Editorial

I write this editorial just a few days after the publication of this year’s A-Level results and with UCAS reporting 602 joint or single honours American Studies courses with vacancies. Figures published earlier this year by UCAS showed as much as an overall drop of 15% in American Studies applications compared with the same point in 2002. Both of these facts would seem to indicate that American Studies—either in the wake of the war against Iraq or as a result of a cyclical downturn—is this year facing a recruitment deficit. While it is too early to suggest this amounts to a permanent reversal, it is not always the case that university administrators have the same intellectual commitment as academics to distinguishing between long-term trends and rogue statistics. During the last year, American Studies at both Keele University and University College Northampton has come under threat, although in both cases objections and lobbying helped thwart any immediate danger. The example of Keele, a 5-rated department in both the 1996 and 2001 RAE, shows that few universities are exempt from such pressures. But while an overall drop in applications might register across all universities with potentially serious consequences, such recruitment problems clearly impact most severely on post-1992 universities who are not insulated by the kudos and status more venerable institutions retain and which are exaggerated as fee-paying students are drawn into a culture of ‘distinction’ by the government’s determination to get 50% of 18-year-olds into higher education. At the very time when less well-resourced and lower-rated departments are being squeezed after the 2001 RAE, now they face the threat of falling recruitment and internal cost-cutting measures from university administrators. The Roberts report, published in May, would seem to offer little consolation to departments and programmes in this situation. If research funding is going to be concentrated in ‘research intensive institutions’ rather than ‘the less competitive departments in the remainder of institutions’—that is, pre-1992 and post-1992 institutions respectively—what happens when the bread and butter teaching funding is threatened by potentially declining numbers of students? All this leaves American Studies in post-1992 institutions horribly exposed, despite the excellent research and teaching that goes on there and the invaluable contribution and commitment to the American Studies community that these institutions make.

Graham Thompson
School of American & Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham NG7 2RD
Tel: +44 (0) 115 9514269
Fax: +44 (0) 115 9514270
E-mail: graham.thompson@nottingham.ac.uk

BAAS Annual Conference: Manchester Metropolitan University 2004, Call for Papers

We are now calling for papers for the 2004 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.

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 researchers, are encouraged to apply. Proposals should be submitted by October 31, 2003 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

BAAS Annual Conference: Aberystwyth, April 11-14, 2003

Chair’s Report

April 2003

As Chair of BAAS I receive a steady, and perhaps increasing, range of enquiries on American Studies matters from media outlets. I always try to pass these on to relevant authorities within BAAS, using the committee members, colleagues within BAAS, and the BAAS email list to search for expertise. Among the media consultations coming through this route in the past year, BAAS members advised BBC Radio Four regarding programming on the ‘special relationship’, on George Washington, and on its prospective coverage of the 2004 presidential election. BBC World TV enquired about the mid term elections, the Discovery Channel, about a programme to be fronted by Eddie Izzard on ‘Americanisation’, and independent production companies wanted advice on the US Civil War, and the impact of American literature.

Other BBC TV and radio requests were for advice on Brooklyn Bridge, and on Time magazine. BBC Radio Two wanted visiting American students as guests, while BBC4’s relaunch of ‘After Dark’, and BBC7’s ‘Manhattan’ were both looking for expert and opinionated participants. International tensions prompted some requests, including those from the BBC Asian Network, BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Radio Wales, and around twenty BBC local radio stations. The majority of these requests are funnelled through to BAAS colleagues with the appropriate expertise, but I have to admit taking occasional advantage of these fleeting minutes of media connectivity.

The mid term elections resulted in interviews for BBC Online, and The Malay Straits Times. BBC Online came back for more for their review of the year. BBC Radio Five wanted comments on the State of the Union address, and on another occasion got me to join Scott Lucas and others in a conversation vaguely related to the opening salvoes of the 2004 election. Perhaps most interesting inquiry was about the viability of a potential campaign for the presidency by rapper and pop music entrepreneur P. Diddy. I responded to the readers of J17 that the hopeful needed party political support, and/or the willingness to spend his fortune freely, and at least one issue to run on. But that even with all these in place, I could imagine some voters being less than enthusiastic about a candidate who had been arrested on gun charges, and had managed to lose the favour and company of Jennifer Lopez.

American Studies events achieved substantial positive coverage in the THES several times over the past year, first in an account of the November colloquium, sponsored jointly with the American Politics Group, and later in the form of an informative piece in advance of the final AMATAS conference. Sue Currell reported on her initiatives in teaching American Studies using an internet and IT-based pedagogy. More light-heartedly, a trip by a group of BAAS members to form a panel at the conference of the Rhetoric Society of America, held in Las Vegas, made an entry in ‘Don’s Diary’.

Less happy was the report that the respected and long-established American Studies Department at Keele University was threatened with substantial cuts under a plan promoted by that university’s Vice Chancellor, Janet Finch. Many colleagues joined BAAS in protesting this attack, which the university authorities insisted was justified by its funding formula. It is impossible to know whether the vigour of the response, and the demonstration by an international body of colleagues of their respect for American Studies at Keele, had any effect, but I presume it did no harm. American Studies will continue at Keele without compulsory redundancies, and changes will include positive initiatives aimed at maintaining and expanding the subject’s presence.

Elsewhere in the press, we were reminded of the roots of American Studies by the warm obituaries to some of those who have been so important to establishing and supporting the subject. Three former chairs of BAAS died in the past year. These three were truly founders and builders of American Studies and of the Association. Frank Thistlethwaite was the Association’s first ever Chair. Dennis Welland was the founding editor of the Journal of American Studies. Peter Parish, when chair, launched the BAAS Short Term Awards and the BAAS Pamphlets series.

All three remained in close touch with the subject and the Association. Peter was delivering a plenary seemingly only yesterday, or at least only as long ago as the Glasgow conference. It was not long ago, either, that Dennis Welland, always deeply proud of his connections with the great American Studies programmes at Nottingham and Manchester, had been in touch to help on some element of BAAS history. And Frank Thistlethwaite’s hand written notes were a real pleasure for this BAAS chair – he must have scoured the newspapers, and he regularly found the opportunity to write to congratulate BAAS for its vigorous promotion of American Studies.

As we are meeting in Aberystwyth, I should also mention the death, just a few days ago, of Alan Conway, a former lecturer here, who went on to a chair in Canterbury, New Zealand, and became central in the development of American Studies in that country through to his retirement in 1985. I also report the death of Duncan MacLeod another retired BAAS member and former conference organiser.

Through the year BAAS responded to consultations by 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, and the Standing Conference on Arts and Social Sciences. BAAS also took part in an initiative to launch a new Area Studies Network, first discussed at a meeting organised by the Learning and Teaching Support Centre in Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. The Area Studies Benchmark – initiated by American Studies lobbying – was published by the Quality Assurance Agency early in 2002.

Members of BAAS and their programmes have been active in many ways. The FTTL funded co-operation initiated by King Alfred’s College, Derby University and the University of Central Lancashire culminated in a fine conference in Preston. The European Association for American Studies conference attracted a large and valuable contribution from BAAS members. The BAAS postgraduate conference, hosted by Sheffield University, was more successful than ever. The BAAS email list maintained a steady information flow to members, and American Studies programmes consulted together and shared information on student exchange, student recruitment, and graduate destinations.

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.

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.

The landscape of journals relevant to American Studies seemed to be re-shaping over the past twelve months. You may have taken the opportunity to examine the re-designed look of the Journal of American Studies in the publishers’ exhibit – do remember that BAAS members’ subscription rates to the Journal of American Studies are very heavily discounted, and very good value. The new journals Comparative American Studies, and the Journal of Transatlantic Studies have been prominent at this conference. Another new journal Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical Perspectives on Europe, Africa and the Americas will start publication in mid-2004. Directed by an international team, it is centred on our American Studies colleagues at the University of Sussex, where they are looking forward to the associated establishment of a Centre, and an MA programme, in Atlantic Studies. The European Journal of American Culture is being relaunched, and all fully-paid up members of BAAS will receive the first year of the remodelled journal free of charge. Also supplied as a free service to the whole American Studies community by BAAS, US Studies Online has now published its third issue, and helps in large part to account for the doubled rate of visits to the excellent BAAS website that Graham Thompson has built.

The work of BAAS is undertaken by a team of your colleagues. The Development subcommittee, led by Simon Newman, manages the Short Term Awards, the postgraduate essay prize, support for the postgraduate conference and other projects, and the management of any professional development matters that come to the Association. The Publications subcommittee, chaired by Janet Beer, links together the wealth of expertise that the Association is now fortunate to have on board, editing the Journal of American Studies, American Studies in Britain, the website, US Studies Online, the e-list, the Microform series, and the BAAS Paperbacks. The Libraries and Resources Subcommittee has added resource materials to the BAAS website, and produces the Libraries and Resources Newsletter. All of this work is done by volunteers, and I take this opportunity to thank them for their commitment and effort, in particular Janet Beer, Mike McDonnell, Celeste-Marie Bernier, and Nick Selby whose current terms of office are completed at this time.

The Treasurer and the Secretary of BAAS give time and effort unstintingly to make sure that the Association is run as effectively and efficiently as possible. All of those members who respond promptly to requests for updated subscriptions, gift aid declarations, and such, also deserve thanks. I would ask those who have been more dilatory, and received more reminders, to give a little more help to the volunteers who manage the Association on their behalf.

We are pleased that at this meeting we are joined by the Transatlantic Studies Association, whose inaugural meeting last year was such a success. The interests of Transatlantic Studies and American Studies clearly complement each other, and provide increasing stimuli and contexts for study that includes the contemplation of America.

The draft programme for this conference listed over 170 titles, with presenters coming from all over the UK, and from a dozen other countries. We are grateful to our friends at the US Embassy for their support for this year’s conference – supporting postgraduate attendance, the BAAS Short Term Awards Scheme – and for their willingness to consider the Association’s proposals. Many people have worked towards mounting this splendid conference – making a visit to Aberystwyth worthwhile for even more than its well-recognised aesthetic attractions. The annual conference is the showcase of the Association, the visible presence of the subject and the profession. It is a huge task to take on for the sake of one’s colleagues, and its rewards are probably very end-loaded. On behalf of the Association I would like to thank the conference subcommittee chair, Mike McDonnell, and, especially this year’s conference convenor, Tim Woods, his colleagues on the faculty at Aberystwyth, and Moira Shearer and the Aberystwyth conference office.

The Association was founded in 1955 after a series of meetings during the previous year or so. I trust that BAAS members savour the approaching half-century, and I look forward to seeing you all next year in Manchester to launch the Association towards its celebrations.

Exchange Programmes Talk Shop

For the fifth year in succession, a lunchtime session was held at the BAAS conference for Exchange Programme tutors and anyone else interested in exchange programmes with American universities. These sessions have proved to be very useful as a meeting point and exchange of ideas and views for those involved in exchange programmes. At previous BAAS conferences the topics of these meetings have been: exchange of marks and grades; strategies for establishing contact with suitable potential exchange partners; the impact of study at an American university on the quality of students’ work on their return in final year. This year’s topic at the conference in Aberystwyth was the pros and cons of an exchange for a year or for a semester. Many illuminating points were made. Perhaps the overall most significant point was that, although very interesting arguments can be advanced on the academic merits on one side or the other, in many universities the deciding factor is not academic considerations but non-academic reasons, such as finance or ways of attracting more applicants.

On the academic arguments, a good case can be made for the greater benefit derived from a year rather than a semester, since this allows students to absorb American culture and society to a deeper extent and to take a wider variety of courses. A reasonable case can also be made, however, for the view that a semester is quite a long time and that students have gained most of the benefits of Study Abroad after a semester and that a second semester provides only marginal additional value. Interesting views on this issue were expressed by Jenel Virden (University of Hull), Steve Mills (Keele University), Tim Ward (Aberystwyth) and others. A crucial point, however, seemed to be non-academic considerations. Even if it were to be concluded that in an ideal world a year is preferable to a semester, the harsh financial reality is that a year is much more expensive, and it is therefore not surprising that most newer universities who are just beginning an exchange programme have opted for a semester rather than a year. On the other hand, some university administrations calculate that a year’s exchange adds to the prestige and attractiveness of their programme and therefore support a year’s exchange. Fortunately, for students, whether they go for a semester of for a year, the vast majority benefit immensely from it and thoroughly enjoy it.

Peter Boyle
University of Nottingham

Aberystwyth 2003: Individual Conference Paper Reports

Denise Askin (St Anslem College, New Hampshire)
From an “Uncommon Quarter”: Literary and Rhetorical Devices in the Sermons of Samson Occom, Native American Preacher (1723-1792)

Increasingly recognized as a “cultural broker” of significance, whose evangelization efforts extended both to his fellow Native Americans and to the white population in colonial and early federal America, Samson Occom is best known for his 1772 “Execution Sermon” preached for a fellow Native American, Moses Paul. This sermon, the first publication by a Native American, enjoyed wide popularity on both sides of the Atlantic, undergoing nineteen editions, one of which was a translation into Welsh. In his preface to the publication, Occom modestly claims that his words are simple enough to be understood by children, Indians, and Negroes, but that they may also be of interest to the more learned because they come from an “uncommon quarter.”

While most of the critical effort on Occom to date has had to do with the execution sermon and with an autobiographical piece, “A Short Narrative of My Life,” Occom’s unpublished materials have been less examined. In his book, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England, Harry S. Stout claims that the New England sermon of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries constituted a medium of communication whose “topical range and social influence were so powerful in shaping cultural values, meanings, and a sense of corporate purpose that even television pales in comparison” (3). He goes on to state that a disproportionate amount of critical effort has been placed on the published occasional sermons, rather than the unpublished “regular” sermons. “Only from the vantage point of unpublished sermons, however, can the full range of colonial preaching be understood (4)”. Stout does not, however, address Samson Occom’s sermons in his book.

This paper addresses Samson Occom’s use of literary and rhetorical devices in his unpublished sermons held by Dartmouth College and the Connecticut Historical Society. It concentrates on four aspects of Occom’s style: 1. the range of his levels of discourse; 2) his use of the rhetorical device of ethos; 3) his adaptation of the jeremiad form; and his use of the Genesis narrative of the creation and fall.

Susana Araujo (University of Sussex)
Joyce Carol Oates’s Love Triangle: Jorge Luis Borges, Alfred Kazin and Charles Sanders Peirce

In her criticism of the seventies, Joyce Carol Oates characterises the current trends of American fiction as an assemblage of “fragments…that ricochet off one another more often than they do off reality.” Oates criticises the anti-realistic and radically self-conscious fiction promoted by authors such John Barth, Donald Barthelme but her main antagonism is towards the prevailing tendency of Anglo-American criticism to equate the writings of those committed to explore social realities with aesthetic conservatism and orthodox realism. In Marriages and Infidelities (1972), Oates rewrites stories by “established” names of the western literary tradition such Chekhov, Flaubert, Kafka, Thoreau, Joyce and John Barth(!).Although self-reflexive and experimental Oates’s rewritings disclose a wide generic amplitude, embracing realism’s engagement with collective experience and the emotional promise of the romance.

The “Sacred Marriage,” the first story of the collection, explores the differences between the ‘inward-looking fabulation’ and other more open forms of metafiction. Some critics have identified two important literary allusions in this story -James’s “Aspern Papers” and James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough. But other intertextual elements left unnoticed: the critic Alfred Kazin (to whom Oates dedicates her story), the writer Jorge Luis Borges (the most emblematic reference of the metafictional movement) and Charles Sanders Peirce (whose philosophical theories regained influence in the seventies) are three other “figures in the carpet” of Oates’s text. In “The Sacred Marriage” Oates traces the encounter of these three figures, in order to explore the power relations in the “love triangle”, which links the author, the interpreter and the text, problematising the different potentials of metafictional writing.

Erica Arthur (University of Nottingham)
The Organisation Strikes Back: Rhetorical Empowerment Strategies in 1950s Business Representations of White-Collar Manhood

This paper focused on a range of business publications that participate in the wider cultural debate, taking place in 1950s America, surrounding business culture and conformity. My objective was to examine the rhetorical devices employed to refute ‘the organization man problem’ as defined by William H. Whyte. Rather than being read as straight empirical evidence of the bureaucratised workplace, the primary documents were appraised as authored texts written from institutional perspectives in language open to cultural influences. Focusing primarily on selling advice manuals, I investigated the ways in which prescriptive employee literature relates to sociological representations of business culture and considered how their linguistic and social constructions resonate across distinct discourses. In so doing the latent gendered dimensions of texts in which the white male focus exists as the generic norm were uncovered.

The publications use a language of masculine physicality to characterise the inactive work of the white-collar employee. An attempt to challenge stereotypical markers of conformity is registered in the invocation of American individualism, discernible through metaphorical figurations and literal descriptions of work attributes. Yet, simultaneously, the paper demonstrated that the tendency in prescriptive employee literature to evince an image of white-collar work that is variously independent, physical and heroic inadvertently calls attention to the negative stereotypes it seeks to overcome.

To illustrate my argument I showed a number of images taken from the publications that the audience seemed to really appreciate. My paper generated some interesting comments and responses and complemented Dan Scroop’s stimulating paper on anti-consumer protest. The Business Culture session was well attended and I found the experience very rewarding.

Helen Chupin (University of Paris IX-Dauphine)
From Bereavement and Mourning to the Anxiety of Separation: From a Thematic to a Psychoanalytical Reading of Anne Tyler’s fiction

This paper aims first to show the thematic importance of bereavement and mourning in Tyler’s texts, from her first short stories to her latest novels. It explores how the narrative event of the loss of a loved one is relayed throughout the work by other stratagems û metaphor, analogy, displacement of the theme to other contexts and other losses. References to popular culture (song lyrics, fairy-tales) are seen to contribute to the mourning theme. There are frequent occurrences of what one might call misplaced mourning (comparisons between mourning and marriage, courtship beginning with a letter of condolence instead of a love letter, an obituary appearing in a newspaper for a person who is still alive).

Finally, a psychoanalytical reading will establish a parallel between mourning and separation anxiety. Certain novels appear to present the mourning theme as a prologue only to evacuate it from the rest of the text but in these cases it can be argued that separation anxiety takes its place, leading logically to images of disintegration or cleavage of the self when the anxiety is presented at its highest level of intensity. Mourning and separation anxiety, both implying the necessity to accept simultaneously loss and autonomy, can be considered as reflecting two aspects of a recurrent obsession in Tyler’s fiction.
This reading of Tyler’s work leads us to consider it as an interrogation on the individual’s fundamental reactions to death, separation and to object loss.

Ian Copestake (Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt)
Williams, Bunting and Poetic Tradition’

This paper discussed the respective attitudes of William Carlos Williams and Basil Bunting towards British and American traditions of poetry, in order to examine how this defined both their public personas and the type of modernisms they aligned themselves with.

It suggested that Basil Bunting’s Williamsesque and Whitman-inspired resistance to the hegemonic iambic foot of English prosody saw him position himself, with regards to his modernist aspirations, in what could be termed a mid-Atlantic position. Bunting’s views on Williams’s poetry, the paper argued, see his admiration tempered only by his criticism of Williams’s intransigent stance as an American alone, who had allowed a legitimate sense of the importance of locality to ossify into a crude nationalism in the face of Eliot’s impact abroad. Bunting marks out differences between himself and Williams in terms of their existence as poets of the eye and the ear respectively, of image and of music, which he feels is a fundamental cause of Williams’s failure to rise above rhetorically entrenched positions in defence of America’s native traditions of writing.

Sue Currell (University of Nottingham)
The History of Speed Reading in America from 1879 to 1940

This paper looked at the relationship between the development of accelerated learning techniques, self-improvement and modernity. Industrial expansion and technological invention after the Civil War in the US created two new circumstances, which profoundly affected reading – a huge proliferation of printed materials and a massive expansion and change in public readership. Unprecedented immigration created a new working class, many of whom were not native English speakers, while developments in industrial technology appeared to “speed up” the pace of everyday life. Studies in language, perception, and mental functioning took on an urgency that paralleled the imperialistic drive towards a unitary national identity that characterised American foreign and domestic policy at this time. The paper looked at how experimental psychologists attempted to understand the reading process, and eventually control reading speeds. The centrality of self-improvement to the wider goals of social harmony and progress was thereby embedded in the goal of rapid reading. The need to understand how the mind could cope with the influx and confusion of perceptions that characterised modernity led to new ways of understanding and, later, training the modern mind in order to avoid becoming lost in the welter of possible mental fragmentation.

John Drabble (Koc University, Turkey)
The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE and the Decline of Ku Klux Klan Organizations in Mississippi, 1964-1971

The extralegal covert action program sought to “expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize” Ku Klux Klan groups. Drabble’s paper assessed COINTELPRO’s effect on Klan groups in Mississippi, adding an entirely new dimension to the question of how and why an important change in race relations came to one Southern State during the 1960s. His research is based on FBI files and white supremacist publications acquired from a number of archival collections. Drabble argued that COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE exposed and disrupted Klan activities, causing disillusionment, and creating factional splits within Klan organizations. They increased animosity among Klansmen, causing expulsions and defections. They discredited high-ranking Klan officers, many of whom were purged or quit. They brought about resignation, frustration and fear among rank and file Klan members, resulting in drastic reductions in Klan membership and the disbanding of most local Klan units Mississippi. In combination with criminal prosecutions, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE vitiated all of the KKK organizations that operated in the state. Remaining hard core Klansmen, Drabble argued, came to see
the Federal Bureau of Investigation as one of their primary enemies. Some infused Klan ideology with the revolutionary discourses of vociferous anti-Semitism, embracing neo-Nazism, Christian Identity, paramilitarization and anti-Federal government rhetoric. They made alliances with racists of different ideological stripes, forging a revolutionary, “white power” movement.

Dr Mira Duric (Keele University)
Reassessing SDI’s Role in the End of the Cold War: US Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union

The paper which I gave at the BAAS Conference 2003 was a precis of several conclusions from my forthcoming book The Strategic Defence Initiative: US Policy and the Soviet Union, which is being published by Ashgate Publishing Limited. My book contains important disclosures by the dozen former politicians who used to work for President Ronald Reagan, whom I interviewed, including Secretary of Defence Caspar Weinberger.

My BAAS paper examined the role of the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) in US-Soviet relations during the Ronald Reagan Presidency. It examined the role of the SDI in the end of the Cold War and analysed the reaction to the SDI from the Soviet Union, including the reaction to the SDI from the new General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

My paper examined the role of the SDI at the Reagan-Gorbachev summit meetings (with particular reference to Reykjavik, 1986; Washington, 1987; Moscow, 1988). It analysed the relationship between the SDI and the legal wording of the 1972 ABM Treaty. Very significant disclosures concerning Soviet anti missile weapons tests were revealed.

My paper concluded by answering the question why the SDI was significant. It provided conclusions to the examination of the role of the SDI in US-Soviet relations and, furthermore, the consequent role of the SDI in the end of the Cold War.

Alexandra Ganser, Julia Pühringer, Markus Rheindorf (University of Vienna, Austria)
Chronotopes of the Road Movie

A web-version can be found at: http://angam.ang.univie.ac.at/roads02/chronotope/index.htm

While the notion of genre has been ubiquitous in film studies from the start, it remains notoriously vague and conveniently or perhaps intentionally ambiguous in its application. Our paper will approach the notion of genre as such – as well as the Road Movie as perhaps the most American of film genres – employing Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. This approach entails a theoretical and methodological focus on the construction of space and time in as well as through texts as never unmediated or “natural”, as always already ideological, historically specific and constitutive of genres. Although Bahktin’s theoretical framework has frequently been applied to literary forms, in particular the novel, and even though an affinity between chronotopicity and film has occasionally been recognized, the constitutive features of various chronotopes have never been systematically applied to film genres or theorized at the level of film as a medium. Our intention was to bring back space on the agenda of cultural theory in general and a Cultural Studies approach in particular. While the first beginnings of a “spatial turn” have been noticeable since the 1980s (especially through the works of Edward Soja and Cultural Geography), space still remains an often underprivileged concept in contemporary analyses of cultural phenomena. Our paper grew out of a larger on-going project at the University of Vienna, which is informed by the same concerns. As a multimedia collaboration between teachers, undergraduate and graduate students, it was inaugurated by the late Prof. Kurt A. Mayer in 1999 and has evolved into a related web anthology (to be found at http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/easyrider/welcome.htm).
Quite unexpectedly, many points of contact to the preceding paper, Ian Davidson’s “Edward Dorn: Home on the Range” emerged. On a personal and final note, our journey to Aberystwyth provided us with some real-life road experience, as we drove through the Cambrian Mountains on the winding concrete that seemed to grow ever narrower, especially for someone driving on what felt like the wrong side of the road.

Dr. John A. Kirk (Royal Holloway, University of London)
The Rise and Fall of School Desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1954-1957

Kirk’s paper, based on research for his recently published award-winning book Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940-1970 (University Press of Florida, 2002), looked at responses to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in Little Rock, Arkansas. The city drew national and international attention in September 1957 when Governor Orval E. Faubus called out the National Guard to prevent the implementation of a court-ordered desegregation plan at Central High School. The constitutional crisis this created only abated when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in federal troops to secure the safe passage of nine black students into Central High. Although the crisis at Little Rock has often been attributed to “massive resistance” Kirk’s paper provided a new perspective on events by exploring the role of “minimum compliance” in events. In line with similar tactics used in other upper South cities, minimum compliance was a stance that sought to employ gradualism and tokenism to delay and limit the implementation of school desegregation for as long as legally possible. Although often presented as a “moderate” stance, in fact minimum compliance only proved to be an insidious and sophisticated form of resistance to school desegregation. Kirk demonstrated how the stance of minimum compliance unravelled in Little Rock and asserted that it was this stance—and not the overwhelming forces of massive resistance—that lay at the heart of the problem of desegregating schools in the city.

Kenneth Luebbering (University of Bergen)
The Immigrant Experience in American Fiction: E. Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes
E. Annie Proulx’s novel, Accordion Crimes, provides an excellent introduction to immigrant studies in the United States. The life of the accordion that is protagonist of the novel illustrates the complex issues facing immigrants. It is not a part of the dominant Anglo culture, and thus required to become American, to make the accommodations necessary to survive in a foreign culture. The instrument is very much a member of the lower classes, who comprise the bulk of American immigrants. The novel takes the accordion from a Sicilian village to New Orleans and up the Mississippi River, following the path taken by thousands of immigrants. It passes through the hands of many ethnic groups, each changing it, forcing music from it that it was never intended to produce. In turn, it plays a role in the lives of the immigrants in a typical process of cultural persistence in conflict with assimilation. The novel illustrates key issues in immigrant studies: the context of time and place of settlement; the processes of immigration, including individual and group immigration, chain migration and density of population; immigrant culture, particularly language; and strategies of adaptation. The novel’s structure, with its multiple narrative frames, points of view and embedded historical detail, provides a qualitatively different experience for readers than a study of primary sources and can prepare students for a more fruitful engagement with such sources.

Tim Nelson (University of Hull)
Youthful Angst: Marvel Comics, the Bomb and the 1960s

A survey of the various comic-book treatments of atomic themes reveals a surprisingly high degree of commercial failure. The various publishers’ inability to sell atomic power is reflective of the audience’s ambivalence towards the new power, particularly with regard to the superhero genre. Marvel’s reinvention of that genre at the beginning of the 1960s centred upon the re-appropriation of atomic themes, capturing a new generation’s ambivalence towards the country’s very real ‘superpowers.’ Marvel’s pseudo-scientific origins, of such popular characters as the Hulk, Spider-man and Daredevil (all centring
on radioactivity), points to the audience’s belief that the existence of such powerful weaponry had changed society irrevocably. This troubled attitude might be best summed up in the famous phrase ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. Marvel’s success lay in harnessing generational ambivalence to patriotic, New Frontier ends. Using slides as a counterpoint, the discussion moves from the original superheroes of the 1940s, considering Superman and Captain Marvel, among others, to look briefly at 1950s horror and war titles, before more closely analysing Marvel’s material from the 1960s. The paper exemplifies how juvenile comic-book material can actually illuminate key aspects of the contemporary Cold-War society.

Inderjeet Parmar (University of Manchester)
A Transatlantic Ruling Class? The Impact of the Interconnections between the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House in the making of a New World Order, 1939-1945

The proposed paper will examine historical evidence of personal, ideological, political and organisational interconnections between the leaders of the CFR and Chatham House during the Second World War. The aim is to examine their roles in assisting the making of an Anglo-American alliance and the construction of a new world order. In the main this involved a series of joint study groups, conferences, study and publicity visits between the think tanks, within a framework of consultations and liaisons with the State Department and the Foreign Office. The paper examines the dense sets of organisational interconnections stretching from the Great War, the founding of the two organisations and through the turbulent interwar years. The paper then subjects the historical evidence to a series of theoretical tests, attempting to determine whether the CFR-Chatham House interconnection constituted a transatlantic ruling class, a liberal Atlantic community, or a neo-Gramscian “Anglo-American establishment”.

Tatiani Rapatzikou (University of East Anglia)
Noir Crossovers: Urban Crime Narratives and Cyberpunk

The convergence of science fiction and crime fiction is felt in the amount of motifs the writers in both genres share. The emphasis placed on social order and disorder as well as on the cartography of urban spaces underlines some of the points these genres have in common.

William Gibson’s writings share a fascination with the mysterious and the terrifying communicated to the reader through a combination of
practices: the use of past visual clichés appear hand in hand with the fears of an anti-human future technology.

The re-emergence of film noir in the hybrid narrative forms of cyberpunk fiction has accentuated the way contemporary social concerns are described, popularised by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).

I will attempt to discuss the noir imagery found in some of Gibson’s short stories, with special reference to ‘Johnny Mnemonic’, contained in his short story collection Burning Chrome and Other Stories (1986). Special attention will be paid to the actual transition from the fixed spatiality of crime writing to the multilayered spatiality of cyberspace as reflected in the visual imagery employed and the identity formation of its characters. The extent to which Gibson’s female characters comply with the femme fatale tradition of the noir narratives will also be examined.

My paper will comment on the intertwining in Gibson’s short story writing of hard-boiled detective formulas with cyberpunk aesthetics. A way of reading the noir images and characters is suggested: their urban visibility is mapped onto the invisible but experientially real spaces of electronic culture.

Caroline Reed (Cambridge University)
“What Would You Like To See?”: Photography and the Stories of Raymond Carver

My paper proposed that the stories of Raymond Carver should be understood within the context of what I termed the writer’s photographic sensibility – the specific formal resemblances between his mode of representation and the particular ontology of the photograph.

I demonstrated that photography is a dominant subject matter for Carver’s stories, and – as his several collaborative projects with photographers attest – is a medium the writer is obviously especially responsive to. I argued also that the writer’s chosen form – that of the short story – is particularly close to the photographic medium; the radical selection of detail that both forms demand occasions their shared practice of decontextualisation. Furthermore, I maintained a more culturally specific connection between Carver’s stories and this medium, a form which has as its essence rendering observation self-conscious. For Carver’s fiction reveals a persistent attention to questions of visuality and perception, as well as a particular relation to the real. This attention informs the thorough but subtle manipulation of photographic seeing at every level of his writing. Drawing upon examples from photographic practice in the 60s and 70s, from artists such as Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, I demonstrated that photography’s ways of seeing and representing the world, not only its choices of technique, but equally its conceptual principles, were a critical – but as yet neglected – influence on Carver’s writing.

Elizabeth Rosen (UCL)
The American West Through an Apocalyptic Lens: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

The Book of Revelation has long been inspiration for fiction writers, but Apocalypse is a theological story in which God is the main character and in which judgment and a New Jerusalem are crucial elements. Its inherently religious elements make the story a challenge to translate into secular fiction.

This paper explored one such successful translation by Cormac McCarthy. In the novel Blood Meridian, the role of deity is occupied by the eerie judge Holden. His judgment is against mankind, and particularly against those who have illusions of permanence. McCarthy’s version of New Jerusalem is especially radical; it is no longer a place, but is instead a new state of mind. This new weltanschauung, along with the translation of New Jerusalem from an outer to an inner state, signals a postmodern rendition of the apocalyptic story.

The paper also explored the implications of overlaying the Western genre with the apocalyptic one. One of the allures of Apocalypse is its duality. Westerns traditionally have the same pattern of confrontation. Yet McCarthy has based his novel on historical events, and his characters do not fall into such clear cut descriptions as Good or Evil. Instead, Blood Meridian’s world is an ambiguous one where morality of the traditional kind is tested to its limits and often found wanting. In the world of McCarthy’s novel, then, the black-or-white opposition of apocalypse seems too simplistic, and consequently McCarthy makes a comment about trying to reduce real history to such simplified moral terms, as well.

Antony Rowland (University of Salford)
Holocaust Camp and Ilse Koch in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’

This paper argued that many of the remarkable poems that Sylvia Plath wrote in October 1962 have never been appraised with an adjective they deserve: camp. Parading their artifice, these texts display the campy stylistics of exaggeration, theatricality, insistent repetition and iteration, outrageous surrealism, overstatement, mock-amazement, melodramatic keening, vamping, bitchiness and sarcasm, interjections, incongruity, black comedy and queer poetics. Famously, this productive month for Plath also heralded two post-Holocaust monologues, ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’: both are examples of Holocaust camp, melding self-referentiality with side-swipes at history. In 1982, critical concern within Holocaust Studies about the danger of aesthetic larceny in relation to the increasing interplay between historical representation and spectacle culminated in Saul Friedlander’s Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death. Rowland argued that the exposition of the Holocaust as spectacle in ‘Lady Lazarus’ can be regarded as an uncanny precursor of Friedlander’s thesis. Unlike Friedlander, camp poetics allow for a self-conscious critique of the poem’s ‘new discourse’: ‘Lady Lazarus,’ Rowland maintained, is paradoxically both a symptom, and vilification, of Holocaust camp.

Lisa Rull (University of Nottingham)
Is this “tzedakah” or just a Woman out of the House? Peggy Guggenheim’s American-Jewish Spirit of Patronage

This paper focused on two statements from Guggenheim to analyse her actions as collector/cultural patron. The longest passage, from her autobiography, outlined her “seven tragedies as an art collector.” These included her missed opportunities for purchases due to financial constraints, disappointments over the increased value of objects she sold or donated to public galleries, and frustration that her rivals ultimately acquired such works. The second statement – that “Somehow, the only pleasure I get while I give is when I withhold for a while to give them pain” – was discussed in connection with revealing anecdotal material and letters on the relationship between Djuna Barnes and Guggenheim. This material analysed Guggenheim’s donation of darned underwear to Barnes as an act of aggressive gift-exchange: one of series of acts where Guggenheim’s complex motivations for supporting cultural producers came to the fore. Through examining such material, the paper considered the (gendered) power relationships embedded in specific acts of patronage. It outlined how Guggenheim challenged philanthropic models in her collecting and financial support of avant-garde creativity, and concluded by proposing that her own contradictory conceptions of Judaic traditions of “tzedakah” (righteousness, charity) were part of the complex influences informing her motivations / actions.

Nick Selby (University of Glasgow)
‘“to be wholly in one place”: Lee Harwood’s The Long Black Veil’

This paper examined the transatlantic relationship that is played out in British poet Lee Harwood’s poem ‘The Long Black Veil’ (1972). It discussed the ways in which Harwood’s detailing of an adulterous affair in this poem also becomes the grounds of an investigation of forbidden, or at least veiled, relationships between European and American poetry. Selby argued that while the poem describes travelling in, and through, America, and its experimental poetics explicitly recall Pound’s Cantos, its lyric intensity stems from its broken attempts to reconcile geographical distance and sexual desire. But, such lyricism also provides a means of deconstructing the colonial desires that haunt the texts that intercut the poem, and the ancient Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris that gives it structure. The paper suggested that to investigate transatlantic poetic relationships is, necessarily, to lift the veil on the politics of cultural power.

Dr. Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson (University of Central Lancashire)
Staging the Scene: American Drama and the Law

This paper explored the way that American drama has evoked “unruly” or outlaw women and overtly staged their guilt or innocence within the space of a courtroom setting. It examined how, in dramatic texts, women as subjects of courtroom dialogue and debate become translated into objects on display, and how their voices become contained or controlled by narratives to which they have only limited access. Particular attention was paid to what Jennifer Wood describes as “usurpatory ventriloquism”—the authority to speak and act for others—that is inscribed in the asymmetrical power relations of the court. Examples ranged from the musical Chicago, to Sophie Treadwell’s expressionist drama Machinal. Passing reference was made to Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, and the paper finished with an exploration of Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour. In each of these dramatic texts, women as the accused—or indeed as accusers—clearly had scripts provided for them, or wrestled away from them. From female murder suspects to women charged—though not openly—with the “crime” of lesbianism, the women on trial provided clear examples of the gendered reception of the law.

The paper made clear the fact that the courtroom normalizes the separation of the good woman and the bad woman, but that the language of the court more often than not blurs the distinctions and makes the search for “truth” a complicated and unstable affair. Thus, drama itself was shown to work as a complicated arena for the exploration of women and the law.

Nerys Williams (Trinity College, Dublin)
Camouflage and Collage: Reading Michael Palmer through Robert Duncan

Customarily Michael Palmer’s poetry is read within the context of a European lyric tradition. The multiple references in his work gesture to poets as diverse as Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, Charles Baudelaire and Andrea Zanzotto. While this European context is a valid one, this paper considered how Robert Duncan’s poetry – with its strategies of collage and serial forms – may also help us to approach Palmer’s densely referential poetry. Palmer’s At Passages (1995) makes a direct homage to Duncan’s own series ‘Passages’ (Bending the Bow, 1968) and includes an elegy to Duncan – ‘Six Hermetic Songs.’ Although their approach to the role of citation in poetry is decidedly different, Palmer’s work acknowledges a debt to Duncan’s strategies of composition. Williams’ paper suggested that Duncan’s ‘Passages’ offers Palmer a way of addressing the more dogmatic claims of a specific vein of Anglo-American modernist practice. Most provocatively, this reading of Palmer through Duncan gave a new insight to the poet’s affiliation both to the poetics of language writing and an overlooked hermetic tradition in American poetry.

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 which is involved in applying directly to an American university for a Teaching Assistantship.

Applicants should send the following by Monday, December 1, 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).

The winner of the first BAAS Teaching Assistantships in 2002 were Vicky Bizzell from Central Lancashire University, who is currently beginning her second year at the University of Virginia, and Steve Brennan, who is currently beginning his second year at the University of New Hampshire. Steve writes: ‘The History Department was most welcoming, with a staff-student barbeque which allowed me to wander around awkwardly introducing myself as “Steve, from Preston, near Liverpool.” As an M.A. student, the only class which all must take is a graduate research seminar. It is most definitely a case of being thrown in at the deep end, with a voluminous reading list and a level of discussion, which, to be honest, I felt was a little beyond me. Nevertheless, I persevered and wrote an extensive research paper, which the course instructor found very interesting. The most rewarding part of this first year was the teaching. Early nerves about standing in front of a group of young people, who differ little in age to myself, were quashed as week by week I grew tremendously in confidence, building a very healthy rapport with my students’ Vicky writes: ‘The BAAS Teaching Assistantship at the University of Virginia has given me unique opportunities and experiences almost too numerous to recount. The English Department, renowned for its scholarly contributions and the many expert professors who make up its numbers, offers both a broad and in-depth programme, which allows M.A. students to cater to their own interests and academic pursuits. Departmental relations between students and professors are encouraged and nurtured by the many wine and cheese evenings which the Department orchestrates. Both students and professors are encouraged to present their work to their colleagues, thereby gaining an important opportunity for feedback, criticism and suggestions. Students invaluably gain a unique opportunity to discuss and raise questions about the forthcoming work of their professors – a policy which is vigorously encouraged and the value of which has proved itself again and again. The BAAS student is given the chance to teach and to receive a pedagogical training. I have developed a passion for teaching, which I hope will stay with me for all of my academic days. The University of Virginia is set in Charlottesville, which is steeped in colonial history and Southern pride and is a wonderful place in which to study. I am thoroughly grateful for the chance to be the first BAAS Teaching Assistantship at the University of Virginia. It has been a thrilling and life-changing experience, which will stay with me forever.’

BAAS members are invited to encourage applications for the BAAS Teaching Assistantships from suitably qualified students.

Peter Boyle
University of Nottingham

Travel Award Reports

John D. Lees Award Report

The primary focus of my PhD research is what I have termed the ‘pro-war movement’ during the Nixon administration. It is a title that is at times inaccurate, and one that was, and is, certainly rejected by those individuals who supported the policy of the Nixon administration regarding the Vietnam War. In many instances such individuals, either publicly or privately, pushed the administration to make greater use of the United States technological, and in their opinion, moral, superiority, yet were loathe to accept the description ‘pro-war.’ In large measure, I am examining the effort by groups such as Young Americans for Freedom, American Friends of Vietnam, Voices in Vital America, the leading Prisoner of War groups, and leaders of the conservative movement to influence government policy and public opinion regarding the importance of victory in Vietnam. Much of my work also considers the internal and inter-organisation debates on this issue, and the reasons why this movement failed to meet its immediate objective.

Considering the breath of material on conservative figures and organisations held at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, a visit to California was fundamentally important to the successful completion of my thesis. Having been considerably aided by the expertise and helpfulness of the Hoover Institution staff, I was fully prepared for a period of intense research in order to complete the list of collections at which I wished to look, and to carry a mountain of photocopying back to England. Fortunately for my research, but not for my photocopying budget, I discovered additional collections, which promised and proved to be most useful, upon my arrival at the Hoover Institution. This included rare video footage of the largest parade ever held in New York City, the ‘We Support Our Boys in Vietnam’ parade of May 1967, a parade that was only nominally neutral on policy issues regarding Vietnam. I soon discovered a wealth of material on a large grass-roots effort, mainly in the New York area, to promote support for Nixon’s policies in Vietnam and to tie patriotism to support for the war. Surprisingly, the New Left Collection provided an abundance of material on the young conservative movement, in particular the effort of students to promote victory in Vietnam and to highlight the righteousness of the American role there.
As much of my research thus far has concentrated on the efforts by figures within the Nixon administration, in particular Charles Colson, to establish and support pro-war groups, the collections at the Hoover Institution provided the first opportunity for me to examine the grass-roots movement, and to fully consider the administration’s efforts in light of, and in response to, this movement. My subsequent visit to the Arizona Historical Foundation at Arizona State University (ASU), in order to consult the papers of Senator Barry Goldwater, allowed me to examine this movement in a different context: how leading conservatives viewed the grass-roots pro-Vietnam effort, and the policies of the conservative movement’s unrivalled leader regarding Nixon’s Vietnam policies. As I had discovered in earlier research, Goldwater publicly maintained support for Nixon’s policies despite private doubts about the efficacy of Vietnamization, and despite the public break of other leading conservative with the administration in July 1971. Goldwater’s papers, which included copies of a political diary that he kept, provided rare glimpses into the factors that influenced the policy decisions of a man torn by the Vietnam issue, not due to a lack of faith in the righteousness of American involvement, but because of the debilitating effect that the war had on the American government and the unity of the conservative movement. I look forward to examining Goldwater’s reports on his meetings with the president and leading White House staff members, reports that have already provided an interesting contrast to those that I found in the files of the Nixon administration.

The success of this trip was based largely on the generosity of time and energy, not to mention expertise, of the staffs of the Hoover Institution archives and the Arizona Historical Foundation. Without the generosity and support of the British Association for American Studies, along with the Gates Cambridge Trust, Peterhouse, Cambridge and the Sara Norton Fund, Cambridge, I would have been unable to spend over two months in the United States. The experience was also rewarding as an opportunity for me to experience student life at Stanford, particularly at a time of student unrest relative to the impending war in Iraq. The parallels to my own research need hardly be stated. My sincere thanks go to those who funded this trip, and to those who made efforts above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that my experiences at Stanford and ASU were profitable and enjoyable.

Peter Parish Award

I would like to express my deep gratitude to the British Association for American Studies for awarding me the Peter Parish award to pursue completion of the American portion of my doctoral research. This award helped fund my visit to Chicago, Illinois and Madison, Wisconsin in April 2003. My thesis is a comparative study of competing loyalties in the lives of British and American department and variety store workers from 1939 through 1970. I am particularly interested in loyalties to employer, union, nation, family and class, and the ways such loyalties were solicited, negotiated and constructed over time.
I visited America twice before this spring, in order to work with various retail archives, research libraries and publications from shopworkers’ unions. However, when I returned from the USA at the end of last summer, three goals remained: to complete work with the Retail Clerks International Association (RCIA) and Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employees Union (RWDSU) records at the Wisconsin Historical Society; to work with the Montgomery Ward’s collection at the Chicago Historical Society; and to record oral history interviews with individuals who worked in department or variety stores in the mid-West.

I passed the first half of my recent visit to America in Madison, working with RCIA and RWDSU publications and records. Unfortunately, I fell ill with the flu the day after arriving in Madison and spent most of my time there focusing on the microform machine through a decongestant fog. Nevertheless, having since reviewed my findings with a clear mind, I am quite happy with the results. Having surveyed the Retail Clerks Advocate from 1938 through 1960 during my last visit to the Wisconsin Historical Society, I was keen to continue my survey of the Advocate through the 1960s and early 1970s. In addition, thanks to Lori Bessler of the Microforms Department, many previously inaccessible RCIA and RWDSU records and publications from urban and rural locals were made available to me on microform during this visit.

