca Tillett (University of Essex) – Mapping the ‘Space Between’: Borders and Border Crossings in George Rabasa’s The Floating Kingdom and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead
Helen Dennis (University of Warwick) – Representing History: Interpretations of the Past in Native American Literature
Chair: Helena Grice (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)

F. The US and Vietnam
Sandra Scanlon (University of Cambridge) – The Conservative Movement and Nixon’s ‘Peace with Honor’ in Vietnam
David Milne (University of Cambridge) – Walt Rostow and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1961-1968
Richard Lock-Pullan (Joint Services Command and Staff College) – The Wrong Army: The US Army, Vietnam and the Cold War
Chair: tba

G. Philip Roth: Transatlantic Connections
David Brauner (University of Reading) – Hyperbole, Humiliation, Ignominy and Indignation: Surreal Comedy in ‘Middle’ Philip Roth
David Greenham (Nottingham Trent University) – Philip Roth and Romantic Irony
Catherine Morley (Oxford Brookes University) – In the Shadow of the Renaissance: Anxious Influences in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral Trilogy
Chair: Graham Thompson (University of Nottingham)

H. American Studies Online Resources Workshop
Sue Currell and Beccie Seaman (Elizabeth City State University) – Is E any Good?: A Tour of the Virtual Learning Environment

3.30-4.00 TEA / COFFEE (Atrium)

4.00-5.30 PANEL SESSION 4

A. Prisons and Prisoners in the American South
Michael J. Pfeifer (The Evergreen State College) – A Lethal Transition: Regulator Movements, Law, and Extralegal Punishment in the Antebellum United States
Vivien Miller (Middlesex University) – Of Mules, Men, and Upright Coffins: Convict Life and Labour on the Southern Chain Gang
Zoe A. Colley (University of St. Andrews) – Another Look at the Imprisonment of Civil Rights Workers in South: Race, Class, and Gender
Chair: tba

B. Women Writing in the Shadow of War
Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes University) – Desire, War and Letters in Gertrude Stein’s Lifting Belly
Sarah Graham (University of Leicester) – Falling Walls: H.D.’s Traumatised Poetic
Sarah Robertson (University of the West of England) – ‘The Voice That Doesn’t Talk’: Narrative Silence and Male Inheritance in Jayne Anne Phillips’ Machine Dreams
Chair: Liz Nolan (Manchester Metropolitan University)

C. Civil Rights in the Early Twentieth Century
Simon Topping (University of Wales, Bangor) – Wendell Wilkie: Republican Anathema
K.J. Verney (Edge Hill College) – Growing Pains: The Struggle for Racial and Grassroots Democracy within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1909-1940
Lee Sartain (Edge Hill College) – ‘We are but Americans’: Georgia M. Johnson and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Alexandria, Louisiana, 1941-1946
Chair: tba

D. Race, Resistance and the Transnational
Alan Rice (University of Central Lancashire) – From the Lincoln Memorial to Lubaina Himid’s Cotton.com: Manchester in the Black Atlantic Imaginary
James Miller (King’s College London) – Black Redemption: The Construction of Ethnicity in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time
Martyn Bone (University of Copenhagen) – It’s Not Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re At: The Transnational South in Patrick Neate’s Twelve Bar Blues
Chair: Maria Lauret (University of Sussex)

E. Transcendence, Technology and Death
Andrew Cutting (London Metropolitan University) – How to Make an Afterlife: Edgar Cayce, L. Ron Hubbard, Dick Sutphen and the Production of Past Lives
Megan Stern (London Metropolitan University) – Riding the Bomb: Astronauts, Death and Rocketry in Cold War America
Polina Mackay (Birkbeck College, University of London) – American Experimental Literature, Technology and Death
Chair: tba

F. The Cultural Economy of Popular Music
Nicholas Gebhardt (University of Lancaster) – Studio Time = Money
Holly Farrington (Middlesex University) – ‘[D]elivered of your burden’: Gospel and the Re-Nationalisation of American Popular Music
Sean Albiez (University of Plymouth) – Early Detroit Techno & Post-Soul Cultural Politics 1980-87
Chair: Eithne Quinn (University of Manchester)

G. Men’s Magazines: Sexuality and National Identity
Karen McNally (University of Nottingham) – Your Pal Joey: Frank Sinatra’s Alternative Playboy
Rahul Krishna Gairola (Pembroke College, Cambridge/University of Washington,
Seattle) – The Hybrid Homos of Adonis and Powhatan: American National Identity and Parody in Sixties Gay Images from Physique Pictoral
Milena Katsarska (Plovdiv University, Bulgaria) – Playboys Old and Young: ‘American’ Signs and Symptoms in Playboy’s Bulgarian Edition
Chair: Paul Grainge (University of Nottingham)

JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES LECTURE
Prof. Philip Morgan (Johns Hopkins University): ‘To get quit of Negroes’: George Washington and Slavery (Sponsored by Cambridge University Press)

7.30-8.15 RECEPTION (Manchester Town Hall)

8.15-LATE DINNER/AFTER-DINNER BAR (Manchester Town Hall)
After Dinner Speaker: Terry Wyke (Manchester Metropolitan University) – Searching for Manchester

SATURDAY, 17 APRIL

7.00-8.45 BREAKFAST (Travel Inn)

9.00-10.30 PANEL SESSION 1

A. Race, Class, and Gender in the Antebellum South
Michele Gillespie (Wake Forest University) – Violence, Work Culture, and Coming of Age in the Early National South: White Apprentices as Citizens-in-the-Making
Tim Lockley (University of Warwick) – Competing for the Poor: Benevolent Women in Antebellum Mobile
David Brown (University College, Northampton) – Uncovering the Informal Economy: Race Relations from the Bottom Up in the Antebellum South
Chair: Martin Crawford (University of Keele)

B. Abolitionism Abroad
Keith Hughes (University of Edinburgh) – Frederick Douglass and the Scottish Press
Daniel Williams (University of Wales, Swansea) – Frederick Douglass and Welsh Abolitionism
Whitney A. Womack (Miami University of Ohio) – ‘The Voice of Living Scotland’: Representations of Scotland in Stowe’s Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands and Margaret Fuller’s At Home and Abroad
Chair: Alan Rice (University of Central Lancashire)

C. America as Liberation, America as Containment
Lisa Merrill (Hofstra University) – Performing Civil War Sympathies
Mary Anne Trasciatti (Hofstra) – Unlikely American Icons of the 1920s: Sacco, Vanzetti and Valentino
Jude Davies (King Alfred’s College, Winchester) – Stupid White Men: Politics, Education and Ethnic Difference in Three Kings and Bowling For Columbine
Chair: Anne-Marie Evans (University of Sheffield)

D. Hollywood, Propaganda, Populism and Post-War Ambivalence
Ian Scott (University of Manchester) – From Toscanini to Tennessee: Robert Riskin, the OWI and the Construction of American Propaganda in World War Two
Nevena Dakovic (University of Arts, Belgrade) – American Political Soap: Popularising the Populism
Mike Chopra-Gant (London Metropolitan University) – American Ambivalence and the Postwar Small-Town Movie
Chair: Andrew Pepper (University of Belfast)

E. Sporting Nation
Colin Howley (University of Sheffield) – Writing Hoop Dreams: Basketball and the Quest for the American Dream
Gabe Logan (Northern Illinois University) – Soccer St. Louis: A Sport Exceptionalism
Ross Dawson (Liverpool John Moores University) – Dallas Does America: The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders as Mass Ornament
Chair: Duco van Oostrum (University of Sheffield)