Working with union publications can be quite informative, but very difficult as well. The challenge is that none of these publications simply reported the activities, goals or conflicts of locals or members without a good deal of editorial gloss. It can be quite difficult then, to understand the complexities of union politics when any sense of conflict within the union has been deliberately minimised and conflicts between the union and employers have been carefully dramatised. The advantage for my study, however, is that these publications were, by their own admission, propaganda tools for maintaining loyal membership and recruiting new members. In effect, critical examination of the publications has allowed me better insight into the ways local and international unions wished to be viewed by their members, as well as a closer understanding of the practical and rhetorical means unions used to recruit and maintain new membership. In particular, my study of international and local union publications and records helped to explain the failures of shopworkers’ unions in the field of department and variety store employment; political and cultural differences between union locals which defined themselves as blue collar and those which defined themselves as white collar; and the ways in which unions tried to foster members’ loyalties to broader ideals such as labour ‘fraternalism’ and American democracy.

I spent the second half of my visit to America working at the Chicago Historical Society. The Society holds the records of Montgomery Ward’s, a large nation-wide dry goods chain store that has since gone out of business. I was eager to work with the collection, because during World War II, the main Montgomery Ward’s store in Chicago experienced a crucial industrial relations stalemate that was never completely resolved, even with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s direct intervention. The dispute, which lasted from 1942 through 1945, was a crucible of conflicted loyalties for employees, who were exhorted to be loyal to union, employer and nation simultaneously. Unfortunately, the collection’s records relevant to this event were limited to contemporary news clippings from newspapers around the country. While these were helpful, there were no records of direct communication with Ward’s employees on the part of the unions, managers, the National War Labor Board, or President Roosevelt. However, the collection included a run of the company’s house organ Forward, from 1957-1971, annual reports, and a good collection of employee training materials which together provided a very helpful overview of employee relations at Ward’s during the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s.

The final purpose for my visit was to interview people who worked in department or variety stores in the mid-West between 1939 and 1970. Earlier in the spring, I had sent oral history recruitment posters to public libraries, union locals, and the Historical Societies in Chicago and Madison. The posters emphasised my interest in finding union members and former Ward’s employees to interview. Even with the generous assistance of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local in Chicago (the RCIA’s successor), I had little luck on that front. However, the posters did generate responses from four former retail employees in the Chicago area who worked in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, so I interviewed these individuals. The interviewees, who worked from one to five years in retail, in stores ranging from Marshall Field’s department store to local five-and-dime stores, described a wide range of experiences and offered great insight into business competition and conditions of retail employment in Chicago at a time when the city was arguably still the retail capital of America.

Overall, my recent research trip to America was productive and left me with the sense that while research could go on forever, the main bases for my thesis have been covered. I am extremely grateful to the BAAS for their generosity, and for the opportunity to pursue this final leg of the American portion of my doctoral research. I hope that next year’s recipient will meet with the same good fortune in his or her research travels.

Other Travel Award Reports

Clodagh Harrington, London Metropolitan University

BAAS kindly awarded me a short-term travel grant which contributed to my recent two-week trip to Washington DC. The purpose of my trip was to collect data for my thesis on the Special Prosecutor in late Twentieth Century American Politics and my two ports of call were the National Archives and the Library of Congress. Having made contact with both institutions in advance speeded up the process of information gathering as time was precious. My thesis covers some but not all of the Special Prosecutors, and I had previously found that information on the lesser-known cases was sometimes hard to come by and I felt that I only had a rather dry and distant interpretation of the events and attitudes of the time.

The National Archives houses the papers of the majority of Special Prosecutors and with the help of NARA’s David Paynter, the in-house expert on the topic, I selected the records of two of the lower profile Prosecutors, Arthur H Christy and Gerald J Gallinghouse. Accessing primary sources certainly allowed me a far better insight into the actual goings-on of the cases than the books and journals that I had previously been relying on for information. Time constraints did not allow me the luxury of trawling through the papers of the other Prosecutors so I opted instead for referring to the Final Reports of Christy, Gallinghouse, Iran Contra and the numerous volumes of the Whitewater/Lewinsky affair.

At the Library of Congress, the main focus of my attention was videos, none of which were available in the UK. Because the crux of my thesis is the evolution of perception of the Special Prosecutor, I was conscious of not getting too bogged down in piles of papers relating to the specifics of the cases, which, although interesting, were not directly relevant to my work. Therefore, watching documentaries and news reports on the scandals, particularly Watergate, Iran Contra and Whitewater/Lewinsky provided invaluable insight into the national mood of the time, and a taste of how the country reacted to each situation. With regard to the presidential scandals mentioned, I was surprised and impressed at the objectivity of some of the programmes and found some of the reporting refreshingly impartial.

I am most grateful to BAAS for making this trip possible. I feel that it will be of benefit in a number of ways, not just on an academic level but also in terms of being able to spend time in the city where all of what I am writing about took place. Being able to visit the various landmarks including the White House, Congress and the Watergate building gave me a visual sense of perspective and a better feel for what I was writing about. Overall, I feel that it was an extremely fruitful trip and I look forward to absorbing all of the acquired information into my thesis.

Lincoln Geraghty, University of Nottingham

The primary purpose of my research trip was to spend one week visiting the Gene Roddenberry Star Trek Television Series Collection held at the Arts Library Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. The collection holds original and unpublished material relating to the production and reception of Star Trek’s original series, including over 330 fan letters and many responses to these letters, sent to Gene Roddenberry and the cast between 1966 and 1969. In addition to the visit to UCLA I planned to attend the annual Pasadena Grand Slam Star Trek Convention, March 28-30, taking advantage of its proximity to the library.

Previous scholarly studies of Star Trek audiences have focused on more marginal and extreme fans rather than the more ‘ordinary’ fans who only write letters to express their interest and pleasure. My thesis is in two parts: the first takes an American Studies approach to the historical, socio-political, and narrative contexts of Star Trek; the second part is a Film Studies reception based investigation of the ways in which average fans engage with the series as revealed in letters sent to official fan publications and the studio. The letters housed in the Young Research Library provide a vital source of primary material enabling me to analyse fan responses to Star Trek, focusing on their emotional and affective relationship with the show. Given the long-running nature of the series, I have found it necessary to address the historically shifting contexts of audience reception. I wanted to examine themes and issues such as divorce and bereavement in the letters found in the collection which I will then compare to more recent letters I have already obtained from the University of Liverpool. Attending the convention after viewing the collection gave me further scope for comparison between extreme and average fans and their varying reasons for watching Star Trek.

Upon viewing the documents housed in the collection I was struck by a real sense of ‘history’. I realise that sounds rather obvious but as both an academic and a fan of Star Trek I have not previously been receptive to how the original series differed from its contemporary television competition in the late sixties. Many fans were eager to write to the production staff telling them how their viewing habits had changed since the series first aired in 1966. Many described other science fiction series such as Lost in Space and The Twilight Zone as inferior to Star Trek’s more fantastic and dramatic stories. These responses have given me plenty to take into account when I come to analyse my findings. One aspect of particular interest will be how Star Trek fitted in as a product of the Hollywood studio system; how much its prominent liberal ethos was governed by studio executives who wanted to sell as many episodes as possible for the highest price. Since viewing the collection I have realised that many fans, as well as responding to the series as they do now with affection and reverence, also wanted to contribute to the success of the series (including starting a letter campaign to save it from being axed). I was aware of the tremendous efforts fans had made in 1967 saving the show for another year but I was unaware just how much Star Trek was part of Hollywood’s inexhaustible creative output – if it had failed it would have been easily replaced with another series at the request of the studio.

Attending the convention helped me to comprehend the level of affection younger fans have for the series but also highlighted the enormous amount of support older fans, those who had watched in 1966, still give to the show and its aging stars. The dynamics of the convention were such that fans could interact with other fans as the day progressed, talk about the show on an intimate level, and also communicate with the objects of their affection, the stars. It was this part of the convention that stood out most as I attempted to understand what Star Trek means to its fans and American society in general. Much of the language used by fans and the stars on stage was centred on the idea of progress and human achievement, especially at a time of conflict (the war on Iraq had just started before the convention weekend). The liberal humanitarianism that characterised Gene Roddenberry’s work was regarded by the fans and celebrities – particularly Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) – as the appropriate response to the problems faced by America. The atmosphere of the audience sharing its thoughts with Nichols on stage and vice versa resembled the feel-good programming of the US talk-show Oprah. Only, in this case everybody was united in the belief that Star Trek had and has an important part to play in the current and future ‘wellbeing’ of the nation.

The Roddenberry Collection forms a unique and original part of my overall thesis. Having published a bibliography of academic Star Trek literature it is clear to me that to date the Roddenberry collection has not been used as a research tool for a published audience study. This research trip enabled me to be the first to address the issue of original fan letters sent to Star Trek during its seminal first series. I now plan to disseminate these original findings in a scholarly article as well as in my doctoral thesis.

I would like to thank BAAS for the financial support provided by the travel grant that enabled me to travel to California. The library staff at UCLA, including Lauren Buisson and Julie Graham, deserves praise for its informed and ever-present help with the collection. I would also like to thank my supervisor, Eithne Quinn, who first made me aware of the award competition and then encouraged me to put forward an application.

Timothy Stevens, Keele University

I would like to extend my sincere thanks to the BAAS for their generous support which allowed me to visit the world’s largest collection of chess literature at the Cleveland Public Library. The reason for my trip was to continue research for my doctoral thesis, which focuses on international chess competition between the U.S and the U.S.S.R during the cold war era. Covering the span 1945-1975, my research explores the changing nature of competitive international chess during the period.

Initially employed as a cultural tool to strengthen post-war relations between the superpowers, the nature of international chess competition quickly changed. As chess was widely regarded as evidence of a powerful intellect, chess matches between players from the United States and the Soviet Union came to have important ramifications. The game became a cerebral battlefield where the victor often claimed considerable intellectual kudos on the international stage.

My thesis explores the effect chess had during the Cold War years. It explores the changing context of the game, from a means of attempting to foster friendly relations to an expression of cold war rivalry. It discusses whether, and to what extent, chess was a means by which the superpowers gained an opinion of each other’s cultural, ideological and intellectual capabilities and attributes. It explores the propaganda value of chess and the ways in which the superpowers perceived defeat and victory in chess competitions. It explores the nature of the personal relationships between the players who represented the different cultures and discusses how they actually perceived each other in the face of intense propaganda. The thesis also discusses whether chess competition affected the political climate or whether it merely reflected the political tensions of the era.
The John G. White Collection at the Cleveland Public Library was founded in 1928 when White bequeathed his collection to the Library. Due to a generous trust fund also bequeathed by White, the collection has grown considerably over the years and now consists of over 35,000 volumes. It also subscribes to 180 periodicals.

Working at the Cleveland Public Library was an absolute pleasure. Partly due to the architecture of the building, and partly due to the extremely knowledgeable and helpful staff, it was a wonderful environment to work in. Faced with such an abundance of research material, the fortnight quickly passed, but the time spent in Cleveland significantly helped my research. The complete runs of numerous historical chess periodicals were extremely useful and these are virtually impossible to find in one collection. The White Collection also contains numerous primary sources and the collections of letters and correspondence were particularly interesting and useful. The enormous array of books and newspaper articles were also extremely valuable.
Although I obviously spent the majority of my time in the library, I did have time for some enjoyable recreation, most notably watching Cleveland’s football and baseball teams, the Browns and the Indians. As my thesis relates to the notion that sport often has important broader implications, perhaps most interesting was the Major League Baseball match I attended on the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The moving expressions of remembrance before the match were augmented by a recorded address from President Bush that put forward the idea that in uniting the nation through sport, baseball was playing an important role in the healing process after 9/11.
Although the two weeks I spent in Cleveland passed extremely quickly, the trip was extremely productive. The trip was a wonderful experience and one that greatly aided my research. Once again, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to BAAS for their generous financial support.

American Studies Centre Annual Report 2002-2003

This report begins with an apology to all members of the US and UK Advisory Panels and colleagues in BAAS, for the failure on our behalf to produce an annual report for last academic year (2001-2). This was due to an on-going issue regarding extended support for the ASRC that we hoped would be resolved and that would then be reported. However, by the end of last year a resolution of the issue had not been achieved. This years report will update colleagues in its final section on the continuing problems faced by the ASRC.

ASRC Conferences and Lectures

This year’s school conference (again held in the Conference Centre of the Merseyside Maritime Museum) looked at the American Presidency. As with future such events, the topic was agreed on following consultation with teachers of American Politics and History. An audience of 200 students and teachers attended. Lectures were presented by Dr.Eddie Ashbee (Denstone College) on the Myths and Realities of Presidential Power, Frank Lennon (Liverpool Hope University College) on Franklin D.Roosevelt, Dr.Niall Palmer (Brunel University) on Lyndon B.Johnson and Professor John Dumbrell (Keele University) on Rating the Presidents. Feedback received from teachers who attended was again highly positive, recognising the ASRC’s efforts to support and advance the work of promoting the study of the US in schools and colleges of FE. Our thanks go to not only all the speakers but also to the Maritime Museum, BAAS and the Eccles Centre for their continued support of the conference programme.

The ASRC also hosted the second visit in four years from Professor Johnella Butler and Dr. John C. Walter of the University of Washington (Seattle). Lectures by both Prof. Butler and Dr. Walter were presented at Liverpool John Moores University and Manchester Metropolitan University on the topics of Muhammad Ali and the World he made (Walter) and From Color Line to Borderlands: American Ethnic Studies as Matrix (Butler.) Our thanks go not only to our two quests but also to Sue Wedlake and Dennis Wolfe at the US Embassy for their support.

CL Henson, former Head of Special Education at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, also visited the ASRC. CL has become a regular visitor over the last few years and this time advised and supported JMU students engaged in research on Native American issues. An article by CL on the generation of finance by Native Americans through Casinos will appear in this years issue of American Studies Today and in the near future on the ASRC web site. It had been hoped that the ASRC would also host a lecture by the award-winning writer Annie Proulx; However, this was postponed until a possible future date.

ASRC Web site (ARNet)

David Forster has continued his work on the development of the ASRC web site. As well as numerous new book reviews and original articles, the ASRC AV Catalogue has been placed on line for subscribers. The hard copy catalogue will no longer be produced. The latest statistical returns show that the web site has now received in excess of 3 million hits since its re-launch in March 1998. In March 2003 the site received at total of 42,426 hits, the highest monthly figure so far achieved.

Requests and Student Visits to the ASRC

As noted in previous annual reports, the number of ‘mailed’ requests to the ASRC has decreased substantially. However, this has been off set by a dramatic increase in emailed requests, not just from the UK but also worldwide. Contacts have also been established with a number of American Universities and Reference Centres and plans are under discussion for visits, during summer vacations, by US students and lecturers. JMU and LCC (Liverpool Community College) students also continue to make an extensive use of all the ASRC’s facilities.

The number of UK schools and colleges visiting the ASRC for study days has also increased. It is hoped that these visits and the school conference programme will reinforce the profile of American Studies in secondary and further education.
The ASRC has also dealt with an increased number of requests from the media, particularly the BBC and the Discovery Channel.

News of Advisory Panel Members

Our congratulations go to two of our UK Panel members. Dr.Eddie Ashbee has secured a position as Associate Professor in American Studies at the University of Copenhagen Business School in Denmark and Steve Kenny (now living in Memphis, Tennessee) has been awarded his PhD by JMU for his research into medical practices in 19th century America.

Pam Wonsek (City University New York) of our US Advisory Panel, will be visiting the ASRC in early July to offer continued advice and support in ways we can develop our services.

Ian Ralston has been appointed as Chair of the Libraries and Resources Sub-Committee of BAAS. ASRC Resources Co-ordinator and Web Manager, David Forster has also joined the Sub-Committee.

2003-4

The schools conference for next academic year will take place in November. The topic will be The US and the Cold War. Details and booking forms can be found on the ASRC web site. (http://www.americansc.org.uk/Conferences/Cold_war.htm)
As noted at the start of this report, the ASRC still faces significant problems that have held back an extension/improvement of opening hours as well as the development of a number of projects. It had been hoped that additional sources of funding, over and above that the ASRC already generates, would be forthcoming. However, this has not been the case. Consequently, the ASRC has decided that in order to secure the future development and maintenance of our work, all possibilities regarding its future location and funding will be considered and evaluated. UK and US Panel members will be informed of all developments in this area.

Ian Ralston, ASRC Director
June 2003

E-mail: I.Ralston@livjm.ac.uk
Web site: www.americansc.org.uk

BAAS Requests

BAAS Conference Easter 2006: Call for Conference Bids

The BAAS Executive Committee are interested in any institutional bids for hosting the BAAS Easter conference in 2006. Initial interest in submitting a bid should be addressed in the first instance to Dr Tim Woods, Chair, BAAS Conference Sub-Committee, Dept of English, Hugh Owen Building, Penglais, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales, SY23 3DY, or by email to tww@aber.ac.uk.

Guidelines on the information required by the Conference Sub-Committee for submitting a bid will be sent out to all enquiries. Fully completed final bids will need to be sent to Dr Tim Woods by 22 September, 2003, in order that the Conference Sub-Committee can consider the bids at its early October meeting. It would be expected that the successful institution will be notified shortly thereafter.

BAAS Short-Term Travel Award Recipients

I am trying to compile a list of all of the recipients of BAAS Travel Awards. If you have been the recipient of such an award, please could you write to or email me with your name and contact information, the approximate date of your award, and your research topic.

Many thanks for your help.

Simon Newman
Chair, Development Sub-Committee

Department of History
1 University Gardens
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ

Telephone: 0141 330 3585
Fax: 0141 330 5000
E-mail: spn@arts.gla.ac.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

Subject Centre Report for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Events

We have held a considerable number of workshops across all our subject areas this year. The events pages of the website provide more detail about the programme and in many cases an event report. Go to: www.lang.ltsn.ac.uk/events/llaseventsarchive.aspx

Sample listing of events:
Curriculum 2000 and the implications for HE
Institutional visit to Coventry University attended by staff from Coventry, Aston, Warwick, Birmingham, Staffordshire.
Using Virtual Learning Environment for Languages
Personal Development Planning in Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies
Area Studies Network meeting
Intercultural learning and the role of visual media
Interactive Whiteboards for Language Teaching
Computer Assisted Assessment
Pedagogical Research workshop
Teaching on less commonly taught Area Studies programmes
Interdisciplinarity & inter-cultural learning in Area Studies curricula
Implications of the White Paper and the National Languages Strategy
Key Skills and Assessment in Linguistics
Set texts? New approaches to the teaching of literature in languages and related studies/area studies

Projects

We are now involved in such a broad array of projects that we have devoted an edition of our newsletter Liaison Light to them. Copies of the newsletter are available from the Subject Centre. Liaison Light can also be viewed online at www.lang.ltsn.ac.uk/news/newsletter.aspx

Selected List of projects included in the newsletter:
Materials Bank
Good practice guide
Pedagogical Research
Area Studies project
The forthcoming Learning Technologies project

Several of these projects also contain mini-projects – a good way of involving a wider range of expertise and sharing out funding amongst the community.

Other Resources

Website
The new Subject Centre website was launched in January 2003. It is database driven, resource rich and, we hope, easy to navigate. The website continues to be well received and is being updated constantly. The next project involves working with the website consultant at Southampton to integrate into the website the software database previously managed by the Subject Centre team at the University of Hull.

Revised PowerPoint presentation
We have produced another version of the ‘Why study languages/linguistics/area studies?’ CD which includes updated statistics from Keith Marshall and additional slides. This can be obtained from the Subject Centre with LLAS notes (see below).

LLAS Notes
We are producing a book of useful facts and figures on student numbers in our subject areas (GCSE, A Level, university applications etc). This is available in August and will be distributed free of charge to those who complete the online booking form. This is available at www.lang.ltsn.ac.uk/mailinglist/notebookfrm.aspx

Area Studies Bulletin: Atlas
We have recently published the first issue of ‘Atlas: the bulletin of the Area Studies projects’. If you are interested in receiving a free copy of this, contact Marie Weaver at the Subject Centre (M.Weaver@soton.ac.uk).

Information Sheets
The following information sheets have been produced/updated since January 2003 by Dawn Ebbrell, Subject Centre/CILT HE Information officer:

Information sheets: 26, 28 and 31 on subject associations updated – to feed into contribution on Subject Associations to web guide.
NEW: Studying Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies at University –three new Fact Sheets which can be downloaded from the Subject Centre website at: www.lang.ltsn.ac.uk/resources/resourcesitem.aspx?resourceid=1586

Languages: Work Project
This project has received funding from the DfES for a two-year period to create promotional materials for languages for school pupils and careers advisers. Subject Centre staff are represented on the Steering Group of this project.

Other Activities

Foundation Degrees
The Subject Centre convened an informal meeting held immediately before this UCML plenary to discuss the implications of foundation degrees for our subject areas.

Scotland
The partnership with Scottish CILT is now well established and the second meeting of the Scottish Advisory Group took place on 16 May. The Chair of the Scottish Advisory Group is John Joseph, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.

Wales
The Subject Centre is working with Keith Marshall, Director of CILT Cymru, to set up a partnership to support colleagues in Wales following the SCILT model. In addition to this we have, in partnership with Alison Allan at HEFCW, convened a meeting of those involved in the teaching of Welsh in HE in January 2003. At present, we are in discussion with HEFCW about the future role and remit of this group.

Learning Technologies
The Learning Technologies Special Interest Group met in February. Additional members were added to the group. The group provided useful advice to the Subject Centre on the shaping of the call for bids for the learning technologies project on ‘Rethinking pedagogical models for e learning’. Eight bids were submitted. The University of Sheffield was awarded the project.

2004 Conference
The Subject Centre and CILT are starting to think about a conference for July 2004. The focus will be languages and related studies with strands on policy as well as pedagogy. Partners in the conference are UCML, SCHML and AULC. The conference will take place from 30 June to 1 July at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Higher Education Academy
The Report of the Teaching Quality Enhancement Committee published in January 2003 recommended that a new Higher Education Academy be established. The Academy would bring together the functions of ILTHE, HESDA and LTSN and develop new functions to better support the enhancement needs and interests of higher education communities. At present, the functions and remit of the academy are being developed in detail. Subject Centres should be fully integrated into the Academy by August 2004.
E J Ashurst, Subject Centre Manager
E.J.Ashurst@soton.ac.uk

Conference Reports

International American Studies Association: First World Congress

The first World Congress of the International American Studies Association took place in Leiden, the Netherlands, in May 2003. Despite the unstable international situation and the SARS epidemic which brought about several last-minute cancellations from the Far East, there were still about 220 participants from five continents. The theme of the conference was “How Far is America From Here?,” and the intellectual exchanges around this topic reflected the controversial and fractious nature of America’s relationship to global politics and culture in the twenty-first century. Unlike some more localized organizations, the focus of IASA is on the United States and the Americas generally as components of a larger world system, and the three plenary speakers gave outstanding talks examining these issues from different perspectives. In “How Far is America from America?,” Werner Sollors from Harvard spoke about American literature and culture as a multilingual phenomenon; in “Resisting Terror, Resisting Empire: The Evolving Ethos in American Studies,” Kousar Jabeen Azam from Hyderabad, India, addressed the “cultural turn” in international relations; while Edouard Glissant from Martinique expounded his theory of métissage in relation to the transatlantic position of Caribbean culture in his lecture “The Politics of Diversity and the Poetics of Mondialité.” Plenary addresses, supposed as they are to combine academic innovation with a broader general appeal to non-specialists, are notoriously difficult to do well, but as a trio these were the most successful examples of the genre I have ever heard. Glissant, who is averse to flying, had arrived by ship from New York only the day before he was scheduled to speak, having caused the organizers some anxiety about whether or not his Atlantic crossing would be blessed by a fair wind.

The Congress also featured a productive exchange between Djelal Kadir, the founder and president of IASA, and Amy Kaplan, President of the American Studies Association, about the role and function of American Studies in the world today. Professor Kaplan had been invited to give a response to Professor Kadir’s first presidential address with a view to establishing the kind of intellectual dialogue and opportunity for disagreement which is, perhaps, not common enough on today’s conference circuit. The organization of the individual panels—two hours for each session—was also designed to allow enough time for more expansive debate and audience participation, rather than having the familiar situation where speakers are shoehorned into tight time grids and everyone is forced to watch the clock. Speakers from Britain included Theresa Saxon from Manchester Metropolitan and Catherine Toal from Cambridge on Melville; Pedro Garcia-Caro from King’s College London on Fuentes and Pynchon; David Ryan from De Montfort along with Liam Kennedy and Scott Lucas from Birmingham on American foreign policy and representation after 9/11; Alex Seago from Richond on the “deterritorialization of pop” and the music of black Detroit; Susan Castillo from Glasgow on Creole identity in New England; Maria Lauret from Sussex in roundtables on multi-ethnic studies and autobiographical writing; Susan Manning and Penny Fielding from Edinburgh on Scottish-American relations; Helen Dennis from Warwick on Native American writing; Duco van Oostrum from Sheffield and Jude Davies from Winchester on American images; Andrew Pepper from Belfast on the internationalization of Hollywood; Celeste-Marie Bernier from Nottingham on Frederick Douglass; and Jay Kleinberg from Brunel, Harry Bennett from Plymouth and Philip Davies from De Montfort in a roundtable on American Studies journals.

Although the largest American Studies association in the world is in India (not the USA), there are some areas of the world, particularly in Asia and Australasia, where the professional organization of the subject is not so widely developed, and participants from these countries particularly welcomed the opportunity to debate the directions in which American Studies might be heading. It was also interesting and illuminating to compare responses from U.S. delegates to those which emerged from other parts of the world, and so to get a sense of how the idea of American Studies works differently in different locations. The programme featured many speakers with extensive experience in American Studies organizations—including Janice Radway, past president of the ASA, Emory Elliott from the international committee of the ASA and Heinz Ickstadt, former president of EAAS—and the best of these sessions had the feel of an “événement,” an old-style Sixties “happening,” where it was difficult to predict who might come under attack or what might happen next.

The Congress is expected to convene on a biennial basis, with the next meeting scheduled for 2005, probably in either Mexico or India, where it is expected that the weather will be warmer than it was this time round in Leiden. Further information about IASA can be found on the organization’s website: http://www.iasa.LA.psu.edu

Paul Giles

Star/Symbiosis Conference, Edinburgh, July 18-21, 2003

Those who attended the ‘Across the Great Divide’ conference in Edinburgh from 18th-21st July 2003 have attested to its overwhelming success. This joint event was the fourth annual conference of Symbiosis, the journal of Anglo-American literary relations, and the first conference of the Carnegie Trust-funded STAR (Scotland’s Transatlantic Relations) Project. Appropriately, it brought together 87 delegates from both sides of the Atlantic and from Canada to Argentina for four days of stimulating dialogue on all aspects of literary, theoretical, and material transatlantic cultural exchange between the British Isles and the Americas. In addition to events held at the University of Edinburgh, the National Library of Scotland (NLS) and the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) sponsored and hosted several conference sessions. ‘Across the Great Divide’ received important support from The University of Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures and the University Development Trust; thanks are also due to Professor Vicki Bruce, Head of the College of Humanities and Social Science, for her support of the event.

The conference began on Friday evening with Professor Amy Kaplan’s plenary lecture, ‘Between Empires: Frances Calderón de la Barca’s Life in Mexico (1843)’, in the Boardroom of the NLS. Professor Kaplan’s new work on this Scottish-born woman’s experience as the wife of a Spanish diplomat in Mexico stimulated lively discussion and set the tone for the rest of the conference. Afterwards, delegates retired to Edinburgh University’s magnificent Playfair Library for a reception marking the official launch of the STAR Project. During the course of the next three days, delegates would present 70 papers on panels that included Transatlantic Romanticism; British Cultures and the Black Atlantic; Constructing the Transatlantic Experience; (Re)creating National Identity; Emigration; Periodicals; Wharton and James; Arthur Conan Doyle and the United States; Britain and the Spanish Americas; Revolution, War, and Transatlantic Identity; Transplanted Religion; Translating Religious Experience; Transatlantic Connections in Music; and Gothic Literature.

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS), the Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA), and the School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures, the conference organisers were able to provide financial support to postgraduates giving papers at the meeting. And at mid-day on Saturday, the STAR Postgraduate Luncheon served as a valuable opportunity for students to give feedback on the direction they would like to see STAR take. Discussion included the format of the STAR Postgraduate Seminar in American Studies, which will reconvene for its second year in Edinburgh in October 2003, and new web content and links that people would like added to the STAR site. A consensus emerging here and throughout the conference was that there is a great demand to expand the project’s scope to include connections between Britain and the Spanish Americas; STAR will begin to facilitate these requests in the coming months.

The proceedings on Saturday afternoon were sponsored by the National Museums of Scotland; many thanks are due to Mr. George Dalgleish and Dr. David Forsyth for their organisation of these stimulating events, which were much enjoyed by delegates. To kick off the ‘museum afternoon’, Dr. Forsyth led a talk in the Royal Museum Lecture Theatre on the NMS’s exciting new Trailblazers: Scots in Canada exhibition, which will run from 17th October 2003 until 4th January 2004. Jenni Calder then put a literary bent on the material culture theme in her plenary lecture, ‘Changing Place: The Migrating Meanings of Objects’, in which she discussed the role of objects in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners and Alistair MacLeod’s collection of stories Island. Following a refreshment break in the Royal Museum’s Bird Hall, George Dalgleish and David Forsyth each led a museum tour that sharpened appetites for future investigations of the collections. Delegates then reconvened in the Royal Museum Lecture Theatre for an absorbing panel entitled ‘The Undelivered Letters: Bridging the Great Divide’. This session centred on the personal tales that have emerged from a series of recently discovered letters, many of which originated in Orkney, which were written to Hudson’s Bay Company men in Canada between 1830 and 1857.

Sunday morning saw further noteworthy sessions and a lively luncheon during which a planned business meeting was postponed in favour of the more immediate pleasures of impromptu Italian entertainment. In the afternoon, Professor Ludmilla Jordanova delivered the third plenary lecture of the conference, on ‘Artists, Portraits, Fiction’. Her memorable illustrated talk on the role of art in fiction explored interconnections in the lives and work of John Singer Sargent, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and nudged emerging themes of the conference into new avenues of interdisciplinary discussion. Later that evening, delegates gathered on the terrace of the Café Hub for a drinks reception, to enjoy good weather and scenic views of the Royal Mile before heading inside for a congenial meal, a musical performance by singer/storyteller Stuart McHardy, and further good talk.

A final day of panel sessions at Old College preceded the concluding event, Monday evening’s ‘Dead Poets / Live Poets’ reading at the National Library of Scotland. Convened by Dr. Nick Selby (University of Glasgow) with the generous assistance of Dr. Kevin Halliwell (NLS), the event utilised the NLS’s archive recordings from the Academy of American Poets to celebrate the rich relationship between American poetry and contemporary poetry written in Scotland. Live readings by Susan Castillo, Alan Riach, Gael Turnbull, and Geoff Ward were interspersed with recordings of the American poets whose work has most shaped their poetry. In the interval, delegates were able to take a saunter around the current NLS exhibition ‘Wish you were here!: Travellers’ Tales from Scotland 1540-1960’.

All in all, ‘Across the Great Divide’ served as a tremendous opportunity for scholarly exchange; much exciting new work emerged, and both the journal Symbiosis and the STAR Project will build on the momentum gained through publication of papers from the conference. Updates on this and other initiatives can be found on the STAR website (www.star.ac.uk). Thanks again to all who participated, and supported the event!

Susan Manning
Elisabeth Dodds

European Historians of the United States

European Historians of the United States celebrated the tenth anniversary of the founding of their association with their regular biennial conference at the Roosevelt Study Centre in Middleburg in the Netherlands. Founded in 1993, with David Adams of Keele University as Founding Father, the conferences of the European Historians of the United States at Middleburg every second year have been consistently intellectually stimulating and socially very pleasant. This year’s conference on April 23-25, 2003, was no exception. It attracted historians of the United States from a wide variety of countries, including Britain, Italy, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France and Spain, as well as Canada and the United States. There was a strong British representation on the programme, including Tony Badger, Rob Lewis, Melvyn Stokes, Louis Billington, David Brown, David Adams, Peter Boyle, Steve Ickringill and Joseph Smith.

The theme of the conference was Frontiers and Boundaries. The definition was broad, allowing a wide variety of approaches, including Thomas Jefferson’s Expeditions to the West, the Communist Party and the Ideological Boundary, Hawaiian Statehood, Frontiers and Boundaries as Reflected in American Film, the Louisiana Cajuns, the Multi-Ethnic Frontiers of the Industrial City and America’s Territorial Frontier in the Philippines. As with previous conferences it is expected that an edition of a selection of the papers will be published as a book. The editors will be the conference organizers, Cornelius van Minnen, Director of the Roosevelt Study Centre in Middleburg, and Sylvia Hilton, from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid. The smooth, efficient organization of the conference was, as usual, an important reason for its success.

The next conference of European Historians of the United States will be held at the Roosevelt Study Centre in April, 2005. An announcement of the theme and a call for papers will be made in due course.

Peter Boyle
University of Nottingham

Conference Announcements

American Politics Group Annual Conference

Paper proposals for the annual American Politics Group conference are welcomed.

The conference will be held at the Rothermere Centre for American Studies, Oxford University, between January 2 and 4, 2004.

The conference organisers will be delighted to consider any proposals on American politics or recent American political history.

Please contact:

Professor John Dumbrell
American Studies
Keele University
Staffs ST5 5BG,

or e-mail: j.w.dumbrell@ams.keele.ac.uk
BAAS/American Politics Group Annual Colloquium

This year’s colloquium will be held at the US Embassy on November 14.There will be sessions on the US Presidency, 40 years on from John Kennedy’s assassination and on US-European relations after the Iraq war.

Anyone interested should contact:

Professor John Dumbrell
American Studies
Keele University
Staffs ST5 5BG,

or E-mail: j.w.dumbrell@ams.keele.ac.uk.

Fourth MESEA Conference, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece May 20 – 23, 2004

Ethnic Communities in Democratic Societies

Proposals for workshops and papers may engage the following topics, among others:
Negotiation of culture, language, religion within (non-)territorial communities / Parochialism and globalization / Community and fragmentation in global cities / Communitarianism vs. rights / Literary and artistic productions within transnational democracies / Aesthetic concerns of ethnic subjects in democratic societies / How literature reflects democratic concerns / Negotiating ethnic exceptionalism and participation in a larger collectivity / Nation states and imagined communities / Nationalism and transnational loyalties / Nativism and racism in democratic contexts / Ethnic Press and transnationalism / Ethnic community vs. local law / (Il)legal immigration / Transnational identities / Fragmented identities / Political agency, political choices / Balkanization of mentality / Bastions of ethnic tolerance / Citizenship and ethnopolitics / Civis and civility / Ethnic anxieties / Ethnic discrimination and affirmative actions / Ethnogenesis and ethnostasis / From Confrontation to cooperation / Internal colonialisms / Mythologized nationalisms / Xenophobia/xenophilia.

Deadline for proposals: December 20, 2003.

Send a one-page proposal and a one-paragraph bio on the same page as E-mail submission to:

raphael-hernandez@mesea.org

Dr. Heike Raphael-Hernandez
University of Maryland in Europe
Im Bosseldorn 30
69126 Heidelberg
Germany

Only members of MESEA or MELUS may present papers at this conference.
For membership information please check: www.mesea.org

Transatlantic Studies Association 2004 Annual Conference

The annual conference in 2004 will be Monday-Thursday July 12-15 in Dundee.

In the light of feedback from delegates and comment in the TSA Newsletter there will be themed interdisciplinary/multi-disciplinary panels as well as discipline specific panels. We would welcome suggestions for themed panels in addition to the following:

Multi/Inter-disciplinary Themed Panels

The impact of race and migration in the transatlantic region
The cold war
Slavery
European-Latin American relations
Anglo-American relations
The impact of us bases in Europe
Anti-Americanism in Europe & anti-Europeanism in America

Disciplinary Panels

History, Diplomacy, Security Studies and International Relations
Literature and Culture
Economics
Planning and the Environment

Please start to offer papers.
All proposals should be presented in a short synopsis (100 words) along with a brief cv.
They should be sent to Alan Dobson at a.p.dobson@dundee.ac.uk

To reach him on or before 1 November 2003.

Crosstown Traffic: Anglo-American Cultural Exchange since 1865
University of Warwick, UK: July 4-6, 2004

An interdisciplinary conference co-sponsored by The North American Conference on British Studies, The Royal Historical Society and The British Association for American Studies

Much has been written about the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States on the level of high politics and diplomacy. Rather less, however, has been written about the presumed existence of a shared, common culture-a culture that has, since the American Civil War, been actively cultivated and promoted as a way of cementing that ‘special relationship’. Still less, perhaps, has been written about the equally important cross-fertilization that has taken place in the realm of the popular cultures of the two nations. This conference proposes a wide-ranging inquiry into the cultural manifestations of the ‘special relationship’ and into the transatlantic traffic in cultural styles, attitudes and motifs between Britain and the United States since the late nineteenth century. Paper and panel proposals will be considered that address the multiplicity of exchanges that have developed between the two nations-both in the realm of specific media (fashion, film, literature and music, for example), and more generally in the cultures of consumption and popular politics. The conference will focus on the traffic in culture that has taken place in either direction across the Atlantic and in both directions. It will pay particular attention to the social differences which influenced the definition and purchase of ‘the popular’ in the two countries and to those differences in racial attitudes which at first divided and then, creatively, brought the two cultures closer together.

Conference organizers: Marybeth Hamilton (Birkbeck College, London), Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge) and Chris Waters (Williams College, Massachusetts).

Proposals are invited for individual thirty-minute presentations or full panels by 1st October 2003. Please send a 250-word synopsis, and a one-page cv to:

Dr Chris Waters
Williams College Oxford Programme
145 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 7AN
E-mail: cwaters@williams.edu
Tel/Fax: 01865.512345

Transit of Venus: An International Pynchon Conference, Malta, June 8-10, 2004

This three-day event, slated to coincide with the next Transit of Venus (June 8, 2004), will provide a forum for wide-ranging engagement with the totality of Pynchon’s work to date.

We welcome presentations on any Pynchon-related subject, taking any critical or theoretical approach; studies of individual texts or of Pynchon’s oeuvre; studies of the texts in themselves or in cultural, literary-historical or other context. We also welcome presentations on other subjects that may appear to particular advantage viewed through the lens of Pynchon’s work.

To facilitate a rich and stimulating exchange of views, all presentations will be in plenary session. Each speaker will be allotted thirty minutes.

Selected conference proceedings will be published as a special issue of Pynchon Notes.

Held in Valletta, the conference will also include a tour of Pynchon’s Malta, observation of the Transit of Venus, and archival displays to complement the academic schedule.

Presentations may take the form of individual papers, media presentations, or panels. Please submit proposals/abstracts (in English) of 500-750 words for individual presentations, or of 1,000-1,500 words for panels. (Also, please specify what, if any, audiovisual or other equipment may be needed.) Responses to inquiries and notification of acceptance will be by E-mail.

Deadline for proposals: October 15, 2003.
Decisions by December 1, 2003.

Proposals should be E-mailed to Vaska Tumir: Vtumir@conestogac.on.ca

Conference organizers:
Vaska Tumir
School of Liberal Studies, Conestoga College, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
John M. Krafft
English Department, Miami University-Hamilton, Hamilton, Ohio, USA

Conference sponsors:
The University of Malta
St John The Cavalier Centre for Creativity, Valletta, Malta

New Members

Tim Blessing is Associate Professor of History at Alvernia College, Reading, Pennsylvania. His research interests are Western Executive, Appalachian Studies and popular culture 1920-1945.

Harina Cacloppo received her DPhil from the University of Sussex where she completed a thesis on Italian American ethnicity.

James Campbell is a postgraduate student at the University of Nottingham researching criminal justice in antebellum Virginia.

Alexandra Ganser is currently doing research for her doctoral thesis on representations of landscape and nature in postmodern American travel fiction. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to study at the University of Oklahoma.

Rowland Hughes currently teaches part-time at both University College London and the University of Hertfordshire. He completed a PhD on early frontier writing.

Kevin Hunt is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham working on the visible word in American art of the twentieth century, with a particular interest in the impact of advertising and graphic design.

David McBride is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham where he is working on a comparative study of US and UK foreign policy in the Middle East, 1945-1956.

Peter McLeay retired from the University of Wolverhampton and is currently working on an introductory text on American Studies.

Stephanie Palmer teaches in the American Studies Centre at the University of Leicester and has general research interests in literature, gender studies and cultural studies, and more specifically in fictional narratives of travel accidents as ways of staging mixed class and regional identities in postbellum American literature.

Julia Pühringer is a student at the University of Vienna currently working on a dissertation about the genre of film noir and its representation in recent US cinema.

Markus Rheindorf is a lecturer in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna. His research interests are film, transposition and adaptation, academic writing, comics and interactive media.

Nicholas Sharman is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne where he is working on the Chicago Seven trial.

Dale Townshend is a postgraduate at Keele University who interested in the use of gothic conventions in nineteenth-century American slave narratives.

Albert Zambone is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford and is currently working on a thesis about popular Anglicism and intellectual culture in colonial Virginia, 1688-1776.

Members’ News

In the Spring 2003, Deborah Madsen took up the Chair of American Literature at the University of Geneva. Her new book, Beyond the Borders: American Literature and Post-Colonial Theory is published by Pluto Press in Autumn 2003.

Edward Ashbee has been appointed Associate Professor of American Studies at Copenhagen Business School.

Dr. John A. Kirk (History, Royal Holloway) won the J. G. Ragsdale Book Award
from the Arkansas Historical Association for best non-fiction book-length study on any subject related to state history for Redefining the ColorLine: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940-1970 (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 2002).

Members’ Publications

Paul Grainge, Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America (Westport and London: Praeger, 2002)

Paul Grainge (ed), Memory and Popular Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)

W. B. Stephens, Sources for U.S. History: Nineteenth-Century Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Following the success of the hardback version of this book, CUP have reissued the book in paperback as part of the History Repeats Itself series.

Graham Thompson, Male Sexuality under Surveillance: The Office in American Literature (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2003)

BAAS Membership of Committees

Executive Committee Elected:

Professor Philip Davies (Chair, first elected 1998, term ends 2004)
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH E-mail: pjd@dmu.ac.uk

Dr Heidi Macpherson (Secretary, first elected 2002, term ends 2005)
Department of Cultural Studies, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 2HE
E-mail: hrsmacpherson@uclan.ac.uk

Dr Nick Selby (Treasurer, first elected 2000, term ends 2006)
E-mail: N.Selby@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Professor Janet Beer
Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University, Geoffrey Marton Building, Roasamond St. West, Manchester M15 6LL
E-mail: J.Beer@mmu.ac.uk

Professor Susan Castillo (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ
E-mail: S.Castillo@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Dr Jude Davies (first elected 2002, term ends 2005)
Department of American Studies, King Alfred’s College of Higher Education, Winchester, SO22 4NR
E-mail: Jude.Davies@wkac.ac.uk

Ms Catherine Morley (Postgraduate Representative, first elected 2002, term ends 2004)
School of Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane Campus, Headington, OX3 OBP
E-mail: c.morley@brookes.ac.uk

Dr Simon Newman (first elected 1999, term ends 2005)*
Director, American Studies, Modern History, 2 University Gardens, Glasgow University, Glasgow G12
E-mail: s.newman@modhist.arts.gla.ac.uk

Dr Ian Scott (first elected 2003, term ends 2006)
Department of English and American Studies, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL
E-mail: Ian.scott@man.ac.uk

Dr Carol Smith (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred’s College, Winchester SO22 4NR
E-mail: Carol.Smith@wkac.ac.uk

Dr Graham Thompson (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
Department of English, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH
E-mail: gthompson@dmu.ac.uk

Dr Peter Thompson (first elected 2002, term ends 2005)
St. Cross College, St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LZ
E-mail: peter.thompson@stx.ox.ac.uk

Dr Jenel Virden (first elected 2002, term ends 2007)* Representative to EAAS, Department of American Studies, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX
Tel: 01482 465638/303
Fax: 01482 465303
E-mail: J.Virden@amstuds.hull.ac.uk

Dr Tim Woods, Department of English, Hugh Owen Building, Penglais, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales, SY23 3DY
E-mail: tww@aber.ac.uk

Ms Kathryn Cooper (Co-opted), Development Subcommittee
Loreto 6th Form College, Chicester Road, Manchester M15 5PB
E-mail: kathcooper@cwcom.net

Dr Jay Kleinberg, (Ex-Officio), Editor, Journal of American Studies, American Studies, Brunel University, 300 St Margarets Road, Twickenham, Middlesex TW1 1PT
E-mail: Jay.Kleinberg@Brunel.ac.uk

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

BAAS Sub-Committee Members

Development:
Professor Simon Newman (Chair)
Ms Kathryn Cooper
Professor Philip Davies
Ms. Catherine Morley (Postgraduate Representative)
Dr Ian Scott
Dr. Peter Thompson
Dr Iain Wallace

Publications:
Professor Janet Beer (Chair)
Dr Jay Kleinberg (JAS)
Dr Heidi Macpherson
Professor Ken Morgan (BRRAM)
Dr Carol Smith (BAAS Paperbacks)
Dr Graham Thompson (ASIB and website)
Dr Jenel Virden

Conference:
Dr Tim Woods (Chair)
Dr Susan Castillo
Dr. Jude Davies
Dr Sarah MacLachlan (2004 Conference Secretary)
Dr Michael McDonnell
Dr. Nick Selby

Libraries and Resources:
Mr Ian Ralston (Chair)
Dr Kevin Halliwell

Editorial

This year’s annual conference is fast approaching and I’m pleased that this issue of the newsletter contains not only registration forms for Aberystwyth but also a provisional programme that should give you all some indication of what to expect over the weekend of April 11-14th. As usual, the line up of plenary speakers and panel papers highlights not only the diversity of work taking place in American Studies—you can choose between race resistance, cyberculture, popular music and native American literature in the first session alone—but also the ability of the conference to attract participants from a global American Studies community. This year there are speakers from Turkey, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, France, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hong Kong, Greece, New Zealand and the United States.

The international dimension to our annual conference is an important ingredient to its continued success and undoubtedly helps in that process of forging and developing the intellectual networks on which we all rely and which are an ever more important dimension to the study of American cultures and societies (however defined). This definition, and the entangled nature of US and non-US life, has been something that the Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies Project (AMATAS) has drawn our attention to over the last couple of years. The one-day conference at Preston to mark the end of the project’s HEFCE funding was, by all accounts, a stimulating event. The full and frank report carried in this issue of the newsletter provides everyone involved with American Studies food for thought when they enter the classroom or embark upon their research projects. Even if no-one has, as yet, responded to my offer to explore some of these ‘discipline’ issues in future editions of the newsletter, the AMATAS event is proof that such important discussions are taking place elsewhere. Hopefully, the newsletter will be able to act as a forum for continued debate.

Just a final word on the Aberystwyth conference. In order to give you even more information about the content of panels, this year BAAS is hoping to offer you the chance to look at abstracts of the papers on the BAAS website (http://http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site) in the weeks prior to the start of the conference. Keep checking the website for updates about this.

Graham Thompson
Department of English
De Montfort University
Leicester LE1 9BH

E-Mail: gthompson@dmu.ac.uk

Aberystwyth Conference, April 11-14, 2003

Notice of BAAS AGM

Agenda:

1. Elections: Treasurer, 3 committee members, any other offices that fall vacant before the AGM
2. Treasurer’s report
3. Chair’s report
4. Amendments to the Constitution
5. Annual Conferences 2004-2006
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

At the 2003 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 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 Sunday 13 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.

The AGM will also be asked to consider proposing an amendment to the constitution in order to restrict Short Term Travel Awards to members of BAAS. If desired, an amendment would come before the 2004 AGM for ratification.

Dr. Heidi Macpherson
BAAS Secretary
Department of Cultural Studies
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
United Kingdom
Tel. (01772) 893039 or 893020
hrsmacpherson@uclan.ac.uk

Costs and Registration

Details about this year’s annual conference in Aberystwyth are now in the process of being finalised. The costs are as follows:

Full BAAS Members: En-suite £170, Standard £145
Postgraduate and UK Teachers BAAS Members: En-suite £160, Standard £135
Non-BAAS Members: En-suite £190, Standard £165
Postgraduate Non-BAAS Members: En-suite £170, Standard £145

Extended Stay on April 10 or April 14:
En-suite Single Room Bed & Breakfast £28
Standard Single Room Bed & Breakfast £20

Banquet on Sunday night 13 April (to inc. wines) £27.50

A registration and booking form is available at the conference website:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/visitors/conferences/baas/Introduction.html

You can also find a copy at the back of this newsletter.

Any queries about the conference can be addressed to:

Dr Tim Woods
BAAS Conference Secretary
Department of English
Hugh Owen Building
Penglais
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Ceredigion, SY 23 3DY
Wales, UK
Tel: +44 1970 622534
Fax: +44 1970 622530
E-Mail: tww@aber.ac.uk

Provisional Programme

NOTE: Please note that this is a first draft of the conference programme and the schedule will no doubt be subject to alterations owing to unforeseen withdrawals or other problems which may cause the panels to change times, or the composition of panels to alter slightly. An amended and final draft of the conference schedule will of course be printed for the conference and included within the conference pack. You will note that the Transatlantic Studies Association will be holding panel sessions in parallel with those organised for BAAS.

Friday, April 11th

1.00 – 4.00pm Conference Registration at Penbryn Hall

5.00 – 6.00pm Plenary Lecture Theatre A12 Hugh Owen Building

6.00 – 7.00pm Reception hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University, hosts of BAAS Conference 2004 In UWA Arts Centre (top floor)

7.00 – 8.00pm Evening Meal (hot buffet, cafeteria style) Penbryn Hall

8.00pm till late Rosser Bar

Saturday, April 12th

7.45 – 8.45am Breakfast Penbryn Hall

9.00-10.30am PANEL SESSION I

1. Massive Resistance
George Lewis (University of Leicester) “Thoughtful Resistance: The Virginia Commission for Constitutional Government, and the Response to School Desegregation”
John A. Kirk (Royal Holloway and Bedford New College) “The Rise and Fall of School Desegregation in Little Rock Arkansas, 1954-1957”
John Drabble (Koc University, Turkey) “The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE and the Decline of Ku Klux Klan Organizations in Mississippi, 1964-1971”

2. Cyborgs and Cyberculture
Alexandra Goody (Oxford Brookes University) “Dada, Cyborgs and the New Woman in New York”
Tatiana Rapatzikou (University of East Anglia) “Noir Crossovers: Urban Crime Narratives and Cyberpunk”
Caroline Bate (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) Cyberculture and Feminism

3. From America to (Every)Where? The Location and Relocation of Popular Music
Jude Davies (King Alfred’s College, Winchester) “‘I’m so bored with the USA – but what can I do?’ Affiliations and Disaffiliations with the American-ness of Popular Music”
Alex Seago (The American International University in London) “Where Hamburgers Sizzle on an Open Grill Night and Day (?) – The Declining Significance of the United States in Global Popular Music”
David Ingram (Brunel University) “‘My Dirty Stream’: 1960s folk music and environmental protest”
Chris Gair (University of Birmingham) “‘The Hardest Questions in Our Darkest Hours’: New Country and 9/11”

4. Encyclopaedic Novels Reconsidered
Luc Herman (University of Antwerp) “Gravity’s Encyclopedia Revisited”
Mike Crowley (University of Georgia) “A Cosmology of Singularities: Authenticity in Don DeLillo’s Underworld”
Gert Morrell (University of Antwerp) “The Ethics of Encyclopedism: Virtue and Knowledge in The Last Samurai”

5. Native American Literature
Chair: Martin Padget (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
Annie Kirby (University of Wales, Swansea) “Crossblood Tricksters, Dead Dogs and AlterNative Warriors: Native Humour and the Subversion of Academic Discourse”
Rebecca Tillet (University of Essex) “Resting in Peace Not in Pieces: The concerns of the Living Dead in Anna Lee Walters’ Ghost Singer”
David Stirrup (University of Leeds) “Artefact and Authenticity: Narrative Strategy in Contemporary Native American Fiction”

Transatlantic Studies Association

1. World War Two and the Building of an Anglo-American Alliance: The Institutional/Individual Nexus
Convenor: Priscilla Roberts (University of Hong Kong)
Chair: Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (University of Edinburgh) TBC
Priscilla Roberts (University of Hong-Kong) “Lord Lothian and the Atlantic World, 1910-1940”
Simon Rofe (University of Kent at Canterbury) “Lord Lothian and American Public Opinion: Catching the Mood and Getting London to Listen”
Inderjeet Parmar (University of Manchester) “A Transatlantic Ruling Class? The Impact of the Interconnections Between the Council of Foreign Relations and Chatham House in the Making of a New World Order, 1939-1945”

10.30 – 11.00am Coffee & Publishers’ Display Penbryn Hall

11.00-12.30am PANEL SESSION II

1. The Republican Party and Civil Rights
Simon Topping (University of Hull) “Wendell Wilkie: Republican Anathema”
Tim Thurber (SUNY – Oswego) “The Republican Party and the Voting Rights Act of 1965”
Robert Mason (University of Edinburgh) “The Republican Party, Citizens for Eisenhower, and African Americans, 1952-1961”

2. America and the Cold War
John Dumbrell (University of Keele) “President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Communism”
Jerome Elie (Geneva) “Unravelling Myth: Was the End of the Cold War Really Not Foreseen?”
Mira Duric (University of Keele) “Reassessing SDI’s Role at the End of the Cold War: US Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union”

3. Senses of Possession: GB and US Poetry
Chair: Tim Woods (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
Nick Selby (University of Glasgow) “‘to be wholly in one place’: Lee Harwood’s The Long Black Veil”
Ian Copestake (Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt) “Williams, Bunting and Poetic Tradition”
Antony Rowland (University of Salford) “Holocaust Camp and Ilse Koch in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’”
Nerys Williams (Trinity College, Dublin) “Camouflage and Collage: Reading Michael Palmer through Robert Duncan”

4. Body Poppin’: Re-Presenting the Body in Contemporary African American Literature and Film
Rachel van Duyvenbode (University of Sheffield) “Black Biopoetics and Barbie: White Dolls and Bodies as Matter in Maya Angelou’s ‘Glass Rain’ and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye”
Howard Cunnel (Institute of United States Studies, London) “Black Skin White Mask: The Prison Writings of Chester Himes”
Colin Howley (University of Sheffield) “Ball and Chain. a.k.a. Black Spatiality: The Dynamics of the Basketball Court and the Trope of the Yard in Contemporary African American Film and Fiction”

5. The Fiction of Cormac McCarthy
John Beck (University of Newcastle) “Blood Meridian and the New Right”
Sarah Maclachlan (Manchester Metropolitan University) “Transnationalism and Cultural Authority in Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain”
Luigi Fidanza (Manchester Metropolitan University) “Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and Masculinity”

Transatlantic Studies Association

2. The Future of NATO: Transatlantic Perspectives
Convenor: Susan Isherwood (University of Dundee)
Chair: Susan Isherwood (University of Dundee)
Michaela Herkorn (Center for European Studies, NYU) “US-German Relations and their Impact on NATO Transformation”
Alrun Deutschmann (German Institute for International and Security Affairs) “The Reform of EU Foreign Policy and EU-NATO Relations”

12.30 – 1.30pm Lunch Cold Buffet Penbryn Hall

1.00-3.30pm PANEL SESSION III

1. American Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century
Hyman Rubin III (Columbia University) “Symbols of American Nationalism in Post-Reconstruction South Carolina”
Anne Sarah Rubin (University of Maryland) “‘The color blue is wholly ignored’: American Symbols and Confederate Nationalism”
Susan-Mary Grant (University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) “Americans: Forging a New Nation; 1860-1914”

2. Democracy’s Discontent (American Politics Group)
Chair: John Dumbrell (University of Keele)
Andrew Wroe (University of Essex) “Distrust in Government: The Role of the Postmodern Economy”
Alex Wadden (University of Sunderland) “Health Care Exceptionalism: Examining the Explanations”
Edward Ashbee (Stafford University) “Civil Religion, the Political Process, and American Identity”

3. American Poetry and Place
Rob Stanton (University of Leeds) “Thought-, World- and Page-Space in the Work of Charles Olson and A.R. Ammons”
Rachel Back (Tel Aviv University) “The ‘Spirits of Place’ in Early Twentieth-Century American Poetry”
Ian Davidson (UW Aberystwyth) “Edward Dorn: Home on the Range”

4. Black Heroes
Chair: Helena Grice (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
Celeste-Marie Bernier (University of Nottingham) “A Moral Hercules: The Haitian Revolution (1791) in Manuscripts by Frederick Douglass”
Duco van Oostrum (University of Sheffield) “‘I am not a role model’: Black Heroism and American Sports”
Maria Lauret (University of Sussex) “Hero and Heroine: Popular Representation of Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks”

5. American Film
Harvey O’Brien (Fellow University College, Dublin) “The Ameromican Dream: Ancient Rome and American Democracy in Spartacus, Fall of the Roman Empire, and Gladiator”
Douglas Muzzio (Baruch College, CUNY) and Thomas Halper (Baruch College, CUNY) “Dead Ends and Menaces: Urban Poverty and Underclass Narratives in American Movies”
Ruth Doughty (Keele University) “From Minstrelsy to Mos Def and Chuck D: The Voyeuristic Representation of Black Culture in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled”

Transatlantic Studies Association

3. The Role of the Individual in the Transatlantic Relationship and a
Transatlantic Ruling Class
Convenor: Charles Whitham (University of Loughborough)
Chair: Charles Whitham (University of Loughborough)
Maria Luz Arroyo (Independent Scholar) “Frances Perkins: Secretary of State”
Jonathan Colman (Liverpool Hope University College) “The London Ambassadorship of David K.E. Bruce, 1964-1968”
Elizabeth Bukspan (French Finance Ministry) “A Transatlantic Ruling Class”

3.00 – 3.30pm Coffee & Publishers Display Penbryn Hall

3.30-5.00pm PANEL SESSION IV

1. Militia and the Right to Bear Arms and the Second Amendment
Chair: Mike McDonnell (University of Wales, Swansea)
William Merkel (University of Oxford) “Carl Bogus Reconsidered: Was the Second Amendment Designed to Protect the Slave Patrols Against the Abolitionists?”
Cassandra Pybus (Australia) “Liberty or Death: Black Loyalists in Revolutionary America”

2. American-European Relations in the Twentieth Century
Tim Lynch (Boston College, Dublin) “The Clinton Administration and Northern Ireland”
Robert McGeehan (Institute of United States Studies, London) “Anti-Americanism and United States-European Relations”
Roger Fagge (University of Warwick) “British Radicals and the Paradox of America: Some Reflections on the Twentieth Century”

3. The Fiction of Philip Roth
David Brauner (University of Reading) “American Anti-Pastoral: Illiteracy, Incontinence and Indignation in Philip Roth”
Margaret Smith (Manchester Metropolitan University) “A Novelist’s Autobiography? The Fiction of Philip Roth”
Aliki Varvogli (University of Dundee) “Exploding Fictions: Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and the Inscription of Terrorism”

4. Constructing American Literary History
Winifried Fluck (Freie Universitat Berlin) “American Culture and Modernity: A Twice-Told Tale”
Michael Boyden (University of Leuven) “American Literature Scholarship: From Consensus to Dissensus (and Back Again)?”
Peter Rawlings (University of the West of England) “Topography, War, and Theory in a the Nineteenth-Century American Construction of a Literary Identity”

5. Postmodern American Fiction
Chris Knight (University of Montana) “William Gaddis’ Parthian Shot: Social Criticism and Satire in the Posthumous Agape Agape and The Rush for Second Place”
Will Kaufman (University of Central Lancashire) “Auster, Camus and Don Quixote”
Christoph Lindner (UW Aberystwyth) “DeLillo’s Garbage and the Ecstasy of Waste”

6. Technologies of Vision
Liam Kennedy (University of Birmingham) Joel Meyerowitz’s Photography
JoAnne Mancini “(University of Sussex) “From the Christmas Card to the Avant-Garde: The Rise and Fall of Chromolithography in the Nineteenth-Century United States”
Caroline Reed (University of Cambridge) “What Would You Like to See?: Photography and the Stories of Raymond Carver”

Transatlantic Studies Association

4. The New American Security Agenda
Convenor: David Ryan (De Montfort University)
Chair: David Ryan (De Montfort University)
Mick Cox (London School of Economics)
Alan Dobson (University of Dundee)
Wyn Rees (University of Nottingham)
Steve Marsh (University of Cardiff)

5.00 – 6.00pm Plenary Hugh Owen Building – Lecture Theatre A12

6.15 – 7.30pm Welcome and Reception National Library of Wales

7.45 – 9.00pm Evening Meal (Hot buffet, cafeteria style) Penbryn Hall

Evening Entertainment Arts Centre – Cinema or Bar, Disco & Party or alternatively Rosser Bar

Sunday, 13th April

7.45 – 8.45am Breakfast Penbryn Hall

9.00-10.30am PANEL SESSION V

1. Towards a New Cultural Cartography: Nationality and American Nationalism in a Global Context
Patrick Miller (Northeastern Illinois University) “The Imperial Matrix: Race, Ethnicity, and American Nationalism at the Turn of the 20th Century”
Paul Spickard (University of California – Santa Barbara) “The Multicultural Fact in America and Europe”
Albena Bakratcheva (New Bulgarian University, Sofia) “Figuring Globalized America as Home”

2. September 11 and After
Rodri Jeffreys-Jones (University of Edinburgh) “September 11: The Lessons of Intelligence History”
Dave Bewley-Taylor (University of Wales, Swansea) “Watch this Space: Technologies of Fortification”
David Ryan (De Montfort University) “The Vietnam Syndrome After September 11”

3. The United States and Foreign Policy
Godfrey Hodgson (University of Oxford) “Wilson and House in Paris: Ideology and Pragmatism in American Foreign Policy”
Catherine Callard (University of Cambridge) “John F. Kennedy and the Laos Crisis”
Trevor McCrisken (University of Oxford) “‘This guy tried to kill my daddy once’: George W. Bush’s Policy towards Iraq”

4. Voices of Middle America: Auster, DeLillo, Updike
Nick Heffernan (University College, Northampton) “‘Never Too White to Sing the Blues’: Don DeLillo and the Death of Rock ‘n’ Roll”
Mark Brown (University College, Northampton) “‘Dis-alienating’ Paul Auster’s New York: Re-reading The New York Trilogy”
Catherine Morley (Oxford Brookes University) “Epic Aspirations for the Great American Novel: John Updike’s Song of America”

5. American Renaissance Literature
Alison Easton (University of Lancaster) “Hawthorne and the Question of Women”
Larry Reynolds (Texas A&M University) “Hawthorne and the Slavery Controversy”
Dawn Keetley (LeHigh University) “Poe’s Parturient Women”

6. American Drama
Heidi McPherson (University of Central Lancashire) “Staging the Scene: American Drama and the Law”
Amy Vodden (University of Exeter) “Belle Reprieve: Re-imagining A Streetcar Named Desire”
Radmila Nastic (Belgrade) “Humour and Irony in David Mamet’s Plays About Education”

Transatlantic Studies Association

5. Comparative Politics
Convenor: Mark Evans (University of Swansea)
Chair: TBA
Panel and Papers: TBA

10.30 – 11.00am Coffee & Publishers’ Display Penbryn Hall

11.00-12.30am PANEL SESSION VI

1. Histories of Black Resistance
Jonathan Watson (University of Sussex) “The Zoot Suit Riots and the Los Angeles NAACP”
Stephanie Lewthwaite (University of Warwick) “Landscapes of Reform: Casa de Castelar and ‘Sonoratown’, 1894-1906”
Malcolm McLaughlin (University of Essex) “Racial Violence and Black Resistance in the Progressive Era”

2. Business History and Culture
Erica Arthur (University of Nottingham) “The Organisation Strikes Back: Rhetorical Empowerment Strategies in 1950s Business Representations of White-Collar Manhood”
Dan Scroop (University of Wales, Bangor) The Texas Chain Store Massacre: Anti-Consumer Protest in a Consumer Republic”
Joy Cushman (University of Glasgow) “Democracy Contested: The Competing Rhetoric of American Retail Employers and Unions, 1940-1960”

3. African American Fiction
Rachel Farebrother (University of Leeds) “‘Ah take mah tex’ ‘tween de lids uh de Bible’: Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Textual Synthesis in Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)”
Owen Robinson (Fellow University of Essex) “‘Who is Lionel Lane?’: The Invisible Hero of Richard Wright’s The Outsider”
Jennifer Terry (University of Warwick) “‘True and Ancient Properties’: The Seduction of Islands for the Black Imagination”

4. Contemporary American Literature
Sarah Graham (University of Leeds) “What’s Eating Dave Eggers?: The Disruptive Dialogue Between Fiction and Memoir”
Ken Luebbering (University of Bergen) “An Introduction to American Immigrant Experience Through E. Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes”
Helen Chupin (University of Paris IX-Dauphine) “From Bereavement and Mourning to the Anxiety of Separateness: From a Thematic to a Psychoanalytical Reading of Anne Tyler’s Fiction”

5. Fog on the Thames / Gloom on the Potomac: Intertexuality, African American Literary Theory, and Hannah Crafts’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative
Tim Lustig (Keele University)
Gill Ballinger (Keele University)
Dale Townshend (Keele University)

6. Manhood and Memory
Richard Lowry (The College of William and Mary) “To Be a Boy: Manhood and Nostalgia in the Gilded Age”
Tim Barnard (The College of William and Memory) “Bullfighting, Watching and Writing: Re-membering Lost Manhood in The Sun Also Rises”
Otto Heim (University of Hong Kong) “Melancholy Returns: Memory, Commodification, and Allegory in Charles Chesnutt”

12.30 – 1.30pm Lunch Cold Buffet Penbryn Hall or Various Committee Meetings with separate venues and lunches

1.30-3.00pm PANEL SESSION VII

1. African American Politics
Elizabeth Grant (University of Birmingham) “Welcome Black America!: Marketing Black Heritage in America’s First City”
Zoe Colley (University of Newcastle) “The Unseen Freedom Struggle: The Black Panther Party and the Politicisation of African American Prisoners, 1966-1975”
Nick Sharman (LaTrobe University) “‘A Knock at Midnight’ or Just a Late Supper?: The Later Rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr”

2. The Atomic Bomb and US Culture
Jenel Virden (University of Hull) “Seeing the Light: Religion, the Bomb and the 1940s”
David Eldritch (University of Hull) “Nothing to Fear: Hollywood, the Bomb and the 1950s”
Tim Nelson (University of Hull) “Youthful Angst: Marvell Comics, the Bomb and the 1960s”

3. American Literary Modernism
Sarah Dauncey (University of Warwick) “Diasporic Rupturings: A Critique of Absalom! Absalom!’s Historicising Project”
Ron Roberts (University of Strathclyde) “Movie Modernism: Dos Passos’s The Big Money and After”
Jo Knowles (Liverpool) “Mommie Dearest: Homosociality, Maternity and Sexuality in Henry James’ Novels”

4. Representations of Gender in American Modernist Literature
Artemis Michailidou (Greece) “Performing Femininity, Disrupting Domesticity: Edna Millay’s Influence on Anne Sexton”
Piotr Zazula (University of Wroclaw) “Personal Icons: Women in the Poetry of Eliot, Williams, and Roethke”
Paula Mesquita (University of Coimbra) “Dressed to Kill: The Sex of the Wars in Cather and Faulkner”

5. Native American Translation and Transculturation
Kathryn Napier Gray (University of Glasgow) “Written and Spoken Wor(l)ds: John Eliot’s Algonquian Translations”
Denise Askin (St Anslem College, New Hampshire) “From an ‘Uncommon Quarter’: Literary and Rhetorical Devices in the Sermons of Samson Occam, Native American Preacher (1723-1792)”
Fabienne Quennet (Philipps-University of Marburg) “Transculturation at the western Frontier: Adopted Captives in Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964), Lucia St. Clair Robson’s Ride With the Wind (1982), Michael Blake’s Dances With Wolves (1988)”

3.00 – 4.00pm Coffee & Publishers’ Display plus Introduction to Poster Session

3.00-4.00pm PANEL SESSION VIII

1. Sexuality in the USA
William Thompson (Kings College, London) “The American South’s Fascination with Sodomy: Examining the Gay Rights Movement Against the Backdrop of Rural America”
Steve Meyer (University of Wisconsin) “‘His pants were open and it was out’: Sexuality, Harassment, and US Autoworkers, 1930-1960”

2. The New Negro and the Harlem Renaissance
Mark Whalan (University of Exeter) “Cosmopolitanism, the Great War, and the New Negro”
Kate Dossett (University of Cambridge) “‘Black is beautiful (and economically independent)’: The Influence of Madam C. J. Walker on the New Negro Woman”

3. The United States and New Zealand
Dolores Janiewski (Wellington, NZ) “From the US to NZ: Moralities, Sexualities, and the New Right”
Paul Morris (Wellington, NZ) “The Ideological Flow Between the US and the UK: Markets, Moralities, and Neoliberalism”

4. American Collectors in Fiction and Film
Nick Yablon (University of Chicago) “Collecting Capital: The Art of Business and the Business of Art in Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire”
Lisa Rull (University of Nottingham) “Is This ‘Tzedekah’ or Just a Woman Out of the House? Peggy Guggenheim’s American Jewish Spirit of Patronage”

5. American Involvement in the World
Priscilla Roberts (Hong Kong University) “Frank Altschul and US Foreign Policy, World War One to the 1970s”
David Milne (University of Cambridge) “Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War, 1961-1968”

6. IQ, Idiocy and American Culture
Susan Currell (University of Nottingham) “Rapid Improvements: The History of Speed Reading”
Martin Halliwell (University of Leicester) “Idiocy, The G Factor and American Film”

4.00 – 5.30pm AGM Hugh Owen Building – Lecture theatre A12

5.00 – 6.00pm Pre-Banquet Bar (cash bar)

6.00 – 8.30pm Banquet Dinner Penbryn Hall

8.30pm Choir Performance in Arts Centre

9.00pm till late Evening Entertainment Arts Centre – Bar (Jazz Band) or alternatively
Rosser Bar

Monday, 14th April

7.45 – 8.45am Breakfast Penbryn Hall

9.00-10.30am PANEL SESSION IX

1. “Possessing the Black Past: African Americans’ Construction and Use of Memory in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century”
Scott Hancock (Gettysburg College) “Forgetting for Belonging: African Americans’ Construction of Memory in the United States, 1775-1900”
Daryl Brown (University of North Alabama) “Historical Eruptions: How the Increasing Presence and Maleability of History has Transformed Contemporary African American Fiction”
Deborah Barnes (Gettysburg College) Commentator

2. Violence in the 1960s
James Murrell (University of Southampton) “Firearms Restrictions in the 1960s: Charting the Debate”
Karen Randall (Southampton Institute) “Moving Targets: Bells, Guns and Vietnam Vets”
Shona Johnston (University of Glasgow) “‘Those crazy guys who cover the war’: The Correspondent as a Participant in the Vietnam War”

3. The American West and the Border
Liz Jacobs (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) “Nationalism, Mestizaje and Interracial Mixing in Chicana/o Cultural Production”
Elizabeth Rosen (University College, London) “The American West Through an Apocalyptic Lens: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”

4. Writing in American Modernism
Caroline Masel (University of Manchester) “Robert Lowell’s Published Drafts: ‘Little Gidding’ in ‘The Quaker Graveyard’”
Rebecca Loncraine (University of Oxford) “Djuna Barnes’ New York Journalism: Stunt Journalism and the Production of the City”
Sarah Cain (Fellow University of Cambridge) “‘The inevitable flux of the seeing eye’: William Carlos Williams and the Science of Vision”

5. African American Folk Culture
Rebecca Griffin (University of Warwick) “Brer Rabbit Goes a Courtin’: Slave Folklore as an Illustration of how to git your gal”
Holly Farrington (Middlesex University) “‘Negroes, black as Cain/ May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train’: The African American Spiritual and Christianity”
John Moe (The Ohio State University) “African American Artistic Expression and the Images of Protest in Contemporary Black Folk Art”

6. Strange Adventures in Colonial Virginia
Chair: Ben Marsh (University of Oxford)
Peter Thompson (University of Oxford) “William Bullock’s ‘Strange Adventure’”
Al Zambane (University of Oxford) “Francis Nicholson’s ‘Inordinate Passion’”
Natalie Zacek (University of Manchester) “‘A most unfortunate divel’: The Truncated Virginia Career of Daniel Parke”

10.30 – 11.00am Coffee & Publishers’ Display Penbryn Hall

11.00-12.00am PANEL SESSION X

1. Contemporary American Women’s Fiction
Kathryn Nicol (University of Edinburgh) “Kathy Acker on the High Seas: Piracy, Territoriality and the American / Postcolonial Text”
Susana Araujo (University of Sussex) “Joyce Carol Oates’ Love Triangle: Jorge Luis Borges, Alfred Kazin and Charles Sanders Peirce”

2. Early Religious Culture in America
Keith Pacholl (California State University – Fullerton) “‘Useful knowledge now forms the soul’: The Transformation of Religious Culture in Early America”
Roland Marden (University of Sussex) “Eighteenth Century Religious Discourse and the Emergence of a Language of Rights”

3. American Television
Margaret Shaw (Bath Spa University College) “Sad in the City: The Myth of Post-Feminist Freedom”
Sherryl Wilson (Bournemouth) “The Grotesque Realism of HBO’s Six Feet Under”

4. Social and Domestic Politics
Jennifer Byrne (University of Arizona, Tucson) “Defining the Tenth and Eleventh Amendments: The Supreme Court’s Many Interpretations”
Dean Robinson (Fellow Harvard University) “Do Conservative Policies Make Black People Sick?”

5. Queer Bodies
Susan Billingham (University of Nottingham) “Bar Dykes and Butches: The Policing of Gender in Dorothy Allison and Leslie Feinberg”
Anna Wilson (University of Birmingham) “Narrative Workings of the Queer Body: The Heartland”

6. Freedom Rides North and South
Clive Webb (University of Sussex) “The Reverse Freedom Rides”
Raymond Arsenault (University of Southern Florida) “Freedom Riders”

7. Nineteenth Century Legalities
James Campbell (University of Nottingham) “‘The victim of prejudice and hasty consideration’: The African American Experience in Virginia Courts of Oyer and Terminer”
Lisa Merrill (Hofstra University) “‘The art of hanging’: Nineteenth Century Executions and the Construction of American values”

12.00 – 1.30pm Lunch Cold buffet Penbryn Hall

1.00 – 2.00pm End of Conference Depart Aberystwyth

EAAS News

The biannual EAAS conference will be held in Prague, Czech Republic from 2-5 April 2004. The theme of the conference is “America in the Course of Human Events: Presentations and Interpretations.” The committee is currently deciding on workshop themes and a call will go out for contributors shortly. A list of workshops and related information should appear in the EAAS spring 2003 newsletter or be accessible from the web page.

It is also worth noting that EAAS sponsors Travel Grants for study in the United States. The deadline for applications for 2003-2004 is March 2, 2003. These travel grants are for postgraduate students in the Humanities and Social Sciences who are registered for a higher research degree at any European university. The scholarships will be aimed at predominantly young scholars in Eastern and Central Europe. There are two types of grants:

Transatlantic Grants will permit the holder to conduct research which illuminates some aspect of the relationship between the United States and Europe (or a country or countries within Europe) at a designated university in the United States. The term of the grant is for from three to eight weeks. Successful applicants will receive a grant intended to cover return travel, living expenses, and a limited amount of travel within the US where appropriate. Health insurance will also be provided. Only students registered for a PhD are eligible to apply.

Intra-European Grants will allow the recipient to conduct research for a period of up to four weeks in an American Studies Centre or University Library in Europe. Postgraduate students registered for either a PhD or Master’s Degree by research are eligible. The Intra-European Grants are also available for institutional research projects involving up to three scholars based on cooperation between two American Studies institutes in Eastern and Western Europe. Although the EAAS grant program is especially meant to encourage American Studies research in Eastern Europe, applications from Western European scholars will be welcome if they are part of an institutional project as outlined above. Application forms are available to download from the EAAS home page at http://www.let.uu.nl/eaas/.

EAAS also promotes the American Studies Network Book Prize. At the EAAS Conference in Prague in 2004 the ASN will award its biennial prize (one thousand Euros) for a remarkable book (monograph) published in English in the field of American Studies. The monograph (not an edited volume) should have been published in 2002 or 2003; the author must be a European scholar who, through membership in his/her national American Studies organization, is a member of EAAS; three review copies of the book should be submitted before 15 December 2003 to Professor Saturnino Aguado, Institute for North American Studies, Universidad de Alcala, Colegio de Trinitarios, C/. Trinidad, 1, 28801 Alcala de Henares (Madrid), Spain.

And finally, EAAS has two web services for consultation. The EAAS home page can be located on: http://www.let.uu.nl/eaas/. It also sponsors a distribution list which you can join by sending a message “subscribe eaas-l” to majordomo@let.uu.nl.

If any BAAS members have any comments or queries about EAAS please contact your representative: Dr Jenel Virden, American Studies, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX; J.Virden@hull.ac.uk.

Fiftieth Anniversary Celebrations

The fiftieth anniversary of the founding of BAAS is fast approaching in 2005. As such, the BAAS Executive, through the Development Sub-Committee, has recently put the fiftieth Anniversary Celebrations on its agenda at all meetings. Dr Jenel Virden (EAAS Representative and Development Sub-Committee member) has agreed to act as the contact point for the group. It has now been confirmed that the annual conference that year will take place at the University of Cambridge. The Sub-Committee is currently discussing a wide range of possible ideas for the celebration, ranging from invited speakers to special conferences. If anyone has any ideas that they would like to put forward to the committee, or if any BAAS member would like to volunteer to help co-ordinate activities as they are developed, could they please contact Jenel at the following address. Dr Jenel Virden, American Studies, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX or J.Virden@hull.ac.uk.

Americans Exhibition, National Portrait Gallery, October 10 2002 – January 12 2003

This exhibition was a celebration of Americans and American history through portraits from the painting and photographic collections of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Notable Americans such as George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, George Gershwin, Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn, represented the diverse range of individuals who have shaped American history. The exhibition was organised by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. American Studies in Britain asked members of the American Studies community to give their opinions on the exhibition.

Anne-Marie Ford, Manchester Metropolitan University

All the usual suspects are here, of course, a wonderful portrait of Benjamin Franklin, the studied gloom of George and Martha Washington, the inspiring image of abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglass, a photograph of Abraham Lincoln, with his world-weary smile. Americans, the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, on loan from the Smithsonian, is a celebration of diversity, in its pictures and photographs of statesmen, poets, artists, musicians, actors, photographers, writers, abolitionists and soldiers. But there are enormous surprises, too. A photograph of a freckle-faced army cadet, circa 1859, turns out to be a young General Custer; there is a painting of frontiersman Davy Crockett, looking slightly ill at ease; and a photograph of The Wild Bunch, outlaws who included Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid among its members. Davy Crockett represents the frontier spirit, so much a part of the myth of building the American nation, whilst a painting of Native American, Sequoyah, reminds us simultaneously of a Cherokee nation broken up, and almost destroyed. Americans strives to address the positive and negative aspects of its history, and, in doing so, gives voice to the multi-ethnicity that is America’s life story.

The paintings and photographs of America’s artists, the men and women whose work so powerfully impacted upon the American nation, are a vibrant celebration of difference, complexity and harmony. Writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James, and Mark Twain, are identified as artists whose collective voice was a shaping influence upon the American spirit and the American mind. They hang alongside portraits and photographs of lesser-known, but equally fascinating, Americans. The painting of printer and publisher, Anne Green, who took over the Maryland Gazette upon the death of her husband, in 1767, is one of a mature, conservative matron, holding, slightly hidden by a table, a copy of the Gazette. In spite of her successful editorship of Maryland’s sole newspaper, when Anne Green died her obituary referred only to her mild and benevolent disposition, conjugal affection and parental tenderness. Detail in this portrait, by Charles Willson Peale, appears to agree that her work was peripheral to the conventional roles of womanhood, perhaps even subversive, but closer study argues otherwise. The newspaper that she holds has the legend ‘printed by’ clearly visible, and the positioning of her hands draw attention to the Gazette. A friend of the family, it is likely that Peale regarded the sitter with admiration and affection, and his painting subverts the language of her obituary, by indicating the importance of Green’s work.

In the early portraits, the men and women who contributed to the national identity stare sombrely back at us, or past us, or far away into the distance. But in the later photographic representations, Americans gaze challengingly into the camera, or provocatively, or throw back their heads and laugh joyously, in a confident and optimistic mood. Icons of the American film industry, Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Audrey Hepburn, jostle for space with a cheerful, relaxed photographic portrait of Ansel Adams, and music-makers such as Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne and Michael Jackson. A variety of artistic styles are exhibited, from those of British eighteenth-century portraiture, impressionism, and the avant-garde, to pop culture and the work of Andy Warhol. What strikes one most forcibly, however, is the strong European connection, of sitters, of painters, of photographers. Tallulah Bankhead sits, swathed in a pink, diaphanous fabric, looking surprisingly pensive and child-like, in a painting by Augustus John. The eight-year-old Edith Wharton was painted in Paris by Englishman Edward Harrison May, and the artist, Mary Cassatt, broods reflectively in a portrait by her friend, the impressionist Edgar Degas. Henry James once commented that ‘It sounds like a paradox, but it is a very simple truth, that when today we look for “American art” we find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a good deal of Paris in it.’1 From canvas to camera the European influence can still be traced, although less profoundly, perhaps. There is a captivating photograph of the publisher James T. Fields, an expressive study of light and shade, taken by Julia Margaret Cameron. It vies for attention with the American Man Ray’s photograph of the art collector and patron, Peggy Guggenheim. It was she who arranged Jackson Pollack’s first one-man show, an artist whose innovative artistic style was startling and, perhaps, profoundly American in its directness. One of my favourite paintings, however, is a self-portrait by the artist Elaine de Kooning. She stares fiercely at the viewer, a woman assured of her artistic and intellectual capabilities, in a space that is clearly defined as her own. An American who, like the exhibition itself, is confident about who and what she is.

Notes
1. The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts by Henry James, ed. John L. Sweeney, Rupert Hart-Davis (London: 1956), p. 216.

Bryan Hawkins, Senior Lecturer in Art, Canterbury Christ Church University College

The exhibition literature for Americans begins with the sentence: ‘A portrait can tell many stories’. There are indeed many stories told in this enormously stimulating, challenging, eccentrically selective and yet gloriously complex journey through portraits of Americans.

In his essay Identity, Genealogy, History Rose speaks of the individual as: ‘the target of a multiplicity of types of works, more like a latitude or longitude at which different vectors of different speeds intersect’. In Americans there is precisely such a sense of identity and identities as at the intersection of particular vectors. These vectors intersect, in the paintings and photographs, as precise moments of American history, the ‘stories’ of individual lives and the representational, aesthetic and formal characteristics of artistic practice. These vectors through the images also intersect with our own lives as we look at the pictures before us.

Any visitor to this exhibition will be confronted, within this construction of experience, with images that affirm, question, challenge, confuse or subvert a sense of congruency and symmetry at the intersection of these ‘vectors’. The exhibition opens with the theme of ‘Freedom’, this extends into ‘The Gilded Age’ and is supplemented by ‘Performing Arts’. Photographs are exhibited in an adjacent part of the gallery. I found this to be an eccentric structure with a generally historical flow that was immediately subverted by my first visual encounter: Warhol’s portrait of Michael Jackson.

In this image the symmetry of the vectors seems perfect and unassailable . The portrait structured in the mechanical surface medium of photo screen printing evokes a sense of ‘image’ and ‘sign’ more than it does the human presence of either artist or subject. The image presents us with an identity as image hollowed out by post-modern culture. The image of Jackson marked a ‘Warhol’ by trademark style, rather than artist’s touch and exists at the moment of Jackson’s most perfect celebrity – a celebrity marked by Warhol’s portrait itself. ‘I was a veteran before I was a teenager’, a video monitor quotes Jackson as saying and thereby evokes the individual tragedy of Jackson and the seemingly universal post-modern, tragic, complex, identity anxiety of the twenty first century.

It seems, however, it was not always so. In a painting of 1849, George Catlin surveys the world beyond the painting with a fixed, measured and analytical gaze. But all is not as it first appears. There is much complexity here too. And a sense in which the vectors of the image are flying off in a confusion of mixed directions and energies. Its simple structure belies its secret insane life. In a web of reflections and meaningful looks the drama of George Catlin, the well–known, massively ambitious and yet failed and flawed painter of the ‘vanishing Indian’, is painted at a specific moment by the Englishman William Fisk. The painting is a portrait by Fisk that appears in its visual construction to be pretending to be a self-portrait by Catlin. The central evidence for this is the characteristic artist’s gaze out of the picture (towards the mirror or mirrors) accompanied by the painting of the back of the canvas on which the artist constructs his image (the image that is for us the painting). This image of an American in America thus reveals itself as fraudulent – a fake self-portrait and a painting by an Englishman painted in England.

After such complexity to find one’s own image reflected and implicated in the exquisite silver-mirrored surface of an 1846 daguerreotype of John Brown might be less of a surprise. It was, however, an extraordinary and uncanny experience. One had to stand in the right place to make it happen but in the case of this beautiful faded trace of a human being the image quite literally stepped out of time and intersected with the world of the viewer .

At this exhibition the viewer must be able to come to terms with good jokes as well as epiphanies and complexities. Harold Rosenberg, ‘proponent of Abstract Expressionism’, is pictured actually turning into an abstract expressionist painting. This occurs at the hand of Elaine De Kooning, wife of Willem de Kooning – an act we suppose of poetic justice or ironic malice. I can sympathise with and enter the artistic and aesthetic dynamic here but it still strikes me as a good joke.

Elsewhere a woman I observed at the exhibition laughed out loud as she turned from Augustus John’s outrageous ice-cream parlour confectionery painting of Tallulah Bankhead to read Tallulah quoted by the video monitor as saying: “Nobody can be exactly like me, even I have difficulty in doing it myself”.

This exhibition is not just a procession of photographed and painted heads. There is complexity everywhere. For me the complexity implied by Duplessis’s painting of Benjamin Franklin is the simplest and most mysteriously profound and moving of all of them. It is the mystery of the ordinary as extraordinary and the extraordinary as ordinary and, as such, it sums up the Americans exhibition as a whole.

Tony McCulloch, Head of American Studies, Canterbury Christ Church University College

‘Is there an American face?’, asks John Updike in the foreword to the Americans exhibition catalogue. Updike’s brief essay is a brave attempt to bring some kind of unity to the exhibition of portraits and photographs of famous – and not so famous – Americans held at the National Portrait Gallery between October 2002 and January 2003. Clearly one of the main challenges presented by an exhibition like this is to endow it with some kind of overall coherence.

Updike’s introduction is much more rewarding than the rather doubtful statement of the exhibition’s sponsors, JP Morgan Investment Bank, that: ‘These portraits provide a view of significant historical figures with one thing in common: the positive impact they have had on people and communities at both a national and an international level’. It is also more stimulating than the ‘official’ division of the paintings in the exhibition into three extremely loose sections entitled ‘Freedom’, ‘The Gilded Age’ and ‘Performing Arts’.

To his own question, ‘Is there an American face’, Updike replies: ‘If there is, it began to form when those stern-visaged English Puritans landed in New England and improvised arrangements with the rocky, forested land and the population of Native Americans’. Encountering the obstacles and hardships of the Frontier, ‘an Indian stoicism invaded their European faces’ and the American of the colonial period and early Republic was therefore typically serious-minded, determined and rather dour.

Thus, as Updike points out, Dickens, in his American Notes of 1842, wrote ‘I was quite oppressed by the prevailing seriousness and melancholy air of business: which was so general and unvarying, that at every new town I came to, I seemed to meet the very same people whom I had left behind me at the last’. Certainly most of the portraits in the first two sections of the exhibition are ‘serious’ and ‘melancholy’, both in terms of the expression of the sitter and the appearance of the portrait: Washington, Franklin, Calhoun, Sherman, Lodge, even Twain – united in little but their ‘prevailing seriousness’.

In the late nineteenth century, Updike argues, things began to change. ‘Expatriatism in Europe created a tribe of hyper-aesthetic Americans who lived pleasantly on their strong dollars and helped hatch modernism’. By the twentieth century ‘popular culture promoted the spread of images of elegance and sensuality. Movies out of Hollywood, on a new scale of art manufacture, flickered above the formerly dull and gloomy citizenry’. Hence the much more colourful portraits – in every sense of the word – of people like Thomas Hart Benson and his wife, George Washington Carver, Lena Horne, Alice Neal, Michael Jackson and John Updike himself. But the ‘native Puritanism’ lingers on in more serious-minded portraits, such as T.S. Eliot’s.

The separate collection of photographs is incorporated by Updike into his Turner-like thesis and this was the part of the exhibition that I personally most enjoyed. The subjects include figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Babe Ruth, Louis Armstrong and Cesar Chavez. But some of the most interesting faces to me are those revealed in the earliest photographs – the callotypes and daguerreotypes – taken between 1844 and the Civil War.

This section includes fascinating pictures of John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and George Custer. But the most poignant picture, to my mind, is that of Rose O’Neal Greenhow and her daughter ‘Little Rose’, taken in 1862. Mrs Greenhow was, we are told ‘a leading member of Washington society’ who sympathised with the secession of the Southern states and was convicted of spying for the Confederacy . The photograph shows her imprisoned in the Old Capitol Building in Washington with her daughter, ‘Little Rose’.

It is the face of ‘Little Rose’ – who looks about nine – that is most haunting, a picture of sadness as she leans against her mother in the bleak , whitewashed room that served as a cell . Mrs Greenhow was later released and exiled to the Confederacy. She travelled to Britain and France to support the Southern cause but on her way home, in 1864, her ship, a British blockade-runner, was pursued by a Union gunboat. She fled in a rowing boat but it capsized and she was drowned. What became of ‘Little Rose’ we are not told.

‘Is there an American face?’ If there is we cannot hope to locate it in any one time or place. This exhibition certainly makes a brave attempt thanks largely to the diversity of the photographs and the later portraits. Without them the Americans exhibition would consist almost entirely of Dead White European Males. However significant they were, they no longer – as Updike reminds us – constitute ‘the American face’.

J. M. Mancini, University of Sussex

In the early 1860s, a young lithographer named Milton Bradley, who like many of his Springfield, Massachusetts, neighbours was a Republican, began to print lithographs after a photograph of Abraham Lincoln. The images sold well: Lincoln’s portrait proved to be a popular subject, and lithographs (unlike photographs) could be produced and distributed cheaply enough to appeal to a wide and diverse audience. There was only one problem: Lincoln grew a beard. Once his customers came face to face with more recent portraits of the man, Bradley found himself stuck with his beardless Lincolns, and feared that the venture would ruin him.