F. The Bush Administration: A Pre-emptive Assessment
Niels Bjerre-Poulsen (Copenhagen Business School) – The Imperial Presidency Revisited?
Carl Pedersen (University of Copenhagen) – Bush and the War to Remake the World: The Tragedy of American Empire
Edward Ashbee (Copenhagen Business School) – The Bush Administration, Religious Faith and Cultural Politics
Chair: Steven Hurst (Manchester Metropolitan University)

G. American Icons
Tim Nelson (University of Hull) – ‘Even an Android Can Cry’: Superheroes, Body-Building and Some Ideas of Masculinity in America
James Mackay- Green Hornet vs. Goethe: The Influence of Pulp Narrative on Jack Kerouac’s Doctor Sax
Tanya Horeck (Anglia Polytechnic University) – American Icon: Representing Marilyn in Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde
Chair: Howard Cunnell (Institute of United States Studies, University of London)

H. Cultural Responses to 9/11
Brian Jarvis (Loughborough University) – Art. After. 9.11
Paul Grainge (University of Nottingham) – A Taste for Black and White: Visual Culture and the Anxieties of the Global
Alex Houen (University of Sheffield) – Novel Spaces and Taking Place(s) in the Wake of September 11
Adriana Neagu (University of East Anglia) – Cultural Studies and Academic Practice after September 11
Chair: Liz Rosen (University College London)

10.30-11.00 TEA / COFFEE (Atrium)

11.00-12.30 PANEL SESSION 2

A. Nineteenth Century American Women’s Writing and Death – Roundtable Discussion
Participants: Alison Easton (Lancaster University), Dick Ellis (Nottingham Trent University), Janet Floyd (King’s College London), Anne-Marie Ford (St Albans Girls’ School)

B. Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
Richard H. King (University of Nottingham) – Explaining American Thought: Menand’s The Metaphysical Club
Peter Kuryla (Vanderbilt University) – Whither ‘Twaddle’ and the ‘Heroic Mind’? Henry Adams and The Metaphysical Club
Paul Jenner (University of Nottingham) – Members Only: Santayana and The Metaphysical Club
Chair: tba

C. New Perspectives on African American Women’s Writing – Roundtable Discussion
Participants: Elizabeth Boyle (University of Sheffield), Mae Henderson (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Maria Lauret (University of Sussex), Duco van Oostrum (University of Sheffield)
Respondent: Rachel van Duyvenbode (University of Sheffield)

D. Public Space and Communal Ritual in the American South
Paul D. H. Quigley (University of North Carolina) – ‘The Glorious Day Surely Belongs to the South’: The Fourth of July in the Southern States, 1848-1865
Brock Thompson (King’s College, University of London) – Black Lace and Black Face: Womanless Weddings and Rural Drag Culture in Arkansas, 1930-1945
Simon Cuthbert-Kerr (University of Strathclyde) – ‘Back Here to the Same Old, Same Old’: The Impact of the Mule Train on the Black Community of Quitman County, Mississippi
Chair: tba

E. The Modern Supreme Court: The Death Penalty, Abortion Rights and Prayer
Elisabeth Boulot (University of Marne-la-Vallée) – The Impact of 30 Years of Supreme Court Jurisprudence on the Application of the Death Penalty in the United States Today
Mary C. Dagg (University of Kent) – Roe v Wade and the ‘Right to Abortion’: A National Myth
Emma Long (University of Kent) – The Supreme Court and School Prayer
Chair: William Merkel (University of Oxford)

F. American Gay Men’s Fiction Before AIDS: A Debate
Participants: Monica Pearl (University of Manchester), Anna Wilson (University of Birmingham)
Respondent: Gregory Woods (Nottingham Trent University)

G. George W. Bush and the World After September 11: A Roundtable Discussion
Participants: Adewale Lasisi, Oyedolapo Babatunde Durojaye, Abiola Hammed Odu, Alfred Toritseju Lawani, (Institute of African Studies, Ibadan)

H. American Landscapes and Photography
John Beck (University of Newcastle) – Dead Calm: The ‘Still’ Image as Aftershock
Neil Campbell (University of Derby) – Virtual Wests: Post-tourism and Postwestern Landscapes
Martin Padget (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) – Photographing the ‘Indian Country’ of the American Southwest: A Critical Travelogue
Chair: Luigi Fidanza (Manchester Metropolitan University)

I. Hollywood and Globalisation
Andrew Pepper (University of Belfast) – The New Face of Global Hollywood: Black Hawk Down and the Politics of Intervention
James Lyons (University of Exeter) – ‘Planet Starbucks’: Gourmet Coffee, Globalisation and the Selling of Seattle
Nathalie Dupont (L’Université du Littoral et de la Côte d’Opale) – The Marketing of American Films: A Global Strategy
Chair: James Annesley

LUNCH (Green Room)

1.30-2.30 PANEL SESSION 3

A. Soldiers and Citizens
Karen E. O’Brien (Northwestern University) – Idealizing America: Soldiers and Popular Citizenship in Revolutionary America
Brad Jones (University of Glasgow) – Friends of the Government: The Impact of the American Revolution on an Emerging Trans-Atlantic British Identity
Chair: tba

B. Progress, Women and Nature: Reinterpretations of Marginal Texts
Rowland Hughes (University College London) – ‘The Panther Captivity’: Shay’s Rebellion, and Early Republican Pamphlet Culture
Stephanie Palmer (De Montfort University/Leicester University) – Female Self-Development Versus the Railroad in Rebecca Harding Davis’ Earthen Pitchers
Chair: Whitney Womack (Miami University of Ohio)

C. 1930s Political Literature
Laura Rattray (University of Hull) – Editing the Thirties: The Lost Work of Josephine Johnson
Juan José Cruz (University of La Laguna, Tenerife) – Poles Without Faith: Anomie and Ethnic Re-affiliation in Nelson Algren’s Never Comes Morning
Chair: tba

D. Aspects of the American Left
Andrew Schroeder (University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh) – ‘Total Information Awareness’ as a Slogan for the Left: Towards an Open Source World
James G. Ryan (Texas A&M University) – The American Communist Party and the Need for Historiographical Synthesis
Chair: tba

E. Re-reading Chinese American Literature
Helena Grice (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) – ‘The beginning is hers’: The Political and Literary Legacy of Maxine Hong Kingston
Yan Ying (University of Nottingham) – Neo-Orientalism in Ha Jin’s Prize-Winning Works
Chair: tba

F. Negotiating Postmodern Spaces
Graham Thompson (University of Nottingham) – The Anxiety of Empire: Business and ‘America’ in United States Postmodern Fiction
Christina Dumbrava (‘Ovidius’ University of Constanta, Romania) – Subject Positions in Postmodern Counterspaces: A Case Study of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
Chair: tba

G. American Politics Since 2000
William Merkel (University of Oxford) – America’s Misplaced Opposition to the International Criminal Court
Christy Allen (University of Essex) – ‘The Second Amendment is Homeland Security’: American Identity and Gun Rights Activism post-September 11, 2001
Chair: tba

H. Literary Histories and the Shaping of National Identity
Michael Boyden (University of Leuven) – The ‘Founding Fathers’ of American Literary History
Andrew Green (University of Birmingham) – Postnational Studies and Mid-Nineteenth Century American Literature
Chair: tba

I. New American Cinemas
Sarah Gamble (University of Edinburgh) – Read my Lips: the Political Erotics of New Queer Cinema
Lynne Hibberd (University of Stirling) – Too Cool for School: Quentin Tarantino’s Impact on American Culture
Chair: tba

2.30-3.00 TEA/COFFEE (Atrium)