Luckily for Bradley, he had already discovered another application for lithography: games and amusements. In the aftermath of the beardless Lincoln debacle, Bradley more or less gave up on portraiture, sticking instead to ventures like the ‘Checkered Game of Life,’ which he printed, cut and packaged himself, and the 1866 Myriopticon, whose backlit, scrolled colour lithographs of scenes illustrating events like the Battle of Bull Run could be unfurled to the accompaniment of a rousing historical commentary. Bradley sold 40,000 copies of the ‘Checkered Game of Life’ in the winter of 1860-1861 alone, and while Americans lost one source of portraits, they gained a new kind of consumer good to add to an already expansive visual and material culture.1

Luckily for the consumers of cheap portraiture, Bradley was surrounded by competitors who were eager to produce images not only of Lincoln but other American ‘heroes’ like George and Martha Washington. Louis Prang’s chromolithographs after Gilbert Stuart’s portraits of George and Martha Washington (the originals of which are in the exhibition), for example, circulated widely alongside images like Winslow Homer’s Campaign Sketches, a series of chromolithographs (published by Prang) which depicted the everyday lives of unnamed soldiers, and Anthony Berger’s 1864 photographic portrait of Lincoln and his son Tad, which appeared in the form of an engraving after a sketch after the photograph in Harper’s Weekly in 1865. From the presses of lithographers and publishing houses, these images then made it into American libraries, scrapbooks and interiors.2 Thus, while a certain number of Americans learned the faces of ‘great Americans’ through direct viewings of paintings or photographs in places like the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. (from which the images in the current exhibition have been loaned), or Mathews Brady’s nineteenth-century photographic studio in that same city (for which Berger produced his image), most did not. Rather, it is likely that all but the tip of the iceberg of American portraiture has been consumed through reproductions.

Unluckily for viewers of the current exhibition, Americans tells us virtually nothing of this, or of the cultural history of American portraiture more generally. It gives us the faces of American history, but little of the context for their production or consumption as images or as historical artefacts. In other words, although Stuart’s portraits of the Washingtons and a photograph of Lincoln are in the exhibit, we get no real understanding of how these and other portraits were seen and used: how they circulated (as originals or copies), who consumed them, and how they fit into the larger trajectory of American image production. Similarly, the exhibition also offers little sense of the historical significance of portraiture in the United States. Although it does occasionally tell us who commissioned a specific image, it offers little sense of why and for whom portraits were made, and of how portraiture (its production and consumption) fits into the larger development of American historical consciousness or identity.

This is reflected in the organisation of the exhibition, which can most charitably be described as random: in Americans, the orator and Constitutional Convention delegate Rufus King sits next to the Mexican War officer Samuel Ringgold, who is joined on the other side by the Cherokee leader Sequoyah. While a historical chain could probably be forged to join these figures (beyond the fact that they were all famous Americans), it is very hard to imagine an American audience, let alone an audience of viewers who cannot be expected to know the first thing about the history of the United States, making much sense of the arrangement. Stylistically, the exhibition presents the same problem—while the introductory text tells us that American portraits ‘vary in style and technique from the most sophisticated—such as those by painters Gilbert Stuart and John Singer Sargent—to those by self-taught artists, including Thomas Badger and William Elwell’, the exhibition itself places Badger’s portrait of African American clergyman Thomas Paul (1825) next to Stuart’s Rufus King (1819-1820) without telling us what the relationship was between ‘sophisticated’ and ‘self-taught’ portraits and their makers in early America.

This is disappointing, for two reasons. First, American art scholarship is highly attuned to social, economic and cultural history, to the relationships between painting and print culture, and to the art world as a series of social and economic constellations. There is no reason to expect anything less of exhibitions produced for public consumption.

Second, many of the clues to these broader historical relationships are present in the exhibition, and could have been made visible to viewers with a bit of effort. To cite three examples: the text alongside Emanuel Leutze’s piercing, brilliant likeness of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1862) mentions that the artist also painted Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way for the United States Capitol. If it had also noted that the German-American Leutze was the author of one of the most famous historical images painted in nineteenth-century America, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851),3 that he devoted virtually his entire career to realising in visual terms the historical and historiographical conundrum posed by the conquest and settlement of the American continents, and that this career blending of portraiture and history painting was quite common in the United States, then it might have been more helpful.4 Similarly, the exhibition includes a number of portraits of publishers and editors, such as Julia Margaret Cameron’s James T. Fields (1869), Cecilia Beaux’s Richard Watson Gilder (1902-1903), Thomas Eakins’ Talcott Williams (1889) and Stanton MacDonald-Wright’s Willard Huntington Wright (1913-1914). And yet, while these individual portraits speak to an important and ongoing relationship between portraiture (and painting generally) and the American print media, the exhibition fails to make this link visible to viewers either by grouping the images together or by noting its persistence in the text panels. And finally, the exhibition offers us the astonishingly self-confident Thomas Hart Benton with his Wife Rita (1922) with the note that Benton ‘joined the American Synchromists, a group of artists concerned with the explication of form through colour.’ What it should also have told us is that Benton was a long-time friend of one of the co-founders of that movement, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, whose portrait of his critic brother sits three paintings down from Benton’s own work.

This is unlucky for viewers, who undoubtedly came to this exhibition to learn. It was certainly true of the patron who followed me about the show, pestering me with questions about the chronology of the Civil War and the Revolution. One wonders, however, whether satisfying this urge was the purpose of this exhibition, or whether it was put on simply because the works had to go somewhere while the National Portrait Gallery is closed for renovation, and because J. P. Morgan put up the cash.

Notes
1. Information on Bradley can be found in James J. Shea, It’s All in the Game (New York, 1960), 47-57.
2. See, for example, Thomas Eakins’ The Dancing Lesson of 1878, which depicts an African American boy learning to dance in a room decorated solely by this very image of Lincoln. Thomas Eakins, The Dancing Lesson (Negro Boy Dancing), 1878. Watercolour on off-white wove paper, 18 1/16 x 22 9/16 inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art: Fletcher Fund, 1925. It can be seen at http://www.metmuseum.org/special/Thomas_Eakins/5.r.htm>. The image of Lincoln is in the upper left-hand corner. Homer and Prang’s civil war images are pasted into the scrapbook made by Bostonian Henry I. Bowditch after the death of his son, Nathaniel, in “A Memorial of Lieut. Nathaniel Bowditch A. A. G., 1st Cavalry Brigade 2nd Division, Army of the Potomac” (1864). Bowditch Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.
3. Oil on canvas; 12 2/5 x 21 1/4 in. (378.5 x 647.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Gift of John S. Kennedy, 1897 (97.34).
4. For an excellent account of Leutze’s career in the light of historiography see Jochen Wierich, “Struggling through History: Emanuel Leutze, Hegel, and Empire,” American Art 15:2 (Spring 2001), 52-71.

J. M. Mancini is lecturer in American Studies at the University of Sussex. She is the author of essays in Critical Inquiry and American Quarterly and a forthcoming book on the emergence of visual modernism in the United States.

Carol Smith, King Alfred’s, Winchester

‘See what you can discover about Americans that you didn’t know before.’
Introductory video to the Americans exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (London) by the Biography Channel

Thus the video introducing this exhibition of a selection of painted and photographic portraits from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington invites the viewer on a voyage of discovery of the history of American portraiture and of the formation of American identity. Due to the temporary closure of the NPG in Washington for extensive renovation (housed in the Old Patent Office Building), this intriguing and inclusive exhibition of American identity titled Americans has been on tour within America and to Japan from January 2001 and ended in London this January. It included a representative range of icons of America ranging from the colonial period to the present day including Frederick Douglass, Lena Horne, Edith Wharton, Martha and George Washington, and Michael Jackson.

The exhibition of painted portraits was arranged around three chronological themes; Freedom, The Gilded Age and The Performing Arts. A selection of photographs was hung in another room. These themes offered a linear and progressive narrative of American history which was paralleled in both the exhibition notes and two catalogues (from the NPGs Washington and London) by an art history narrative. The latter narrative detailed the complex relationship between the European and American history of portraiture. It stressed a shared history of sitters, patrons and painters in the colonial period and the nineteenth century and the more specifically ‘American’ nature of the modern portrait. The way in which the exhibition particularised the history of reciprocal nature of the relationship between American and British portrait painting and construction of identity was particularly illuminating in this post 9/11 era. The dynamics and importance of cultural exchange and shared heritage is emphasised. Thus the image of the Irish-born George Berkley by the Scottish-born painter John Simibert sat beside the young Edith Wharton, a long term resident of France, painted by the British-born Edward Harrison May, and the portrait of T.S. Eliot (a British citizen from 1927) by the English artist Sir Edward Kelly. What the London viewer discovered here about Americans was that we have and continue to be very alike – a powerful cultural statement in these times.

The symbiotic and transatlantic relationship between sitter, artist, nationality and institution focussed on by the exhibition is apt given the history of the founding of the NPG gallery in Washington as detailed by that museum’s research historian Margaret C.S. Chisum in an essay in the American exhibition catalogue. There she outlines the foundation of the NPG in Washington and its opening in 1968 as directly influenced by the cultural and ideological nation-building mission of the existing NPGs in London and Edinburgh. The Americans exhibition included several paintings from that opening exhibition This New Man: A Discourse in Portraits such as John Singleton Copley’s self -portrait and Augustus John’s painting of Tallulah Bankhead; unfortunately an image of Pocahontas by an unidentified English artist originally bought in England was unable to travel due to conservation problems.

Sitting alongside this art-historical transatlantic narrative of cultural exchange and the creation of an American painting style is a more complex narrative of the representation of historical and contemporary American identity. This latter narrative stresses and constructs America as a unique nation; as the introductory video asks ‘Where else but in America could you find Franklin, Crockett and Douglass’? The exhibition both acknowledges and contains the more problematic aspects of the formations of America, such as slavery, by linking these icons of revolution, westward expansion and abolition. The suggestion is that all three are integral to the formation of American identity, as is emphasised by the sub-titling of the first section of the exhibition, Freedom, by a quotation from Douglass ‘If there is no struggle, there is no progress’. The choice of these portraits and their linkage can be read to suggest that such problematic struggles over slavery are inherent to the formation of America and further as a welcome corrective to the exclusive WASP founding fathers history of America. Carolyn Kinder Carr emphasises this narrative of inclusive diversity in explaining the process of selection she and fellow curator Ellen Miles employed in an essay in the London catalogue. She states that selection was determined by ‘issues of chronology, occupation, gender and ethnicity’ and that ‘a conscious effort was made to include a cross section of the lively people whose diverse occupations and accomplishments are so fundamental to the vitality of the American nation’.

The result of this selection process is certainly representative and the combinations offer a positivist and vital history of the nation. In the middle section, The Gilded Age, the celebration of struggle as central to the formation of the nation continues with the bombastically heroic portrait of the Union General Sheridan by Thomas Buchanan Read. Sheridan is represented atop a rather startled looking Rienzi (his favourite horse) with saber drawn ready to rally his troops at Cedar Creek. Opposite, in contrast, was hung the stunningly beautiful portrait of Juliette Gordon Low by Edward Hughes. Gordon Low, one of the many Whartonesque American heiresses who married into the transatlantic Low family and spent the period of her marriage in England, is represented as the epitome of American passive femininity. Yet as the exhibition notes reveal this image belies the actuality of her life as she overcame great personal adversity to found the Girl Scouts of America – ‘an operation in the vanguard of the suffrage movement’. Thus her portrait might be read as representing an alternative to the male heroics of such as Sheridan and offer a gender-suitable (for the nineteenth century) method for women to take part in the struggle to form the larger American identity.

The last section, entitled The Performing Arts contained the most innovative portraits both in terms of technique and choice of sitters. Here the range of sitters is the most representative in terms of gender and ethnicity, with a rather disturbing portrait of Marianne Moore, an astonishingly intimate (for the time) image of Tallulah Bankhead in a negligee and a regal portrait of Lena Horne hanging alongside the ‘greats’ of Carl Sandberg, Lincoln Kirstein and John Updike.

Thus this fascinating exhibition offered a positive narrative of the long and continued transatlantic cultural exchange between Americans and Britons at the same time showing how this relationship is continually reinterpreted in the service of the building of the nation in America.

News from AMATAS

AMATAS Conference on Americanisation and the Teaching of the Humanities January 17, 2003 University Of Central Lancashire, Preston

Anyone in the least bit familiar with the British press will recognise that ‘Americanisation’ remains a modern preoccupation, whether for good or ill. Few stop to address the many and varied, indeed multifarious and often incompatible ways, in which the seemingly self-defining term is used. Is it merely a term to describe a creeping modernisation rooted in the American experience? Is it a way of describing the overt exporting of American agendas, whether geo-political or cultural? Or is it the way people outside the USA ape America? Perhaps Americanisation is but a synonym for an imperialism that treats the rest of the world as little more than a market and a resource for American products? But on a day that the Yale historian-pundit Paul Kennedy writes in The Guardian about the inevitability of anti-Americanism so long as the USA is the only empire in town and as The New York Times continues to debate what redevelopment might be appropriate to replace the World Trade Center the relationship between globalisation and Americanisation remains a current, vital and immediate issue, long after such diverse British writers as Hoggart and Hoskins reacted to changes in the post-war British landscape as we too were occupied by a foreign power. In a world still preoccupied with a seemingly US led celebration of globalisation it seems doubly appropriate that such topics be discussed by those BAAS members keen to engage with American and local debates given the current British preoccupation with courses relevant to the real world that are then deemed ‘mickey mouse’.

Whatever such populist criticism of higher education may mean, it is reassuring that American Studies colleagues from around the UK and beyond have been part of the University of Central Lancashire-based project on Americanisation, which has been taken not as a given, but as something inherently problematic. But this very problematic dimension has been recognised as an essential strength throughout this project, no less in this final conference. Sponsored by HEFCE the project has been concerned to direct its eventual outcomes towards students’ learning experiences, initially through the provision of workshops, but latterly by their publication on the web of examples of best practice teaching.

Patrick MaGhee , the Pro-Vice Chancellor opened the conference by recognising that American Studies enjoyed possibly a unique ability to make use of students’ existing knowledge of things American from which critical reflection could flow. Philip Davies (De Montford University and the Eccles Library, Chairperson BAAS) reminded participants that the AMATAS project had been the only successful FTTL bid to emerge from within American Studies. The project provided a useful opportunity to counter the pervasive and corrosive belief that America could be fully appreciated by the British merely by listening to Radio 4 and reading the broadsheets. The Lancashire – USA links (first Mormon bishopric/ Butch Cassidy the son of Lancashire Mormon pioneers/King Cotton) clearly illustrated how links between the USA and the UK were deeply set and often as much local and national.

The guest lecture “Americanisation and Globalisation” was given by the man who gave us the term “McDonaldization”, George Ritzer (College Park, Maryland) who was over just for this occasion. He chose to focus his remarks around a concern for the “globalisation of nothing”, perhaps the ultimate post-modern experience, which recognises the need to appreciate that with US markets saturated US corporations need to grow overseas – hence ‘Grobalisation’ is already a more appropriate term than globalisation. Widely seen as a form of expansionist imperialism, ‘grobalisation runs counter to what many commentators prefer myopically perhaps to see, ‘glocalisation’. Certainly the interaction between grobalisation and glocalisation needs serious investigation. But where once it was American productive capacity that threatened to undermine foreign industry (as British cotton manufacturers had done in the nineteenth century in places such as India) today Americans are more concerned to export their culture of consumption, with its assumptions of high rates of mobility, excess as the norm, cathedrals of consumption, high rates of affluence and the democratisation of excess. Nevertheless it remains unwise to equate McDonaldization with Americanisation, for the roots of the former clearly lie in the kinds of bureaucratic predictability associated with Weber, and increasingly it is foreign firms (Body Shop and IKEA) that now promote the next stage of McDonaldisation within the USA. Indeed McDonaldisation increasingly has its centre of gravity beyond the USA, whereas other supposedly international rather than US organisations such as the IMF seem increasingly to promote an essentially American agenda over such things as free trade. So George Ritzer is now going beyond his initial model to consider how McDonalisation impacts upon local-global tensions. He suggested that such local flourishes within say McDonalds restaurants (such as beer in Germany) were essentially cosmetic and no way challenged the basic features of McDonaldisation. Nevertheless he is attempting to develop new theoretical insights into the tensions between global and local processes, with particular interest in the significance of a shift from place specific to place neutral production and, increasingly consumption, the contrast between a craft centre (US “craft barn”) where craftspeople work and sell their products and souvenir shops (as in the Magic Kingdom) where American flags probably come from South Korea, Mickey Mouse T-shirts from Morocco. Emphasising that place/non-place produces and services are linked by an often wide continuum he fended questions that tended to centre around his model’s seemingly lack of interest in the role of the state, whether the USA or rivals such as the EU. Some present were a little worried that McDonaldisation was somewhat of a theoretical steamroller, applicable in so many circumstances it, despite the author’s personal stance, encouraged an essentially pessimistic attitudes towards globalisation – it’s inevitable, so go with it, reminiscent of the nineteenth century cry “You can’t fight city hall”.

In the second keynote address, Deborah Madsen (soon to take up the Chair of American Literature at the University of Geneva) spoke on “Americanisation and Exceptionalism”, a talk stimulated by a recognition that globalisation is not limited to economic forces in general or even capitalism in particular, and some fear its impact as they see it upon the USA itself. Fundamentalist Christian web sites already see globalisation as a multicultural threat to American exceptionalist values. The exceptionalist tradition provides many Americans with a useful set of expectations as regards their relationships past and present with the outside world that can be expressed through a developed rhetorical vocabulary which continues to allow many Americans to consider themselves standing outside history. Such reactions address real cultural needs even while escaping into a mythical American dream experience that lies beyond everyday realities. While people of necessity live within real historical circumstances, exceptionalism provides a symbolic language that treats a dream as the true reality. Of course most people do not directly relate with the world beyond their locality never mind beyond the USA. So it is locally, within their own lives that Americans of necessity work through their concerns. Modern Chinese-American writers such as Gish Jen in her books Mona in the Promised Land and Typical American are exploring ways in which the various generations explore the potentials and unexpected constraints and limitations offered them by identifying with the exceptionalist model of expectations, whether choosing to identify with mainstream or with other ethnic identities, initially negotiating their own version of the longstanding national preoccupation with E Pluribus Unum. When such choice, however, produces identities at odds with democratic values, confusion results, echoing perhaps Americans’ wider confusion within the wider world. Talk contrasted Mrs Peeke’s infamous 1882 doggerel rejection of multiculturalism, where it is the pluribus that is rejected in favour of the unum, with Mayor Gulianno’s September 21st 2002 speech praising American pluribus without which the unum is impossible. Chinese-American writers’ exploration of identity suggests that ethnicity is now far more than merely deconstructing the dead white male canon. The WASP narrative may have been displaced by various ethnic strands – but there remains a need to appreciate what multi-cultural narratives, cultural or merely literary, have had to struggle against, without which their preoccupations may seem merely personal or idiosyncratic.

Two workshops followed: “Approaches to Teaching American Popular Culture in Britain” chaired by Neil Campbell (University of Derby) with Jude Davies (King Alfred’s College), Simon Philo (University of Derby) and Alistair Keane (University of Derby) who sought to provide flavours of the various AMATAS workshops that would highlight the teaching implications of the project. Neil Campbell kicked off with how students are encouraged to look at their surroundings in ways they may never have previously considered, to see which elements are local, national and from overseas, with a concern not for America as a distant place but as somewhere possibly influencing their local experience of their everyday surroundings. Seminal texts, British and American, are then introduced to encourage debate over the landscape as a repository of cultural forms and signs. The workshop has now not only been published both on the AMATAS website but as a free-standing volume (and both are well worth seeing).

Alasdair Keane based his workshop on students’ existing interest in popular music, with modern concerns placed in historical context, with popular music seen as having subversive qualities, challenging British conventions, at least with the arrival of rock ‘n roll. One useful by-product of these workshops has been the students’ recognition that there are many different forms of American music, with some forms, such as race records only being fed back into the US mainstream via the Beetles, the Stones and Clapton, illustrating how music is dynamic, recycling sounds and attitudes not merely handing on a canon. Musical styles are now so recycled it may be impossible to discern a peculiarly American influence. Is the term Americanisation appropriate in an age of world music anyway?

Simon Philo continued along similar veins illustrating strategies based on discussing pop art that encourage students to engage with notions of degenerate art, dumbing down, with collages being a useful way to get people talking about whether their responses would be similar to those of the original audiences. Meaning changes become apparent as priorities and particularly as political agendas change, as with the ending of the cold war.
Jude Davie talked about the possibilities and limitations of net group discussions between British, American and Dutch students following a showing of Three Kings. Once the necessary software was in place the staff kept well away, possible in an experiment lasting only a couple of weeks. Colleagues who have tried longer periods found interest waned as exams approached, and sometimes month long discussions did need the occasional staff intervention to fire things up again. Students doing this for credit were also far more willing to devote time to it than were volunteers doing it over and above course work. Net etiquette has to be clearly set out, and even then contributors often found themselves hurt by the unthinking use of national stereotypes by others in the group. But having three groups successfully avoided a more obvious US non-US dichotomy of responses, also helped by the initial questions being designed to open out from the common experience of having seen the same film. Final discussions on who was the most American character soon revealed the complex nature of such a question, with the US-educated Iraqi rebel finally being emerging as the unanticipated popular choice.
Despite the whistle-stop nature of this session it usefully brought various teaching issues to the fore, with practical suggestions from the final discussion from the floor.

The alternative workshop “Teaching Imperial America: Ways Forward” was led by David Ryan (De Montfort University) and Scott Lucas (University of Birmingham). A critical and historically embedded understanding of America’s concept of its own national security is essential to any useful analysis, argued David Ryan. The relatively benign narrative of the USA’s international role in much mainstream literature can be interrogated faithfully by reference to a variety of sources, including US government documents, and statements by major players in US diplomatic circles. Ryan identified America’s shifting sense of its own national security needs, from simple territorial integrity, through definitions including European and Asian aims, to the target of securing the American Way of Life, and on to the Clinton administration’s goal of a National Security of Engagement and Enlargement. The pragmatic narratives emerging from some American sources provide a clear ideological foundation for US policy sometimes connected to the protection of America’s ‘right’ to consume a large share of the world’s resources, while the public statements defined aims as a more generalised commitment to intangible ideals and an opposition to enemies whose shape shifts according to the perception of the viewer.

Working from an essay, and numerous links maintained by himself with the help of James Boys and Andrew Day (www.ajday.demon.co.uk/49thparallel) Scott Lucas took the audience to view NSC 68 and numerous other documents to illustrate the ideological and cultural conceptualisation built into the US ideas of national security. Defined and re-defined over time, there recurs an underlying definition of international difference, and of American moral superiority in terms of underlying conflict in the realm of ideas and values. The country, seeing itself once as ‘mortally challenged by the Soviet System’ has moved on to define other ‘others’, but has maintained a mantra that requires participants to be ‘with us, or against us’, and does not easily accommodate other ways of negotiating the policy space. Culture, ideology and geopolitics are intricately connected and provide opportunities for intellectually incisive learning.

George Ritzer, Deborah Madsen, Scott Lucas and George McKay, with moderator Steve Mills (Keele University) finally took the platform for the final plenary session: “New Directions for American Studies: Teaching Global America Without Frontiers”. If HEFCE funded events must have feedback forms, then teaching conferences have to end with a plenary session. Responding to the day’s presentations it was soon clear that not only was Americanisation still highly problematic, but so was its relationship to UK-based American Studies. Nevertheless, certain overarching themes did emerge. Scott Lucas was afraid that discussion of culture, even when dealing with corporate activities, still found it difficult to engage sufficiently with political power. Despite a rhetoric of privatisation and free enterprise the role of the state has been enhanced over the last decade and American Studies, not just discussions of Americanisation, need to take that on board more fully. Looking at the debate from the other end of the telescope George Ritzer commented upon how paradoxically he felt intellectually more at home overseas than at home where American Studies was too narrowly concerned with race, class and gender to engage adequately with political and corporate power without which the real cultural wars made little sense. George McKay was worried that we were too willing to accept the USA’s own exceptionalist rhetoric. Indeed, as Liam Kennedy from the floor forcefully pointed out, American Studies tended by its very existence to give credence to the exceptional nature of the US experience, a position held equally by those who considered themselves pro or anti-American. Scott Lucas forcefully rejected the utility of such simplistic dichotomies, and several speakers from the floor commented upon the way people chose a bundle of attributes that together comprised their own particular acceptable USA. Hence left-wing Europeans traditionally enthuse about American folk culture, particularly music, while rejecting much of US foreign policy. Of particular interest to the moderator was Deborah Madsen’s call to encourage students to engage with the traditional canon if for no other reason than to enable students to appreciate the difficulties facing those who came to reject the canon in favour of a more inclusive range of concerns. This cry from someone based within a literary tradition seemed very similar to Scott Lucas’s initial plea that in our concern for resistance and liminal groups we do not forget that these groups have to operate within power structures, corporate and governmental. If we fail to recognise the role of power, whether cultural or political, we are not doing our students justice, at risk of merely exposing them to surface noise rather than deep structures. And this debate did highlight one of the strengths of the AMATAS project. By focusing upon the undergraduate teaching implications of these discussions, workshops and websites, it has reminded us all that postgraduate, faculty concerns with obscure people, places and things, while no doubt justifiable within a research culture, are not necessarily immediately appropriate for undergraduate consumption. This does not mean that undergraduate teaching must involve dumbing down: far from it. Rather it means that students with very little analytical exposure to the United States need to be introduced to certain basics that long-time professional academics may come to take for granted, particularly the main elements of the historically dominant society. To teach students about the political process, about the development of a cultural canon, or about mainstream values, is not to validate these structures and processes, but enables students to appreciate how difficult it is to change the inertia within any society, not least the USA. We may even then more fully appreciate the actions of those who have challenged and changed mainstream society. If the project has helped us re-evaluate how our students come to experience both the USA and our debates about the USA it will have succeeded in no small way.

This was an excellent finale to a most worthwhile project. For more details please see the project website (www.amatas.org).

Steve Mills, University of Keele

Obituaries

Professor Peter J. Parish, 1929-2002

The untimely death of Peter Parish in May 2002 robbed the community of British Americanists of one of its most distinguished, active and well-loved senior members. Without question, his contribution to the evolution of American studies in Britain was immense: a gifted teacher and admired scholar, he also played a significant role in the development of BAAS, and latterly in founding and shaping BrANCH (British American Nineteenth Century Historians). In each of these various capacities, throughout a career of over forty years, he endeared himself to colleagues and students alike for his humanity, good sense, honest judgment, approachability, generosity of spirit, modesty, and – not least – his kindly wit. Less immediately evident was the Catholicism that informed all these. His story is an essential part of the larger process that since 1945 has seen the study of America and its history travelling from the relative margins of British academic life to the more favoured place it occupies today.

The bright son of an Essex schoolmaster, Peter took a First in History at University College London in 1950. After graduation, he did his two years of obligatory National Service in the RAF, and returned to London to take up a postgraduate studentship under the supervision of Hale Bellott. A year as a visiting research fellow at Bowdoin College was followed by three years as a librarian at Manchester University. Then, in 1958, having recently married a fellow librarian, Norma Telfer, he was appointed Lecturer in American History at the University of Glasgow. His growing reputation on both sides of the Atlantic, confirmed by his magisterial study of the American Civil War, elicited an invitation to take up the Bonar Chair of Modern History at Dundee University, which he held until 1983. In that year he returned to London, to become Director of the Institute of United States Studies. Retirement in 1993 prompted no easing up in teaching or scholarship. As Visiting Professor of American Studies at Middlesex University and then, from 1996, as Mellon Senior Research Fellow in American History at Cambridge, he continued to supervise research students and to lecture with his customary clarity, erudition, balance and wit.

BAAS members will need little reminding of Peter’s chief publications. The American Civil War (1975) is his masterpiece. A work of remarkable lucidity, balance and shrewd judgments, it is rightly esteemed as one of the great single-volume studies of the conflict. As the thirtieth anniversary of its appearance approaches, it remains essential reading. The same fair-minded and balanced analysis is evident in Slavery: History and Historians (1989), a book which takes the uninitiated by the hand and leads them with great assurance through the minefield of slavery’s historiography. Few BAAS historians will not have contributed entries for the Reader’s Guide to American History (1997), an indispensable work of reference in which Peter’s editorial skills fused with his keen historiographical judgment to impressive effect; there will be fewer still who have not at some time or another turned to it as a way out of a tight bibliographical corner. Peter’s articles and essays are too numerous to list here, but those on religion during the Civil War, and his reflective essays on American nationalism, deserve special mention.

During Peter’s happy three-year term as Chairman of BAAS(1977-1980), he was notably successful in broadening the range of the Association’s activities and enhancing its profile at a time of increasing retrenchment in higher education. At his prompting a short-term travel fund for postgraduates was established, to support research visits to the United States. He also inspired the excellent series of BAAS Pamphlets and gave the project the best possible launch by producing the first and best-selling of these, on slavery. This publication project was but one expression of Peter’s concern to make fresh scholarship on American themes accessible to the widest possible readership. Another was his book, co-authored with Peter Batty, The Divided Union: The Story of the Civil War (1987), based on the television series for which he acted as the historical consultant. Indeed, all his writings – strikingly free from jargon and grandiloquence – bear the distinctive marks of an author who thought of himself above all else as a teacher.

Peter served the community of British Americanists in other important ways. To his involvement with the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission, the English-Speaking Union, the Fulbright Commission and other public bodies he brought to bear his particular brand of good sense and personal diplomacy. As a frequent visitor to the United States, where he had many friends and was held in high regard, especially amongst historians of slavery and the Civil War, he acted as the perfect ambassador for British Americanists. He not only recognised earlier than most the benefits that would accrue from establishing a forum for British historians of nineteenth-century America, but helped to found one: as the first Chair of BrANCH, from 1992 to 1997, he fostered an organisation over whose lively and collegial annual gatherings he presided with his customary erudition and good humour. The launch of the journal American Nineteenth Century History, under BrANCH’s auspices, owes much to his vision.

Peter Parish’s death deprives us of several promised works, including a book on the historical reputation of Abraham Lincoln, whom he much admired. While we quite properly regret that particular loss, just as we shall sorely miss his company and wise counsel, we may also take pleasure in celebrating the many ways in which he so effectively promoted a better understanding of America on this side of the Atlantic.

Richard Carwardine

Dennis Welland 1919-2002

The death of Dennis Welland on 1 September 2002 has deprived the British Association for American Studies of a founding father and gifted literary critic.
Army service during the greater part of World War II both delayed an entry into academic life and influenced his approach to both institutions and literature: he would remark that he knew the circumstances of every man under his command and did not allow a day to pass without writing to Joan, his wife to be. His service experience after graduation from, and returning to, University College, Nottingham, as it then was, must have served to inform a thesis on Wilfred Owen which was published in 1960.

Before that, however, he had also become interested in American Literature and received a Rockefeller award to spend a year at the University of Minnesota, attracted there by the presence of Henry Nash Smith. This interlude generated a permanent shift of attention to American Studies.

Where there was an institution to join and nurture, Dennis would be found, playing his part. He was justifiably proud of having been treasurer, secretary, and Chair of the Association, and a constant attendant at conferences, but his most lasting contribution to the establishment of American Studies in this country must be reckoned to be his leadership in the creation of the Journal of American Studies.

This was by no means an overnight development. Copies of the New Series of the British Association for American Studies Bulletin are, I would guess, now pretty thin on the ground, but Number 4, in August 1962, welcomed Dennis as its new editor in succession to George Shepperson. Since production had already been undertaken at the Photographic Unit of the University of Nottingham, there was obviously an advantage to be gained – but for one difficulty: the announcement was coupled with the advice that, after 1 October, the editor’s address would be the Department of American Studies at the University of Manchester. The persuasive powers of Marcus Cunliffe had succeeded in detaching Dennis from an institution to which he had been committed for over twenty years and to which he continued for the rest of his life to owe loyalty.

The Sixties was a period when American Studies became recognized as a discipline and not as a field that, in Britain at least, only commanded the attention of maverick individuals. These were conditions made for Dennis to exploit, as new Universities and new academic demands opened fresh possibilities. Manchester, despite its institutional conservatism, took a lead in recognizing the new subject and Dennis, particularly after the departure of Marcus for Sussex, became steadily more prominent in University affairs. In April 1967, however, there appeared under his editorship the first issue of the Journal of American Studies then, as now, published by Cambridge University Press for the Association, and which would become internationally known as an outlet for British research. Dennis retired from office at the end of 1976, having, in the words of his successors, established a journal ‘for whose foundation and character he is largely responsible.’

By this time University administration demanded an ever increasing amount of his attention. He had become Dean of the Arts Faculty, and an almost inevitable appointee to major University committees. Duty called and his public manner made him a popular choice in many venues: it was not surprising that he should so greatly have enjoyed being – and to be enjoyed as – presenter of honorary Graduands. In the academic year 1980-1981 he was fully occupied as acting Vice-Chancellor. These commitments and attractions took him a distance from teaching and research in American Literature.

As a critic, Dennis was at ease in the company of classical texts: as a rule, he preferred the period from Benjamin Franklin to Upton Sinclair. There were, of course, exceptions, most notably Arthur Miller, for whom he provided in 1961 one of the earliest academic appreciations. Once again an institutional connection can be discerned, with a longstanding involvement in the often chequered fortunes of the University Contact Theatre, to which he devoted during twenty years much time.

One can only speculate as to Dennis’s personal preferences in his academic writings, but it seems likely that he would have looked benevolently on his work on Mark Twain, especially Mark Twain in England (1978). There might appear a synergy of researcher and subject: Dennis relished the retailing of anecdotes, often with himself in a central role, which displayed his gift of language and humorous self-deprecation to the best advantage. He enjoyed a display of himself as a figure of some note, for example, re-reading, with a wry pleasure, decades later, correspondence with Edmund Blunden which had made its way to the Library of the University of Texas.

His death, as a young 82 year-old, is cause for sadness but also an occasion for recognition of his contributions to American Studies. Above all, he demonstrated that there was no contradiction between a maintenance of established literary values and their application to a field previously shunned by British scholarship. It was a task and a service well done.

Peter Marshall

Funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB)

The Arts and Humanities Research Board began holding structured annual consultative meetings with subject groups and learned societies this past autumn. BAAS has sent representatives both to the History and Related Subjects as well as the Languages and Literature Meetings. In these meetings the AHRB emphasised that they generally operated in a “responsive” mode, and try not to be prescriptive. However, the number of “managed” programmes is growing, and the AHRB is keen to get feedback from the scholarly community about what areas to encourage, and particularly what areas are “cutting edge” at the moment. They seem particularly keen to foster more interdisciplinary research. In the spring, they will be consulting with BAAS and other learned societies about the possibilities of ring-fencing funds for specific projects, either from “threatened” or “emerging” fields.

Currently, postgraduates receive a much larger proportion of funding than from other Research Councils, or about 40% of available funds. About 12% of undergraduates go on to do Master’s degrees, and of these about 12% obtain funding from the AHRB. About 25% of Master’s students go on to do the PhD, and the AHRB funds about 25% of these. The proportions vary in different subject areas. There has been a rise in applications from postgraduates of about 15-20% in the last few years. More generally, across the eight schemes in History and Related Subject areas, there have been, in the 2001 competition, 600 awards from 1,650 applications; the numbers are roughly the same for English Literature and Language (618 awards from 1,654 applications). The percentage of successful applications is remarkably high, but as the number of applications rises quickly as they have been doing, this success rate will inevitably fall. The AHRB also emphasised that they were striving to achieve some semblance of “balance” across the Humanities, but the way to do this was not so clear. Again, at present the AHRB simply responds to the number of applications received, but would like to try and foster a more proportional system, particularly based on the size of different constituencies. The AHRB was keen to emphasise that though there were no subject panels specifically devoted to Area Studies or interdisciplinary applications, the AHRB never turned down applications on the basis that they ‘could’ be presented to another Council. Moreover, these have usually been dealt with in the past by several different panels within the AHRB, and the success rate of interdisciplinary proposals seen by more than one panel has actually been marginally higher than normal.

In light of these meetings, and the encouraging response BAAS has had from the AHRB about Area Studies, including American Studies, we are keen to push our members to apply to the AHRB, as well as the ESRC. The AHRB provides funding for Research, Research Leave, Research Exchanges, Research Centres, and Resource Enhancement, as well as giving awards for Innovation, Fellowships in the Creative and Performing Arts, and Small Grants in the Creative and Performing Arts. Though the vast majority of funding for, and applications from, academics to the AHRB is for individual research leave, the AHRB is also keen to get the academic community to think of ways of developing research based less on a model of lone scholarship, and that requires larger grant funding. For more information about AHRB and its work, see www.ahrb.ac.uk

For more information about the Subject consultations with the AHRB, please contact Phil Davies (Philip.Davies@bl.uk ), Mike McDonnell (m.mcdonnell@swan.ac.uk), Heidi Macpherson (hrsmacpherson@uclan.ac.uk) or Nick Selby (N.Selby@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk).

Travel Award Reports

The Malcolm Bradbury Award Kathryn Napier Gray, University of Glasgow

When I discovered in January 2002 that I was the winner of the very first Malcolm Bradbury Award, nobody was more surprised and pleased than me. So, several months later, on an unusually sunny day in Glasgow, I set out on Iceland Air to the American Antiquarian Society, Massachusetts, where it was raining, heavily. Thankfully, the next day, this changed and Massachusetts looked very beautiful in the fall sunshine.

Apart from these meteorological considerations, for Early American Studies, especially studies of New England, AAS is a real treasure trove. In my current research, I am interested in the emergence of Indian and colonial identities as they evolve in the texts of seventeenth century New England. Many of the holdings I was interested in are not unavailable anywhere else, so it was essential that I made this trip. Armed with several pencils (no pens allowed in the reading room) and many notepads, I made my way to the stacks. My PhD research is on the work of John Eliot, “Apostle to the Indians”, but for this project, I was interested in the writings of his contemporaries. Specifically, I was able to compare Eliot’s work with: Daniel Gookin’s “An Historical Account of the doings and sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England”, 1677, the manuscripts of minister, Thomas Shepard, John Cotton’s “A Discourse about Civil Government” 1663, and the collected papers of Roger Williams. All proved useful, although, seventeenth century manuscripts are particularly difficult to decipher, sometimes the nineteenth century bound copy is worth keeping in view! Probably the most fascinating and well-penned manuscript was that of England’s man in the colony, Edward Randolph, who, after “King Philip’s War” of 1675, writes back to England, presenting a very different picture from the one the above-mentioned colonists would have preferred. Alarmingly modern in its political manipulation, Randolph’s letter, which would have been read by the Privy Council and the committee for Trade and Plantations, seeks to decimate the reputation of the colonial government, and Eliot’s ongoing missionary project with Algonquian Indians. Given my focus on the transatlantic relationship, this letter really helped crystallise the tensions between New and Old England, and helps determine the framework for the emergence of a New English identity in this period.

Of course, secondary sources, including George Parker Winship’s The Eliot Indian Tracts, 1925, Wilberforce Eames’s work on Eliot’s Algonquian translation of the Bible and on the Bay Psalm Book, and William Wallace Tooker’s work on Eliot’s Indian interpreters, are all crucial to my research and are rarely available in Britain. Equally fascinating were the gems which I accidentally came across in general searches, for instance: a copy of a woodcut print of the bureau Eliot wrote from and an account of its history through various owners, accounts of centenary memorials, of bi-centenary and tri-centenary memorials in Massachusetts, stories about Eliot included in nineteenth century Sunday School story books, for example, “The Good Indian Missionary,” 1857, and finally, copies of some wonderful portraits of the Massachusetts missionary himself.

I would especially like to thank the librarians at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, for all their help and suggestions. Also, I would like to thank Glasgow University’s Arts Faculty for the research support award, which helped with a rather large photocopying bill. A final thank-you must go to BAAS for the travel award, and I hope next year’s winner has an equally successful and enjoyable trip.

Marcus Cunliffe Travel Award H Dosanjh Kaur, University of Hull

I used my £500 travel award to travel to the US in July and August 2002 and conduct research at Johns Hopkins University, The National Library of Medicine, The Colonial Williamsburg Library and the Schomberg Centre in Harlem. The purpose of the research visit was to collect data on the place of slaves and former slaves in the development of American Medicine, particularly gynaecology, obstetrics and psychiatry.

I spent a week searching the archives of the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. I am indebted to Professor Ranice Crosby for spending so much of her time exploring the material with me. I am also grateful to Cory Sandone and other members of the department for their suggestions of articles and their willingness to discuss the research area with me.

In addition I spent a substantial amount of time researching in the National Library of Medicine, Washington. This was hindered by the fact that much of the library’s collection is in closed stacks and a significant proportion of the material requested appeared to be missing. However, I made contact with members of the National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine group and found some useful material which I followed up at the Colonial Williamsburg library in Virginia. Finally I spent time searching the collection of the Schomberg Institute in Harlem.

Following the trip my research has developed in depth and scope. Several new possibilities have emerged and I am currently in the process of submitting an article for publication. I had the opportunity to search several collections in detail and to gain detailed information from faculty and librarians about my research area. I am very grateful for the award which enabled me to conduct the trip and collect essential research material for my thesis.

David Milne, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge

Last January I was the fortunate recipient of a short-term travel grant from the British Association for American Studies. This grant covered my transatlantic flight, while the Lyndon Baines Johnson and John. F. Kennedy libraries kindly awarded me additional funds to cover my living expenses. I spent two weeks in both Austin, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts pursuing research toward my doctorate, entitled “Walt Rostow and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1961-1968.”

John F. Kennedy appointed Walt Rostow to be his Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs in January 1961. Exasperated by Rostow’s bellicosity on the issue of military escalation in Vietnam, Kennedy moved him to serve as Chairman of the Policy Planning Council at the State Department in December 1961. Rostow worked in the Policy Planning Council up until April 1966, when Lyndon Johnson appointed Rostow to replace McGeorge Bundy as his National Security Adviser.

Rostow’s mantra throughout his academic career was that of Third World modernization: that is, U.S. largesse and advice should be dispensed across the developing world to combat the “disease of the transition” that is communism. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Rostow was the pre-eminent civilian hawk on the issue of military escalation in Vietnam. His current position – formulated in response to former Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara’s admission In Retrospect that U.S. policy toward the Vietnamese Civil War was “wrong, terribly wrong” – is that fending off North Vietnam until 1975 gave the remaining western-inclined nations of Southeast Asia the space and time to facilitate the rapid economic growth that led to their designation as Pacific “tiger” economies. In other words, America’s Vietnam War was in no way futile.
While in Austin I was fortunate enough to interview Professor Rostow in his office at the library (as well as trawl through eighteen boxes of his national security files). At eighty-six years old, Rostow continues to lecture on economic history at the University of Texas at Austin, and remains in remarkable intellectual and physical shape. Rostow began his interview by stating (self-deprecatingly, I hope) that I had chosen a lousy topic, but was very generous with his time. While his responses on Vietnam were expectedly bellicose and unrepentant, he was also keen to emphasise the positive successes enjoyed by the Alliance for Progress for Latin America under Lyndon Johnson – a policy that most commentators take to have died with Kennedy in November 1963. Professor Rostow was most forthcoming in his responses and talked openly for over an hour. When finally he enquired as to the crux of my thesis – particularly with regard to Vietnam – I chose not to sour the convivial atmosphere, parrying: “I admire your consistency.”

The remaining two weeks in Boston were less eventful but highly productive. My thanks must go to the archival staff at both the Kennedy and Johnson libraries, who were unfailingly helpful and generous. Spending four weeks in U.S. presidential archives affords one the time to photocopy a mass of documents. A significant part of the second year of my PhD will be spent analysing those memoranda and cables. So my thanks must go to BAAS for contributing so generously to this research trip. It has provided me with much of the raw material on which my dissertation will be based.

Elizabeth Jacobs, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

First of all I would like to thank BAAS for their support and for the travel grant that enabled me to use the Chicano Research Collection at Arizona State University. The purpose of the trip was to strengthen sections of my doctoral thesis, Chicana/o Literature and the Politics of Identity, with archival material not available in the UK. The thesis focuses on issues of identity associated with the Chicano Civil Rights Movement (el movimiento) and subsequent revisions in Chicana women’s writing of the post Movement decades.

Housed in the Department of Archives and Manuscripts at the Hayden Library, the collection supplied relevant material for the thesis in several ways. Firstly it has particular strengths in Chicano literature, history, immigration, civil rights, and Chicana feminist expression in the twentieth century, and therefore contributed to a more general understanding of the Chicana/o experience in the United States. Secondly and more specifically it began as a circulating collection of books that directly represented the thought and philosophy of el movimiento. Originally established in 1970, over the years it has expanded to become a unique collection in all formats including manuscripts and personal papers, a book collection, oral histories, videos and photographic prints. Given this wealth of material, it was fortunate that Chris Marín the curator and archivist of the collection was willing to offer her expert reference assistance throughout my stay. Her invaluable guidance and information regarding both the collection and all things Chicana/o meant that I achieved a good deal of relevant research in a relatively short amount of time. Among the manuscript collections I found most interesting were the Rose Marie and Joe Eddie Lopez papers. These are an important record of their civic and political efforts and include correspondence, news clippings, political memorabilia, as well as campaign materials. In relation to the thesis, the papers provided unique insights into the nature of local socio-political activism during the protest decades, and threw light on the couple’s joint involvement in the establishment of the little documented Chicanos por la Causa Organisation in the Phoenix area.

My research also benefited from personal discussions and interviews with many of the staff based in several departments at ASU, these included the Department of Literatures and Languages, the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies and the Hispanic Research Center. In particular the Chicana writers Professor Cordelia Candelaria and Professor Margarita Cota Cardenas offered important and personal perspectives on Chicana political writing and activism, self-publishing and issues of Chicana identity. At ASU since 1981 Margarita Cota Cardenas has principally taught in the Department of Literatures and Languages, but kindly allowed me to interview her at home. During the nineteen seventies she acted as co-founder and editor of Scorpion Press, one of the major outlets for the work of Mexican American and other Latina women poets writing at that time. Based on firsthand experience she was able to clarify the difficulties Chicana women writers experienced with funding, distribution and promotion of their literature during its early period of growth and development following the Chicano Movement’s decline. On a more contemporary note her colleague and fellow writer, Professor Cordelia Candelaria, currently head of a busy and flourishing Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, introduced me to the research team there, many of whom are presently developing a multi-volume Encyclopaedia of Latino Culture for the Greenwood Publishing Group. Other Departmental activities included a summer academy for middle and secondary school teachers titled ‘Teaching Arizona’s Hispanic Heritage,’ a project that incorporated some very interesting ideas for a pedagogical approach to multicultural education. Towards the end of my stay the Chicano historian Ed Escobar and ethnomusicologist Peter Garcia both of the Chicano Studies Department took me on a tour of Phoenix where we visited an exhibition of film posters from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema at the Chicano Museum before meeting other members of the Department at an award ceremony for the first honorary scholar in Hispanic Business, courtesy of the Wells Fargo Bank.

The research visit proved to be successful on all counts, but would not have been possible without the generosity of BAAS, who I would like to thank again for their support. I would also like to extend my thanks to Gary Keller and Gema Ledesma of the Hispanic Research Centre for helping to iron out the technicalities of the trip, Chris Marín, Margarita Cota Cardenas, and Cordelia Candelaria for their hospitality, expertise and sound advice, and the Department of English UWA and my supervisor Dr. Martin Padget for their encouragement and backing.

G.H. Bennett, University of Plymouth

The travel award paid for an airfare to the United States which began a four week visit to the United States in July-August 2002. Material was gathered from the National Archives in Washington for the project the GI in the West Country 1942-45 to supplement that already gathered from the Public Record Office Kew, from oral history accounts, and from other record repositories, including local studies libraries throughout the South West of England. Material gathered from United States Navy records about the training in the South West of Naval Combat Demolition Units in the South West was particularly interesting.

During the course of my visit I also had the opportunity to work in a private archive held by Professor Gil Guinn of Lander University. South Carolina. He amassed a considerable archive of correspondence with British pilots who trained in the United States from 1941 to 1945 before he was struck by long term illness. Professor Guinn made his archive available to me over the summer and together we embarked on the writing of a book on The Training of British Airmen in the United States under the Towers Scheme. Approximately 20% of the book was completed before I had to return home in time for clearing. The book is particularly interesting because of the parallels with the training of Americans in the West Country. It was instructive to discover that the same kind of cultural tensions generated during the war by the presence of Americans in Britain were mirrored by the tensions generated by the training of British airmen in the United States. Application has been made to the British Academy to support this project with a small grant. The Guinn archive will eventually join his book collection in the library of the University of South Carolina at Columbia.

Also during my stay in the United States I gathered material for a documentary collection on the Roosevelt peacetime administration. The final manuscript of this is due to be handed to the Manchester University Press in August 2003. The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute have generously agreed to support the book by awarding me a Lubin-Winant Fellowship. Lastly, a visit to the Carter Library in Atlanta was fitted in to enable me to complete an article on Presidential libraries in the United States. That article is now complete and is under consideration. I hope to present an aspect of that research at the next BAAS conference.

Jonathan Watson, University of Sussex

I would like to thank BAAS and UCLA for their generous support in financing a research trip to Los Angeles over August and September of 2002. The trip gave me the opportunity to conduct a large part of the primary research required to complete my D.Phil. My thesis examines the structures, aims and agenda of the Los Angeles branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) between 1930 and 1950.

My work seeks to contribute to the understanding of the development and activism of NAACP branches in urban centres during the Depression, the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. Many historians have viewed this period as containing the beginnings of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet analysis of cities in the West, and of the NAACP branches during the period remains incomplete. In turn, analysis of African American Los Angeles has been focussed largely on events since 1965, paying little attention to the dynamics of community politics in the years before Watts. My research seeks to broaden understanding both of the NAACP, its branches in the West, and of the black community in a city that has become a model of urban expansion in the United States.

Having previously examined the correspondence of the Los Angeles NAACP with its New York head office, I was left with an incomplete understanding of the branch’s policy, activism and internal politicking — one letter to Walter White, Executive Secretary of the NAACP during the 1930s and 1940s, from branch president H. Claude Hudson indicated he felt branch affairs should not be the concern of the Association’s head office. His successor, Thomas L. Griffith Jr., shared this attitude. Previous attempts to find the branch’s own files have also proved fruitless. The purpose of the trip, therefore, was to find any other evidence of activity by either the branch, its members, or the broader African American community in Los Angeles. I was aided in this task before I left by consulting the superb Online Archive of California. This web resource catalogues the majority of collections held in all of California’s academic and research libraries, allowing scholars to depart for research with as much knowledge as is possible of what collections are available across the state of California.

My research was centred at two libraries within Los Angeles. The majority was undertaken at the Young Research Library at the UCLA campus in Westwood. Here, I was able to consult the files of the Los Angeles Urban League from the same period (including the organisation’ s extremely informative responses to a questionnaire for the Myrdal study.) I was also able to examine the papers of the Southern California ACLU, and the papers of the state’s leading black insurance group, both of which shed light on the status of African Americans in the city during the period.

The most rewarding work at UCLA came from two sources; the city’s weekly African American newspaper, the California Eagle, and Forty Years, the privately published autobiography of its editor Charlotta Bass. Whilst the Eagle gave me information regarding the branch’s activities on a weekly basis (Bass was on the branch board), Forty Years offered me invaluable information on the history and construction of Los Angeles’ black elite. According to Bass, a number of key families dominated black Los Angeles’ business and social institutions. I was also able to examine the Library’s collection of oral histories, which provided me with further insights into the city’s black leadership.

My second period of research was conducted at the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research in Inglewood. In terms of scale, there could not have been more difference between this library and the one on Campus. Housed in a converted tyre store on Vermont Avenue, this small library nonetheless holds a vital series of collections for scholars interested in the California left. The library was one of very few buildings in the area saved from destruction in the violence following the Rodney King verdict in 1992 and continues to tie its research objectives to broader goals of community education. Its staff were able to offer me a great deal of help, whilst also letting me examine both Charlotta Bass’ personal papers, and several other collections detailing the development of black Los Angeles.

With work at these two libraries provided me with new insights into subjects that I was already aware of and pointed the way toward other areas whose importance I had underestimated. With this research completed, I now have the majority of the primary sources I need to complete my D.Phil at Sussex. I again express my thanks to BAAS for their generous support.

Fulbright American Studies Institutes 2003

The world-wide Fulbright Commission is proud to announce details of The Fulbright American Studies Summer Institutes. These Institutes are designed as rigorous 6-week academic seminars with the purpose of providing participants with a deeper understanding of American life and institutions in order to strengthen curricula and to improve the quality of teaching about the US in universities abroad. The Institutes may strengthen an already well-established American Studies faculty at an UK university, or boost a young American Studies program in the UK.

Each program includes two components: an intensive, four-week academic seminar and a study tour of up to two weeks designed to reinforce the academic content of the seminar. 18-30 foreign educators participate in each Institute

Most Institutes will run from late June to early August 2003 and are designed for faculty members of American Studies and other relevant university departments (i.e., Social Sciences, Politics, English Literature), and include:

SUBJECT:

Managing Diversity: The American Experience
INSTITUTION: TBC

American Political Development: Ideas and Institutions
INSTITUTION: TBC

Religion in the United States
University of California, Santa Barbara

Contemporary American Literature
Northern Illinois University (DeKalb, IL)

US Foreign Policy: Foundation & Formulation
University of South Carolina Columbia, South Carolina

The Civilization of the United States – An Introduction
New York University

The US Constitution: Origins, Evolution and Contemporary Issues
Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania

Religion in Contemporary America: Church, State and Society
Boisi Center, Boston College, Boston, Massachusetts

For further information on the individual programs (e.g. subject material, suitable applicant background), please consult the following website (do not apply through this website): http://exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/apply.htm

Criteria:
Must be an EU citizen.
Be able to demonstrate an outstanding academic record.
Be able to demonstrate evidence of initiative and active involvement in extra-curricular activities.

Ideal Candidate:
Is a younger or mid-career member of faculty.

Is an individual whose UK University is seeking to:
Introduce US Studies into its curriculum or,
Develop new US Studies courses or,
Enhance and update existing courses on the US.

While the individual’s scholarly and professional credentials are important, how participation in the Institute will enhance American Studies at the individual’s home university is equally important.

Benefits:
Round-trip international travel (and domestic travel if the course requires trips).
Maintenance costs, inclusive of university lodging and meals.
Where applicable, extra money provided for books and materials.

For more information and an application form, please send a 41p SAE to the address below, specifically quoting which institute you are interested in. Applications must be received by Friday 21 February 2003.

British Programme Manager
US-UK Fulbright Commission
Fulbright House
62 Doughty Street
London
WC1N 2JZ

Rockefeller Fellowships

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library

Short-Term Residential Fellowships

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, in cooperation with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, is pleased to invite applications for short-term residential fellowships at the John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Library. A principal component of the Foundation’s Research Division, the Library supports research on British America, the Revolutionary era, and the early Republic, and has particular strengths in areas relating to eighteenth-century Williamsburg and Virginia, the colonial Chesapeake, African American studies, the decorative arts and material culture through 1830, archaeology, architectural history, and historical preservation.

Fellowships are available for between one and three months and carry a stipend of $1,500 per month. An additional housing subsidy of $300 per month will be provided for pre-doctoral candidates. The fellowships are open to American and foreign nationals who are engaged in pre- or post-doctoral, or independent research. Fellows are expected to be in continuous residence at the Rockefeller Library and to participate in the intellectual life of the Foundation’s research and education campus. Fellows are also invited to attend colloquia, seminars, and lectures at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and at the College of William and Mary.

Applications are welcome from scholars working in a variety of fields—African American studies, archaeology, architectural history, cultural studies, decorative arts, history, material culture, and related subjects. Applicants should submit six copies of the following materials: a succinct description of the project (1,000 words) and a résumé. In addition, three letters of reference should be sent directly to the address below. Deadlines for applications are April 1 and November 1.

Further information about the Foundation and Rockefeller Library is available at www.colonialwilliamsburg.org.

Address all materials to:

Fellowship Committee, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Library
The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Post Office Box 1776
Williamsburg, Virginia 23187-1776 USA

Conference Reports

Coast to Coast: An Interdisciplinary American Studies Conference. The BAAS 2002 Annual Postgraduate Conference, The University of Sheffield, Saturday 23 November 2002

Sponsored by the University of Sheffield, BAAS and Comparative American Studies, 2002’s postgraduate conference attracted over fifty delegates from all over the country and a higher number than ever before from overseas; from the University of Edinburgh to the University of West England and from North Carolina Central University to Baskent University, Turkey. Twenty-three postgraduates gave papers over the course of the day, creating a forum for debate and research dissemination.

The broad scope of presentations testified to the interdisciplinary focus of this year’s conference. Ranging from the seventeenth century (Catherine Armstrong, “The Seas Thus Enraged: Henry Norwood’s Voyage to Virginia”, Warwick University) to the contemporary (Elissa Rospigliosi, “Like a Dream That Won’t Let Go: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and the Myth of the West”, Mansfield College, Oxford) expertise crossed between the fields of drama, film, literature, poetry, legal studies, history and media studies. This conference also brought together scholars within the field of African American history with a special panel devoted to histories of the American South. In addition, there were numerous papers which engaged in intersectional readings including Kuldip Kuwahara, “Exploring Asian Contexts in American Women’s Writing”, North Carolina Central University and Rebecca Loncraine, “Djuna Barnes’ New York Journalism: Stunt Journalism and the Production of the City”, Rothmere American Institute.

“Coast to Coast” embarked on a series of intellectual journeys and returns, re-mapping disciplinary borders within American Studies. Six papers were selected for publication in a forthcoming special edition of US Studies OnLine: James Campbell, “African American Responses to Crime in Antebellum Richmond Virginia”, University of Nottingham; Ben Williamson, “The Unutterable Entertainments of Paradise: The American Landscape and Waste in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace”, University of West England; Elizabeth Rosen, “The American West Through an Apocalyptic Lens: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian”, University College London; Catherine Morley, “Epic Aspirations for the Great American Novel: John Updike’s Song of America”, Oxford Brookes University; Sara Upstone, “Toni Morrison and the Magical Re-Visioning of Space”, Birkbeck College; Scott Duguid, A “Hollywood Ending? Totalitarianism and Mass Culture in The Naked and the Dead”, University of Edinburgh.

The conference was hugely enjoyable and the evening’s entertainment sponsored by The University of Sheffield provided an excellent opportunity to continue discussion well into the night! Thanks are due to The University of Sheffield and BAAS for their financial assistance and to staff of the American Studies programme at Sheffield as well as Professor Dick Ellis of The Nottingham Trent University. In particular we would like to extend our gratitude to Professor John Haffenden, Dr Hugh Wilford, Dr Matthew Bevis and Dr Duco van Oostrum for their support.

Rachel van Duyvenbode and Colin Howley

Conference and Seminar Announcements

Fourth Symbiosis Conference:” Across the Great Divide”, Edinburgh, 18-21 July 2003

CALL FOR PAPERS

The STAR Project is collaborating with Symbiosis, a journal of Anglo-American literary relations, to hold the Fourth Symbiosis Conference, “Across the Great Divide,” in Edinburgh from July 18-21, 2003. The conference invites papers on all aspects of literary, theoretical, and material transatlantic cultural exchange between the British Isles and the Americas; panel proposals are also welcomed. This meeting will coincide with a major exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland that will investigate the impact of Scottish emigration to North America on both the emigrants and the indigenous people they encountered. The conference events will take place in conjunction with both the Museum of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland.

Proposals of approximately 300 words and a brief CV should be submitted by February 28, 2003 to:
Elisabeth Dodds
Centre of Canadian Studies
21 George Square
Edinburgh, Scotland EH8 9LD
e-mail: elisabethdodds@star-project.org

Conference information can be accessed online at www.star.ac.uk

About the STAR Project

Scotland’s Transatlantic Relations Project is made possible by funding from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and convened by Susan Manning (University of Edinburgh). STAR is an interdisciplinary collaborative venture involving colleagues across the Scottish universities, research libraries and museums, in association with partners in North America and the Caribbean. Its goals are to facilitate links with existing groups in transatlantic studies, to enable connections between researchers and resources, and to engage in active identification of research projects and publishing ventures. In addition to running the 2003 Symbiosis conference, STAR is actively pursuing joint activities with other institutions. The STAR Postgraduate Seminar in American Studies is currently running in Edinburgh at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) and the National Library of Scotland.

The STAR website (www.star.ac.uk) will contain a unique archive of original resources for transatlantic studies, including online papers, digitized texts, and a gallery of images. The site will serve as a forum for information exchange and discussion of transatlantic topics, with features such as a message board, suggested reading list, and a directory of STAR members. In addition, it will provide updated information on upcoming conferences, transatlantic exchange programs and funding opportunities. Finally, the site’s extensive ‘links’ section will serve as a portal to other relevant websites.

Suggestions for the STAR Project, such as desirable web content and useful links, are strongly encouraged. Please direct any correspondence to Elisabeth Dodds at the above address, or to Susan Manning at susan.manning@ed.ac.uk.

Commonwealth Fund Conference on American History

A Commonwealth Fund Conference on American History on the theme of “American Cinema and Everyday Life” will be held at University College London on 26th-28th June 2003. Approximately 60 papers will be presented on the social experience of movie-going. For further details, please see the conference web-site: www.ucl.ac.uk/history/cf2003 or contact Melvyn Stokes at M.Stokes@ucl.ac.uk

New Challenges for the American Presidency

The Institute of United States Studies and The Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library

Two day conference: 12-13 May 2003

British Library Conference Centre, Euston Road, London

Keynote address by Professor Richard Neustadt, Professor Emeritus, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

With panel discussions on “The State of the Presidency”, “Legislative Leadership in Polarized Politics”, “The President as Chief Executive: Implementing the War
on Terror”, and “The Commander-in-Chief in the Permanent War”.

Registration fee applies. To receive a registration pack contact:

Institute of United States Studies
Tel: 020 7862 8693
Email: iuss@sas.ac.uk
Web: www.sas.ac.uk/iuss

Marbury v. Madison: A Bicentennial Reconsideration

The Institute of United States Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Two day conference in association with the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies: 29-30 May 2003

Lincoln’s Inn, London

Keynote address by Professor Charles Hobson, Editor, The Papers of John Marshall, The College of William & Mary

With presentations by:

Sotirios Barber, Robert Clinton, Robert Faulkner, Matthew Franck, Herbert Johnson, Sanford Levinson, Robert McKeever, William Nelson, Kent Newmeyer, HW Perry,
Jack Pole, Shlomo Slonim, James Stoner and Christopher Wolfe

This conference qualifies for Law Society and General Council of the Bar CPD hours

Registration fee applies. To receive a registration pack, contact:

Institute of United States Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Tel: 020 7862 8693
Email: iuss@sas.ac.uk
Web: www.sas.ac.uk/iuss

University of Oxford, Rothermere American Institute Seminar Series

Americanisation & Anti-Americanism: Global Views Of The U.S.A.

The Rothermere American Institute is pleased to announce a series of seminars addressing global perceptions of the United States of America. America’s global presence in the twentieth century has elicited a vast array of reaction – from sympathetic emulation to caustic denunciation. Europeans have long wrestled with the ambivalence of their American vision. Around the world, peoples of various nations have admired America for its democracy, egalitarianism and social dynamism while others have loathed its lack of refinement and its “cultural imperialism”. Most recently, attitudes toward America from within the Islamic world have been the subject of much speculation. This seminar series approaches the topic of American image(s) abroad from within a number of disciplines and with a variety of perspectives.

All seminars will take place in the large seminar room at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, 1A South Parks Road, Oxford.
All are Welcome.

Tuesday 25th February 2:30-4pm
Sergio Fabbrini, University Professor of Political
Science, University of Trento, Italy, “Reacting to America: Globalization and American Hyper-Power in a European Perspective”

Thursday 13 March 5pm – 6:30pm
James Epstein, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, “Britain’s ‘America’: Notes from the 19th Century.”

Tuesday 29 April 2:30pm – 4pm
David Ryan, Principal Lecturer, Department of Historical and Institutional Studies, De Montfort University. “Americanisation and Anti-Americanism at the Periphery: From Central America to 9/11”

Tuesday 13 May 5pm – 6:30pm
Richard Crockatt, Reader in American History, University of East Anglia. “No Common Ground?: Islam, America and Anti-Americanism”

Tuesday 27 May 2:30pm – 4pm
Richard Pells, Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin.“From Modernism to the Movies: The Globalization of American Culture in the 20th Century”

Thursday 12 June 5pm – 6:30pm
Heinz Ickstadt, Professor of American Literature, Kennedy Institute for North-American Studies at Free University, Berlin. “The Presence of America and Postwar-Germany’s Cultural Responses”

For more information please see the RAI’s website at www.rai.ox.ac.uk
or contact Cheryl Hudson at cheryl.hudson@rai.ox.ac.uk or (01865) 282711

New Members

Edward Burton is an American gradute student currently finishing his doctoral thesis on “The Swedish-American Immigrant Press and the Vietnam War.” He teaches at the University of Göteborg in Sweden.

Owen Butler is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham studying the American or Know Nothing party in the south.

Darren Carlaw is currently doing a PhD at the University of Newcastle, researching the role of the flaneur in New York literature.

Allen Cline is a PhD student at Queen Mary College. His research interests include public administration and public management policy in the US and the UK. He is comparing the Clinton/Blair reforms and working on an analysis of the Bush management agenda.

Richard Crockatt has taught American History at UEA for 24 years. His interests are in US foreign policy/international history with special focus on the cold war and recent events, including September 11. Publication include The Fifty Year War: the United States and the Soviet Union in World Politics, 1914-1991 (Routledge, 1995) and America Embattled: September 11, Anti-Americanism and the Global Order (Routledge, December 2002).

Paul Edwards is a research postgraduate at the University of Nottingham working on an analysis of the architect Victor Gruen, founder of the shopping mall.

Luigi Fidanza is a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University researching western American literature, particularly Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurty in relation to gender studies.

Graeme Finnie is a postgraduate student at the University of Dundee researching Chicano/a and Native American literature of the US/Mexico border.

Graham Frater is an Open University tutor and independent education consultant with a longstanding interest in American literature and a PhD on Sarah Orne Jewett

Robert Freedman is currently undertaking a Historical Studies MPhil at the University of Cambridge and writing a dissertation on the religious right in the 1970s.

Joanne Hall is a postgraduate at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests are the representation of the female hobo in literature, history and film, twentieth century American fiction, the 1930s and the graphic novel.

Marybeth Hamilton is the author of When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment. She is currently writing a book called In Search of the Blues about the blues and its audiences.

Adrian Hunter teaches at the University of Stirling. His research interests include the American short story, Stephen Crane and civil war literature.

Joel Isaac has research interests in the history of American social science.

Kirsty Jardine is a postgraduate student at the University of Glasgow and is interested in American-Jewish literature, gothic literature and romanticism.

Christoph Lindner is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. His research interests are nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, film and popular culture.

Emma Long is a postgraduate student at the University of Kent, Canterbury researching the relationship between schools and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

Conor McGrath is a lecturer in Political Communication and Public Affairs at the University of Ulster, having previously worked as a lobbyist in Westminster. He is currently writing a book on lobbying in Washington, London and Brussels and researching the representation of American and British politics in fiction and autobiography.

Roland Marden is a lecturer in American Social Studies at the University of Sussex. His research interests are eighteenth century American political thought, the American founding and modern constitutionalism.

James Miller is a PhD student at King’s College, London writing about William Burroughs, James Baldwin and alterity in cold war literature.

Amy Morris is a fellow and university assistant lecturer at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and in interested in early American literature, particularly New England Puritan poetry.

Champa Patel is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include comparative twentieth century American and postcolonial history, and especially political pan-African movements.

Tom Rogers is completing a PhD at the University of Sheffield on John Berryman.

Elizabeth Rosen is currently working on PhD at University College, London. Her area of interest is contemporary apocalyptic fiction and twentieth century American fiction.

Gillian Stern is a commissioning editor at Sage Publications where she is working on establishing the journal Comparative American Studies and commissioning a Handbook of American Studies. She is also a reader of unpublished novels for Curtis Brown

Carole Sweeney is a lecturer in French Studies at the University of Southampton.

Diane Wallace is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. Her research interest is the influence of African American music in African American literature and art.

Kevin Watson is a postgraduate student at the University of Sheffield. His research brings together nineteenth century religious, immigration and labour history. He is also interested in primitive Methodism in the US and twentieth century evangelical religion.

Yan Ying is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. His research interests are Asian American culture and representation, particularly Chinese American literature.

Members’ News

Mark Newman, Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945-1995 (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8173-1060-6), has won the 2002 Lillian Smith Book Award for non-fiction from the Southern Regional Council.

The History Subject Centre, Learning and Teaching Support Network have made Andrew Dawson’s web December “site of the month”: http://hca.ltsn.ac.uk/ict/Site_of_the_Month/
The pages, dealing with teaching a variety of courses in American History and research are at: http://www.gre.ac.uk/~da07/

Members’ Publications

John A. Kirk (History, Royal Holloway, University of London), Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940-1970 (University Press of Florida, 2002)

BAAS Membership of Committees

Executive Committee Elected:

Professor Philip Davies (Chair, first elected 1998, term ends 2004)
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH E-Mail: pjd@dmu.ac.uk

Dr Heidi Macpherson (Secretary, first elected 2002, term ends 2005)
Department of Cultural Studies, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 2HE E-Mail: hrsmacpherson@uclan.ac.uk

Dr Nick Selby (Treasurer, first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
E-Mail: N.Selby@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Professor Janet Beer
Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University, Geoffrey Marton Building, Roasamond St. West, Manchester M15 6LL
E-Mail: J.Beer@mmu.ac.uk

Ms Celeste-Marie Bernier
Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD
E-Mail: aaxcb1@nottingham.ac.uk

Professor Susan Castillo (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ
E-Mail: S.Castillo@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Dr Jude Davies (first elected 2002, term ends 2005)
Department of American Studies, King Alfred’s College of Higher Education, Winchester, SO22 4NR
E-Mail: Jude.Davies@wkac.ac.uk

Dr Michael McDonnell (first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Department of American Studies University of Wales, Swansea Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP
E-Mail: m.mcdonnell@swansea.ac.uk

Ms Catherine Morley (Postgraduate Representative, first elected 2002, term ends 2004)
School of Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane Campus, Headington, OX3 OBP
E-Mail: c.morley@brookes.ac.uk

Dr Simon Newman (first elected 1999, term ends 2005)*
Director, American Studies, Modern History, 2 University Gardens, Glasgow University, Glasgow G12
E-Mail: s.newman@modhist.arts.gla.ac.uk

Dr Carol Smith (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred’s College, Winchester SO22 4NR E-Mail: Carol.Smith@wkac.ac.uk

Dr Graham Thompson (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
Department of English, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH
E-Mail: gthompson@dmu.ac.uk

Dr Peter Thompson (first elected 2002, term ends 2005)
St. Cross College, St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LZ
E-Mail: peter.thompson@stx.ox.ac.uk

Miss Andrea Beighton Co-opted, Conference SubCommittee
Deputy Director, Rothermere American Institute, 1A South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG
E-Mail: Andrea.Beighton@rai.ox.ac.uk

Ms Kathryn Cooper Co-opted, Development Subcommittee
Loreto 6th Form College, Chicester Road, Manchester M15 5PB
E-Mail: kathcooper@cwcom.net

Dr Kevin Halliwell Ex-officio, Library Subcommittee
National Library of Scotland
E-Mail: k.halliwell@nls.uk

Dr Jay Kleinberg Ex-officio, Editor, Journal of American Studies American Studies, Brunel University, 300 St Margarets Road, Twickenham, Middlesex TW1 1PT
E-Mail: Jay.Kleinberg@Brunel.ac.uk

Dr Iain Wallace Ex-Officio, Library Subcommittee
John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 150 Deansgate, Manchester M3 9EH
E-Mail: i.r.wallace@man.ac.uk

Subcommittee Members

Development

Dr Simon Newman (Chair)
Professor Philip Davies
Ms Celeste-Marie Bernier
Ms. Catherine Morley (post-grad)
Dr. Peter Thompson
Dr. Jenel Virden (EAAS rep)
Dr Iain Wallace (ex-officio)

Publications

Professor Janet Beer (Chair)
Dr Heidi Macpherson
Dr. Carol Smith (Paperbacks)
Dr Graham Thompson (ASIB and webster)
Professor Jay Kleinberg (Editor of Journal of American Studies)
Prof. Ken Morgan (Editor of BRRAM)
Ms Kathryn Cooper (co-opted)

Conference

Dr Michael McDonnell (Chair)
Dr Nick Selby
Professor Susan Castillo
Dr Jude Davies
Dr Tim Woods (Aberystwyth, Conference Secretary 2003)
Dr. Sarah MacLachlan
Ms Andrea Beighton (co-opted)

Libraries and Resources

Dr Iain Wallace
Dr Kevin Halliwell

BAAS representative to EAAS

Dr. Jenel Virden (terms ends 2007)*
Department of American Studies, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX
E-Mail: J.Virden@hull.ac.uk

[* indicates this person not eligible for re-election to this position. All co-optations must be reviewed annually]

Editorial

Welcome to the 87th edition of the BAAS newsletter and my first as editor. This newsletter hopefully continues the fine work done by my predecessors and follows the format they have established. There is a large—although not complete—collection of reports on papers delivered at the annual conference in Oxford. If anyone who has not sent in a report would like to do so, then I’m sure I can find space to include them in the next issue. Under the new publishing schedule of a late summer issue in September and a spring issue in February, then you will need to get the reports to me by the end of the year. An e-mail attachment is fine. I would also just like to thank Dick Ellis for helping me out with the logistics of producing the newsletter, as well as assiduously passing on all those e-mails!

What of the future for the newsletter? As well as carrying on all the services it currently provides, I think there is room in American Studies in Britain for more discussion of just what American Studies in Britain is all about as we leave the exuberances of millennial discourses behind us and face the realities—sometimes harsh, sometimes exciting—of teaching, studying and researching within the field at all levels. Members might want to cast their attention back to issue 81, the Autumn/Winter 1999 edition of the newsletter—and available on the BAAS website (http://http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site) if you don’t have a hard copy—where BAAS committee members were asked for their thoughts about American Studies as it stood on the verge of the new millennium. Opinions were divided, often vociferous, but always committed. How have these visions of the future of American Studies been played out in the last three years and how do you see them developing in the future? Do we have control over how the discipline develops or are our hands tied by the demands of institutions and government? What do changes mean to schoolteachers, undergraduates, postgraduates, lecturers and professors alike? Are you happy with the transnational turn in American Studies? These are some of the questions that I hope might be explored in future issues. So if you have ideas and opinions that you would like to put to other BAAS members then please get in touch with me.

Graham Thompson
Department of English
De Montfort University
Leicester LE1 9BH

E-mail: gthompson@dmu.ac.uk

BAAS Annual Conference: Aberystwyth 2003, Call for Papers

We are now calling for papers for the 2003 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.

Proposals for 20 minute papers should be a maximum of 250 words with a provisions 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 researchers, are encouraged to apply. Proposals should be submitted by 31st October 2002 to:

Dr Tim Woods
BAAS Conference Secretary
Department of English
Hugh Owen Building
Penglais
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Ceredigion, SY 23 3DY
Wales, UK

Any other comments or suggestions are also welcome.
Conference Secretary: Dr Tim Woods
Tel: +44 1970 622534
Fax: +44 1970 622530
E-Mail: tww@aber.ac.uk

BAAS Annual Conference: Oxford 2002

Chair’s Report

April 2002

Even before this year’s BAAS conference one of the major American Studies events of the past year took place in Oxford, when the former President of the United States, Bill Clinton, formally opened the Rothermere American Institute in May 2001. The event was delightful, and, while President Clinton may now be somewhat divorced from party politics, it is always possible that his very positive mood was at least in part a response to the defection on the previous day of Senator Jim Jeffords from the Republicans, giving the Democrats control of that chamber, and re-establishing the divided government that has been typical of the past generation of US politics. The Rothermere Institute is a most welcome addition to the American Studies resource base in the UK, and its influence is already being felt. It was a brave and generous act to issue an invitation even before the foundations were finished, to host the BAAS conference. Andrea Beighton and Alan Ryan have done a remarkable job in facilitating this conference.

The Association continued to communicate American Studies interests at every possible opportunity. We responded to consultations from the AHRB, Hefce, the British Library, and ESRC. The BBC and other media outlets have approached the Association requesting expert advice and commentary in their current affairs and other programming. The Times printed a letter commenting on the fact that the methodology of its subject tabulations understated the availability of American Studies in UK HEIs. The Guardian also recognised in print that its subject listing failed to do full justice to American Studies, and, after very wide consultation with American Studies programmes, BAAS provided data which was used by The Guardian to replace on its website its own, flawed, tabulation. We are not always successful. A letter to the THES responding to comments made about area studies subjects in the RAE was not picked up, and an offer to The Guardian to update the American Studies table in the light of the recent RAE results met with no response.

In concert with BUTEX, the Association approached a number of figures in the UK and the US regarding the proposed imposition of ‘tracking charges’ on exchange students to the USA. Barry Sheerman MP was vigorous in his support, and engaged US Ambassador William Farish in this discussion. Barry Sheerman also helped us follow up our concerns about American Studies students wishing to move on to PGCE courses, passing on our report on PGCE transition, and corresponding on our behalf with the Minister of Education, the Rt Hon Estelle Morris, and with Mike Tomlinson of OFSTED.

The QAA benchmarking process continued, and, after much very useful consultation, the Area Studies benchmarking group sent its final draft to QAA in January 2002. The American Studies RAE team also put in a great deal of work, before issuing its results. All those teams of researchers who entered under American Studies deserve the thanks and congratulations of the American Studies community. They have done their best, they have invested heavily and energetically into the subject, and it is painful that they should suffer from damaging decisions regarding government funding for research. Many Americanists are entered in the RAE in Units of Assessment, and go through QAA visits in subject provider groups other than American Studies, and our colleagues have contributed to highly respected research and teaching groups throughout the UK’s higher education community. It is not yet clear whether the QAA, or the RAE will have much of a shelf-life. Regardless, the American Studies community will continue to be engaged in exciting teaching, and stimulating research.

As well as ongoing activities—such as support for conferences, the paperbacks series, and the Journal, the Association continues to look for initiatives through which it can promote the subject, and support its members. The second issue of US Studies Online appeared, providing a legitimate, refereed opportunity for postgraduate publication. The website did suffer some problems early in 2002. Nottingham Trent University has provided an excellent location as the site has been developed, and we are very grateful for this support, but it became clear that we could not rely on volunteer effort to maintain the site at all times. The site has now been relocated. The address remains http://http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site.

The website will be central to another initiative—the creation of a gateway to teaching resources in American Studies. Aimed primarily at supporting school teachers who need materials for Americanist GCSE and AS/A2 level teaching, it is certain that this gateway will point to many resources also suitable for university teaching support. The new BAAS Graduate Assistantships programme was carefully shepherded by Peter Boyle, and the first two students are progressing through the application process for the Universities of Virginia and New Hampshire.

This year the maximum Short Term Award was increased to £500. With the help of a grant from the US Embassy we were able to give a total of 14 awards. We are very grateful for the support that we receive from the Embassy, and that on this occasion has boosted the direct aid that we can give to young British scholars of American Studies. The Embassy’s Minister Counsellor for Public Affairs, Pamela Smith, and the Cultural Attaché, Carol Lynn MacCurdy, both good friends to the British American Studies community, moved on to new posts. The new Minister, Dan Sreebny, and the Acting Cultural Attaché, have continued to be very supportive, and we are pleased to welcome the new Cultural Attaché, Dennis Wolf. Sue Wedlake continues to be a great help to BAAS.

As well as last year’s very successful conference at Keele, the Association also mounted the annual autumn colloquium with the American Politics Group. At the APG conference in January Professor John Dumbrell of Keele was elected chair, and Dr. Esther Jubb of Liverpool John Moores became vice chair. The Chair of BAAS represented the Association at the Omohundro conference, held in Glasgow, and at the re-launch conference of the Bulgarian Association for American Studies, held in Blagoevgrad.

During the year Professorships have been conferred on Margaret Walsh and David Murray. Promotions have also been achieved by Douglas Tallack, to Pro Vice Chancellor, and Stephen Burman, to Dean of Humanities. Richard King was made Vaughn Research Fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Centre of Vanderbilt University, and Celeste Marie Bernier was a Gilder Lehrman Fellow at Yale University. Chris Bailey took on the Directorship of the Bruce Centre at Keele, and Philip Davies became Director of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library.

The Journal of American Studies changed editors this year. I am pleased, on behalf of the Association, to thank Richard Gray for all his diligent work on the Journal, and to welcome Jay Kleinberg and Susan Castillo, the new editorial team. I also wish to thank all of my committee colleagues, but especially those whose terms come to an end at this AGM—Celeste Marie Bernier, Dick Ellis, Paul Giles, Simon Newman—and to the Association’s representative to EAAS, Mick Gidley.

Most of all, 2001 will be remembered for the September attacks in New York City and Washington. The letter that I wrote on behalf of the Association to Ambassador Farish on September 11th was just one of many thousands received at the Embassy, but still the Embassy found time to respond. BAAS members are intimately connected to the USA. They have studied and taught in American, they have relatives and friends in America, they have colleagues, and former teachers and students, in America. I fall into all of these categories, as do so many of you. My former student, Angela Houtz, was still in her mid 20s when she was killed last September. She had come to Britain to learn about us and our country, and, as so many of us have found in our turn, she also learned much about herself and her home. She allowed this transatlantic intelligence to inform and enrich her life. On both sides of the Atlantic we will continue to learn, teach, research, seek to understand—warts and all—and to take this intelligence into our lives.

Philip John Davies

Short-Term Travel Award Raffle

As members know, the Short Term Travel Awards provide vital support to postgraduate students and younger scholars seeking to complete research or present their findings at conferences in the United States. This year BAAS increased the number and the value of these awards, and we held a raffle during the annual conference in Oxford to help raise money in order to augment the Short Term Travel Fund. I am very grateful to all who bought and sold tickets, and to our generous sponsors who provided the prizes. The prizes, the donors and the winners are as follows:

The case of Corona Beer (donated by Corona Brewing Company) was won by Lindsey Traub (Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge)

A bottle of scotch whisky (donated by Allied Distillers Limited) was won by Tatiana Rapatzikou (University of East Anglia)

A bottle of single malt scotch whisky (donated by Morrison Bowmore Distillers Limited) was won by Jeffrey Weinberg (Executive Office of the President of the United States, and George Washington University)

An American Civil War style quilt (made and donated by Mrs. Maureen Newman) was won by Alison Easton (Lancaster University)

Two round-trip airline tickets to the United States (donated by American Airlines) were won by Jay Kleinberg (Brunel University).

Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors and the members of BAAS we raised £760.

Simon Newman (University of Glasgow)

Exchange Programme Talk

The topic for discussion at the lunch-time meeting on Saturday, April 5, at the BAAS Conference in Oxford, was the impact of a period of study at an American university on students’ written work on their return, especially on a Final Year dissertation. The topic was briefly introduced by Peter Boyle (University of Nottingham) and then opened up for discussion.

All participants at the session agreed that the beneficial effects of a period of study in America on students’ general educational development and their general understanding of American culture and society were immense and incontrovertible. The precise measurement of the impact on written work was, however, more open to debate.
Frank Lennon (Liverpool Hope University) suggested that if students spent a year at an American university, they were a year older and more mature, which might account for their intellectual growth as much as their time in America. Martin Padget (University of Wales, Aberystwyth) pointed out, however, that their students went to America for a semester in a three-year degree rather than adding an additional year, so that their students were not a year older, yet they seemed, after their time in America, to demonstrate in their written work a more secure sense of what they were writing about as a culture. Steve Mills (University of Keele) suggested that there were quantifiable points which should satisfy a QAA auditor seeking a demonstration of Value Added as a result of a period of study in America, such as appreciation of the sheer size of America and a consequent appreciation of such matters as that all political issues were local issues, whether in Kansas or California.

With regard to the dissertation in particular, it was felt that there were practical difficulties in students devoting much time to their Final Year dissertation while they were in America. Students took a full load of courses and needed time to participate in general cultural activities, which made it impractical to expect them to research a topic which they would then write up in their Final Year. It was felt, however, that the stimulus of study and travel in the United States, along with ideas developed in courses taken at an American university, had very beneficial impact on the quality of dissertations, though this was liable to vary from one student to another.

It was felt that the Exchange Programme Talk Shop, which has become an established tradition at the BAAS conference in recent years, had the value of providing an opportunity for exchanging ideas on the academic impact of exchange programmes as well as the practical value of enabling exchange tutors to come to know one another and to compare notes on nuts and bolts matters.

Peter Boyle (University of Nottingham)

BAAS Teaching Assistantships

Victoria Bizzell (University of Central Lancashire) and Stephan Brennan (University of Birmingham) have been awarded the first BAAS Teaching Assistantships. The awards were presented at the Conference Banquet at the BAAS Conference at Oxford. Victoria will be a Teaching Assistant in the Department of English at the University of Virginia, while Stephen will be a Teaching Assistant in the Department of History at the University of New Hampshire. The awards are for two years, during which time Victoria and Stephen will study for an M.A.

The origins of the BAAS Teaching Assistantships lie in a scheme which has operated for more than twenty years between the University of Nottingham and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). In 1977-78 Peter Boyle spent the year on an exchange at UWM. David Healy from UWM, who spent the year at the University of Nottingham, suggested that a contact between the two universities should be maintained by the award by the UWM History Department of a Teaching Assistantship to a student in History or American Studies at the University of Nottingham. The award, which is named the David Healy Award, has been made every second year, with the successful applicant going to UWM for two years and taking an M.A. in History, financed by the Teaching Assistantship. The scheme has been very successful, with all candidates completing their M.A. and going on to successful careers. Some have gone on to take a Ph.D. and pursue an academic career, such as Simon Newman, Director of the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies at the University of Glasgow, and Mark White, who lectures in American History at Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London. The scheme has benefits for all parties, at no cost. UWM adds to its international profile by the appointment of a British Teaching Assistantship, who has been screened and selected in a competitive process by experienced British American Studies specialists. The University of Nottingham benefits by being able to offer such an attractive award.

Peter Boyle therefore suggested to Phil Davies, chair of BAAS, that a similar scheme might operate at the national level through BAAS. Approaches were made to a number of American universities and favourable responses were received from the University of Virginia and the University of New Hampshire. The awards were advertised last autumn and a Selection Panel established, consisting of Peter Boyle, Jenel Virden and
Heidi McPherson, which chose Victoria Bizzell and Stephen Brennan as the successful applicants. We wish Vicky and Steve every success. We hope that they will serve as good ambassadors and help to ensure that the scheme becomes firmly established. In the course of time, we would hope not only to maintain the BAAS Teaching Assistantship in the Department of English at the University of Virginia and in the Department of History at the University of New Hampshire but also to add other universities and other disciplines, such as Politics.

Peter Boyle (University of Nottingham)

Oxford 2002: Individual Conference Paper Reports

Surname A-M

Edward A. Abramson (University of Hull)
Fitzgerald, the Jews, and Hollywood

In this paper I analysed Fitzgerald’s changing attitude toward the Jews as expressed in his fiction, culminating in his reaction to Jewish-created Hollywood. In his earlier writings (This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, and The Great Gatsby) he presented an image of the Jew as an alien who posed a threat to his mid western and Princeton-based sense of what comprised American society. This view changed with his creation of a romantic ideal in the portrayal of the Jewish film producer Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon (unfinished, posthumous, 1941). Stahr was based upon Irving Thalberg, whom he first met at Universal Pictures in 1931, and one can see in his characterization a greater change in attitude toward the Jew in America than is reflected in that of most of his literary contemporaries. Fitzgerald was again in Hollywood from 1937 until his death in 1940 and, with Thalberg having died in 1936, seems to have felt that the possibility of Hollywood becoming a vessel for art, as opposed to a mere money making machine, had also died.

Fitzgerald, and other American authors of the period, reacted defensively to the increasing number of Jews entering American society. However, Fitzgerald was not an anti-Semite, although his characterization of Meyer Wolfsheim, in The Great Gatsby, does possess anti-Semitic overtones. His reaction to this new, vibrant, presence in America was more complex than simple hatred, and one can see in his fiction a subtext in which he works through his attitude toward the Jews.

Anne-Marie Angelo (Uppingham School)
White Space, Black Value: African Americans in Civil Rights Era Advertising

This cultural history paper analysed the role of mainstream advertising in race relations during and immediately following the civil rights movement. Whites used the space of advertising, as in Life magazine, to appear integrationist by portraying black models for the first time. However, this integration was merely ‘representational’. Blacks and whites did not interact in ads. Ads also used colour-blind imagery and language, and they avoided connecting blacks with products, continuing to exclude them from the mass market and mainstream society.

During the civil rights period, whiteness dared not speak its name, could not speak on its own behalf, but continued to advance through a colour-blind language radically at odds with the distinctly racialized distribution of resources and life chances in society.

Since there were so few depictions of blacks in advertising, these images inked themselves on the American consciousness. They influenced both white understanding of blackness and black self-perception. At the height of a complicated period in American history, advertisements presented an image of blacks that whites found appropriate and thus mirrored underlying social prejudices.

Furthermore, advertising during the civil rights movement allowed a space for the racially-motivated attitudes of whiteness to continue. Whites could see integrated advertisements without having to realize true integration in their own lives. Through assimilating blacks into a white-dominant medium, advertisers created artificial life situations and perpetuated a segregationist attitude into the integrated period of American history.

Edward Ashbee (Denstone College)
‘Being American’: Representations of National Identity

Representations of American national identity take three broad forms. Some have talked of the US as a political construct. ‘Being American’ depends upon allegiance to particular principles. This minimalist—and exceptionalist—approach was shaped by the Cold War but can coexist with multiculturalist understandings of the contemporary US. There are also cultural representations of American identity. These suggest that the US is—like other nations—constructed around networks of interlocking folkways. From this perspective, American identity has a more restrictive character. The process of Americanisation requires formal and structured programmes of assimilation and may, in practice, take a number of generations. Lastly, there are ethno-racial depictions of American identity. These assert that—for reasons derived either from racial or quasi-racial constructs—only some individuals can be assimilated into American cultural formations.

Although these representations underpin political discourse, there have been few attempts to consider and assess popular perceptions of American identity. However, in 1995-96, the General Social Survey (GSS) sought to gauge the character of public opinion as part of a study of 24 countries conducted by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). Respondents were asked about the factors that allowed an individual to belong to a particular nation. What, for example, made someone ‘truly’ American or British? The exact wording of each question was adjusted so as to correspond with national circumstances.

The findings suggest that significant majorities have restrictive attitudes towards American identity. In particular, African-Americans are disproportionately likely to define national identity in terms that exclude relative newcomers.