BAAS ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

5.00-6.00 PANEL SESSION 4

A. Antebellum Masculinities
Richard Godbeer (University of California, Riverside) – ‘The Overflowing of Friendship’: Male Love and Civic Virtue in the Early Republic
Thomas Ruys Smith (University of East Anglia) – ‘Extraordinary Metaphysical Scamps’: The Creation of the Mississippi Gambler

Chair: Anne-Marie Ford (St Albans Girls’ School)

B. Narrating the Nation: Strategies of Inclusion and Exclusion
Jarod H. Roll (Northwestern University) – The ‘Radical’ Roots of the Far Right: The Interracial and Socialist Origins of American Pentecostalism
Louis Mazzari (University of New Hampshire) – The Modern Realism of New Deal America

C. Women, Economics and Activism
S. J. Kleinberg (Brunel University) – Widows and Property in the United States
Rachel Cohen (Brunel University) – Identity and Memory: Jewish Women in America as Activists and Feminists 1960-1990
Chair: tba

D. Rethinking Beat Poetry
Nick Selby (University of Glasgow) – Lying Under the Poem’s Law: America, the Abject, and John Wieners’ The Hotel Wentley Poems
Jo Pawlik (University of Sussex) – The Sublime in Beat Writing: Its Relationship to the American Tradition and to Contemporary European Postmodernism
Chair: Catherine Martin (University of Sussex)

E. Music and Protest: The Sixites
David Ingram (Brunel University) – ‘Prelude to the Afternoon of a Sexually Aroused Gas Mask’: Frank Zappa’s Anti-Pastoral Satire
Seth Hague (Essex University) – ‘It’s not about the words, it’s about the spirit’: Music and the Stylisation of Activism in the American Civil Rights Movement
Chair: tba

F. Presidential Politics: Rhetoric and Elections
Ben Dettmar (University of Glasgow) – God Help Us!: The Use of Religious Rhetoric by American Presidents
Laurence Horton (University of Essex) – The Prairie Progressives: Iowa Democratic Party Caucuses and Presidential Nominations 1972-2004
Chair: tba

G. Native American Narration
Annie Kirby (University of Wales, Swansea) – ‘Forgotten Contextual Meanings’ in Native American and Academic Storytelling: Victor Masayesva’s Hopiit and Itam Hakim Hopiit
Larry Russell (Hofstra University) – A Performance of Healing in Rituals of Pilgrimage
Chair: Martin Padget (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)

6.00-7.00 THE ECCLES CENTRE LECTURE
Prof. Richard Gray (University of Essex) – title tbc
(Sponsored by The Eccles Centre for American Studies)

7.30-8.15 RECEPTION (venue tba) – sponsored by Cambridge University, host of the BAAS Conference 2005

8.15-LATE DINNER / AFTER-DINNER BAR (Kro 2)

SUNDAY, 18 APRIL

7.00-8.45 BREAKFAST (Travel Inn)

9.00-11.00 PANEL SESSION 1

A. Land and Landscape
Jess Edwards (London Metropolitan University) – Cultural Geographies of Early Colonial America
William E. Van Vugt (Calvin College) – American Agriculture: The Contributions and Adjustments of British Farmers in Ohio, 1800-1900
Marina Moskowitz (University of Glasgow) – ‘After a Season of War’: Sharing Horticultural Success in the Reconstruction-Era Landscape
Mariko Ijima (University of Oxford) – In Quest of Paradise: The Achievements of Japanese Coffee Farmers in Kona, Hawaii
Chair: tba

B. Seen and Not Heard: Growing Up in America
James Campbell (University of Nottingham) – Responses to Juvenile Crime in the Urban Antebellum South
Jenny Bavidge (University of Greenwich) – ‘I am a city child’: Images of the New York Child
Rachel McLennan (University of Glasgow) – Voices in the Cosmos: Self and World in Narratives of Female Adolescence
Joanne Hall (University of Nottingham) – The Wanderer Contained: Issues of ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’ in Relation to Harold Grey’s Depiction of Little Orphan Annie
Chair: Daniela Caselli (University of Salford)

C. Race, Representation and Silence: Strategies of Inclusion and Exclusion
Stephanie Munro (Lancaster University) – The Strange and the Familiar: Lydia Maria Child’s ‘The Quadroons’ and ‘Slavery’s Pleasant Homes’
Cynthia Whitney Hallett (Bennett College, NC) – Mules and Magnolias
Mark Whalan (University of Exeter) – ‘How’d they pick John Doe’: Race, James Weldon Johnson and the Memorialisation of the Great War
Kimberly Springer (King’s College, University of London) – Censoring Black Female Sexual Agency in the Hyper-Capitalist Age
Chair: tba

D. Early Twentieth Century African American Activism: Image, Performance and Health
Catherine O’Hara (University of Ulster) – Reading Harlem Images: Graphic Design and the Harlem Renaissance
Andrew Fearnly (University of Cambridge) – Culture and Controversy in the Communities of Cleveland
John F. Moe (Ohio State University) – ‘Free at Last, Free at Last’: Personal Narratives and Artistic Reflections of the Black Migration to the Urban North
James E. Reibman (Lafayette College) – Health Care in Harlem: the Great War to the Lafargue Clinic
Chair: tba

E. Poetry and Subjectivity I
Michael Hinds (Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University) – Randall Jarrell and Intersubjectivity: ‘My Randall Jarrell’
Stephen Matterson (Trinity College, University of Dublin) – Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems as a Form of Autobiography
Joseph Kennedy (University of Sussex) – Our Man in the Open Air: Reading Robert Lowell’s ‘F.O. Matthiessen 1902-1950’
Christina Makris (University of Sussex) – ‘The Energy of Meaning’: The Interface of Scientific Discourse, Experimental Poetry and Art in the Work of Madeline Gins
Chair: Nerys Williams (University College, Dublin)

F. Defining Politics in Bush’s America
Esther Jubb (Liverpool John Moores University) – One Dimensional Patriotism: Patriotism and Dissent in Post-9/11 America
Robert Busby (Liverpool Hope University College) – Patriotism Policies and the People: George W. Bush and Public Opinion
Andy Wroe (University of Kent) – The Workplace and Trust in Government
Alex Waddan (University of Sunderland) – Politics and Social Policy in Bush’s America
Chair: John Dumbrell (University of Leicester)

G. Don DeLillo: Narrativity, Subjectivity and Catastrophe
Kiki Benzon (University College London) – Narrative Geometry in Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis
Benjamin Bird (Leeds University) – From Third to First-Person Consciousness: The American Ascetic in Don DeLillo’s Americana
Sarah Heaton (University of Central Lancashire) – Terrorising Space: The Post-Terrorist Landscape, the Twin Towers, Television, and the Everyday in Don Delillo’s Fiction
Elizabeth Rosen (University College London) – Lenny Bruce: Don DeLillo’s Apocalyptist Extraordinaire
Chair: James Annesley (Kingston University)

11.00-11.30 TEA / COFFEE

PLENARY SESSIONS

Prof. Peter Nicholls (University of Sussex) – Wars I Have Seen: Problems for Twentieth Century American Poetry

Prof. Tony Badger (University of Cambridge) – Southern Liberals Confront the World: LBJ and Albert Gore

12.30-1.30 LUNCH

1.30-2.30 PANEL SESSION 2

A. Native Sons: Race, Violence and Social Change
Andrew Read (Queen Mary, University of London) – Black Violence, White Mask: Reconsidering Racial Indeterminacy in Faulkner’s Light in August
Steven Troy Moore (Abilene Christian University, Texas) – Rage and Symbolism in Richard Wright’s Native Son
Fred Arthur Bailey (Abilene Christian University, Texas) – C. Vann Woodward and the Transformation of Southern Historiography
Chair: tba

B. Exploring the Limits of Genre
Gary Williams (University of Idaho) – Julia Ward Howe’s Hermaphrodite Novel: Conceptualising Gender Ambiguity in Mid-Nineteenth Century America
Tim Lustig (Keele University) – Sun Spots and Death’s Heads: Irony and Realism in Henry James’s The Europeans
Emily Barker (University of Essex) – ‘Communicating Modernity’: Different Stylistics of Voice and Place in the Detective Fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett
Chair: tba

C. American Popular Music in the 1930s and 1940s: Morale, Ideology and Success
Martyn Beeny (University of Kent) – The Dance Bands of the American Forces During World War II: Music for Morale, Music for Mayhem
David Butler (University of Manchester) – Can Anybody Swing Here?: Performing Jazz for Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s
Tim H. Blessing (Alvernia College, Pennsylvania) – Glenn Miller at 100: A Reassessment of His Impact on Popular Music
Chair: tba

D. Americanism and Anti-Americanism in the Post-War Era
Dominic Sandbrook (University of Sheffield) – From ‘Americanisation’ to the British Invasion, 1954-1966
Joe Street (University of Sheffield) – Malcolm X, the West Midlands, and the Black Atlantic in the 1960s
Simon Hall (University of Leeds) – Organising Experience, Anti-Americanism, and 1960s Radicalism
Chair: Adam Smith (University College, London)

E. Discipline and Punish: Masculinity and Criminality in America
Howard Cunnell (Institute of United States Studies, University of London) – Breaking the Code: Compulsive Masculinity and the Convict Ethic in Edward Bunker’s Dog Eat Dog
Lee Grievson (King’s College, University of London) – Underworlds and Reformations: Gangsters and Governance in the Silent Era
Terrie Schauer (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver) – Punks and Cowboys: American Popular Filmic Discourses of Punishment
Chair: Luigi Fidanza (Manchester Metropolitan University)

F. Abstract Expressionism in America
Sara Wood (University of Birmingham) – On Norman Lewis (title tbc)
Lisa Rull (University of Nottingham) – Expatriate Visions of Americans in Europe: Painters, Collectors, Writers, and Myths of Modernism in Film
David Howard (NSCAD) – Modernism’s Last Post: The Critical Demise of Clement Greenberg’s ‘Post Painterly Abstraction’ Exhibition in Los Angeles
Chair: tba

G. Poetry and Subjectivity II
Nerys Williams (University College, Dublin) – ‘Why can’t I write a book called Fraud?’: Reading Norma Cole’s Contrafact
Philip McGowan (Goldsmiths College) – Sectioning Sexton
Brendan Cooper (University of Cambridge) – John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Theodicy and the Book of Job
Chair: Stephen Matterson (Trinity College, University of Dublin)

H. The Presidency of George W. Bush: American Government in a Time of War
John Dumbrell (University of Leicester) – The Bush Doctrine
Michael Cox (London School of Economics) – title tbc
Steve Hurst (Manchester Metropolitan University) – The Intellectual Roots of George W. Bush’s Foreign Policy
Chair: Andy Wroe (University of Kent)

I. The Subversive Gaze: Race, Gender and Film Genre
Martin Shingler (Staffordshire University) – Epitomising Hollywood Melodrama: Now Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942)
Celeste-Marie Bernier (University of Nottingham) – ‘Sometimes it is those outside our world who can best understand us’: Sympathy and Race in Todd Haynes’s Far From Heaven (2002).
Chloe Toone (University of York) – Blonde and Brunette: Non-White Identification with American Film Culture of the First Half of the Twentieth Century
Chair: Eithne Quinn (University of Manchester)

Minutes of the 2003 AGM

British Association for American Studies: Annual General Meeting 2003

The 2003 AGM of BAAS was held on Sunday 13 April 2003 at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth at 4pm.

Elections:
Treasurer: Nick Selby (to 2006)
Committee: Janet Beer (to 2006), Ian Scott (to 2006), Tim Woods (to 2006)

The Treasurer circulated a draft of the audited accounts, which was approved. There was limited discussion regarding the old Leeds Building Society Account. NS reported that he is still attempting to trace the account. PD reported that BAAS has rationalized accounts significantly over the last several years. NS asked members with information on the account to contact him directly. Steve Mills asked NS to contact members who hadn’t returned giftaid forms.

The Chair provided a comprehensive report of the year’s activities for American Studies as a discipline. The report included mention of:
1. Media enquiries on American Studies topics, ranging from the BBC to The Malay Straits Times, as well as coverage of American Studies in the THES (including ‘Don’s Diary’)
2. American Studies under threat at Keele and BAAS’s vigorous response
3. The passing of key American Studies colleagues, including three former chairs: Frank Thistlethwaite, Dennis Welland, and Peter Parish. The chair was also sad to report the deaths of Alan Conway and Duncan MacLeod.
4. Consultation with professional and academic bodies, including the Commission on the Social Sciences, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Higher Education Funding Council, the British Academy, the Economic and Social Science Research Council, the QAA, and the Standing Conference on Arts and Social Science
5. The launch of the Area Studies Network
6. Several conferences and projects, including the AMATAS project, the EAAS conference in 2002, the BAAS postgraduate conference at Sheffield.
7. The short term award and other prizes, to be announced at the Conference Dinner1
8. Promotions, appointments, and other successes for BAAS members2
9. The success of journals related to American Studies, particularly the Journal of American Studies, and American Studies On Line, with newly or soon to be launched journals such as Comparative American Studies, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, and Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Europe, Africa and the Americas.
10. Thanks to the members of BAAS who volunteer their time, particularly on the BAAS Committee. Special thanks were extended to the Treasurer, Secretary, and subcommittee chairs, as well as Janet Beer, Mike McDonnell, Celeste-Marie Bernier, and Nick Selby whose current terms of office were completed (JB and NS were subsequently re-elected to their positions).
11. A welcome to the Transatlantic Studies Association who joined BAAS in Aberystwyth.
12. Thanks to the US Embassy for support of postgraduate attendance, STAs and other proposals.
13. Final thanks to the organizers of the conference, including the conference subcommittee chair, Mike McDonnell, the conference convenor, Tim Woods, his colleagues on the faculty at Aberystwyth, and Moira Shearer and the Aberystwyth conference office

The Secretary announced that the Committee wished the membership to consider whether we should bring forward a formal amendment to the Constitution to restrict BAAS prizes (including STAs and Essay prizes) to BAAS members. The Secretary stressed that an amendment could not be proposed for this year, but only for the 2004 meeting, and that the Committee, having had long discussions about the issue, wished to gauge the full membership’s feelings on the matter. Arguments for and against the restriction were both expressed. Arguments for restrictions included ensuring that our members benefited from our generosity; arguments against included the fact that all research in American Studies strengthens the discipline, whether or not the researchers were formal members of the organization. A proposal to restrict the prizes was passed by a 2 to 1 majority. The Secretary will discuss an appropriate wording of the amendment with Charities Commission and will bring forward the formal amendment next year.

Conferences: Mike McDonnell thanked Tim Woods and Moira Shearer and the administrative staff at Aberystwyth for their efforts at organizing the 2003 conference, and he extended an invitation to members to give feedback on the conference, directed to the Secretary, Heidi Macpherson. Next year’s conference, organized by Sarah MacLachlan, will be held at Manchester Metropolitan University from 15 to 18 April. The following year, Cambridge will host the 50th anniversary conference. The Committee is currently looking for future bids for future conferences, with Nottingham a possibility for 2006. The Chair of the Conference subcommittee will circulate announcement inviting bids. MM closed by thanking the association for an enjoyable three years on the committee.