Dr. Graham Barnfield (Surrey Institute of Art & Design)
‘Oh Logo!’ Left-Literary Modernism takes on Advertising, 1926-1941

The paper discussed the 1930s critique of advertising developed by James Rorty, among others, and now cited by ‘anti-capitalists’ like Naomi Klein. Previously the New Left avoided Rorty, who drifted sharply to the right in the post-war world, but today he is warmly embraced. My paper set out to problematise this new emphasis, whilst differentiating Rorty from his contemporaries.

In Our Master’s Voice (1934), Rorty claimed that advertising created false needs, spread misinformation, transformed civilisation into ‘pseudoculture’ and prompted scientists to prostitute themselves in support of commerce. His stinging rebuke to the ad industry as parasitic and possibly fascistic, based on his own advertising career, was part of his own rejection of the market, itself closely linked to the intellectual left of the Depression era.

In summarising this approach, my paper also pointed to its key weakness: an elitism that repeatedly characterised the public as infantile morons and passive consumers, undermining the social democratic aspects of Rorty’s critique. Panellists and other colleagues pointed out that Rorty was not unique in this respect, and good comparative use was made of the recent BBC Century of the Self documentaries and their discussion of the commercial use of Freudian ideas.

Mirza Asmer Beg (Aligarh Muslim University)
The United States, Nuclear Weapons and South Asia

The nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan shook the global strategic community, bilateral relations worsened and tensions over Kashmir increased. India claimed that its tests were in response to China’s continued intransigence on its borders, its assistance to Pakistan and in particular its missile and nuclear programmes. Pakistan’s response was inevitable. this dramatically altered the scenario from a purely bilateral situation to one that intrudes indirectly on the wider strategic environment. There were two immediate
anxieties, one a possible nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir which may escalate to a nuclear war. The other that a nuclear arms race may result with its adverse fall-outs. This paper is an attempt to examine the contradictory interpretations of the concept of deterrence by India and Pakistan and test their validity. The Indian doctrine in abjuring the first use of nuclear weapons rests on the assumption that possession of nuclear weapons deters their use. Pakistan’s doctrine seems to be entirely opaque, except that its objective is to neutralise India’s advantage. Secure in the knowledge that no Indian government is likely to resort to such dangerous brinkmanship, the Pakistan intelligence agencies have played havoc. As a result of Pakistan’s continued unwillingness to stop abetting terror in Kashmir the Indian Government is under Great pressure to take the battle to the enemy. So far India has desisted from doing so but how far it would be able to do so in the face of great internal pressures and increasing Pakistani belligerence, is difficult to tell. It is in this context that a clear and definite articulation of policy on the part of the US could tilt the balance between war and peace in South Asia.

Mark Brown, (University College Northampton)
Telling the Dodgers’ Story: the Community of Baseball in Paul Auster’s Films

The focus of Paul Auster’s films Smoke and Blue in the Face (1995) is on the neighbourhood of Park Slope, the Brooklyn Cigar Company store, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and friendship. My paper examined how Auster constructs the central space of the store as an interstitial urban space, beyond the surveillance of New York’s dominant money relations. In Park Slope and in the store, the characters use time to tell stories and discuss Brooklyn’s baseball past. From beyond the boundaries of the Brooklyn neighbourhood it is possible to detect the influence of social processes that extend far beyond the place-bound experience of the individual. The films represent these discourses through the global finance of Manhattan and the racism experienced by the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson. Baseball is also a metaphor for metropolitan life and artistic production for Auster. Ultimately, Auster identifies a mode of metropolitan living, subject to chance and contingency, and dependant upon an understanding of how contemporary social relations operate both locally and beyond the local.

My paper considered Auster’s understanding of community against Raymond Williams’ terms of ‘militant particularisms’ and ‘structures of feeling’, and Doreen Massey’s sense of community in a global environment. I also examined Auster’s sense of community for signs of reactionary and nostalgic view of neighbourhood that would render community a negative, exclusionary rather than an affirmative, inclusive experience.

Christopher Clark (University of Warwick)
Women’s Lives in Utopia: A Mother and her Daughters at the Northampton Community (1843-45)

In her 1990 book Women in Utopia: The Ideology of Gender in the American Owenite Communities, Carol A. Kolmerten laid out a compelling framework for interpreting the experience of middle-class women in 19th century American intentional communities. Often reluctantly following husbands to new communities, obliged by the principle of equality to live without servants or domestic help, married women frequently found community life the very opposite of ‘utopian’. Sharing membership with men who spoke of equality and women’s rights, but who made no attempt to share the true burden of women’s responsibilities, community women were often obliged to carry a double load of communal or professional and of domestic labors. Kolmerten suggested that this undermined the success of communities that were organized around nuclear families. Single women in communities, on the other hand, and communities (such as those of the Shakers) that rejected conventional family life did not face these problems, and were more contented and successful as a result. My own book, The Communitarian Moment (1995) about the Northampton Association in Massachusetts, modified Kolmerten’s argument while supporting most of her conclusions. But my evidence was then culled from a variety of fragmentary sources on women’s experiences in the community.
The present paper offers a more thorough assessment, made possible by the recent discovery of about 70 letters from a Northampton Association woman and her daughters. These letters, written by women members of the Stetson family, simultaneously provide the perspectives of married and unmarried women on community life. Linked to an array of other evidence about Northampton, and to comparisons with Hopedale and contemporary Fourierist and Owenite communities, they address many dimensions of women’s experiences: the circumstances, motivations, and aspirations for joining a community; practical aspects of community life and work; women’s participation in decision-making; and the connections and boundaries between what the Stetsons called the ‘community’ and the ‘domestic’ aspects of their lives. Like many abolitionist women from middling and poorer families, the Stetson women combined household and industrial work with a commitment to social reform. To these they added a (fluctuating) set of expectations about the benefits of communal living.

Mother and daughters traced a subtle path between relative autonomy and being subjected to the attitudes and decisions both of their own husband and father, and of other men in the community—they not only often worked a ‘double day’, but also faced a ‘double patriarchy’. Yet gender, its assumptions and ideologies, formed only part of a more complex web of social relationships and disagreements. The Stetson letters throw important fresh light on the economics of community life and on the tensions over what one of them called ‘religious belief, diet, and amusements’, which caused divisions among community members, often without regard to gender or marital status. Above all, the evidence points to conflicts within families over issues of community policy, suggesting that it was not the position of married women as such, but the conflicting ideologies of ‘family’ and ‘community’ that undermined utopian aspirations.

Jude Davies (King Alfred’s, Winchester)
Gender and Power in the Visualizing of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy

This paper examined Hubert Davis’s Symbolic Drawings for Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1930) in the context of debates over the significance of Dreiser’s prolixity, massiveness, and inarticulateness.

It was argued that adaptations and illustrations of all sorts exist in an ambivalent relationship to their original, aiming to condense it into a series of images or scenes, yet at the same time by their very existence adding further layers of thematic material. In this ambivalence, the illustrations and film versions of An American Tragedy paralleled critical writing, which also works according to a combination of condensation and proliferation. The paper’s main concern was with the ways that Davis’s illustrations recast relations of gender, power and visibility.

In terms of its narrative, An American Tragedy risks a particularly extreme androcentrism by placing the pregnancy and death of a woman as determining incidents in the life of its male protagonist. As point-of-view becomes crucial for a properly proportioned understanding of this narrative, the perspectives and gazes depicted by Davis were seen to render anew the intertwined narratives of Clyde and Roberta, and ultimately to fold back into the questions of definitive explanation that Dreiser’s novel continues to pose.

Anna Dreda (University of Birmingham)
The Poetics of Protest: June Jordan—Lyrical Catalyst for Change

The complexity of black life in America creates a multiplicity of oppressions which poets have addressed in dazzlingly powerful ways from Phyllis Wheatley in the sixteenth century to the present day. Twentieth century poets like Jordan, Audre Lorde and Sapphire confront issues of black on black hatred, violence against women and children, and the ways in which fear and abuse can corrode beauty and vitality. Writing poetry becomes for them a way of defining truth so that they can create truth; a way of telling what they see that they may change what they see. ‘Poetry is not a luxury’, it is a ‘litany for survival’. As Audre Lorde says, ‘…when we are silent we are still afraid, so it is better to speak…’

One of the pivotal elements of Jordan’s poetry is her willingness to expose and politicise that which would seem to be most intensely personal and private. The ‘conscious family’ of black women poets to which Jordan belongs takes as its motto bell hooks’s admonition to ‘talk back’. As hooks exemplifies, ‘talking back’ implies not only disagreement and dissent, but also a willingness to talk about things that ‘should’ be kept silent. Jordan considers the particular silences of women, and in breaking those silences identifies ways in which poetry can affirm courage.

Rachel van Duyvenbode (University of Sheffield)
Ghostly Goddesses: Nella Larsen’s Passing and Apparitions of the White Woman

This paper analysed the performances through which the passing protagonist becomes a spectrally and textually white woman in Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing. Using the figure of the ghost as an exemplar of bodily transformation and binary subversion (absent/present, black/white) this paper argued that the white woman functions as a spectre of cultural haunting in the text. In contrast to Richard Dyer’s suggestion that the privilege of whiteness prevents subjection to ‘stereotyping in relation to one’s whiteness’ (White, 1997, p. 11), I demonstrated that Larsen’s presentation of the white woman necessarily invokes typecasts of disowned, white forms of female deviancy.

Principally through an analysis of the motifs of the ghost, vampire and sexual transgressor this paper argued that the imagery aligned to the white woman explores contemporary anxieties surrounding the stability of colour, class and sexual identities. I suggested that the surfacing of the white woman within images of the ghost and vampire specifically approach fears of interracial sex and the deadly sexuality of white women. Acknowledging the persistence of cultural and literary stereotypes of African American women’s ‘excessive’ sexuality, I argued that Larsen’s displacement of aberrant sexuality upon the white woman manifests a politicised, textual strategy. Finally, this paper discussed how the motifs of white woman as vampire, ghost and sexual transgressor contest social ideologies of the Cult of True Womanhood. Filtered through the phobic fantasies of the bourgeois black narrator, I suggested that typecasts of white women’s ghastly whiteness facilitates the dialogic (re)construction of presentations of black womanhood.

Lucy Frank (Warwick University)
‘Being only out of Sight’: Sarah Piatt, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Problem of Mourning in Postbellum America

Lucy Frank’s paper discussed mourning after the American Civil War, exploring the way in which tropes of haunting and the uncanny were used as a means of figuring the effects of the war on American society. The paper compared Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s best-selling novel The Gates Ajar (1868) with the poetry of the Kentucky writer Sarah Piatt (1836-1919).

Phelps turns to a beneficent spirit world in order to offer consolation to her readers, reminding them that even though the absent dead are temporarily ‘out of sight’ they are nonetheless an invisible, consoling presence. In Piatt’s poetry, however, the war dead return to haunt rather than to console. Through close readings of some of Piatt’s poems, Frank discussed the way in which Piatt uses multiple voices, fractured time frames and lack of closure to stage the impossibility of representing death and loss in terms of a single framework of meaning.

Frank concluded that in refusing traditional forms of sentimental consolation Piatt does not create a poetics of despair, but, through the breakdown of stable identity, temporality and rhetorical certainty in her writing, she mobilises loss and fragmentation to disclose poetically the politics traditionally foreclosed by sentimental writing. Ultimately, Piatt’s ambivalent rejection of religious consolation in exploring the effects of death opens up new ways of critiquing dominant cultural values and narratives of history and identity.

Paul Grainge (University of Nottingham)
Global Media and the Ambiguities of Resonant Americanization

In a panel that explored questions of Americanization and the transatlantic, Paul Grainge examined the subject in terms of contemporary news discourse. Establishing the premise that Time magazine played an important post-war role in the dissemination of American values and liberal ideologies, his paper asked what effect the increasingly global organization and operation of parent company, AOL/Time-Warner, has had on Time Atlantic’s news identity, the international edition of the magazine serving Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Combining economic and cultural analysis, Grainge argued that Time Atlantic, once framed by Henry Luce as a missionary agent of America’s ‘towering uniqueness of power’, is no longer defined in any simple sense by the sponsorship of American values. Instead, the magazine figures a discourse of America, but in relation to postnational configurations that have seen the increasing emergence of transnational elites, agendas and commercial imperatives. Drawn from research conducted for the AMATAS project, Grainge’s paper argued that if the ambiguity of resonant Americanization describes a conjuncture where the ubiquity of U.S. forms and cultural products in the world is matched with the need to renew or reconfigure the hegemonic basis of American power, Time Atlantic suggests particular transitions in the mode and marketing of U.S. media/discourse abroad.

Steve Hewlett (Director of Programmes, Carlton TV)
History on the Box

Steve’s talk began with a discussion of the TV marketplace, pointing out that it is the reverse of the publishing marketplace. To make money, television depends on attracting a vast number of people who pay nothing. Material that works on the printed page and attracts buyers often doesn’t work on TV. In the case of factual programming, history provides ideal material. Good TV is good stories, and narrative history is just that. And unlike some other types of factual programming, history documentaries provide a story with an ending.

Originally, however, historical programming caught on because it allowed more scope for controversy. In Britain, it has been taboo for ‘current events’ television shows to be controversial—this is viewed as ‘bias’. But history TV programmes are frequently revisionist, thereby provoking their audience to re-think contemporary issues. Starting with early revisionist historical programming, such as A.J.P. Taylor’s famous lectures, producers began to see that history programming allowed for television with a political purpose.

In the past few years, history programming has escalated rapidly as the TV audience has recognized that history provides an inexhaustible source of ‘ripping yarns’. History programmes fulfil every criterion for ideal viewing: they are informative, giving the viewer a feeling that his time is well spent; they have a good story line with a conclusion; and they have credibility. Although historical scholars sometimes see television history as light-weight, the audience is sensitive to its credibility; if history on TV dumbs down, it will flop.

Steve believes that the current popularity of history is also a reflection of our times. In the context of an increasingly un-ideological world, people look to the past to locate themselves. And in Britain, where the future is uncertain, this has especial resonance, as people seek to redefine themselves and their nation by reflecting on where they have come from.

Keith Hughes (University of Edinburgh)
Frederick Douglass & Thomas Carlyle: The Romantic Rhetoric of Heroism

The paper is a contribution to the ongoing project to recognise the importance of Black American writing in a Transatlantic context. The focus was Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave (1853), his speech known as ‘The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro’ (1852), and Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question’ (1849).

Douglass deploys Romanticist discourse as Abolitionist cultural ammunition, appropriating the rhetorical and moral authority of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, interpreting them ‘from the slave’s point of view’. An exemplary Transatlantic rhetorical move occurs in ‘The Meaning of July Fourth’, where slavery is seen as doomed’: ‘nations now do not stand in the same relation to each other…. Space is comparatively annihilated.—Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other’.

Read alongside the Douglass texts, Carlyle’s ‘Nigger Question’ disarticulates its own rationale, deploying the very Romanticist discourse which Douglass invoked. Claiming to speak for ‘Fact and Nature’, Carlyle argues that ‘niggers’ are inferior to whites, so must work for whites, deploying Romantic universalism to propose economic policies solely in the interests of white landowners. Abolitionist language is turned against against blacks needing ‘emancipation’ from their ‘indolence’. Carlyle’s text reincarnates Bromion, the enslaver in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion: ‘Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun;/They are obedient, they resist not’.

Douglass deploys Romanticism as a tool towards an Abolitionist future; Carlyle’s pamphlet, however, represents the dead-end of a discourse blind to its own assumptions.

Esther C. Jubb, (Liverpool John Moores University)
The Multiple Presidency? George W. Bush and presidential management

It was suggested in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th that the nature of political life in the US would be changed forever. This paper examines the nature and effectiveness of George W. Bush’s leadership, at home and abroad, prior to September 11th and in the months following the attacks. It initially focuses on the development of the Bush administration and the nature of his presidency during the early months of the term of office, examining the process of establishing an administration after the unprecedented events of election 2000. Then follows an assessment of the operational and management style of the administration as it followed its domestic and foreign policy agenda. The paper then goes on to contrast this established modus operandi with the leadership style we have witnessed during the war against terror. In assessing the nature and extent to which the Bush presidency has changed and developed in response to these challenges observations are made that the President has adopted a variety of strategies for meeting the exigencies of the new political environment.

Ian Margeson (University of Gloucestershire)
Reverend Jacob Duché and The Atlantic Vine

I begin my paper by relating how in October 1777 the Anglican cleric and former chaplain to the Continental Congress, Jacob Duché, wrote to George Washington, seeking to persuade him that the Declaration of Independence should be rescinded. Two years earlier Duché had preached sermons to the Continental Congress and Continental army promoting Anglo-American reconciliation. These sermons were published and circulated in Philadelphia. They interpret the empire as an Atlantic ‘ vine ‘ spreading British liberties, institutions, and cultural influences to the American continent. Making a political parable of the biblical parable of the vine, Duché argues that American ’branches’ would cease to thrive if severed from British ‘roots’.

The principles underpinning Duché’s commitment to preserving and strengthening the Atlantic vine were nurtured during his time as a student at the College of Philadelphia in the 1750s. Under the leadership of Provost William Smith the college’s primary aim was to follow the example of Scottish educators in Aberdeen and nurture useful citizens capable of contributing to the province’s political, social, and economic life. This philosophy was absorbed by Duché, and articulated in his Caspipina letters, published in the Pennsylvania Packet during 1771 and 1772. In these letters Duché reasserts Smith’s Anglo-Scottish educational blueprint, emphasizing its role in sustaining Pennsylvania’s commercial success, cultural advancement, and polite society. Philadelphia’s philanthropic projects such as the hospital, employment house, and charity schools are cited as examples of English Enlightenment humanitarianism spreading to the American continent through the Atlantic vine.

In his letter to Washington, Duché asserted that the vine must be protected from destructive ‘husbandmen’, most notably the New England radicals in Congress. This would be Duché’s rationale for remaining opposed to American Independence.

Robert Mason (University of Edinburgh)
Television, politics, and the public interest: the origins and impact of the Gore commission

The development of digital television provided the Clinton administration with an opportunity to examine officially the nature of the public-interest commitments of broadcasters. In 1997 the administration convened the Advisory Committee on Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters (the Gore commission) to consider this question; it hoped that one of the commission’s key recommendations would be the gift by broadcasters of free air time to politicians during election campaigns. Free time had secured wide support during the 1990s among a growing school of media critics as a way to improve the quality of political discourse in the United States. It appealed to the administration as a measure of campaign finance reform by reducing the need of politicians to raise large sums of money for paid television time.

This effort to redefine the nature of the public interest in broadcasting achieved little success, illustrating the obstacles to any such reform. In many cases both broadcasters and incumbent politicians opposed the free-time proposal. Their influence contributed to the commission’s decision to recommend only a voluntary scheme of free time, suggesting that television stations should schedule five minutes of ‘candidate-centered discourse’ each evening during the last month of a campaign. Despite the cautious character of the proposal, its impact was limited in 2000. Relatively few stations aimed to meet this target, and the initiative failed either to lift the quality of campaign debate or to alleviate the problem of money in politics.

Tony Morris (Commissioning Director and Co-founder of Hambledon and London)
Trade Book Publishing

Tony began with an overview of the history marketplace today. Challenging the notion that the history book market is experiencing a new ‘golden age’, he pointed out that history books still aren’t really big sellers. For example, according to sales figures only a handful made more than £100,000 last year. And looking at the best seller list, the range of popular history topics is much more limited than the range of topics researched by academics. The public, despite its newfound appetite for reading about the past, is inclined to favour only a rather narrow and predictable list of subjects—wars, Nazis, kings and queens (especially the Tudors), ‘big sweep history’ (e.g. Simon Schama), revolutions, and the lifestyles of the aristocracy. This poses the question of whether the popular reader of history is really seeking knowledge, or has merely discovered that history can be good entertainment.

But the number of history book titles published in the UK each year has grown considerably since the 1960s. This is partly because books have become cheaper to publish. Nevertheless, the resulting increased competition means that publishers are looking for titles that will really sell. At precisely the time when scholars are under more pressure than ever to publish their PhDs and research monographs, publishers are becoming less interested in handling them. In the long run, it may be that either the form of the PhD will have to change, or specialized research monographs will have to find new outlets. This process, in Tony’s view, has already begun. And it may be that producing history books with a more popular appeal—‘trade’ history books—will become the norm for historical scholars.

Stephanie Munro (Lancaster University)
Past Present: Lydia Maria Child, Toni Morrison, and Slavery Revisited.

In this paper I sought to trace the different ways in which the nineteenth century white abolitionist and novelist Lydia Maria Child, and the twentieth century African American novelist Toni Morrison, relate to the slave’s narrative as a form of testimony. Both women, I argued, play a vital role in representing the experience of slavery to their respective audiences, though they do so in ways that reflect the very different text milieus out of which they each write. Child, as editor of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) was compelled, like the author herself, to negotiate between nineteenth century sensibilities, and the realities of slavery as they were experienced and witnessed by a young woman born into this condition. Both author and editor give indications, in their respective writings, of the ways in which they feel circumscribed by the conflicts inherent in the project they have undertaken, a circumscription that is, I argued, underwritten by the ideological context created by the cult of true womanhood. Looking at Child’s introduction to Incidents, and one of her letters to Jacobs (thankyou to Rachel van Duyvenbode for being ‘The Voice of Lydia Maria Child’), I considered how her understanding of her relation to the slave’s narrative compares to that of Morrison’s, as represented in her 1987 novel Beloved. I concluded by considering the implications of the preceding argument for conceptualising slavery as a past event that continues to impact upon present consciousness.

Surname N-Z

Greg Neale (Editor, BBC History Magazine)
Popular History Magazines

BBC History Magazine was launched in May 2000 in response to a remarkable
growth in public interest, and has quickly become Britain’s best-selling popular
history monthly, with an average sale of some 53,000. The BBC hopes to start marketing BBC History Magazine in North America in the coming year: at the moment, its US and Canadian sales are relatively limited.

Based on his experiences as Editor of BBC History, Greg talked about how a
popular history magazine is launched. The market research behind the creation of BBC History was extensive, and identified six categories of popular history readers: the ‘history fanatics’, who are deeply passionate about history; the ‘academics’, who enjoy a professional relationship with the subject, whether as students, teachers or other; ‘history and heritage workers’ (eg museum and gallery staff); the ‘social historians’, who are interested both in historical personalities and in understanding how people lived in the past; the ‘modernists’, who believe that history, especially that of the 20th century, has a contemporary relevance; the ‘blood and guts’ enthusiasts, who enjoy military history (and other forms of conflict — possibly including sport!); and the ‘local neighbourhooders’, whose interest in history is mostly confined to genealogy or the history of their immediate area, and otherwise can find much history slightly dull.

While considering all these categories of potential reader important, the magazine has sought, editorially, to aim mostly at those groups which, aggregated, are classified as the ‘history buffs’ (‘fanatics’ and ‘academics’), and the ‘contemporary historians’ (the ‘social historians’ plus the ‘modernists’), though a smaller part of the content covers military, local or family history topics.

Although its readership is predictably interested in popular history (as depicted in television, radio and best-selling books), the magazine has also sought to cater for those interested in such academic history topics as feature in Britain’s National Curriculum, and bases much of its feature articles on new research emerging in the more scholarly press.

Two extensive reader surveys conducted since the magazine was launched have also found that while its readers are interested in military history, and other ‘popular’ topics, there is an even stronger enthusiasm for such topics as the remote past, archaeology, and the Middle Ages. Successful articles, Greg said, are those which present material with a strong narrative and a compelling story line, together with a sense of historical context and authorial analytical expertise.

‘If we had to describe the editorial balance we seek to strike, I’d say it would be a mixture of journalistically-literate history and historically-literate journalism’, Greg said.

Mark Newman (University of Derby)
The Delta Ministry in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 1964-1967

The National Council of Churches’ Delta Ministry (DM) operated a project in Hattiesburg, south central Mississippi, between 1964 and 1967. It conducted programmes in health, relief and literacy, liaised with the white community, and assisted the local civil rights movement. Elderly and young African Americans proved most receptive to movement activity and involvement, while black middle-class and professional people, including many ministers, often remained aloof. Elements of the white middle class privately expressed disquiet about the worst excesses of racial discrimination but, fearing likely white reprisals, they would not act publicly. Local white ministers generally shunned approaches from the DM’s ministers, who, in consequence, acted mostly as aides to civil rights workers. The African-American population was riven by class differences. The DM increasingly sided with the more activist elements. Territorial and wary of competition, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People became hostile to the DM and its association with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Despite such problems, the Ministry helped facilitate voter registration, county participation in a federal surplus commodities programme, food and clothing distribution, community centres, and Head Start programmes for deprived preschool children. The DM began withdrawing from Hattiesburg in 1966, confident that local people could sustain the city’s civil rights movement without outside assistance.

John Osborne (University of Hull)
‘We’re all born naked—and all the rest is drag’: The Photography of Diane Arbus 30 Years after her Death

Diane Arbus (1923-71) is certainly the most famous, and possibly the most notorious, American photographer of the second half of the twentieth century. However, like the poet Sylvia Plath, her controversial subject-matter and death by suicide have misled critics into interpreting her works biographically, as subjective, even narcissistic, a visual diary from the wrong side of despair.

In this paper I wish to overturn or at least go beyond this critical orthodoxy, presenting Arbus as a profoundly analytical photographer whose oeuvre is predicated on the view that art is a discourse for deconstructing other discourses. For example, different of her images subvert or profane the sacred discourses of nation (she is particularly good at excavating the latent militarism that undergirds patriotic feeling), family (her work presents the family not as our refuge from the ills of the world but as the place where we are first exposed to them), gender (no other photographer has done as much to unmoor society’s sexual certitudes), normalcy (in her art normality is not an edenic given but an ideological aspiration that visibly warps its adherents), nature (for Arbus, human beings are by nature unnatural, our natural habitat the city), physical conformity (in a famous image Arbus depicts a giant in such a way that the viewer cannot decide if he is unusually large or the other people present are midgets) and childhood (for her the young are not innocent, and assuredly not angelic, but are small adults already inscribed with their elders’ confusions and anxieties).

In the process of anatomizing these and other of conventional society’s cherished myths and ideals, Arbus systematically opposes all essentializing discourses—especially those that proffer the illusion of an holistic selfhood. In her pictures identity is always socially constructed and, therefore, relativistic, provisional and performative. That is to say, identity is a product of those social discourses that art exists to liberate us from. The photographic image is her means of exposing the bogus identity we are invested with by the dominant social imageries. Arbus is not proposing that we can dispense with the concept of the self, but rather that we should stop trying to invest it with a permanency and authenticity it cannot sustain. From this perspective, the bank manager who does not acknowledge that his three-piece suit, intimidating desk and sceptical demeanour are performative is more deceived than the transvestite, since both are employing forms of drag but only the latter is conscious of it. What makes Arbus’s posture so radical, to the point where it anticipates by thirty years such contemporary cultural gurus as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, is her refusal to designate a ‘core’ identity behind and anterior to the social mask. Identity is that which is performed through masquerade:
the triumph of the transvestite is not that he is more authentic than the bank manager but that he accepts (indeed, dramatizes) the inherent inauthenticity of selfhood; the tragedy of the bank manager is precisely that he has embraced the mask in the false belief that it is a face.

In order to keep her art radical, so that it does not simply assimilate other discourses into a kind of metalanguage, Arbus has photography deconstruct itself, laying bare the elements that make up its own discourse. One way she does this is by taking the camera into the nudist colony, the freak show, the drag ball, the lunatic asylum, the ‘Mister Universe’ contest, the brothel, thereby rendering explicit the voyeuristic base upon which all photography rests. That is to say, she makes the viewer uncomfortably conscious of the politics of the gaze. Again, by declining the technical perfectionism of fellow American photographers like Ansel Adams and Robert Mapplethorpe, Arbus avoids their tendency to so aestheticize their subjects that they efface not only the political content of the pictures but also the politics of the picturing process. Her utterly compelling, technically imperfect photos seem to say that if art has the power to deconstruct all other discourses it is not because it is more beautiful or more true than they are, but because it more readily acknowledges its own rhetorical status. As Picasso said, art is a lie that helps one see the truth more clearly. Or, to put it another way, the image that knows its own fictiveness is the better able to reveal the fictive nature of identity.

Inderjeet Parmar (University of Manchester)
American Foundations and International Knowledge Networks: The Role of
the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations during the Cold War

The paper argued that the American foundations constructed knowledge networks around the world as part of America’s cold war initiatives. In particular, the paper focused on how the foundations promoted US hegemony in 3 cases: Indonesian economics/politics, Latin American social science and development studies, and on African Higher education
development. In each case, the foundations’ role was to establish and build up relevant Area Studies programmes in the USA, found a journal, set up fellowships and scholarships, and build connections between American and third world scholars and
research institutions. The ideology promoted by such efforts may be called ‘developmentalism’ or modernisation: a particular view of economic development that it would mirror western industrialisation and be based on a transfer of cultural and material resources from the west to the developing world. The net effect of such initiatives,
the paper concluded, was to consolidate US hegemony and to marginalise alternative development strategies. The theoretical conclusion of the paper was that neo-Gramscian hegemony theory best explained the evidence and that there was no evidence for the
contrary ideas of Barry Karl and Stanley Katz, who had suggested that the foundations were objective, disinterested, non-political and non-ideological.

Christopher Saunders (University of Cape Town)
The United States and Namibian Independence, 1975-1989: an interpretation

I argued in this paper that it has always been important—and post-September 11 it may seem the more so—to study the motives for, and the consequences of, American foreign policy from the vantage-point of the country or region concerned as well as from Washington D.C. In this particular case the country concerned was never of great interest to the U.S. in itself. Though there is a considerable literature on U.S. policy to southern Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, there is no substantial scholarly work on American policy specifically in regard to Namibia. But the U.S. devoted enormous energy in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s to achieving Namibian independence. I argued that U.S. interest derived from Cold War considerations as well as the idea that a Namibian settlement was important for change in southern Africa as a whole. The U.S. was as much concerned with the form of Namibian independence as with independence as such. In his recently-published memoirs, Sam Nujoma, the leading figure in the Namibian liberation struggle, repeats the accusation that the Reagan administration worked to delay Namibian independence, but the evidence suggests that nothing short of full sanctions against South Africa might have produced independence sooner, and such sanctions might have proved counterproductive.

William Schultz (The University of Athens)
The Hidden Logic of the American Dream in the Landscapes of Ballard’s Hello America: The Reality Made through Simulacra

In the science fiction novel Hello America (1994) J.G. Ballard presents a vision of America in 2130 to warn readers about undesirable tendencies in the national character (excessive self-interest, desire for power, and insufficient regard for the environment) and to encourage the development of more desirable tendencies (optimism, inventiveness, and regard for others and for the environment). The cover shows the great mixture of cultural images woven together. Ballard creates an alternative, abandoned, powerless America through three landscapes: the empty, dead cities; the areas outside them where gigantic images of John Wayne or other cultural figures appear in the sky; and the electrographic dream of a science fiction Las Vegas. In the Introduction he claims his purpose is to reveal the hidden logic in the American dream of today so that the novel’s nightmare will not occur. Like the social philosopher Baudrillard, he believes American reality is created by its cultural images and not the other way around; this simulation by which the social form is reproduced through relationships makes everything into a simulacrum. It is the process of the Coca-colonization of Europe and the world feared by the French communists in 1949. Not just a drink, it and other cultural icons reproduce some of the social form which created it: cultural simulation and assimilation.

Viviane Serfaty (Université Robert Schuman—Strasbourg)
The American Quest for Self : Some Aspects of Women’s Self-Representational Writing on the Internet

This paper examines diaries posted on the Internet by anonymous American women. A brief history of online diaries and of the web log phenomenon is provided, showing that posting one’s diary online is now within anyone’s reach as it no longer requires any web designing skills.

In a second stage, the four structural features of online diaries are identified and analyzed.

1. Accumulation refers to the coexistence of text, images and sometimes sound in most diaries. Media accumulation functions to create and enhance the density of the fiction of self constructed through diary writing. Thus the basic purpose of traditional autobiographical writing—self-construction and reconstruction through the writing process itself—is maintained online.
2. Open-endedness : the daily entries and the archives covering several years provide a space for stability, while the very fact of using the first-person singular enables the writer to work out a definition of self which is the very first step towards self-transformation, open-ended and potentially infinite.

3. Self-reflexivity, i.e. thinking through the very process of diary writing, serves both as a means of distanciation and as a way of deliberately highlighting its kinship with fiction writing.

4. Co-production points to the fact that online diaries have devoted audiences which interact with the writer and thus turn the process of identity construction into a collaborative project.

The final section of the paper is a case study of an American woman’s use of her diary as self-justification for her own unconventional life choices.

David Seed (University of Liverpool)
Mapping the Postnuclear Ruins of America

This paper presented a preliminary survey of selected works read through the perspective of cultural geography with the notion of space being divided between larger location, locale, and the psychological perception of space. The examples considered were taken mostly from the 1950s and early 1960s, and the analysis focused on the repeated loss of location with the attendant concentration on more local regions. A theme of the paper was the contradictions and disparities which prevented these narratives from drawing their details into coherent unity. Thus Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow! (1954) included a map of his bombed cities which gave a vertical clarity unavailable to the more horizontal confusion of his survivors. Alfred Coppel’s Dark December (1960) was discussed as an example of a protagonist’s gradual loss of orientation as be travels across war-blasted California; and the re-appropriation of the landscape through exploration was considered in works by Leigh Brackett and Edgar Pangborn. The landscapes in these works were examined as palimpsests containing the cryptic traces of pre-war culture which had to be deciphered. A key texts here was Walter M.Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) which recapitulates western history in a fated cycle of events. Finally, the discussion turned to Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka’s Warday (1984) which describes a tour round a post-war USA which has fragmented into separate regions dependent on foreign aid.

Bénédicte Sisto (University Blaise Pascal, France)
Coral Gables, Florida: America’s ‘Finest Suburb’ in the Roaring Twenties

George Merrick founded the city of Coral Gables in Southern Florida in the early 20th century with the idea—as well as the ideal—to lay out and build the most beautiful suburb ever attempted. This presentation traces the evolution of America’s ‘finest suburb’ from 1899—when Merrick’s father, a Congregational minister, decided to move from Massachusetts to the village of Miami—to the Roaring Twenties when Merrick put Coral Gables in the national spotlight. It explains how Merrick used the tropical surroundings to exoticize the place and make it not only a residential suburb inspired by Mediterranean Rivival architecture but a place to live and work, an entire city with business and commercial areas and even a school system ranging from elementary to university level. Finally, this presentation examines the crucial role Coral Gables played in the incredible real estate boom that swept over Florida during the Twenties, and takes into consideration the carefully orchestrated marketing campaign used by Merrick to attract national publicity.

Sources for the paper include documents from the Archives and Special Collections at the Historical Association of Southern Florida, the University of Miami (Otto G. Richter Library), The Miami-Dade Public Library (Florida Special Collection) and the Coral Gables City Hall (Historic Preservation Department). Picture postcards from Coral Gables in the 1920s illustrate this presentation.

Rebecca Starr (Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education)
Recruitment Tactics of the Oneida Community and Women: Evidence from the Letters of Sophia Bledsoe Herrick

The Oneida Community was the longest lived (1843-1879) and the most experimental in gender and family structure and roles, of all the 19C American utopian communities. A spate of books and articles in the 1980s and 1990s ( for example, Louis Kern, An Ordered Love ) suggested that women of the Oneida Community enjoyed a greater ideological and practical equality with their menfolk than their middle class sisters confined by the domestic ideal. These publications generated a debate that is still developing. Robert Fogarty’s recent edition of the diary of Tirzah Miller Herrick (Desire and Duty: The Intimate Diary of Tirzah Miller) has given us insight into the mixed character of this ‘freedom’ in the life of a woman born into the Community’s values. Miller’s unhappy account is all the more poignant for its nearly unexamined acceptance of the Community’s (and that of its leader John Humphrey Noyes) control over her life. We have some fragments from women who left the Community, but we have not thus far had an account from a woman who rejected the community after prolonged and intense pressure to join. The private letters of Sophia Bledsoe Herrick, gives us a first hand account of this ‘other side’ of a woman’s experience of male proselytes from the Community. Dovetailed with evidence from the OC archive at Syracuse University Library, the letters also shed light on such important Oneida practices as ‘mutual criticism’ and on Oneidian’s theological views of women. Lastly, the letters suggest the existence of a heretofore unknown ‘branch’ of the Oneida Community in New York City.

Herrick’s husband James Burton Herrick, a clergyman in a poor working-class New York City parish, was personally converted by Noyes about1865, a few years after their marriage in 1860. There followed an intense two year campaign by Herrick and a ‘prayergroup’ of radical (possibly Chartist) workingmen disciples of Noyes to bring Herrick’s wife into the fold. Unable to accept the Community’s sexual beliefs, feeling at times physically threatened, she ultimately sought a legal separation. Sophie (who would later become a scientific writer, literary editor and social commentator for The Century Magazine) describes these conversion tactics as well as her reflections upon the Community’s sexual, social and economic systems in letters written in the 1870s. James Herrick would move into the community in the 1870s, becoming the stirpicultural partner and finally the husband of Tirzah Miller, the ‘Dear Jamie’ of her intimate diary. These letters offer unique insights from the perspective of a reflective, analytical, and unsentimental woman with unusual literary gifts, and adds a new dimension to our knowledge of this strongly, self-consciously intellectual 19C community.

Joe Street (University of Sheffield)
‘Art is to politics as content is to form’: a case study of two cultural organisations in the 1960s civil rights movement

My paper explored the history and development of two organisations that grew out of the 1960s civil rights movement. Both organisations attempted to unite the freedom struggle with African American culture in order to broaden the parameters of the movement. The Free Southern Theater, established in 1964, was initially an integrated group. During SNCC’s 1964 Summer Project, the FST toured Mississippi, performing Martin Duberman’s In White America, a drama-documentary about the history of African Americans. Following the success of this tour, the FST settled in New Orleans and developed its own concept of black nationalist community theatre. The Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project emerged from the student movement two years later and attempted to establish the centrality of a biracial folk culture to the South. In an atmosphere of polarised racial opinion, the SFCRP failed in its quest to unite the races. Its tale of failure was explored in the paper alongside the relative success of the FST. I used the examples of these organisations to draw conclusions about the development of civil rights historiography, suggesting the historians should be challenging their own conceptions of the movement and its legacy.

Despite the small audience, a lively debate followed. Its highlight was a comment from Anne Romaine’s former tutor at Vanderbilt University. His thoughts on the SFCRP founder’s personality and academic prowess were uncannily similar to my conclusions about her historical significance. Thanks to an adept chair, the debate gave all three panellists opportunity to broaden the debate and discuss a number of different issues.

Jenny Terry (University of Warwick)
‘When all the wars are over’: the post war fiction of Toni Morrison

Forming a part of the session ‘Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Writing American Memory’, this paper proposed that war and its after effects are central to the conception of Toni Morrison’s seventh and most recent novel, Paradise. Exploring aspects of the text that its original title, War, would have drawn explicit attention to, the paper attempted to interrogate the complexities of what military service might mean to African Americans in terms of belonging, the definitions of home that emerge from experiences of combat overseas and Morrison’s depiction of the justifications and repercussions of violence through the embattled stance taken by the all black town of Ruby.

Departure to, and return from, war is one of the chief forces shaping the town’s story and the paper suggested that participation in various Twentieth Century conflicts contributes much to the increasingly isolationist and patriarchal stance taken by the leaders of Ruby. It is military service which crystallises the particular ideas of community held so dear by the veterans and it is later the rhetoric of ‘defence’ which enables their attack on the outsiders at the Convent.

In conclusion, it was argued that, although Paradise fails to present an explicit critique of American militarism and imperialism, despite a focus on the era of Vietnam, attempts to explore concomitant dynamics such as nationalism, ‘Othering’ and the escalation of aggression can be identified in Morrison’s narrative.

Wendy Toon (Keele University)
From Hitler to Herbie: The Forgotten Relationship between Nazis and Hollywood’s Loveable Bug of the 1960s

The process of denazification during the American Occupation of Germany inevitably involved the removal of overtly Nazi symbols, practices and associations. Therefore it seems surprising that such a potent symbol as the Volkswagen (People’s Car) should not only have survived this process but have gone on to be an American icon of the 1960s. It is this forgotten relationship between a Nazi pet project and Hollywood’s portrayal of the ‘Bug’ that this paper addressed.

The Volkswagen was commissioned by Adolf Hitler and championed by the Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) organization. It served an ideological and sociological function and simultaneously assisted the financial liquidity of the government, with weekly instalment payments from prospective owners. It featured heavily in domestic propaganda and had both civilian and military connotations. A brief history of the beginnings of the Volkswagen pointed to its significance as a symbol during the Nazi period. Thus, if the symbol of the Swastika is dangerous, militaristic and subverting the cause of democracy, then why not the Beetle?

After the fall of the Third Reich, however, it was not destroyed or made taboo. In fact the Volkswagen became one of the world’s most popular automobiles. The series of Herbie films fuelled this popularity. Hollywood’s portrayal of the Beetle could not be further from the one that might have been expected. In fact, the image of a magical, friendly, humanized car with personality, that attains celebrity status, remained almost completely unchanged from the representation devised by the Third Reich.

Dr Hugh Wilford (University of Sheffield)
CIA plot, socialist conspiracy or New World Order? The Origins of the Bilderberg Group, 1952-55

The main aim of this paper was to draw on newly available archival evidence to document the origins of the Bilderberg Group, a secretive council of Atlantic elites which derives its name from the Dutch hotel in which it first met in 1954. After narrating Bilderberg’s early history from 1952, when the idea was hatched, to 1955, when its continuation was assured by the granting of American foundation support, the paper considered the various conspiracy theories which have attached themselves to the Group. Some on the European left have interpreted it as a CIA plot to undermine socialism; others on the American right as a socialist conspiracy to destroy the US’s capitalist, democratic institutions; most recently, extremist groups in both America and Europe have
accused it of being the seat of a hidden global government, the ‘New World Order’. The paper concluded that, despite its obvious idiocies, it was this last theory which came closest to the truth, in that the new documentary evidence tends to support Dutch
political economist Kees van der Pijl’s claims of the existence of a ‘trans-Atlantic ruling class’. Examination of David Icke’s claims that the Group is in fact composed of twelve-foot, shape-shifting lizard aliens was left for a future conference.

Robert Williams and Stephen Welch (University of Durham)
Political Scandals in the United States: Towards a Theory

Political scandals have become a serious focus of academic attention in the past decade or so. But if political scandals are no longer regarded as mere epiphenomena, the froth on the political cappuccino, there are still only a small number of studies which go beyond the case study. Thus we know a lot about particular scandals in terms of their genesis and development but few attempts have been made to draw general lessons from their occurrence.

This paper offers a more theoretical treatment of political scandals in the United States. Our interest is not in comparative political scandals and nor is it in scandal as such. We suggest that viewing American political scandal historically provides a perspective on long-term scandal dynamics. We then suggest that placing this view into a framework of political and media development makes it possible to account not only for the forces which generate political scandals in the United States but also for the role political scandals have played in political change. We argue that political scandals in the United States need to be understood in terms of a process of political contestation and this demands a close examination of the nature of political participation and of the prevailing political issues and political environment.

Andrew Wroe (University of Essex)
Post 9/11: An Analysis of Political Trust

Before 9/11, only 4 in 10 Americans said they trusted government all or most of the time. After the destruction of the Twin Towers, it increased to 6 in 10. This paper examines why 9/11 has changed positively the way Americans feel about their government. It also examines whether the increase in trust will prove permanent or transient. It is argued that the headline level of trust post 9/11 is over-inflated, and does not reflect underlying (negative) sentiments about government. Thus, while the government’s response to the domestic attacks and its prosecution of the war abroad should have a moderately positive effect on citizens’ evaluations, trust will nonetheless decline as the US returns to normality.

Travel Award Reports

John D. Lees Award Report

Aaron Winter, University of Sussex

Report on research trip to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Alabama and the University of Georgia in Athens (17-28 March 2002).

The focus of my DPhil research is the politics, discourses and strategies of the U.S. extreme right (white supremacy, Christian Identity and patriotism) and how they have transformed, becoming increasingly unified, radicalised and antagonistic to the mainstream political system, in the post-civil rights or ‘Fifth’ era (1970-present). In terms of both subject matter and historical focus, the SPLC’s Intelligence Project is an invaluable resource. It is not only the premier monitoring organisation in the field, but was established in 1981 (as Kianwatch) in response to the resurgence and paramilitarisation of the extreme right in the late 1970s and early-l980s.

Upon arriving in Montgomery on 18 March, Laurie Wood, Research Director of the Intelligence Project, graciously took me out to dinner where we had the opportunity to discuss the work of the Intelligence Project and the objectives of my trip. After dinner Laurie was kind enough to give me a tour of Montgomery including such sites as the Civil Rights Memorial and the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. The following day I arrived at the SPLC, where I met the research team and was given access to a wealth of reference material, back issues of the Intelligence Report and primary literature including Posse Comitatus, Aryan Nations’ Calling Our Nation and The National Alliance’s National Vanguard My first two days were spent reading this material and examining each group’s history, political manifesto and theories about contemporary race, religion and politics.

Along with meeting the research team for lunch each day to discuss the material, on the third day the team of Laurie, Joe Roy, Michelle Bramblett and Tafeni English convened to answer questions that I had prepared. We discussed the SPLC and Intelligence Project, its political and legal work, and epistemological approach to defining and classifying extremist groups. More specifically we discussed the historical and political development of the contemporary extreme right, with particular reference to the influence of anti-government patriotism on traditional white supremacist and Christian Identity movements. Moreover, we discussed the influence of events such as the farm crisis, Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma and September 11 and predictions for the future. The meeting concluded with a power-point presentation highlighting specific groups, their profiles, websites and most recent developments.