Publications: Janet Beer gave a summary of the past year’s activities within the publications subcommittee. The EUP BAAS paperback series, edited by Simon Newman and Carol Smith, with assistance from Nicola Carr at EUP, continues to produce good quality paperbacks. The editors are always keen to see new proposals. This year also saw a new editor of BRRAM, Ken Morgan. BRRAM has a higher profile on the website and a number of important projects underway. Members who are aware of good archives should contact Ken Morgan, Carolyn Masel, or Janet Beer with that information. The Journal of American Studies has a new cover, a new reviewers’ database, and two new members on the editorial board, Professor David Seed, and Professor Walter Hoelbling. The website has been redesigned, with many new links and resources, and is currently receiving up to 120 hits a day. ASIB, edited by Graham Thompson, continues to be a source of important information, and US Studies On Line has recently published a selection of papers from the last BAAS postgraduate conference. JB closed by offering thanks to Jay Kleinberg (editor of JAS), Ken Morgan, Simon Newman, Carol Smith, and Graham Thompson.

Development: Simon Newman reported on the year’s activities, noting the central place of the essay prize and the STA prizes, as well as introducing the new Ambassador’s prize. BAAS has sponsored several conferences, including a schools conference, several postgraduate conferences, and work of the Scottish Association, and welcomes proposals in support of conferences year round. As Chair of the subcommittee, SN responded to the HEFCE review of the RAE. Plans for the 50th anniversary celebration are continuing, and members are urged to contact Jenel Virden with ideas. SN offers thanks to Jude Davies for representing BAAS on the area studies network and LTSN.

Libraries and Resources: Ian Ralston, the new library and resources subcommittee meeting chair, began by thanking Iain Wallace, who has now retired, for his long service to committee. He extended thanks as well to Richard Bennet, Duncan Hayes and Kevin Halliwell. IR reported that the newspapers holdings database on the website (which is also available by link as American Resources Centre website) has been a popular resource for American Studies scholars. Looking to next year, he reported that plans exist for a new seminar workshop, directed at lecturers, postgraduates, and librarians. He is also keen to enhance membership of committee. PD reported that the library newsletter is free to members who request it; interested parties should contact Ian Ralston or Nick Selby.

EAAS: Jenel Virden made her first report as EAAS representative. She attended her first EAAS meeting Athens, from 20-23 March for meeting, at no cost to BAAS. Next year’s meeting will be held at the conference in Prague from 2-5 April. One issue for EAAS was the selling of mailing lists, which was a much debated topic. JV also reported that the conference proceedings from Graz is soon to be published. The next EAAS newsletter is in press and should be better than the former one which suffered from deadline problems. The latest newsletter will have the Prague workshops listed, and BAAS members can propose papers to those workshops. The EAAS website and logo are being redesigned. The 2005 meeting will be held in conjunction with the 50th anniversary celebrations at Cambridge; the 2006 venue is still uncertain. The Russian Association has been included in EAAS. As a final note, JV recorded that BAAS members have been successful in putting forward proposals for the Prague conference, with 3 stream lectures and 6 workshop proposals to be chaired or co-chaired by British scholars.

AOB:
1. Jude Davies reported on the AMATAS project for Alan Rice. The project has now finished. Outcomes included the delivery of 23 workshops, a booklet by Neil Campbell, and 2 conferences (one on 911 at Winchester May 2002, and one featuring George Ritzer, at UCLAN, in January2003). Copies of the final report of project are available.
2. Sue Wedlake reported that April 2005 is centenary of Senator Fulbright’s birth. The Embassy will be organizing some events, and hopes to link these events to BAAS’s 50th anniversary. Members are invited to contact Sue Wedlake with ideas.
3. BAAS records its thanks again to Tim Woods, Martin Padget, Mike Foley, and Helena Grice for their help in organizing the 2003 conference.

Notes

1. This year the Association awarded ten Short Term Awards. Joanne Hall of Nottingham University took the Marcus Cunliffe Award; Joy Cushman of Glasgow, received the newly established Peter Parish Award in History; the Malcolm Bradbury Award went to Jonathan Sanders of Cambridge; and Sandra Scanlon of Cambridge was the winner of the John Lees Award. Other Awards went to Lincoln Geraghty of Nottingham; Clodagh Harrington (London Metropolitan); Bradley Jones (Glasgow); Catherine Martin (Sussex); Catherine Morley (Oxford Brookes); and Sarah Silkey (UEA). Two postgraduate essay prizes were awarded: to John Fagg of Nottingham, and to Jennifer Terry of Warwick. And the winner of this year’s Arthur Miller Prize, donated by the Arthur Miller Centre at the University of East Anglia, is Robert Cook, of Sheffield University.

2. Other member successes in the past year include Professor Tony Badger, becoming Master of Clare College, Cambridge; Professor Janet Beer, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, and Pro-Vice Chancellor of Manchester Metropolitan University; Professor Douglas Tallack, Chair of the international Universitas 21 steering group; Richard Carwardine, Rhodes Professor of American History, Oxford; Desmond King, Mellon Professor of American Politics, Oxford; Simon Newman, Dennis Brogan Professor American Studies, Glasgow; Mark Jancovich, Professor of Film Studies, Nottingham; John Owens, Professor of American Politics, Westminster; Neil Wynn, Professor of American History, Gloucestershire; Jon Roper, Reader in American Studies, Swansea; Sharon Montieth, Reader in American Studies, Nottingham; Peter Ling, Reader in American Studies, Nottingham. Professor Janet Beer is a member of the QAA advisory group on subject benchmarking; Dr. Jenel Virden, became of member of the Board of examiners for ESRC training; Dr. Jude Davies and Dr Sarah MacLachlan were Fellows at the Salzburg Seminar. Jude Davies was also nominated by BAAS to the Board of the Learning and Teaching Support Centre in Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. Professor Philip Davies was elected to the Committee of Academicians of the Academy of the Social Sciences. Mark Newman won both the Lillian Smith Book Award of the Southern Regional Council, and the American Studies Network Book Award. The Cambridge Donner Book Prize was awarded to Professor John Dumbrell.

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

EAAS News

There have been some problems with the posting and receipt of the EAAS newsletter by BAAS members. This is currently under discussion and debate with the EAAS executive. In the meantime, may I take this opportunity to encourage BAAS members to keep the EAAS website on their web bookmarks and to check it regularly for news on forthcoming events. The website has been recently revamped and is now updated frequently. You can locate it at http://www.eaas.info

At the website you can find a copy of the most recent newsletter from October 2003, which gives you a full listing of the workshops for the upcoming conference at Prague. The Prague conference will take place from 2-5 April 2004. You can download conference and hotel registration forms as well. The deadline for registration has been extended to 20 February.

The EAAS newsletter also has details on the EAAS Travel Grants for 2004-2005 for study in the United States for postgraduates in the humanities and social sciences currently registered for a higher research degree at any European university. The deadline for submission of applications is 1 March 2004.

Postgraduate Thesis Database

The new American Studies Research Portal (www.asrp.info) maintains a database of American Studies postgraduate research students along with their thesis topic. Each year, in the spring edition of American Studies in Britain, we will include a list of postgraduate researchers taken from this database.

PhD Student Researchers

Alford, Matthew
University of Birmingham
Thesis Title: Nuclear Crises, anti-Americanism, US Foreign Policy

Asaf, Siniver
University of Nottingham
School of Politics
Thesis Title: WSAG and Crisis Decision-making during the Nixon-Kissinger Years

Ball, Dewi I.
University of Wales,Swansea
Department of American Studies
Thesis Title: The United States Supreme Court and the Unilateral Abrogation of Native American Sovereignty
Research Interests: Native American Politics, History and Law, International Relations, Politics.

Barber, Matt
University of Exeter
Thesis Title: American Politics in Hollywood Cinema
Research Interests: An examination of depictions of the White House and the US President in Hollywood cinema and US TV with particular emphasis on the debates surrounding the relationship between popular culture and historical studies.

Barker, Emily
University of Essex
Department of Literature
Thesis Title: Detective and Crime Fiction in the US
Research Interests: American Gothic; Southern Writing; Folklore; Urban myth

Belcher, Jean
University of Wales, Swansea
Department of History
Thesis Title: The Influence of America on Thomas Paine during 1775
Research Interests: Thomas Paine and the politics of America during the era of the American Revolution

Blohm, Gary
University of Exeter
Thesis Title: Subjectivity and Place in the Works of Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver (strictly provisional title)
Research Interests: The thesis examines the internal and external components of subjectivity in the two writers’ work. Beginning with Bukowski’s brutal upbringing and the marginalisation of the working classes during the Depression, the role of Place (ie Los Angeles) is added to a study that utilises work on narcissistic personality disorder to establish his alter ego’s position in society and his corresponding mindset. Likewise, Carver is studied in the context of place – geographically and in a social sense – to analyse his fictions of the banal in his urban, small-town and suburban locations. The thesis concentrates on the work ethic and the centrality of occupation in self-perception. Beyond the Depression, the thesis focuses on the time span between the 1960s to around 1990.

Buley, Benjamin
London School of Economics and Political Science
Department of International Relations
Thesis Title: The War on Terror and the American Way of War

Butler, Owen Robert
University of Nottingham
School of American and Canadian Studies
Thesis Title: The Know-Nothing Party in the South
Research Interests: Nineteenth Century, Antebellum era especially and 1850s in particular
Cain, Mark
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Thesis Title: Innovation and Tradition in Postwar American Poetry

Chochinov, Jennifer
University of Warwick
Department of History
Thesis Title: Escaping the Bugaboo?: American Exchange Students in W. Germany, and W. German Exchange Students in America, 1950-1968

Clerk, Sigrid
University of Dundee
Thesis Title: Moravian Missionaries and the Delaware Indians mid to late 18th century. (not fixed)
Research Interests: The influence of the Moravian missionaries on the Delaware Indians in the Ohio Valley in the mid to late 18th century.

Cohen, Rachel
Brunel University
School of International Studies
Thesis Title: Identity and Memory: Jewish Women in America as Activists and Feminists 1960-1990

Crosthwaite, Paul
University of Newcastle Upon Tyne
Department of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
Thesis Title: Time, History, and World War II in Contemporary British and American Fiction
Research Interests: World War I threatened the technological, scientific, and historical certainties of modernity, prompting modernist literary disruptions of linear time that challenged the laws of causality on which the modern project was founded. World War II, in many ways the first truly global war, provoked radical mutations of these strategies. My project resituates the British and American novels I discuss within a wider intellectual movement—including Paul Virilio, Zygmunt Bauman, and Adorno and Horkheimer—that views World War II as a crisis of modernity. Critical studies of the novelists I discuss frequently invoke the so-called New Physics to account for the texts’ temporal disruptions; I suggest that the metaphorical use of quantum mechanics is itself a response to the war—specifically the graphic instantiation of this previously mysterious paradigm in the form of the atomic bomb. Ultimately, I aim to establish the centrality of World War II to the study of the postmodern movement in fiction. I divide the writers I concentrate on into four groups, according to how directly they experienced warfare: first, John Hawkes, Joseph Heller, and Kurt Vonnegut, all of whom saw active service; second, J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, who, though child civilians during the war, were nonetheless subject to the conflict; third, Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon, who were children in the USA; finally, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, who were born after the war. I consider how the time elapsed between war and composition itself inflects the temporal structuring of the novels.

Cunnell, Howard
University of London
Thesis Title: Condemned Men: Masculinity, Race & Identity in Contemporary American Prison Writing

Dagg, Mary
University of Kent
Department of History
Thesis Title: Rethinking Roe v Wade in Historical Context
Research Interests: I am using Roe v Wade as both a focus for the career of Justice Blackmun, and as a turning point in the histories of the pro-choice and pro-life movements. I am also looking at the effect that abortion has had on American politics at both state and national levels.

David, Claire
University of Birmingham
Thesis Title: A reassessment of Raymond Carver’s work using psychoanalytical theory (working title only)

de Rouvray, Christel
London School of Economics and Political Science
Department of Economic History
Thesis Title: Economists writing history: economic history in the post-war era
Research Interests: Economic History; Twentieth Century American Intellectual Thought;

DeVaney, Charles
University of Westminster
The Centre for the Study of Democracy
Thesis Title: The effects of the Civil Rights Act on representation local government

Deverick, Dave
University of Nottingham
School of American & Canadian Studies
Thesis Title: Ulysses S. Grant as military commander
Research Interests: My PhD compares Grant’s strategic and tactical ability with that of his Civil War contemporaries. However, I have an interest in American history in general, and especially African- American history. My MA thesis compared the roles of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in passing civil rights legislation.

Doughty, Ruth
Keele University
Thesis Title: Scoring a Black Aesthetic: Music in the Films of Spike Lee

Duguid, Scott
University of Edinburgh
Thesis Title: Norman Mailer and cultural politics
Research Interests: Postwar American literature, art, and culture; Modernism/Postmodernism; Race/ethnicity (particularly black-Jewish relations) Theory (Adorno, Jameson) The American public; intellectual Censorship

Edwards, Paul
University of Nottingham
School of American and Canadian Studies
Thesis Title: The Pre-History of Post-Modernity: Victor Gruen and the Development of the Shopping Mall
Research Interests: Examining the intellectual and cultural development of the shopping mall in 1950s and 60s America through the work of the architect Victor Gruen.

Esbester, Mike
University of York
Department of History
Thesis Title: Safety First on British Railways, 1913-48
Research Interests: I am looking at the transfer of the ‘Safety First’ movement from the railways in the USA to those of Britain, c.1913-48. This was concerned with educating railway employees to work ‘safely’ and was achieved through a series of ‘informal’ articles, written in a ‘man-to-man’ style. In addition, I am examining the return trade in safety education, from Britain to the USA, and the tensions between the two.

Falconer-Salkeld, Bridget
University of London
Institute of United States Studies
Thesis Title: The MacDowell Colony: a musical history of America’s premier artists’ community

Farrington, Holly
University of Middlesex
Department of American Studies
Thesis Title: Bringing me to where I am: jazz autobiography in context

Fearnley, Andrew
Cambridge University
Department of History
Thesis Title: Houses and Churches: Culture and Community in 1930s Cleveland.
Research Interests: My work focuses upon the first black theatre, Karamu House, in a place – the urban midwest – and at a time – 1930s-1940s – when cultural pursuits are seemingly neglected by historians, particularly those of African American history. Through archival research and oral interviews with those who can remember Karamu House’s projects, I seek to provide a greater appreciation of how black communities functioned and what their priorities and outlook were.

Felton, Mark
University of Essex
Department of History
Thesis Title: Resistance in Exile: Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapa Sioux in Canada 1876-1881
Research Interests: Aboriginal-white relations in the United States and Canada during the 19th century.