After completing my research at the SPLC, on 22 March I travelled to Newnan, Georgia where my brother had arranged a meeting with an associate who’s grandfather had been a KKK member at the height of the civil rights era. I was given a tour and history of Newnan focusing on the murder trial of John Wallace, KKK history and lynchings, as well as discussing the effects of desegregation and civil rights on local politics and race relations.

On 26 March I travelled to the University of Georgia in Athens, where I visited the Hargrett and Russell Collections. At the Hargrett, I consulted their ‘Right Wing Political Collection (1950-1971)’, examining issues of the KKK’s American Klansman, while at the Russell, I consulted the archives of mainstream segregationists such as Roy V. Harris, Georgia State legislator and president of the Citizens Councils of America. This material allowed me to compare the politics and strategies of both the extreme and mainstream right in opposition to desegregation and civil rights, to the more radical version that followed in the ‘Fifth Era’.

Unfortunately, after two days in Athens I had to return to Atlanta to catch my return flight to the UK. While far too short, this trip was an extremely interesting, productive and enjoyable experience, and I know that my research will benefit from it immensely. I would like to take this opportunity to thank BAAS for the John D. Lees Short Term Travel Award, which made this research trip possible. I would also like to thank Laurie Wood, Michelle Bramblett Tafeni English, Joe Roy, Richard Cohen, Founder Morris Dees and all the SPLC staff for their time, expertise and hospitality. Finally, I would like to thank Mike Winter and his associate, as well as my supervisors Dr. Clive Webb and Professor William Outhwaite for their support, and Dr. Webb for his help in arranging this trip.

Other Travel Award Reports

A.R. Flint, Anglia Polytechnic University

I thank BAAS for its kind and very generous support, which allowed me to visit the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, Georgia. The essential close primary archival research around which my thesis is predominantly based was only made possible by this award.

The purpose of my trip to Atlanta was to continue research for my doctoral thesis, The Carter Presidency and the New Christian Right. My work focuses on foreign and domestic policy issues deemed by Christian conservatives in the 1970s to be emblematic of the increasingly secular, liberal humanist nature of American public and political discourse. Specifically, I am examining the Congressional ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment; the ban on prayer in public schools; access to federally funded abortions and the tax-exempt status of Christian academies. It will explore the clash between the Carter administration and the Christian Right over the diffusion of American military and economic global influence with detailed reference to two case studies: the Panama Canal and SALT II treaty negotiations. The purpose of this study is to broaden existing revisionist scholarship on Carter through analysis of this unexamined theme and to reposition Carter within the historiography of the Christian Right.

Jimmy Carter was the most avowedly pious American president of the twentieth century. My research argues that he was the first president to bring spiritual concerns to the centre of American political discourse. His devout evangelical faith was a catalyst for Christian political activism during the late 1970s and laid the basis for their ascent to a key role in American political life thereafter. Paradoxically however, Carter abjectly failed to retain the support of the Christian Right, and the movement played a key role in removing him from office in favour of Ronald Reagan, a candidate whose lack of religious credentials made him a far less obvious champion for Christian conservatism.

Managed by the National Archives and Records Administration, the Carter library is a repository of approximately 27 million pages of Jimmy Carter’s White House material, papers of administration associates, including documents, memoranda, correspondence, interview transcripts etc. There are also hundreds of hours of audio and visual tape. Of particular interest were the transcripts of the Oral History Project on the Carter White House carried out by the White Burkett Miller Centre of the University of Virginia. The library holds many difficult to attain secondary sources pertaining to the Carter administration. On first arrival the amount of archival material available made research rather daunting but fortunately the archival staff at the library were extremely helpful in helping me focus my energies in the most rewarding areas. I can say that the support of BAAS was absolutely vital in helping to allay the cost of my photocopying bill!

All of my research objectives of my visit to the Carter library were successfully achieved. The range of resources available was extremely impressive, and the research that I carried out in Atlanta is of vital importance in completing my thesis. Serious archival work on the Carter Presidency has only just got seriously under way and my research is now in a position to make a valuable and innovative contribution to the developing historiography on the Carter White House.

David Stirrup, University of Leeds

I must begin by expressing my gratitude to BAAS for their generous support of my research into representations of death in contemporary Native American fiction. As sombre as it may sound, my focus is ultimately on aspects of ritualization and the formation of community.

My trip, conducted over the first three weeks in April, began in Chicago where I spent a few days exploring the Ayer collection of Native American Ethnography. This research, principally a search for band-specific historical context, was aided by Robert Galler, interim director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for Native American Studies.

From Chicago I travelled to Milwaukee, to the University of Wisconsin campus, to meet with Kimberly Blaeser, author of several collections of poetry, a critical text on Gerald Vizenor, and editor of Stories Migrating Home. Kim was extremely generous with both her time and advice; she put me in email contact with Heid Erdrich and made several useful suggestions regarding both my interpretation of fictitious communities and also the predominant non-Native view of Native communities in the U.S.

Leaving Milwaukee, I headed for Minneapolis to meet with David Treuer. David is a lecturer at the University of Minnesota and author of the novels Little and The Hiawatha. Like Kim, David was welcoming and generous with his time. His responses to my questions regarding his own work were open and enlightening, and our lengthy discussion of Native American Literature in general offered many interesting insights on the representations of Ojibwa ceremonies and use of the Anishinabe language by many of his contemporaries.

After a short stay in Minneapolis—the Library of the Minnesota Historical Society threw up several fascinating local studies—I hired a car and headed north. On Heid Erdrich’s advice I drove up through Minnesota via Little Falls (where Louise Erdrich grew up) making stops in Leech Lake and White Earth reservations in an attempt to garner some appreciation of the landscape and geographical situations of the types of communities that writers such as Erdrich and Treuer draw from. My ultimate destination was the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota where a visit to the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Heritage Center and a conversation with one of the volunteers there also lent new perspectives as to the nature of commitment to community held by the people here.
I have returned with information and experience that I could not possibly have gained without this first hand experience. I have kept contact with Kim Blaeser and David Treuer and feel that I have established some firm foundations for future research. Once again, thank you to BAAS for helping to make this possible.

Jennifer Robinson, University of Derby

The Travel Award generously supplied by BAAS helped to finance a research trip to New Mexico in February 2002. I am a PhD student specialising in issues of identity, gender and spatial imagery as represented in some nineteenth century American women’s writing for girls and my research trip had a two-fold purpose. The first was to attend the American Popular Culture Association’s Conference and present a paper on the Gothic aspects of my selected texts ; there has been little critical writing on the Gothicism of such writing for girls, so I particularly wished to discuss this with an American academic audience. In the event my paper was well received and was followed by stimulating and rewarding discussion ; the papers of my co-panellists, which were respectively concerned with the literary imaginations of Victorian heroines and power and surveillance in writing for girls, were also illuminating with regard to my research. In addition, other panels, including those on literature and eco-criticism, African-American women’s romance writings and gender, race and writing in the context of the Civil War, were both relevant to my research and also stimulating in connection with other interests in various areas of American culture. Generally, the conference offered excellent opportunities for networking with academics with related research interests.
I also wished to make use of the resources of the University of New Mexico. I was able to access much useful material there; for example, I located articles produced by the local press in the mid-nineteenth century relating to the education, upbringing and dress of young girls in the area at that time. The University also has an extensive collection of chicana writing which, since it frequently centres on issues of gender and identity and the representation of these in the spatial imagery of texts, is an area which I research in connection with my PhD. I was able not only to access many such texts but also to attend a lecture by Dr Carl Mora on chicano/a film and the screening of a film from the ‘Aztlan Cinema Series’.

My research trip, then, successfully fulfilled both of its purposes: both my attendance as a participator at the conference and my research at the University of New Mexico were of immense benefit to me. Although the primary benefits I derived from this visit relate to the development of my PhD, as my comments here indicate many aspects of my trip were also of more wide-ranging benefit in furthering my knowledge and understanding of related aspects of American culture. In addition, my paper is to gain publication as part of the conference proceedings, with due acknowledgement to BAAS. I should like to reiterate my thanks to BAAS here, for supplying the partial funding which made this stimulating and immensely worthwhile trip possible.

Sam Luton, University of Warwick

I would like to take this opportunity to extend my warmest thanks to the British Association of American Studies and the University of Warwick Graduate History Department for their generous support in funding my recent research trip to the United States. My MA dissertation has focused on inter-racial encounters in taverns in antebellum New Orleans, and having access to the city’s many archives provided vital primary resources that have formed the basis of my work.

Whilst in New Orleans, I visited three different archives and libraries, each of which provided a different selection of useful resources. I spent the majority of my time working in the Louisiana Collection branch of the Special Collections Department at Tulane University. Their range of early New Orleans Directories, dating from 1822, allowed me to lay the quantitative foundations for my work on taverns, and to gain a better understanding of their geographical distribution. I also found their range of City Ordinance Digests to be invaluable in the creation of a legislative framework (concerning slaves, free-blacks, and coffee-houses) for my study. Moreover, I was able to consult a number of published secondary sources relating to the city that had proved impossible to find in England. The helpful staff and friendly atmosphere made it a very pleasant place to work, and the sheer size of the collection meant I could happily have stayed there for ten months, not just ten days!

The second location I found useful was the Williams Research Center, located in the city’s French Quarter. Much of the qualitative evidence in this work has been drawn from contemporary newspaper reports, and the Williams Research Center had an extensive range of this kind of source. Time, yet again, proved to be a frustrating limiting factor, but I was still able to consult a number of different papers, from a number of years. I concentrated on the New Orleans Bee and the New Orleans Daily Delta, the largest newspapers in the First and Second Municipalities respectively, although I also consulted a selection of issues from the Louisiana Gazette, the Louisiana Advertiser, and The True American. The Bee’s ‘City Intelligence’ column, in particular, was a bountiful source of information.

Finally, I visited the City Archives section of the New Orleans Public Library. This houses a significant selection of early nineteenth century government documents. Again, I found the staff helpful in guiding me through the archival maze to appropriate sections of the extensive holdings, and it was instructive to view a range of the tavern licenses issued in the antebellum period. There was, however, simply not enough time to delve properly through the full range of materials relating to taverns and coffee-houses held in the archives, and I certainly hope to be able to revisit them again in the future to extend my study.

Beyond the strictly academic, this grant has enabled me to visit the city (and its taverns), to walk around it, and to get some kind of feel for it. This, too, was invaluable for the writing of this dissertation. Once again, many thanks for this opportunity.

Conference Reports

Making Sense of 9/11: Teaching American Studies After the Attack on the Twin Towers

This one-day conference was held at King Alfred’s Winchester on 25 May 2002 under the auspices of the HEFCE funded project AMATAS (American Studies and the Teaching of American Studies). The event was designed to provide a focus for mature reflection on 9/11 and its legacy by considering their implications for what happens in the Higher Education classroom.

Hence the morning session, ‘Thinking 9/11 and America’ was composed of two papers devoted to serious consideration of the language and concepts through which 9/11 has been or could be understood. In the probing and elegant ‘Living in a time of crisis: Thinking 9/11’ Victor Seidler, Professor of Social Theory at Goldsmith’s College, London, made a forensic analysis of the key terms underlying policy-making post-9/11 demonstrating the limitation of notions of ‘crisis’, and narrow definitions of ‘civilisation’. Taking his cue from the patriotic advertising that emerged immediately after 9/11 Professor Andrew Wernick, of Trent University in Canada followed up by mapping the synergies between US political ideology and the patterns of consumption celebrated in advertising, in ‘Let freedom ring, or re-branding America’.

The second session focused directly on 9/11 in the classroom. In ‘A constructive anti-Americanism? Crossing the boundaries of 9/11’ Professor Scott Lucas of the University of Birmingham emphasised the importance of contextualising 9/11 according to multiple disciplines and histories, from longstanding dynamics in US foreign policy to the relations between institutions, nation states, economics, national ideologies and myths of the nation. Alasdair Spark of King Alfred’s Winchester brought the session to an end with a presentation ‘9-11@24/7: Opportunities for teaching in American Studies’ that was itself interactive, demonstrating perfectly how students’ own experiences of the US as a global cultural power, demonstrated by CNN coverage of the war in Afghanistan, can be utilised to open up historical, political, and cultural understanding.

The event concluded with a plenary whose clarity and focus owed much to a telling summing-up by Shamoon Zamir (King’s, London). Most of the papers will shortly be available in print and at the AMATAS website (http://www.amatas.org), from which can also be ordered a selection of student workshops on Americanisation, including a version of Alasdair Spark’s paper. It is perhaps appropriate here then to rehearse some of the themes that attracted conspicuous discussion or agreement. In this sense the event could be seen as a snapshot of responses from a cross section of Americanists of various stripes and other scholars from ten institutions, (and in no sense would claim to represent the American Studies community as a whole). If there was general agreement among those present, it was that 9/11 and its aftermath had demonstrated the limitations of narrowly culturalist conceptions of Americanisation as a positive, two-way process. There was a general tendency also to question notions of 9/11 as an epochal, qualitatively unique and specifically American event, whether by pointing to the problems attendant on notions of 9/11 as ‘crisis’, or by ‘thinking beyond and before 9/11’ in Scott Lucas’s phrase, or by reference to the necessity of coming to terms, as Shamoon Zamir rightly insisted, with other, less media-friendly victims of state and terrorist violence.

What remained unresolved, maybe productively, were the disciplinary orientations necessary to be able to properly teach 9/11. A recurring issue on the day was the extent and nature of the dialogues possible with cultures marginalised by American dominance, including rational Eastern traditions. There is also the paradox that 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan have simultaneously demonstrated the crucial importance of national political and military history, while showing up the limits of nation-based perspectives. As an attack on America, prompting a military response by American and its allies, at one level 9/11 reasserted the importance of the nation as the object of analysis. Yet at the same time the non-national source of the attack, its global political fallout, as well as the filtering of many responses through binaries of East/West, Christian/Muslim, and Modernity/Tradition, can only intensify the already existing trajectory of interest in comparative, transatlantic, and post-national ‘American Studies’. One feels that this debate will run and run, but if so the warmth and good humour evident at Winchester were exemplary, and one hopes they will be replicated at the closing AMATAS conference at University of Central Lancashire in January.

Jude Davies, King Alfred’s, Winchester

News from AMATAS

1) BAAS, Oxford 2002

Thanks to all those who stayed until the Monday morning and contributed to a lively session on Americanisation run by the project. It showcased the research work that has gone into the workshops and included papers by Dr. Paul Grainge from University of Nottingham, Professor John Walton from the University of Central Lancashire and Ms. Carol Smith from King Alfred’s College Winchester. Professor Scott Lucas from the University of Birmingham summarised the arguments around Americanisation coming from the project in an improvised extempore performance that spoke eloquently to the project’s desire to make a difference to the teaching of American Studies in Britain.

2) Workshops Still Available

Many institutions have benefited from our excellent workshops on Americanisation which are FREE OF CHARGE. They encompass a wide range of topics from the Cultural Cold War (Professor Scott Lucas) through Jim Crow in Europe (Dr Alasdair Pettinger) and Pop Art in Britain (Simon Philo) to Landscapes of Americanisation (Dr Neil Campbell). The project can continue to fund the visiting of these workshops to institutions until January 31. Do please avail yourself of this opportunity before it is too late as wherever we have given workshops they have been greatly appreciated as an excellent and provocative learning experience for the students. The full list of workshops and an on-line booking form are on the website www.amatas.org or you can order the latest edition of our booklet of workshops from fsbayntun-roberts@uclan.ac.uk

3) Website Update

There are many useful resources on the website including Syllabi on Americanisation, essays by scholars in the project, papers from our May conference on ‘Making Sense of 9/11’ (see article by Jude Davies elsewhere in this issue) and materials linked to the workshop topics. For instance text and images to Neil Campbell’s Landscapes of Americanisation Project are now all available on line on our website www.amatas.org If you have any relevant text or image-based material you would like to donate to the website we would be most grateful. Please contact the project manager at the address below.

4) George Ritzer to Address AMATAS Final Conference

The AMATAS Project is pleased to announce that the illustrious academic Professor George Ritzer, author of The Macdonaldization of Society (1993), from College Park, Maryland will be the keynote speaker at the AMATAS day-conference, ‘Americanisation and the Teaching of the Humanities’ on January 17th 2003 . His international contribution to the understanding of America’s global power and of consumerism makes him an especially noteworthy keynote. The conference will address issues of American economic, cultural, political and military power and the relation of globalisation to Americanisation. Academics from all disciplines are welcome including Cultural Studies, Politics, History, Geography, Visual Arts and Popular Culture Studies, Sociology and Literary Studies. The conference will be interdisciplinary and will include workshops on pedagogic approaches to teaching Americanisation as well as keynote lectures including that by Professor Ritzer. Professor Deborah Madsen, author of American Exceptionalism (Edinburgh 1999), has agreed to give a keynote on aspects of American influence not necessarily imposed through global capitalism. We are still developing the full programme. It will be posted on our website at www.amatas.org in the autumn.
If you want to contribute please contact the project manager and conference organiser Dr. Alan Rice at arice@uclan.ac.uk
If you would like to attend please contact the administrator Fiona Bayntun-Roberts fsbayntun-roberts@uclan.ac.uk

Dr. Alan J. Rice
Principal 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
E-Mail: arice@uclan.ac.uk
Tel: 01772 893125
Fax: 01772 892924

AMATAS website http://www.amatas.org

Conference Announcements

The American Politics Group/British Association for American Studies Annual Colloquium

The American Politics Group/British Association for American Studies Annual Colloquium will be held at the US Embassy, London, on 15 November 2002.

The theme will be ‘Presidential Power Today’ and the keynote speaker will be Professor Richard Neustadt.

Anyone interested should contact:

John Dumbrell
School of American Studies
Keele University
Staffs, ST5 5BG.
E-Mail:j.w.dumbrell@ams.keele.ac.uk

American Politics Group: University of Reading, January 3-5, 2003

Papers are invited on any aspect of American politics.

Please reply to the conference organiser if you wish to offer a paper, are willing to act as a panel chair or discussant, or intend to attend the conference withut giving a paper.

Dr Ross M. English
Department of Politics
University of Reading
Whiteknights
Reading RG6 6AA
UK

Tel: (+44) (0)118 931 8504
Fax: (+44) (0)118 975 3833
E-Mail: r.m.english@reading.ac.uk

For information on how to join the American politics group, please contact:

Dr Dean McSweeney
School of Politics
University of the West of England
Bristol BS16 1QV
E-Mail: dean.mcsweeney@uwe.ac.uk

The Spectacle of the Real: From Hollywood to ‘Reality’ TV and Beyond: Brunel University, London, January 25-26, 2003

Hollywood special effects offer spectacular creations or re-creations that make claims to our attention on the grounds of their ‘incredible-seeming reality’. They can appear both ‘incredible’ and ‘real’, their appeal based on their ability to ‘convince’—to appear real in terms such as detail and texture—and on their status as fabricated spectacle, to be admired as such. At a seemingly very different end of the audio-visual media spectrum, ‘reality’ television offers the spectacle of, supposedly, the ‘real’ itself, a ‘reality’ that ranges from the banality of the quotidian to intense interpersonal engagements (two extremes experienced in Big Brother, for example).The two also overlap, however, nowhere more clearly and jarringly than in the ultimate ‘spectacle of the real’, the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, live television coverage of which evoked constant comparison with big-screen fictional images.

Impressions of the ‘real’ or the ‘authentic’ (or the authentic-seeming) are valued as forms of media spectacle in a number of other contemporary media forms. Other examples include the ‘uncanny’ verisimilitude of the latest developments in computer-generated animation displayed in films such as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) and Shrek (2001), and the recent tendency to include scenes of real sexual intercourse in more ‘legitimate’ forms of cinema (even if this has been confined to the ‘continental art film’ sector).

The aim of this conference is to explore some of the issues emerging from this fascination with both the impression of ‘reality’ and the fact that it is often presented and experienced as a form of spectacle; or, alternatively, the fascination with the spectacular and the fact that it is often considered in terms of its apparent ‘realism’. Broad questions we wish to explore through the examination of a wide range of textual material concern the nature and different forms of both ‘spectacle’ and of ‘the real’ (along with ‘reality’, ‘realism’ and ‘authenticity’); and, especially, the points of conjuncture between the two. If the term ‘spectacle’ tends to orient us towards the big-budget Hollywood productions, for example, we also wish to consider its wider resonances.

How, for instance, are heightened moments of spectacle, such as those found in overtly visible special effects sequences, marked off differently from the spectacle of audio-visual production more generally? Other potential questions to be addressed include issues of consumption: how do different forms of spectacle mobilize (or seek to mobilize) different kinds of spectatorship and what kinds of pleasures or other engagements do they entail? What are the similarities and differences between Hollywood spectacle and that produced in other geo-cultural contexts. And if ‘spectacle’ ranges across forms as diverse as the Hollywood blockbuster, videogames and ‘reality’ TV, what about more overtly political interventions that seek to question or reject the practices of the commercial mainstream. In this context, the term ‘spectacle’ evokes the broader social critiques of consumer capitalism associated with figures such as Guy Debord or Walter Benjamin and the ‘anti-spectacular’ strategies pursued by elements of the political avant-garde.

Proposals for papers are invited across this range of issues, in film, television and new media. Please send proposals of 350-400 words by 30th June, 2002 to:

Geoff King
Film and TV Studies
Brunel University
Cleveland Road
Uxbridge UB8 3PH
UK
E-mail: geoff.king@brunel.ac.uk

New York, Chicago, Los Angeles—Cultures and Representations II: University of Nottingham, April 4-5, 2003

Following the success of the first ‘New York, Chicago, Los Angeles Cultures and Representations’ Conference (Birmingham UK, Sept. 1999) which saw the participation of over 65 academics from 10 counties, the Three Cities project team is pleased to announce its final international conference, to be held April 4-5, 2003, at the University of Nottingham, UK. We invite papers from scholars working on New York, Chicago or Los Angeles in any period and from any disciplinary orientation.

The project members and many of our associates work on representations of urban space in literature, photography, fine art, visual culture, maps, architecture, popular art, advertising, television and film and many draw on contemporary work in urban and visual theory, cultural studies and cultural geography. We would be pleased to see papers reflecting these emphases. The project has developed the use of multimedia for the study of visual, literary and cultural representations of urban space and we would particularly welcome papers that seek to utilise or address the use of new technologies for the study of city spaces CitySites an electronic book was published in December 2000 and is currently available at http://www.citysites.org.uk.

Although the primary foci of the conference will be the cities of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles we welcome comparative papers that set these cities in a wider national or international context.

Papers should be 25-30 minutes in length. We are open to papers that think creatively about the paper presentation— whether this is through the use of video, computer or visual presentation. We also welcome proposals for whole panels, short roundtable discussion panels, or presentation and response sessions.

The deadline for proposals is October 31st 2002, and proposers will be informed of their acceptance by December 15th. Proposals should be submitted on paper and disc and should be no more than 300 words in length. The proposal should be accompanied by a covering letter detailing institutional affiliation (where appropriate), contact address and email address. Please sent to:

Dr Anna Notaro
School of American & Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham NG7 2RD
UK

Proposals can also be submitted electronically to Anna.Notaro@nottingham.ac.uk

In Our Time: America Since 1945: University of East Anglia, Norwich: April 24-26, 2003

An international conference organized by the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies.

This international conference is inspired by the work of Godfrey Hodgson, the distinguished print and television journalist, political commentator, and historian of the United States. Taking its title from Hodgson’s ambitious and sweeping survey, America In Our Time, published in 1976, the conference seeks to reassess the political and social history of the United States since World War II. Papers on any aspect of American history since 1945 will be considered. We are particularly interested in papers that address some of the major themes of Godfrey Hodgson’s journalism and historical scholarship, and which offer fresh perspectives on such topics as the presidency, Congress and foreign policy, liberalism, conservatism, the South, race relations, and the news media. We also encourage papers that, in the spirit of Hodgson’s work, attempt broad, ambitious interpretations that range across the period in question.

The University of East Anglia is one of the longest-established centres for American Studies in the United Kingdom. Strongly associated in the public mind with the late Malcolm Bradbury, it is home of the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies, and is located in Norwich, one of Britain’s finest cities.

Invited speakers include:

Todd Gitlin
Godfrey Hodgson
Richard Sennett
William H. Chafe
Jay Kleinberg
Anthony J. Badger
Michael J. Heale

Proposals:

Please send a 200-word abstract by July 31, 2002 (by post, fax, e-mail, or e-mail attachment) to:

Professor Adam Fairclough
School of EAS
University of East Anglia
Norwich NR4 7TJ
U.K.
E-Mail: adam.fairclough@uea.ac.uk
Fax: 01603-507728 (omit first digit if dialing from outside U.K.)

Visit our website: http://www.uea.ac.uk/eas/News/inourtimeamericasince1945.htm

International American Studies Association—How Far is America From Here?: Leiden, The Netherlands, May 22-24, 2003

The IASA

Founded in 2000, the International American Studies Association, the only internationally chartered association of/for Americanists from all parts of the world, defines its mission as furthering the international exchange of ideas and information among scholars from all nations and various disciplines who study and teach America regionally, hemispherically, nationally, transnationally and as a global phenomenon. For more information, please see the IASA’s website at http://iasa.la.psu.edu

The first World Congress of the Association will be held at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, 22-24 May 2003. Calls for seminar, panel and roundtable proposals follow. All presenters and participants in the Congress proceedings must be paid-up members of IASA at the time the Congress takes place. (See membership link on the IASA website for details; membership registration will also be available at the Congress.)

The Congress

University of Leiden, The Netherlands, 22-24 May 2003
Plenary Speakers: Edouard Glissant, Werner Sollors

The Program Committee hopes that the topic of the Congress, ‘How Far is America From Here?’, will allow for a considerable range of comparative, interdisciplinary and other theoretical approaches to American nations and cultures. It is very much at the heart of this comparative agenda that ‘America’ be considered as a hemispheric and global matter. We welcome proposals that seek to rethink the question of American identities relationally, whether the relations under discussion operate within the borders of the United States, throughout the Americas, and/or worldwide.

To this end, we will welcome proposals for seminar sessions, panels, roundtables or individual papers that seek to interrogate the topic of the Congress itself:

(1) Which, whose America, when, why now, how?

(2) What is meant by ‘far’-distance, discursive formations, ideals and ideologies, foundational narratives, political conformities, aberrations, inconsistencies?

(3) Policy formations and deformations (rhetorical and otherwise);

(4) Where is here-positionality, geographies, spatial compressions, hegemonic and subaltern locii, disciplinary formations, reflexes and reflexivities?

It is hoped that participants will address such questions, and others, in the multiple Americas within the USA and the bi-continental western hemisphere, as part of and beyond interamerican cultural relations, ethnicities across the national and cultural plurality of America, mutual constructions of North and South, borderlands, issues of migration and diaspora. The larger contexts of globalization and America’s role within this process will be addressed within the Congress, alongside issues of geographical exploration, capital expansion, integration, transculturalism, transnationalism and global flows, pre-Columbian and contemporary Native American cultures, the Atlantic slave trade, the environmental crisis, the political and cultural implications of free trade, relationships between America and the Caribbean, varieties of language, U.S. literature in relation to Canadian or Latin American literature, religious conflict both within the Americas and between the Americas and the rest of the world, with such issues as American Zionism, exceptionalism, and the discourse of/on terror and terrorism.

Proposals are welcome from scholars working in diverse fields, including history, anthropology, and the social sciences, as well as literature, media, and culture. The Program Committee actively seeks proposals that reflect the diversity of scholarly interests and range of methodological approaches within the social sciences; we are especially interested in how the humanities and the social sciences in American studies might inform one another on common themes or subjects, and we therefore encourage proposals that bring the humanities and social sciences into juxtaposition. The Committee welcomes explorations of ‘America’ according to such topics as: society, demography, immigration, race, ethnicity, gender, class, culture, space, landscape, the natural and the built environment, economy, technology, infrastructure, architecture, political economy, politics, policy, and planning. Participants may also like to consider the significance of the Internet and other new technologies, both as a topic in itself and as a way of presenting material. (Multimedia facilities will be available at the Congress.) In this way, the program will be constructed to allow participants to speak to each other across disciplines as well as across nationalities.

Proposals can be either for individual papers (normally 20 minutes) or for complete panels (normally 90 minutes). The Program Committee also welcomes different formats and invites proposals for roundtables on specific topics, where each speaker would offer an initial position paper (5-10 minutes) before the session is opened up to wider discussion and participation.

The Program Committee also invites proposals from those wishing to lead seminars. Such proposals should include a description of the topic and a current curriculum vitae for the seminar leader. Seminar topics should be clearly defined so as to provide the maximum benefit to participants. The IASA will advertise the seminar and register participants, with short papers being exchanged in advance to allow more time for discussion. Seminars will normally be limited to fifteen people.

Proposals for individual papers should be up to 250 words. Proposals for complete panels, roundtables or seminars should be up to 500 words, and should include the names and institutional affiliations of all participants. Please send material by 15 September 2002 to either of the Co-Chairs of the Program Committee:

Lois Parkinson Zamora
Department of English
University of Houston
Houston, TX 77204
USA
E-Mail: lzamora@uh.edu

Paul Giles
Fitzwilliam College
Cambridge University
Cambridge, CB3 0DG
UK
E-Mail: pdg23@cam.ac.uk

E-Mail submissions are welcome.

New Members

Allan Ali is a retired consulting actuary interested in US history 1760-1800.

Peter Ashdown teaches history and law at Brighton Independent Girls’ School and is particularly interested in civil rights and the south since 1900.

Susanne Auflitsch is a postgraduate student at Brasenose College, Oxford. Her research interests are twentieth-century drama and contemporary feminist theatre.

Chris Bailey is a professor of American politics at Keele University and director of the David Bruce Centre for American Studies. His research interest include the US congress, environmental politics and social regulation.

Dr Mihai Balanescu teaches at UEA, Norwich whose specialism is in African American studies, with particular emphasis on the Harlem renaissance and balck music.

Stephanie Bateson is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield where she is researching gender in Students for a Democractic Society.

Dr G H Bennett is a senior lecturer at the University of Plymouth. His research interests are American politics since 1945 and the American military since 1939.

Hanne Borchmeyer is a student at the University of Munich.

Natalie Bormann is a PhD student at the University of Newcastle. Her research interests are US foreign policy and identity, US strategies of security since the end of the Cold War and National Missile Defense.

Mark Brown is a PhD student at University College Northampton where he completing his study on the relationship between NewYork city and identity in the works of Paul Auster.

Owen Butler is a postgraduate student at the University of Nottingham.

Catherine Callard is a PhD student at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Her research is on JFK and the Laotian crisis.

Sarah Dauncey is a PhD student at the University of Warwick. Her research interests are twentieth century literature, particularly modernism.

Kate Dossett is a PhD student at St. John’s College, Cambridge studying the role of African American women in the Harlem Renaissance.

Don Doyle teaches at Vanderbilt University. His research interests are southern history and nineteenth century urban history.

Dr Mira Duric has completed a PhD at Keele University on US foreign policy.

Sarah Emsley is a doctoral student at Dalhousie University in Canada. Her dissertation is on Jane Austen.

Paul Fairclough teaches ‘A’ level government and politics in Leicester.

Jane Ferentzi-Sheppard is a part-time MA student at Bath Spa University College where she is working on a dissertation titled ‘Migration from West Dorset to Jefferson Co. New York 1830-1900’.

Nathalie Gegout is a postgraduate student at the University of Birmingham and is interested in African American literature and Caribbean literature.

Jessica Gibbs is a postgraduate student at University of Cambridge. Her research interest are US policy towards Cuba in the post-Cold War period.

Clodagh Harrington is a PhD student at London Guildhall University working on the role of the special prosecutor in late twentieth-century American politics.

Arlene Hui is a postgraduate student at UCL whose dissertation analyses the representation of miscegenation in American film and how those representations are affected by American contemporary culture as well as by Hollywood trends.

Cheryl Hudson is a graduate student in history at Vanderbilt University, Nashville. Her research explores the meanings attached to citizenship and community belonging in modern urban political culture.

Simon James is a postgraduate student at the Institute of United States Studies.

Alexander Leicht is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham with research interests in contemporary philosophy and democratic theory, Pragmatism and Neo-Pragmatism, twentieth-century art and nineteenth-century landscape painting.

Maggie Mackay is a PhD student at the University of London. She is studying the works of playwright/director Maria Irene Fornés.

Christopher McKenna is a lecturer at the Said Business School, Oxford. His interests include Americanisation and the culture of consumption.

Alan Mendoza is a PhD student at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His research interests are Anglo-American relations, British and US politics and NATO enlargement.

William Merkel is a D. Phil student at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford writing a dissertation titled ‘Universal Liberty and African American Slavery: A Re-evaluation of Thomas Jefferson’. He is the co-author of The Militia and the Right to Arms, or How the Second Amendment Fell Silent (Duke UP, 2002).

David Milne is a PhD student at University of Cambridge writing on ‘Walt Rostow’s Non-communist Manifesto for US Foreign Policy, 1961-68’.

Catherine Morley is a PhD student at Oxford Brookes University. Her interests include Jewish American literature, postmodern American fiction, science fiction and native American literature. She is currently researching the American preoccupation with the epic/Great American Novel in the work of Don DeLillo, John Updike and Philip Roth.

Derrick Murphy is vice principal of St. Dominic’s Sixth Form College, Harrow and series editor of the Collins Flagship History series.

Thomas Mulhall is a part-time D.Phil student at the University of Ulster. His areas of interest is leaders in the black civil rights movement.

Ann Parker is currently education officer for ACUK/NATO in the East Midlands and is principal examiner for AQA in American history.

Dr Anat Pick has research interests in Henry James, nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, film studies and philosophical approaches to literature.

Julia Pollok is a student at the Amerik-Institut of the Ludwig-Maximilans-Universtät, München, Germany. Her interests are American politics, especially foreign policy, and religion and politics.

Siân Price is an assistant producer at BBC Wales. She is interested in the US war of independence and US culture in the 1950s.

Gönül Pultar is assistant professor at Bilkent University, Turkey and is the founding editor of the Journal of American Studies of Turkey.

Paulo Jorge Batista Ramos is a postgraduate student at the University of Manchester where he is researching the Yale Institute of International Studies.

Lee Sartain is a research student at Edge Hill University College working on women in the NAACP.

Sandra Scanlon is a postgraduate student at University of Cambridge. Her research interests are twentieth-century diplomatic history, particularly US foreign policy and he Vietnam War and alliance diplomacy during the Second World War.

Dr Axel Schaefer is a lecturer at Keele University whose main research interests are nineteenth and twentieth-century US social thought and social policy, intellectual history, and the politics of evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

Sarah Silkey is PhD student at UEA, Norwich currently examining American representations of lynching to the British public, transatlantic reform movements, and the exploitation of British interest in American race relations by American civil rights activists.

Gary Smith is a student at Dundee University whose research interests are slavery and the Civil War.

Dr Jennifer Smith is a part-time lecturer at Leicester University. Her research interests are religions and politics in colonial America, especially Roger Williams and toleration,1960s reform and radicalism, and the development of American identities.

John Soutter is a postgraduate student at the University of Liverpool where he has finished his thesis entitled ‘William Gaddis: Systems Novelist’.

Marc Stears is a lecturer at University of Cambridge and author of Progressives, Pluralist and the Problems of the State.

Kim Sturgess is a doctoral candidate at UEA, Norwich. Her dissertation comprises an interdisciplinary cultural study of nineteenth-century America with a focus on American ethnogenesis.

Sandra Summers is a mature student doing a PhD part-time at Keele University on The Use of Presidential Power in US Foreign Policy.

Fionnghuala Sweeney is lecturer in comparative American studies at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests include African American literature, the black Atlantic, Anglo and Hispanophone Caribbean literature and culture and southern US literature.

Peter N. Ubertaccio is assistant professor of political science and pre law advisor at Stonehill College with specialties in the American presidency, American political history, politics and law, and political parties.

Aaron Winter is a postgraduate at the University of Sussex whose research focus is political discourse and rhetoric and he is currently working on discourses and rhetoric of the contemporary US extreme-right.

Dr Shamoon Zamir is Director of American Studies at King’s College London. His research interests are African American and native American literatures, literature and anthropology, photography and twentieth century poetry.

Members’ News

Fiona Le Brun has recently been awarded a Chair at the Savannah College of Art and Design (Department of Liberal Arts) in the USA.

Mark Newman’s book, Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945-1995 (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2001) ISBN 0817310606 has won the American Studies Network Book Prize 2002 from the European Association of American Studies.

Members’ Publications

Woodrow Wilson by John A. Thompson in the ‘Profiles in Power’ series, published by Longman, an imprint of Pearson Education. ISBN 0582-24737-3. £15.99

BAAS Membership of Committees

Executive Committee Elected:

Professor Philip Davies (Chair, first elected 1998, term ends 2004)
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH E-Mail: pjd@dmu.ac.uk

Dr Heidi Macpherson (Secretary, first elected 2002, term ends 2005)
Department of Cultural Studies, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 2HE E-Mail: hrsmacpherson@uclan.ac.uk

Dr Nick Selby (Treasurer, first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
E-Mail: N.Selby@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Professor Janet Beer
Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University, Geoffrey Marton Building, Roasamond St. West, Manchester M15 6LL
E-Mail: J.Beer@mmu.ac.uk

Ms Celeste-Marie Bernier
Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD
E-Mail: aaxcb1@nottingham.ac.uk

Professor Susan Castillo (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
Department of English Literature, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ
E-Mail: S.Castillo@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

Dr Jude Davies (first elected 2002, term ends 2005)
Department of American Studies, King Alfred’s College of Higher Education, Winchester, SO22 4NR
E-Mail: Jude.Davies@wkac.ac.uk

Dr Michael McDonnell (first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Department of American Studies University of Wales, Swansea Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP
E-Mail: m.mcdonnell@swansea.ac.uk

Ms Catherine Morley (Postgraduate Representative, first elected 2002, term ends 2004)
School of Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane Campus, Headington, OX3 OBP
E-Mail: c.morley@brookes.ac.uk

Dr Simon Newman (first elected 1999, term ends 2005)*
Director, American Studies, Modern History, 2 University Gardens, Glasgow University, Glasgow G12
E-Mail: s.newman@modhist.arts.gla.ac.uk

Dr Carol Smith (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
School of Cultural Studies, King Alfred’s College, Winchester SO22 4NR E-Mail: Carol.Smith@wkac.ac.uk

Dr Graham Thompson (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
Department of English, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH
E-Mail: gthompson@dmu.ac.uk

Dr Peter Thompson (first elected 2002, term ends 2005)
St. Cross College, St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LZ
E-Mail: peter.thompson@stx.ox.ac.uk

Miss Andrea Beighton Co-opted, Conference SubCommittee
Deputy Director, Rothermere American Institute, 1A South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG
E-Mail: Andrea.Beighton@rai.ox.ac.uk

Ms Kathryn Cooper Co-opted, Development Subcommittee
Loreto 6th Form College, Chicester Road, Manchester M15 5PB
E-Mail: kathcooper@cwcom.net

Dr Kevin Halliwell Ex-officio, Library Subcommittee
National Library of Scotland
E-Mail: k.halliwell@nls.uk

Dr Jay Kleinberg Ex-officio, Editor, Journal of American Studies American Studies, Brunel University, 300 St Margarets Road, Twickenham, Middlesex TW1 1PT
E-Mail: Jay.Kleinberg@Brunel.ac.uk

Dr Iain Wallace Ex-Officio, Library Subcommittee
John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 150 Deansgate, Manchester M3 9EH
E-Mail: i.r.wallace@man.ac.uk

Subcommittee Members

Development

Dr Simon Newman (Chair)
Professor Philip Davies
Ms Celeste-Marie Bernier
Ms. Catherine Morley (post-grad)
Dr. Peter Thompson
Dr. Jenel Virden (EAAS rep)
Dr Iain Wallace (ex-officio)

Publications

Professor Janet Beer (Chair)
Dr Heidi Macpherson
Dr. Carol Smith (Paperbacks)
Dr Graham Thompson (ASIB and webster)
Professor Jay Kleinberg (Editor of Journal of American Studies)
Prof. Ken Morgan (Editor of BRRAM)
Ms Kathryn Cooper (co-opted)

Conference

Dr Michael McDonnell (Chair)
Dr Nick Selby
Professor Susan Castillo
Dr Jude Davies
Dr Tim Woods (Aberystwyth, Conference Secretary 2003)
Dr. Sarah MacLachlan
Ms Andrea Beighton (co-opted)

Libraries and Resources

Dr Iain Wallace
Dr Kevin Halliwell

BAAS representative to EAAS

Dr. Jenel Virden (terms ends 2007)*
Department of American Studies, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX
E-Mail: J.Virden@hull.ac.uk

[* indicates this person not eligible for re-election to this position. All co-optations must be reviewed annually]

Editorial

After some discussion, the BAAS executive has determined to re-schedule the release of American Studies in Britain, the BAAS newsletter. Currently, as you will know, our newsletter is scheduled to appear in November/December and May/June – roughly speaking. Aficionados of the newsletter will know that this schedule is more often honoured in the breach than the observance. After editing two issues (i.e., one year’s worth of newsletters!), I believe that the reason for this recurrent lateness is quite plain. Simply put, in practice this timing seems not very workable.

This is because the time allowed to assemble, put together and edit the conference reports and write-ups for the Summer ASIB is too short. It takes too long to collect, collate and edit these reports and get ASIB out on time. Since the page-setting and printing take, say, circa four weeks, only a relatively short time is left after the conference before ASIB should theoretically be fully assembled. If publication is set back into late June and, subsequently, a slippage of only ten days occurs, ASIB has to be distributed in the vacation – not ideal timing – or held back until late September.
Relatedly, releasing the second ASIB in late November means it is not possible to carry the BAAS conference programme for the following year, or, even, usually, any real details (e.g. of plenary speakers), as these are quite often not settled by the time ASIB needs at present to be assembled (circa late October). For example the last ASIB (number 85) was held back from publication until very early January, yet even then no real details about the conference could be provided when asked for in mid-December – quite reasonably, since things were still being settled!

Hence, a rescheduling has been agreed. In future the first ASIB will appear in early February and the second in late September. The September ASIB will carry a fuller, better-edited conference report, the February issue, details of the Spring conference.

This agreed re-scheduling, of course, implies either another ASIB very, very soon after the last or only one ASIB during 2002 – a ‘bumper double issue’. In the event, the Executive decided that, since you were all such keen readers of the newsletter (well, look: you’ve got to the end of this editorial, haven’t you [despite the fact it is one of the least interesting ever written]?), we should not deprive you of your regular ASIB mainline ‘fix’. So here, only weeks after ASIB 85, is ASIB 86: enjoy!

Dick Ellis

Notice of BAAS AGM

Agenda:

1. Elections: Secretary, 3 committee members, 1 post-graduate representative, EAAS representative, any other offices that fall vacant before the AGM
2. Treasurer’s report
3. Chair’s report
4. Amendments to the Constitution
5. Annual Conferences 2003-2005
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

Members are reminded that the Treasurer may come to the AGM to propose a change in subscription rates for calendar year 2003.

At the 2002 AGM, elections will be held for three positions on the Committee (three year terms), for the Secretary of the Association (three year term), for the post-graduate representative (two year term), for the EAAS representative (five year term), and for any offices that fall vacant before the AGM. Current incumbents of these positions (except EAAS representative and post-graduate representative) 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, Jenel Virden, by 12.00 noon on Sunday 7 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. 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 Jenel Virden
Head of Department
American Studies
University of Hull
Hull, HU6 7RX
United Kingdom
01482-465303
J.Virden@hull.ac.uk

Amendment of Constitution to be considered at BAAS AGM, 2002

A minor constitutional amendment will be put to the 2002 AGM of BAAS. The aim of this is, by legitimating the collection of EAAS subscriptions, to allow BAAS to give BAAS members full rights as EAAS members (since part of their subscription currently pays for their membership of EAAS). The current wording effectively prevents this.
This amendment to the Constitution will be proposed at the AGM. Section 4.2 of the Constitution amended to read:

All members shall also pay the membership subscription to the European Association for American Studies, the amount to be collected and forwarded annually by the Treasurer of the British Association for American Studies.