Gemelos, Michele
University of Oxford
Thesis Title: Twentieth-century British writing and New York City

Geraghty, Lincoln
University of Nottingham
School of American and Canadian Studies
Thesis Title: Living with Star Trek: American Culture and Star Trek Fandom

Grant, Elizabeth
University of Birmingham
Thesis Title: The Greek Picnic: Race, Place and Memory in Post-Industrial Philadelphia

Hadji Haidar, Hamid
University of Essex
Department of Government
Thesis Title: Rawls’ Political Liberalism and Mill’s Perfectionist Liberalism
Research Interests: American Political Thought; British Political Thought

Hardie, Kirsten
University of Brighton
Department of Communication Arts
Thesis Title: But Who is Betty Crocker?

Harvey, Jack
University of Glasgow
Department of English
Thesis Title: Marilyn Hacker’s editorship of The Kenyon Review
Research Interests: Marilyn Hacker; The Kenyon Review;

Hibberd, Lynne
University of Birmingham
School of American and Canadian Studies
Thesis Title: Who’s Cracking the Whip? Subversive representations of gender, domesticity and sexuality in film musicals of the 1950’s.

Hilditch, Lynn
Liverpool Hope University
Department of American Studies
Thesis Title: Lee Miller: Photography and Surrealism

Horton, Laurence
University of Essex
Thesis Title: Cognitive approaches to domestic policymaking: the 1995 federal government shutdown

Hunt, Kevin
University of Nottingham
School of American Studies
Thesis Title: Text Messages: The Changing Function of Words, Letters and Figures In American Art
Research Interests: My thesis is a conceptual study beginning with the self-conscious application of text in nineteenth century American art, which then moves on to examine how text (including titles) changes its function in relation to form and content against the backdrop of Realism, Modernism, and Postmodern. In doing so my intention is, in part, to examine how the concept of periodisation is problematic when it comes to positioning certain American artists or artistic styles/movements.

Iijima, Mariko
University of Oxford
Department of Modern History
Thesis Title: The Coffee Industry and the Multiethnic Society In Kona, Hawaii

Jones, Brad
University of Glasgow
Thesis Title: How the Revolution changed, and helped create, a new, Trans-Atlantic political culture of loyalty to the Crown. (working title)
Research Interests: Time period—18th century as a whole, with focus on Revolutionary period. Location—the British Atlantic World, including Canada, the Colonies, British West Indies, Scotland and England itself. More exact location(s)—New York City, Halifax, Nova Scotia ,Kingston, Jamaica, Charleston, SC, London and Glasgow.

Kilkelly, Emma Louise
University of Exeter
Department of English
Thesis Title: African-American identity expressed through music, in the literature of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin (extremely provisional title)
Research Interests: Articulating African American thought: Music and Mental Illness in Invisible Man and Coming Through Slaughter. Jazz & Mental Illness 1920s & 1930s American Culture/Literature

Knox, Simone
University of Reading
Department of Film, Theatre and Television
Thesis Title: Postmodernism and Popular Media Culture

Lewis, Christopher
University of Birmingham
Thesis Title: MACV-SOG Covert Operations Program on the Ho Chi Minh Trail,1964-72
Research Interests: I have specialised in research into covert operations during the U.S. commitment to Southeast Asia (1950s-1970s),but I am hoping to read for my PhD. in the near future, and hope to look into the emergence of the Department of Homeland Security within the

Long, Emma
University of Kent
Thesis Title: The Supreme Court, Education, and the Establishment Clause,1947-1997

Maddra, Sam
University of Glasgow
Department of History
Thesis Title: ‘Hostiles’: The Lakota Ghost Dance and the 1891-92 Tour of Britain by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

Maes, Lean
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Department of English
Thesis Title: Trauma and Gender in Jewish-American Women’s Holocaust Fiction

Mata, Tiago
London School of Economics and Political Science
Department of Economic History
Thesis Title: Trajectories of Dissent: the history of Radical Political Economics and Post Keynesian Economics

McClean, Josephine
University of Ulster
School of History and International Affairs
Thesis Title: The ambiguous effect of the transcontinental railroad on American life during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Research Interests: Transcontinental Railroad 1863-69; Emigration and Immigration; Irish Diaspora; Ethnic Conflict; Employment of Immigrants; Westward Expansion; Native America; Film representations of Nineteenth Century America; Literature

McDonald, Brian
University of Edinburgh
Thesis Title: Fictional Liberalism, Novel Democracy: The Postwar American Novel and the State of American Liberal Democracy

McLoughlin, Kate
University of Oxford
Department of English
Thesis Title: Martha Gellhorn: the War Writer in the Field and in the Text
Research Interests: Martha Gellhorn (1908-98), American war reporter, particularly her Second World War writing; war writing (journalism and fiction) -particularly in the 20th century; reportage; 20th Century prose (British and American) – particularly the novel.

McNally, Karen
University of Nottingham
School of American and Canadian Studies
Thesis Title: Reading Sinatra Through the Social and Cultural Concerns of Post-War America

Mellor, Michael
King’s College London (University of London)
Thesis Title: Anthropoetics of American Literature
Research Interests: Ethnopoetics (Gary Snyder, Jerome Rothenberg), Ethnographic Metafiction (William Vollmann), Anthropologically influenced fiction (Alejo Carpentier, DeLillo, Burroughs, Gaddis)

Miller, James
King’s College London (University of London)
Thesis Title: James Baldwin and the articulation of alterity in Cold War American literature
Research Interests: I am concentrating on the period 1945-80. The reception of French Existentialism in Cold War America is a major part of my thesis as is Civil Rights. Other authors who are discussed in great detail in addition to James Baldwin include Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison and the Beat Generation, especially ethnic encounters/ encounters with ‘otherness’ in Beat writing.

Munro, Stephanie
University of Lancaster
Department of Women’s Studies and English
Thesis Title: The Anti-Slavery Writings of Lydia Maria Child,1830-1867

Nelson, Michael
University of London
Thesis Title: U.S. Foreign Policy towards China’s Entry into the World Trade Organization from 1981 to 2001

O’Connor, Dan
University of Warwick
Thesis Title: Public Privates: Writing Transsexulity in the Anglo-American Twentieth Century
Research Interests: Film, History, Philosophy, Politics, Popular Culture, Sociology; My project focuses upon written accounts of transsexuality – an entirely new way of being human which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Whilst there had always been men and women who acted as the opposite gender, the medical technologies had not existed to enable them to become the opposite sex. Advances in cosmetic surgery and hormonal therapies permitted men to become women and women to become men at the bodily level. My research explores both the way transsexuals themselves saw this transformation and the way mass-media related to it. My major sources are the published autobiographies of about 40 transsexuals, and the newspaper, television and fiction (film, lit) accounts of people who changed their sex. My aim is to explore how both Britain and the US had similar popular languages of sexual difference which were expressed through the pop-culture icons of the time. It was this language which the transsexuals had to try and make their changing bodies speak, and which the media tended to judge in terms of its success.

Omry, Keren
Goldsmith’s College (University of London)
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Thesis Title: Adorno, Jazz, and Ethnicity in African-American Literature of the Twentieth Century

Ormrod, James
University of Essex
Department of Sociology
Thesis Title: The Multi-Dimensional Discourse on Outer Space Colonization.
Research Interests: I am studying the citizens’ Pro-Space Movement. This is largely a US phenomenon and most of my research has been/will be conducted in the States.

Panay, Andrew
University of Aberdeen
Department of Sociology
Thesis Title: Vanishing White American’s: The Captivity Scenario in American Culture

Peacock, James
University of Edinburgh
Thesis Title: Paul Auster and the Puritan Tradition
Research Interests: Looks at Paul Auster’s position within a literary tradition which includes the American writers of the nineteenth century (Poe, Hawthorne etc.) but goes back further to the concerns of the early Puritan settlers. Also pursuing ongoing research into the influence of Quakerism on American literature

Perl, Shoshana
London School of Economics and Political Science
Department of International Relations
Thesis Title: Transatlantic Trade Disputes: The Helms-Burton Act as a Two-Level Game
Research Interests: GATT; WTO; US Trade Policy;

Pethers, Matthew
King’s College London (University of London)
Department of American Studies
Thesis Title: Print Culture and the Public Sphere in Late Eighteenth-Century America

Pirolini, Alessandro
University of London
Thesis Title: The cinema of Preston Sturges between classicism and post-modernism.
Research Interests: Currently working on a series of multimedia lessons on film language. Previous researches include: Europeans in Hollywood, the cinema of Ernst Lubitsch, the cinema of Rouben Mamoulian.

Pollard, Finn
University of Edinburgh
Thesis Title: In Search of this new man, the American” : Concepts of American National Character,1782-1832
Research Interests: Focused on literary concepts of American national character in this period – key figures – Washington Irving, Hugh
Henry Brackenridge, James Kirke Paulding. Also interest in Henry Adams

Prannzo, Diane
University of Essex
Department of Sociology
Thesis Title: Love, Justice and Knowledge-Child Custody decisions in the US, Sweden and England

Quillin, Bryce
London School of Economics and Political Science
Department of International Relations
Thesis Title: Understanding Degrees of Compliance with the Basel Accord,1988-2000
Research Interests: US economic regulation; Financial regulation; US firms’ non-market strategies; Pensions/retirement markets; Social security policy

Quinn, Adam
London School of Economics and Political Science
Department of International Relations
Thesis Title: Bush Administration Foreign Policy in Intellectual Historical Context: The Balance of Power, Alliances and Liberal Internationalism.
Research Interests: US foreign policy The history of the USA since 1789 American political ideology Twentieth century international history

Reid, Chad
Thesis Title: Early American History of the Book; Colonial Newspapers; Intellectual Working and Labour Class History

Robson, Victoria
London School of Economics and Political Science
Department of Government
Thesis Title: Ethnic Interest Groups and Foreign Policymaking: the case of the Arab Americans
Research Interests: Interest Groups; Lobbying; U.S. foreign policy; Arab Americans; Agenda setting;

Rosen, Elizabeth
University College London (University of London)
Department of Language and Literature
Thesis Title: Contemporary Apocalyptic Literature and Film: The Postmodern Evolution of the Apocalyptic Paradigm.

Rubenson, Daniel
London School of Economics
Department of Government
Thesis Title: Community Effects on Political Participation: The Role of Social Capital, Heterogeneity and Government Competencies
Research Interests: My PhD compares political participation across a large set of American cities. I analyze how social and political context influence individuals’ propensities for taking political action. Other research interests include: elections and electoral systems; political behaviour; racial diversity; local government and politics; the application of multilevel modelling to political science problems.

Sahin Gencer, Sultan
University of Nottingham
Thesis Title: Actresses and the 90s Hollywood: an interpretation of the industrial power perceptions

Sami Gorgan Roodi, G
University of Sussex
School of English and American Studies
Thesis Title: America in the Plays of the Great Depression
Research Interests: American Drama and Literature in the Great Depression

Schiller, Neil
Liverpool Hope University College
Department of American Studies
Thesis Title: The historical present: notions of time, history and cultural lineage in the writing of Richard Brautigan
Research Interests: Richard Brautigan; American counter-culture; Beat Writers; postmodernist engagements with notions of time and history; Historicism; Eastern philosophies; Western philosophies

Stevens, David
University of Reading
Department of Film and Drama
Thesis Title: Between Old Hollywood and New Hollywood – Forms in Transition 1967-76 (working title)

Stoneman, Paul
University of Essex
Thesis Title: The Origins, Role and Maintenance of Political Trust

Thompson, Brock
King’s College London (University of London)
Thesis Title: An Un-Natural State: Same-Sex Desire in Arkansas, The Depression through the Clinton Era
Research Interests: Queer Theory; Gay and Lesbian Studies; Southern American Studies; Twentieth Century America; Social Movements and Social Change

Tsakona, Anna Elisabeth
University of Cambridge
Department of History
Thesis Title: Anti-Americanism in Europe: the case of Greece

Wood, Jayne
University of Leeds
School of English
Thesis Title: Conceptualising and Contextualising the Literary Career of Louis Bromfield (1886 – 1956)
Research Interests: Late nineteenth and twentieth century American literature and culture; Twenties and Thirties; Modernism; Regionalism; Midwest; Realism; ‘Lost Generation’; Americans in Paris; Suburbia.

Woolf, Paul
University of Birmingham
School of American and Canadian Studies
Thesis Title: US imperialism and literature; nineteenth-century detective fiction; US television; British television.

Zumoff, Jacob
University College London (University of London)
Department of History
Thesis Title: The Communist party in the United States and the communist international, 1919-29

News from AMATAS

AMATAS has just been awarded Transferability Funding to take the Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies Project into the English Subject Area. The project has played a significant and timely role in the development of the teaching of American Studies in Britain into a more Transnational and Intercultural paradigm. Through workshops, conferences, journalism, teaching materials and a forthcoming collection of essays (McKay, Davies and Campbell eds. Issues in Americanisation and Culture) the project has foregrounded American popular culture’s role as a soft tool of American power for good and ill and cultural theory as the most apt means with which to interpret it. Throughout the project we concentrated on popular culture, but found students in American Studies and cognate areas wanted to link the ideas to their understanding of Literary Texts.

So having completed its work in American Studies the project has been awarded money to work with the English Subject Centre to use its expertise to generate similar intercultural and transnational ideas in the areas of literature and media. This is a particularly timely intervention as during the Centre’s conference English: The Condition of the Subject in July 2003 a clarion call was made by Catherine Belsey to end the “Apartheid between English and Cultural Studies” (THES July 18).

The project will work principally with academics already running modules on American Literature to show the enhanced possibilities of an intercultural and Transatlantic approach to their syllabi. The project launched with sessions at the Subject Centre Event on Teaching American Literature on October 24th 2003 and material from that event can be found on the Landscapes of Americanisation section under Workshops on these web pages. Other materials from this event will be added to the resource section during 2004.

We plan to hold two regional events: one in Bristol at the University of the West of England on March 12 2004 (see details below) and one in the Midlands/North in September. At these events workshops will present options on ways in which the teaching of American texts can be enhanced by cultural theory and an intercultural approach. Workshops will range from Disneyfication through the Titanic’s Transatlantic Resonances to Theories of Americanisation. We will also gather curriculum and resource materials on the theme of Americanisation and the Transatlantic with special reference to the teaching of English over the next year to add to the resources on the website. We are hoping to use our website to highlight interesting curriculum developments and articles in the Transatlantic field – if you have materials you feel would be of use to the project please contact the project manager (address below).

Our aims for the project are the following:

1) To foreground the intercultural and the Transatlantic in English Studies courses with American content.

2) To consider literary representations of related questions of power, desire, resentment towards the USA.

3) To use cultural theory to underpin our work within English Studies.

If you want any more information on this new phase of the project or indeed if you want to talk to issues the project raised in American Studies please feel free to contact the Project Manager:

Dr. Alan J. Rice
Senior Lecturer in American Studies and Cultural Theory
Project Manager for the Americanisation Project (AMATAS)
Dept. of Cultural Studies
University of Central Lancashire
Preston
PR1 2HE