BAAS Annual Conference, 2002 at Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, 5-8 April – Provisional Programme

PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME
(Draft, subject to change, please see our website at www.rai.ox.ac.uk for latest details)

BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR AMERICAN STUDIES
ANNUAL CONFERENCE, 2002
Rothermere American Institute
University of Oxford
5-8 April 2002

Friday 5 April

1.00-4.30pm
Registration – St Anne’s College Oxford

4.00pm
Tea and Coffee

4.45-5.00pm
Welcome and Introductions – Philip Davies, Chair, BAAS
St Anne’s lecture theatre

5.00-6.00pm
Guest Lecture – Professor Helen Taylor, Exeter University
St Anne’s Lecture Theatre

6.00-7.00pm
Reception – Generously Sponsored by Aberystwyth University, host of the 2003 BAAS Conference

7.00pm
Dinner, St Anne’s dining hall

8.00-11.00pm
Social in marquee, band

up to 12 midnight
Late bar in JCR bar

Saturday 6 April

9.00-10.30am
SESSION 1

1. Contemporary New York Literatures: Commodity, Community and History
Chair: Professor Peter Brooker, University College, Northampton
Nick Heffernan, University College, Northampton, “A Literature of Products and Services: Commodity Fetishism in Bret Easton Ellis’s New York Fiction”
Mark Brown, University College, Northampton, “Telling the Dodger’s Story: the Community of Baseball in Paul Auster’s Films”
Catherine Morley, Oxford Brookes University, “History Made ‘Real’ in a Fictional World: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with the Past in Underworld”

2. Going to the Margins: Aspects of American Photography After WWII
Chair: TBA
Martin Padget, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, “Cold War Era Photography and the Search for ‘New Foundations’: Paul Strand’s Representations of the Western Isles of Scotland in Tir a’Mhurain (Land of Bent Grass)”
Neil Campbell, University of Derby, “‘The Look of Hope or the Look of Sadness’: Robert Frank’s Dialogical Vision”
John Beck, University of Newcastle, “Landscape Photography as Counter-Surveillance”

3. Southern Plantations in the Early Republic
Chair: TBA
James Baird, Bard College, “‘Life in the Business of Another’: Patterns of Conflict Between Overseers and Their Employers in Late Colonial and Early National Virginia”
Steven Sarson, University of Wales, Swansea, “Management and Labour in Chesapeake Plantation Households in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries”
Emily West, University of Reading, “Tensions, Tempers and Temptations: Marital Discord Among Slaves in Antebellum South Carolina”

4. Fitzgerald and Faulkner: Narratives in Fiction and Film
Chair: TBA
Edward A. Abramson, University of Hull, “Fitzgerald, The Jews and Hollywood”
Laura Rattray, University of Hull, “The Narrative Vision of Tender is the Night”
Mike Gray, University of Essex, “Watching Faulkner and Film in Sanctuary”

10.30-11.00am
Tea and Coffee

11.00-12.30pm
SESSION 2

1. Critiques of Mass Culture
Chair: TBA
James E. Reibman, Lafayette College, “Fredric Wertham and Mass Media Violence”
Graham Barnfield, Surrey Institute of Art and Design University College, “‘Oh Logo!’: Left-Literary Modernism takes on Advertising and Branding, 1926-1941”
David Cuthbert, Queen’s University, “Totality and Inversion: Charles Olson on Culture”

2.American Writers on Tour
Chair: TBA
Peter Rawlings, University of the West of England, “Senses of the Past: Henry James and the Art of Travel”
Theresa Saxon, Manchester Metropolitan University, “‘At Home In Paris’: The American Abroad in Henry James’s The American”
Sam W. Haynes, University of Texas at Arlington, “The Ugly American in the Post-Colonial Era: James Fenimore Cooper and Edwin Forrest in England”

Or move to University Museum

11.10-12.00pm
Guest Lecture – Jack Pole, Oxford
University Museum Lecture Theatre, Parks Road

12.00-12.30pm
Drinks Reception, University Museum

12.40-1.30pm
Lunch, St Anne’s dining hall

1.30-3.00pm
SESSION 3

1. Contested Images of African Americans
Chair: TBA
Howard L. Sacks, Kenyon College, “Erasing Blackface: the NAACP Campaign Against Minstrelry”
Anne-Marie Angelo, Uppingham School, “White Space, Black Value: African Americans in Civil Rights Advertising, 1954-1969”
Thomas Doherty, Brandeis University, “Blacks in Your Living Room: The Amos and Andy Show”
Andrew Read, Queen Mary, University of London, “‘A Black Hand on a White Woman’s Throat’: Thomas Dixon and the Representational Power of Black Violence”

2. American Politics Today
Chair: TBA
Edward Ashbee, Denstone College, “Representations of American National Identity”
Alan Grant, Oxford Brookes University, “Democracy, Elections and Electoral Reform”
Esther Jubb, Liverpool John Moores University, “September 11th: The Bush Administration and Crisis Decision-Making”
Stephen Welch and Robert Williams, University of Durham, “Political Scandals in the United States: Toward a Theory”

3. The Civil War: Memories and Mourning
Chair: TBA
Edward Harcourt, Vanderbilt University, “Sam Watkin’s Co. Aytch: ‘A Side Show of the Big Show’: Writing Confederate Memory”
John David Smith, North Carolina State University, “Gallantry, Loyalty and Caste: The Negro in the American Rebellion”
Lucy Frank, University of Warwick, “‘Being Only Out of Sight’: Sarah Piatt, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Problem of Mourning in Postbellum America”

4. Genre and Meaning in Mid-Nineteenth Century Women’s Writing
Chair: TBA
Richard J. Ellis, Nottingham Trent University, “Highjacking Sentimental Slavery: Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig”
Lindsey Traub, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, “‘The Things One Didn’t Know’: Henry James’s Reading of Louisa Alcott and her Contemporaries”
Ann Heilmann, University of Wales, Swansea, “Medusa’s Blinding Art: Mesmerism and the Problem of Female Artistic Agency in Louisa May Alcott’s A Pair of Eyes (1863)”
Lisa Merrill, Northwestern University, “Embodying Allegories: Julia Ward Howe, Acting and Activism”

5. Atlantic Exchanges
Chair: TBA
Ian Margeson, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, “Reverend Jacob Duché and the Atlantic Vine”
Daniel Kilbride, John Carroll University, “American Travellers to Scotland, 1750-1850”
Matthew Pursell, Brown University, “The Narrative Articulation of English Liberty and American Servitude in the Colonial British Atlantic, 1660-1780”

3.00-3.30pm
Tea and Coffee

3.30-5.00pm
SESSION 4

1. Embodiments of Antebellum American Science
Chair: TBA
Sam Halliday, Queen Mary, University of London, “Bodies Without Matter, or, What Hawthorne Learned From Amputees”
James Massender, Brunel University, “Trauma, Dissection, and Display: Recovering the Labour of Antebellum Natural History”
Dana Medoro, University of Manitoba, Canada, “Menstruation, Gynaecology and Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter”

2. Pardoning Nixon Again?
Chair: Gareth Davies, St. Anne’s College, Oxford
Dean J. Kotlowski, Salisbury University, “A Revisionist View of Nixon’s Civil Rights”
Kevin Yuill, University of Sunderland, “Helping the Strong, not the Weak: Nixon’s Civil Rights Turn in 1970”
Alex Waddan, University of Sunderland, “Nixon and Clinton as Pre-Emptive Presidents”

3. Contemporary African American Autobiography
Chair: TBA
Maria Lauret, University of Sussex, “Race Men and Women: the Making of Public Intellectuals in the Memoirs of bell hooks and Henry Louis Gates, Jr”
Duco van Oostrum, University of Sheffield, “‘Not Written By Himself’: The Ghost of Contemporary African-American Autobiography”
Scott Bunyan, University of Sussex, “Silence in Auto/Biography: The Space Between Brothers and Keepers”

4. New Directions in New Netherland History
Chair: TBA
Jaap Jacobs, University of Amsterdam, “The Company and the Colonists: Relations Between Rulers and Ruled in New Amsterdam”
Simon Middleton, University of East Anglia, “Artisans and Trade Privileges in New Amsterdam”
Claudia Schurman, Georg-August University, Goettingen, “The Atlantic Network of Jakob Leisler, 1660-1691”

5. Murder, Mayhem and Underworld Traffic
Chair: TBA
Mara Keire, Rothermere American Institute, “Making a Killing: Murder, Prohibition and Organized Crime, 1917-1933”
Andrew Warnes, Lancaster University, “Sugar and Cocaine, Molasses and Crack: The Segregation of Stimulants in American Culture”
Vivien Miller, Middlesex University, “The Life of Ruby McCollum and the Death of Judy Buenoano: Paternalism, Feminism and Capital Murder in the Twentieth Century US South”

Move to University Museum

5.15-6.15pm
Cambridge University Press/Journal of American Studies Lecture by Professor Bruce Newman, De Paul University, Chicago
University Lecture Theatre, Parks Road
Followed by drinks reception

6.15pm
Drinks reception, University Museum

7.00pm
Dinner, St Anne’s dining hall

8.00-11.00pm
Social in marquee with DJ, sponsored by Corona Brewing Company

up to 12 midnight
Late bar in JCR bar

Sunday 7 April

9.00-10.30am
SESSION 5

1. Science Fiction Landscapes
Chair: TBA
William Schultz, University of Athens, “The Representation of American Time in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard: Pathology and Therapy”
Tatiani Rapatzikou, University of East Anglia, “Architectural Landscapes in William Gibson’s Narratives”
David Seed, Liverpool University, “Mapping the Postnuclear Ruins of America”

2. American Adolescents in the Late Twentieth Century
Chair: TBA
Pete Coviello, Bowdoin College, “Boys on Lonely Walks: Vernacular Utopias in American Adolescence”
Pam Thurschwell, University College, London, “‘Kickboxing, Sport of the Future’: Utopia and Dystopia in the American High School Movie”
Kasia Boddy, University College, London, “Regular Lolitas”

3. The Role of NGOs in American Foreign Policy During the Cold War
Chair: TBA
Hugh Wilford, University of Sheffield, “CIA Plot or Socialist Conspiracy?: The Origins of the Bilderberg Group, 1952-55”
Inderjeet Parmar, University of Manchester, “Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Cold War”
Paulo Ramos, University of Manchester, “The Role of the Yale Institute of International Studies during the early Cold War”

4. The Common Soldier’s Experience of War in Early America
Chair: Julie Flavell, University of Dundee
Stephen Brumwell, “‘The Bloodiest Scene in America’: Reassessing the St Francis Raid of 1759”
Daniel Krebs, Emory University, “Captive German Soldiers in the American Revolution”
Michael A. Bellesiles, Newberry Library, Chicago, “The Experience of Common Soldiers in the War of 1812”

5. Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Writing American Memory
Chair: TBA
Jenny Terry, University of Warwick, “‘When the Wars are Over’: The Post-war Fiction of Toni Morrison”
Anna Dreda, Community Educator, “The Poetics of Protest: June Jordan, Lyrical Catalyst for Change”
Sarah H.S. Graham, University of Leeds, “‘What’s Eating Dave Eggers?’: The Disruptive Dialogue Between Fiction and Memoir”

10.30-11.00am
Tea and Coffee

11.00-12.30pm
SESSION 6

1. American Foreign Policy in Africa and Asia
Chair: TBA
Matthew Jones, Royal Holloway, University of London, “The Racial Dimension of US Foreign Policy in the Far East: SEATO and the Bandung Conference, 1954-55”
Ian A. Horwood, College of York St. John, “Competing Visions of Airmobility: The Howze and Disosway Reports of 1962”
Mirza Asmer Beg, A.M.U. Aligarh, “The United States, Nuclear Weapons and South Asia”
Christopher Saunders, University of Cape Town, “The US and Namibian Independence, 1975-1990”

2. Gender and Conservatism in American Politics
Chair: TBA
Marjorie Spruill, University of Southern Mississippi, “Women for God, Country and Family: Religion, Politics and Antifeminism in 1970s America”
Mokhtar Ben Barka, University of Valenciennes, “Christian Fundamentalism and Gender in America”
Mary Ellen Curtin, University of Essex, “The Politics of Race, Class, and Sex in Barbara Jordan’s Path to Congress, 1962-72”

3. Reading Medical Disorders
Chair: TBA
Lois Rudnick, University of Massachusetts, Boston, “The Syphilis Papers: Gender, Psychoanalysis and Sexually Transmitted Disease in Late Victorian America”
Stephen C. Kenny, Liverpool John Moores University, “The Making of a Medical Reputation: James Marion Sims’ The Story of My Life”
Susan Currell, University of Nottingham, “‘A Short Introduction to the History of Human Stupidity’: Walter B. Pitkin and the Eugenic Response to the Great Depression”
Louis J. Kern, Hofstra University, “‘Reverence for Supreme Wholesomeness’: S. Weir Mitchell, Physical Culture, Social Hygiene, and the Crusade Against ‘Hysterics for Diversion’”

4. Criminal Justice and the African American Community in the Eighteenth Century
Chair: Simon Newman, University of Glasgow
Jack D. Marietta, University of Arizona, “African-American Crime in Pennsylvania, 1780-1800: Abolition, Immigration, and Race Prejudice”
Catherine A. Cardno, Johns Hopkins University, “Theft and Death: The Experience of African Americans and the Courts of Charles County, Maryland, 1696-1770”
William G. Merkel, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, “To See Oneself as a Target of a Justified Revolution: Thomas Jefferson and Gabriel Prosser’s Uprising”

5. The Political Causes of Inequality
Chair: Alexander Pacek, Texas A&M University
Benjamin Radcliff, Vanderbilt University, and Karrie Kosel, Cornell University, “Partisan Politics, Public Policy, and Social Structure: Assessing the Causes of Inequality in the American States”
Rodney Hero, University of Notre Dame, “‘Colorblind’ Perspectives and Inequality in American Politics: Theoretical Traditions and Racial/Ethnic Policy Outcomes”
Suzanne Coshow, University of Notre Dame, “The Consequences of Inequality: Explaining Patterns of Public Policy in the American States”

12.30-1.30pm
Lunch, St Anne’s dining hall

12.40-1.25pm
Lunchtime meetings of affiliated groups
Rothermere American Institute

Meetings:
Room 1 Exchange Programmes Talk Shop
Chair: Peter Boyle, University of Nottingham

1.30-3.00pm
SESSION 7

1. Race and Gender in the Harlem Renaissance
Chair: TBA
Kate Dossett, Cambridge University, “‘Our Women and What They Think’: Amy Jacques Garvey and Feminist Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance”
Mark Whalan, University of Exeter, “Soldiers of Democracy: the Great War and African American Culture in the 1920s”
Jack B. Moore, University of South Florida, “Black Prizefighters and the Harlem Renaissance”
Rachel Farebrother, Leeds University, “Thinking in Hieroglyphics: The Complexity of Zora Neal Hurston’s Cross-cultural Aesthetic”

2. Transatlantic Romanticism
Chair: TBA
Susan Manning, University of Edinburgh, “Wordsworth and Margaret Fuller”
David Greenham, University of Nottingham, “Emerson and the Germans: A Review and a Critique”
Keith Hughes, University of Edinburgh, “Frederick Douglas and Thomas Carlyle: The Romantic Rhetoric of Heroism”
Matthew Scott, Somerville College, Oxford, “Writing Under the Influence: Wordsworth in America, 1802-2002”

3. New Directions in Governance
Chair: TBA
Ben O’Loughlin, New College, Oxford, “Measuring Influence: The role of think-tanks in political change in the US and UK”
Paul Tracey, Gordon Clark and Helen L. Smith, Rothermere American Institute, “An Age-Centred Perspective on the New Economy: Implications for Europe”
Christopher McKenna, Said Business School, Oxford, “Building the Contractor State: Consultants and the Outsourcing of the Federal Government”

4. Hollywood: Politics on Film
Chair: TBA
Wendy Toon, Keele University, “From Hitler to Herbie: The Relationship between Nazis and Hollywood’s Loveable Bug of the 1960s”
Brian Baker, Chester College of Higher Education, “Harry’s Dick: Siegel and Eastwood’s Dirty Harry and Nixon’s America”
Sabine Haenni, University of Chicago, “Hollywood’s Image of the Nation During World War I”
Andrew Pepper, Queen’s University, Belfast, “Hollywood, Globalization and the American Revolution”

5. Reading Elections
Chair: TBA
Simon Topping, University of Hull, “‘Never Argue With the Gallup Poll’: Thomas Dewey, Civil Rights and the Election of 1948”
Dr. Jonathan Bell, University of Reading, “Representations of Southern Liberalism: Ideology and the Pepper-Smathers 1950 Florida Primary”
Donna Jackson, Keele University, “Votes and Vietnam: LBJ, the Tonkin Gulf and the 1964 Presidential Election”

3.00-4.00pm
SESSION 8

POSTER SESSION – Hartland Room
Tea and Coffee

POSTER SESSION PARTICIPANTS
Posters will be available for view throughout the whole conference. There may be room for more presentations in this format. Please contact Andrea Beighton if you are interested: andrea.beighton@rai.ox.ac.uk

3.00-4.00pm

1. The City in Film
Chair: TBA
Deborah Lovatt, Nottingham Trent University, “The Aesthetics of Astonishment in Alex Proyas’ Dark City”
Douglas Muzzio and Thomas Halper, Baruch College, CUNY, “The Reel City: Images of American Cities in Movies, 1896-2001”

2. Rereading Southern Histories
Chair: TBA
Don H. Doyle, Vanderbilt University, “Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha”
Fred A. Bailey, Abilene Christian University, “Thomas Dixon and the South’s Heritage of Hate”

3. Women and Utopian Communities
Chair: Robert Fogarty, Antioch College, Ohio
Christopher Clark, University of Warwick, “Women’s Lives in Utopia: A Mother and her Daughters at the Northampton Community (1843-45)”
Rebecca Starr, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education, “Recruitment Tactics of the Oneida Community and Women’s Evidence from the Letters of Sophia Bledsoe Herrick”

4.00-5.30pm
BAAS AGM, St Anne’s Lecture Theatre
(Please be punctual, elections are first order of business)

6.00-8.00pm
Banquet, St Anne’s dining hall

8.15-12 midnight
Evening at Freuds night spot
(Please assemble in dining hall after dinner to walk to Freuds)

Monday 8 April

9.00-10.30am
SESSION 9

1. Politics and the American Media
Chair: Paul Martin, Wadham College, Oxford
Marc Stears, University of Cambridge, “The New Republic and the Creation of an American Ideology of Labour”
Nathan Abrams, University College, London, “‘A Journal of Significant Thought and Opinion’: Commentary Magazine 1945-1995”
Robert Mason, University of Edinburgh, “Political Journalism on Television, and its Critics: Some Evidence From 2000”

2. Civil Rights in Mississippi
Chair: TBA
Françoise Hamlin, Yale University, “‘The Book Hasn’t Closed, The Story Isn’t Over’: Continuing Histories of the Civil Rights Movement in Coahoma Co., Mississippi”
Mark Newman, University of Derby, “The Delta Ministry in Hattiesberg, Mississippi, 1964-66”
Joseph Street, University of Sheffield, “‘Art is to Politics as Content is to Form’: A Case Study of Two Cultural Organizations in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement”

3. American Women’s Writing
Chair: TBA
Paraic Finnerty, University of Kent, “‘Had Not Shakespeare Wrote’: Emily Dickinson and a Nineteenth Century American Fantasy”
Heidi Slettedahl MacPherson, University of Central Lancashire, “Telling the Tales: Women and the Law in Twentieth Century American Literature”
Viviane Serfaty, University Robert Schuman, Strasbourg, “The American Quest for Self: Some Aspects of Women’s Self-Representational Writing on the Internet”

4. Designing City Space, Imagining Urban Place
Chair: TBA
Bénédicte Sisto, Blaise Pascal University, “Coral Gables, Florida: ‘America’s Finest Suburb’ in the Roaring Twenties”
Steve Hartlaub, Frostburg State University, and Rich Jelier, Grand Valley State University, “Building Community: Political Philosophy and the New Urbanism”
Bart Eeckhout, Ghent University, “Changing the Social Profile of Times Square: Class Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Crossroads of the World”

5. Meanings In Music
Chair: TBA
Geoff Ward, Dundee University, “‘Thunder Over Clarksdale’: Harry Smith and the Poetry of the Blues”
David Ingram, Brunel University, “Ecocriticism and Music: Wilderness Ethics in Trout Mask Replica”
Peter Hammond, University of Nottingham, “Cultural Integration in a Segregated Society: Class, Race and Folk Music in the 1930s South”

10.30-11.00am
Tea and Coffee

11.00-12.00pm
SESSION 10

1. Guest Lecture – Peter Thompson, University of Oxford

2. Presidency Round Table: “Bush’s First Year”
George C. Edwards, Presidential Studies Quarterly and Texas A&M University
John Owens, University of Westminster
Jon Herbert, Keele University

3. Photographing American Identity
Chair: TBA
John Osborne, “‘We’re All Born Naked – And the Rest is Drag’: The Photography of Diane Arbus 30 Years After Her Death”
Mick Gidley, University of Leeds, “Photographing Others, Photographing Ourselves: Episodes in American Portraiture”

12.00-1.30pm
SESSION 11

1. Americanisation and the Transatlantic
Chair: Alan Rice, AMATAS Project Manager, University of Central Lancashire
Carol R. Smith, King Alfred’s College, Winchester, “Exhibiting the Nation: Images of African Americans in the Smithsonian”
Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham, “Americanization and the Cultural Cold War”
Paul Grainge, University of Nottingham, “Global Media and the Ambiguities of Resonant Americanization”

2. Space and Spectacle: Theodore Dreiser and American Culture
Chair: TBA
Bill Brown, University of Chicago, “Dreiser’s Vestibular Culture”
Chris Gair, University of Birmingham, “Dreiser and the Significance of Race”
Jude Davies, “Gender and Power in the Visualizing of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy”

3. Fiction and the Politics of Representation
Chair: TBA
Rachel Van Duyvenbode, University of Sheffield, “Ghostly Goddesses: Nella Larson’s Passing and Apparitions of the White Woman”
Stephanie Munro, Lancaster University, “Past Present: Lydia Maria Child, Toni Morrison and Slavery Revisited”
Howard Cunnell, IUSS, University of London, “Condemned Men: Race, Masculinity and Identity in Contemporary American Prison Writing”

4. The Politics of School Desegregation
Chair
Paul E. Mertz, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, “Arlington and Norfolk, Virginia: Southern School Desegregation, 1958-59”
Tracey Wismayer, University of Sheffield, “The Kennedy Justice Department and the Desegregation of Education”
Gareth Davies, St. Anne’s College, Oxford, “Nixon and the Politics of School Desegregation”

5. The Past, the Media and the Marketplace
Chair: Julie Flavell, University of Dundee
Greg Neale, Editor, BBC History Magazine, will speak on Popular History Magazines
Tony Morris, Commissioning Director and Co-Founder of Hambledon & London, will speak on Trade Book Publishing.
Steve Hewlett, Director of Programmes, Carlton TV, will speak on “History on the Box”

1.30-2.30pm
Lunch, St Anne’s dining hall

2.30pm
DEPART

Area Studies Workshop: Developing Strategies for the Marketing of Area Studies

A workshop on Developing Strategies for the Marketing of Area Studies has been organised by the LTSN Subject Centre in Language, Linguistics and Area Studies. The purpose of the workshop is to work together across areas, to share ideas on methods for making Area Studies a more attractive option for students, and to develop a template for a ‘Marketing Pack’ to be disseminated to colleagues in Higher Education for use with schools and colleges. It has been brought to our attention by our Advisory Group for Area Studies that this is an issue of concern to many colleagues in Area Studies and there is a real need to address issues of recruitment and the overall profile of the field.

It is intended that the Marketing Pack developed should contain some generic information on why Area Studies contribute significantly to the development of academic and key (transferable) skills through their emphasis on interdisciplinarity, language learning, study abroad and other distinguishing features of Area Studies provision. It will also emphasise the ways in which these unique features of Area Studies courses contribute to graduate employability. The pack will contain advice for colleagues on how to make their courses visible and attractive to young people through open days, visits to schools and colleges and departmental web pages. We would also be looking to our representatives from Subject Associations to advise on the development of a template Powerpoint presentation that can be adapted for use by individual areas. The Subject Centre will take responsibility for compiling the pack and disseminating it to institutions, but your help will be invaluable at this meeting to set the process in motion and to advise on the needs for your area. We are pleased to announce that we will have representatives present from our Advisory Group for Area Studies, as well as case studies of successful practice from a variety of areas. We are also fortunate to have a keynote address on current issues in Area Studies from Professor Hodder-Williams (Bristol).

If you would like to propose a case study or have any further questions please send a message to Alison Dickens, Academic Co-ordinator for Area Studies, a.m.dickens@soton.ac.uk

We very much look forward to your participation in the workshop.
Alison Dickens
Academic Co-ordinator Linguistics and Area Studies
Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies
School of Modern Languages
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ
Tel. +44 (0)23 8059 7785
Subject Centre Office Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 4814
Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 4815
Website: http://www.lang.ltsn.ac.uk
General enquiries: llas@soton.ac.uk

AMATAS Bulletin.

Free Workshops
Our workshops went live in October and we already have 15 bookings from Durham to London and Salford to Worcester. Topics range from Jim Crow in Europe to the Americanisation of popular music, from the cultural Cold War to Hollywood and Nazi Germany. You can find a complete list of the available workshops on the website with descriptors attached to all – feedback on workshops already delivered and resources to put them into context. Remember you can book these workshops either to fit into your regular syllabi or as stand-alone sessions. You could give your students an insight into topics that might not even appear on your syllabi or to familiar topics differently nuanced by our project team. If you would prefer to see the workshops in booklet form we can post our Descriptor Booklet to you; just email or write to us at the address below. Remember the workshops are only fully funded until the end of this year – BOOK EARLY TO AVOID DISSAPPOINTMENT. It is also possible to book workshops by e-mailing our Project Administrator – fsbayntun-roberts@uclan.ac.uk – or just drop her a line to the address below.

Website
Thanks to our new webmaster, Bernard Quinn, material on the website has mushroomed since the last bulletin. We now have a photo-essay from Bogdan Barbu on the Americanisation of Rumania and images of Transatlantic Seaside Resorts from Professor John Walton’s impressive collection giving an enhanced visual feel to the pages. Also, there are student responses and academic essays on the Resources page that increasingly showcases interesting work in the field of Americanisation and the Transatlantic. If any of you have work you would like to contribute to this section do send it to us here at the project as it would not only showcase your contributions in the field, but also provide materials for the increasing numbers of students working on Americanisation. Remember to use the message board to engage in the lively debates that have started on the site. From the end of the month you will be able to book workshops directly on the website. Any material you would like to donate to the website send in the first instance to the project manager arice@uclan.ac.uk

Publications
Project Director Professor George McKay’s essay on Anti-Americanism was published in the THES on December 14 (RAE week). It alerted the wider community to the project and can be read on our website if you missed seeing the print version.

Awayday
The project team had a most successful awayday to discuss the future direction of the project on January 17-18. Almost all of the workshop deliverers were there as well as Steve Mills from Keele University as an external facilitator. The team were really energised by this event and we hope the focusing of the project that this event helped engender will carry us all through to the end of the year.

BAAS Conference, 2002
The project will be represented by a panel that will showcase the research underpinning the workshops. Professor John Walton will present on Coney Island and Blackpool, Paul Grainge on Brand Identities, Carol Smith on the Black Atlantic and Professor Scott Lucas on the Cultural Cold War. The session is on Monday 8th April and we hope to see many friends of the project there to engage in lively debate.

New administrator
Our new Project Administrator Fiona Bayntun-Roberts joined us on January 15, and is eagerly awaiting any questions, queries or bookings connected with the Project. Fiona is from a background in Corporate Administration so please bear with her – at least for the first couple of weeks! She looks forward to hearing from you soon. Fsbayntun-roberts@uclan.ac.uk

Dr. Alan J. Rice
Principal 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
arice@uclan.ac.uk
01772 893125
fax 01772 892924
AMATAS website http://www.amatas.org

American Politics Group’s 28th Annual Conference – A Report

The American Politics Group’s 28th Annual Conference was hosted by the Department of Government at the University of Essex in early January 2002. This year, the John D. Lees Memorial Lecture was given by Bronwen Maddox, Foreign Editor of The Times, London. She gave an incisive and extremely well-informed assessment of the war on terrorism, concentrating on US war objectives and on the lasting implications for global power structures. The lecture was given at short notice and was very well received and appreciated by the audience. The American Politics Group would like to thank Bronwen for agreeing to do the keynote lecture, especially considering the short notice she was given. Her insights and passion for the US were admired by all there.

As always, delegates representing many different institutions and countries attended the conference. As well as the US and the UK, Germany, Denmark, The Netherlands and Portugal were all represented. The conference, as always, provided the forum for papers on various aspects of contemporary US politics and recent US political history. Subjects covered ranged from green politics to federal election monitoring, from foreign policy interest groups to general issues of American identity, from Congressional leadership to the politics of Presidential organisation. The conference featured some excellent presentations from postgraduate students and from visiting American academics. Conference organiser Andy Wroe of the University of Essex would like to thank all those who attended and gave papers, making the conference a great success. Next year’s conference (January 2003) is to be organised by Ross English at the University of Reading. We wish him well.

Alan Grant (Oxford Brookes University), whose term of office had come to a close in 2002, was replaced as APG chair by John Dumbrell (Keele University). Esther Jubb (Liverpool John Moores University) was elected as Vice-Chair. The American Politics Group is a subsection of the Political Studies Association. All BAAS members with an interest in US politics (including political history) are invited to join.

Apart from the annual conference, the Group holds a Colloquium at the US Embassy every November, organised jointly with BAAS.

Membership enquiries to:
Dr Dean McSweeney
School of Politics
University of the West of England
Bristol, BS16 1QY
E-mail: dean.mcsweeney@uwe.ac.uk

The APG/BAAS Annual Colloquium 2001: The Presidency of George W. Bush: The First Year – A Report

The Annual Colloquium was held at the US Embassy in London on Friday 16 November 2001 and as usual was organised in conjunction with the British Association for American Studies. The theme this year was the first year of the new Bush presidency. Dr. Tim Hames, political writer with The Times began the day with a lecture entitled ‘George W. Bush and the Nature of the American Presidency’ in which he related models of presidential government put forward by Richard Neustadt and Charles O. Jones to the operation of the office since Bush came into power. Dr. John E. Owens of the University of Westminster spoke on ‘The Bush Presidency and Congress’ and analysed the development of the relationship through three phases: from inauguration to the end of May when Senator Jeffords’ defection from the Republican Party gave control of the upper house to the Democrats, from June to September 11th, and the period since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC.

Following lunch there was a session chaired by Dr Dean McSweeney of the University of the West of England using the digital video conferencing facilities of the Embassy which linked the colloquium with a studio in Washington where we were joined by Professor Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Professor Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution. The two guests answered and commented on a wide range of interesting questions from a panel comprising Professor Dilys Hill, Dr. Edward Ashbee, Dr. Esther Jubb and Professor John Dumbrell. After a short delay while contact was made with Washington the technology thankfully worked without a hitch, apart from when the camera zoomed in to focus on a flower vase rather than Norm Ornstein!

The final session was presented by Professor John Dumbrell of Keele University who spoke on ‘The Foreign Policy of the Bush Administration’. He examined the contrasts and continuities in US foreign policy under the Clinton and Bush presidencies.

There seemed to be a consensus that it had been a very successful and stimulating day which had answered many questions and raised many more about how the Bush presidency would develop over the next three years. Thanks are again due to Sue Wedlake of the Cultural Affairs Office of the Embassy for her invaluable assistance in organising the event.

Alan Grant, APG Chair

Book Review

Peter H. Hassrick, The American West, Out of Myth, into Reality, University of Washington Press, 2000. 176pp, £25.95.

During the history of western incursions into North America there has never been a single ‘west’. Defined in personal and geographic terms as ‘over there from where we are’, it has moved from the Tidewater to the Appalachians, from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, to the Great Plains and to the Rocky Mountains, and thence forward to the Pacific Ocean. In both time and place it has been a concept as much as a physical reality; and as such has caught the imagination of Americans and visitors alike in the context of Jefferson’s empire of liberty. But the immensity of the High Plains and the grandeur of the Rocky Mountain system have led us nowadays to think of the west in those terms. To the sentinels of Chimney Rock and Scott’s Bluff that marked the Oregon Trail, and to the alluring mesas of the southwest, worthy settlers, homesteaders, ranchers, miners, opportunities and fugitives zeroed into the mountain passes and canyons in search of their personal el doradoes. Some found it, but for many it was always somewhere else.

In their coming they violated the natural environment, made their mark upon the landscape, and what we see today is partly created by what they and their successors did. Yosemite is camp-ground and parking-lot as well as natural wonder. We can never recover the initial excitement of the discoverers but we can still enjoy its magnificence. And this is true throughout the West. We are enabled now by good roads and trails to experience in a quite meaningfui way the Bad Lands of South Dakota and the many other sites. ‘Progress’ is how we care to see it. For some nineteenth century artists in the exuberance of the Victorian age, whose values were as prevalent in the United States as in Britain, it undoubtedly existed. This is the message of John Gast’s painting ‘American Progress’ (1873) in which boats, wagons, stage coaches, telegraph wires and trains head westward guided by an angelic maiden clasping to her bosom a School Book, for education and learning are the keys to enlightenment! These westerners were heroic, but the times were also tragic as the native Americans were thrust aside and the buffalo slaughtered almost to extinction.

The American West, Out of Myth, into Reality is a volume with colour illustrations of the highest quality interspersed with informative essays that together visually and textually interpret this American westward movement that was of almost cosmic significance. It is the catalogue of an exhibition of western art that was conceived by Ann Townsend of the Trust for Museum Exhibitions simultaneously with a separate initiative by Andrew Maass of the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson. Together with Peter Hassrick of the University of Oklahoma, who then curated the exhibition, they persuaded almost seventy institutions and individuals to lend pictures and sculptures for a travelling show that began its journey in Jackson in February 2000. Hassrick has provided an illuminating essay on ‘The Elements of Western Art’, and other thematic and interpretative texts are contributed by Donna Davies, Bradley Finson and Stephanie Foster Rahill. Old favourites are illustrated: Bierstadt’s ‘Wind River Country’ (1860), ‘The Oregon Trail’ (1869), and ‘Twilight, Lake Takoe’ (1873); and two of Moran’s pictures of the Falls of the Yellowstone are here, all representing a rather romantic tradition. These are balanced by Catlin’s precisely drafted pictures of Indian life and less well known representations by Samuel Seymour, John Mix Stanley and others. One of the most powerful images is Maynard Dixon’s ‘The Earth Knower’ (1933-35) whose shrouded chiselled features are presented against a background of horizontal strata and coned rock formations suggesting an intimacy of man and landscape. But for this reviewer perhaps the most haunting and lasting memory of this book is Cyrus Dallin’s bronze Appeal to the Great Spirit (1916-20), representing an Indian warrior sitting in a crucifix posture on his horse, with arms outstretched, and symbolising the tragic fate of his people.

David Adams, Keele University

‘Another Country’ Postgraduate Conference: Report

Birmingham University 24 November 2001

Co-sponsored by the British Association for American Studies and the European Journal of American Culture
by Sara Wood and Andrew Green, Birmingham University

It gave us great pleasure this year to hold the annual postgraduate conference sponsored by BAAS and EJAC at Birmingham University, in the Department of American and Canadian Studies.
‘Another Country’, the title of the conference, was chosen to reflect specific trends in recent academic studies: namely, the resituating of American studies into a more ‘transatlantic’ or ‘global’ context. The papers therefore reflected a broad arrangement of ideas and ideological discussions within different aspects of national culture.

Besides welcoming many visitors as an audience to the conference; and a number of department teachers/lecturers who chaired events; the ‘Another Country’ conference featured 22 original papers in all. Overall, approximately forty people attendended at Birmingham University on the day. The event was a lively, constructive and enjoyable; and thanks are due to all who took part.

During the day, we were pleased to hold a lunchtime session held by Liam Kennedy and Dick Ellis which aimed at giving suggestions to postgraduate students about how to approach getting academic work published.
Finally, in the late afternoon sessions, we organised a session which also sought to assess early responses to the aftermath of events in America on September 11th, 2001.

The running order for the day’s paper was as follows:

Morning sessions:

Cinematic Societies: From the Cigar Stall to the Coffee House?

The Coffee Republic: Chain stores, the coffee house and the contemporary American city.
Joseph Kennedy, University of Sheffield

Telling the Dodger’s Story: The community of baseball in Paul Auster’s films.
Mark Brown, University College Northampton

Plotting a way out of the Language Lab: “The Water Method Man” as postmodern critique.
Lucas Johnson, University of Birmingham

House of Games: David Mamet’s women and confidence men.
Olga Nunez Miret, University of Sussex

Whiteness, Apparitions and Transatlantic Nations

‘Alas for the Poor Savages’: The south Pacific Islands and Islanders in Typee and Omoo.
Theresa Saxton, Manchester Metropolitan University

‘In the eye of the sun’: Isabel’s story in Melville’s Pierre and national fictions.
Andrew Green, University of Birmingham.

Ghostly Goddesses: Nella Larsen’s Passing and Apparitions of the White Woman.
Rachael Van Duyvenbode, University of Sheffield.

The White Atlantics: Whiteness, transatlantic space and postnational identities in London films.
Anne Marie Kane, King Alfred’s College

Early afternoon sessions

‘Another Language’: Hieroglyphics, Jazz, Poetry, Basketball and Cross-Narratives of ‘Race’

Thinking in Hieroglyphics: the complexity of Zora Neale Hurston’s cross-cultural aesthetic.
Richard Farebrother, University of Leeds.

Jazz and African-American literature.
Sara Wood, University of Birmingham

The Surgeon’s Song: History and Healing in Michael S. Harper’s Debridement.
Matthew Merlino, University of Pennsylvania

In Your Face: African-American Urban Culture and the Aesthetics of Basketball in Contemporary American Fiction.
Colin Howley, University of Sheffield

Behind the Scenes: Invisible Architects of Culture

Film Title Sequences by Saul Bass.
John Rogerson, University of Birmingham.

The displaced American: Edwar McKnight Kauffer.
Graham Twemlow.

“Can You Forgive Her?” The American Studies Feminist, the Art Patron, and the Lure of Gossip in research.
Lisa Rull, University of Nottingham.

Late Afternoon Groups

Terrorism and Popular Culture

I Want to Believe: A discussion of Popular American Conspiracy Culture
and the Paranoid style.
Mark Latham, University of Sheffield

Fashion, Terrorism and Hyperreality in the novel Glamorama.
Joanne Carr, University of Sheffield

The Fiction of Don Delillo and the Cultural Hegemony of Television in the aftermath of 11.09.01.
Catherine Morley, Oxford Brookes University.

Early Twentieth Century Literature

“A meeting South”: Sherwood Anderson and the Cultural economy of New Orleans.
Mark Whalen.

The American Congress in Maxwell Anderson’s Plays of the Great Depression. Reza Sami Gorgan Roodi
The Literary Career of Louis Bromfield: What is forgotten and “What is remembered”.

The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Poet: FitzGreene Halleck.
Eddie Marcus, King’s College.

BAAS Membership of Committees

(including co-opted members and invited observers)

Executive Committee Elected:
Professor Philip Davies (Chair, first elected 1998, term ends 2004)
Dr Nick Selby (Treasurer, first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Dr Jenel Virden (Secretary, first elected 1998, term ends 2002)
Professor Janet Beer (first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Professor Susan Castillo (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
Professor Dick Ellis (first elected 1999, term ends 2002)
Dr Paul Giles (first elected 1999, term ends 2002)
Dr Michael McDonnell (first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Dr Heidi Macpherson (first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Dr Simon Newman (first elected 1999, term ends 2002)
Dr Carol Smith (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
Dr Graham Thompson (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)

p/grad:
Ms Celeste-Marie Bernier (first elected 2000, term ends 2002)*

ex officio:
Professor Richard Gray (Editor, Journal, term ends 2001)
Dr Iain Wallace (Chair, Library & Resouces Subcommittee)

co-opted:
Ms Kathryn Cooper

Development sub committee
Dr Paul Giles (Chair)
Professor Phil Davies
Dr Heidi Macpherson
Dr Simon Newman
Ms Celeste-Marie Bernier (post-grad)
Dr Iain Wallace (ex-officio)

Publications sub committee
Professor Janet Beer (Chair)
Dr Jenel Virden
Professor Susan Castillo
Professor Dick Ellis (Editor, American Studies in Britain)
Dr Graham Thompson (webster)
Professor Richard Gray (Editor of Journal of American Studies)
Professor George McKay (Associate Editor of Paperbacks)
Professor Richard Simmons (Editor of BRRAM)
Ms Kathryn Cooper (co-opted)

Conference sub committee
Dr Michael McDonnell (Chair)
Dr Nick Selby
Dr Carol Smith
Miss Andrea Beighton (Oxford, Conference Secretary 2002)
Professor Alan Ryan (Oxford, Conference Secretary 2002)
Dr Tim Woods (Aberystwyth, Conference Secretary 2003)

Libraries and Resources Subcommittee
Dr Kevin Halliwell

BAAS representative to EAAS
Prof Mick Gidley (term ends 2002)*

[* indicates this person not eligible for re-election to this position. All co-optations must be reviewed annually.]

Editorial: Area Studies Benchmarking: It’s Still Here!

Dick Ellis

This project is now in the final stages of completion, following the end of the consultative process. It will be important to become familiar with the benchmark, when it is published. I will notify you all on the mailbase when this occurs. The benchmark will appear on the QAA website at: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/crntwork/benchmark/benchmarking.htm

All of us have probably heard by now that following a considerable shake-up at QAA (including the departure of John Randall) and a major rethink of its approach, subject reviews will not take the form they have in the past, and institutional reviews will receive more emphasis. However, despite a few (misguided) rumours to the contrary, benchmarking statements will remain very important, not least because each institution will be required to have in place robust Quality Assurance procedures. The QAA is making it clear that, so far as they are concerned, these statements will retain relevance in any new QA regime. Benchmarking statements are, as we know, not meant to provide checklists (this has been the most frequently asserted theme). But, the argument runs, they will nevertheless stand as ‘authoritative reference points’ — though now no longer used ‘in fear’ in the run-up to a QAA visit, but more constructively. For example they can be used as guidance when re-validating existing programmes or devising new ones.

This expectation is made clear in a letter from Mike Laugharne (Benchmarking Project Manager, QAA) to the LTSN Subject Centre in Language, Linguistics and Area Studies. In this Mike Laugharne says: ‘contrary to views being expressed in some quarters, benchmark information about academic standards remains, and will continue to remain, central to the revised arrangements for review that are being developed currently’.

So, in sum, the Area Studies benchmarking statement remains and will remain a siginificant new aspect of our approach to delivering American Studies. We need to remain, or become, fully familiar with it.

BAAS Annual Conference

Rothermere American Institute,
University of Oxford, 5 – 8 April 2002

Andrea Beighton, RAI

The Annual BAAS Conference will take place this year at the University of Oxford, based at St Anne’s college and hosted by the Rothermere American Institute. We have received a fantastic response to the call for papers, resulting in a programme that will encompass a multitude of disciplines. Attempts are being made to diversify slightly from the standard conference ‘panel’ formula, with opportunities throughout the Conference to view Poster Sessions showcased by individual scholars, as well as hear keynote speakers, guest lecturers and view exhibitions by Publishers.

Aside from the academic content of the conference, there will of course be opportunities to explore the cultural attractions of Oxford, as well as enjoy the all-inclusive evening entertainment, including a night out at a local nightspot, Freuds, an evening sponsored by the Corona Brewing Company, drinks receptions and a DJ night with dancing at St Anne’s.

The Conference application form can be found on the RAI and BAAS websites with full information about registration fees and the provisional programme at: www.rai.ox.ac.uk and http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site

There is a limit to space available, so please register early to avoid disappointment. The closing date for registration is 1st March 2002, after which time you may incur a late registration fee.

Please note that due to the generosity of the American Embassy in the UK, BAAS postgraduate students and school teachers who are British or UK-based will be eligible for a special stipend to help cover costs in attending the conference.

Any questions can be directed to:

Andrea Beighton
BAAS Conference Secretary
Rothermere American Institute
1A South Parks Road
Oxford, OX1 3TG
Tel: 01865 282710
Fax: 01865 282720
andrea.beighton@rai.ox.ac.uk

Donations Needed: BAAS Short-term Travel Awards

Did you know that BAAS awards up to six short-term travel awards for deserving young scholars to undertake research in the United States? This programme contributes considerably to fostering talent among the American Studies community in the UK. However, it does depend for its funds entirely on public contributions, and it can only have a long-term impact if BAAS members and other interested persons continue to be generous with donations. The Treasurer of BAAS therefore welcomes contributions small and large, and invites anyone wishing to support BAAS in maintaining its work in this area to complete and return the donation form at the back of this newsletter.

At the Annual Conference at Keele University, BAAS also launched a new, named, short-term travel award in memory of Malcolm Bradbury. This particular award will be given to the best proposal in the field of American literary studies. We are currently soliciting particular donations to ensure sufficient funds to make this an annual award and to ensure a proper and fitting memorial to Malcolm Bradbury.
In addition to the regular awards, the following specific prizes are now given each year:

THE MARCUS CUNLIFFE AWARD is given to the best proposal in the field of American Studies.

THE JOHN D LEES AWARD is given to the best proposal in the field of American Political Studies.

THE MALCOLM BRADBURY AWARD is given to the best proposal in the field of American Literary Studies.

Funds for these awards come entirely from private contributions, and donations of any amount are always welcome. Please consider adding a donation to your annual BAAS subscription, or send a donation separately to the Treasurer using the form. We would very much appreciate donations of all sizes, from £5 to £5000!
BAAS is a registered charity (No. 1002816). For further details, contact:

Nick Selby (Treasurer)
Department of English Literature
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, G12 8QQ
0141 330 5296
n.selby@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

What LTSN can do for American Studies

Mike Kelly, Director, Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies

Americanists will probably be aware that the Learning and Teaching Support Network was set up two years ago by the UK funding councils, to provide information and services for the entire academic community. Its purpose is to help improve the quality of the education we all offer, addressing the needs of teachers in relation to their particular academic disciplines. Twenty-four subject centres now exist, each providing a range of support services for a set of disciplines, sub-disciplines and interdisciplinary groupings. As its title suggests, the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies has the lead responsibility for Area Studies, which covers the teaching of interdisciplinary programmes focusing on a particular country or area, including American Studies. Within the Subject Centre team, Ali Dickens is the academic co-ordinator for Area Studies activities, and to advise us on the kind of activities that Area Studies teachers would find useful, we have established a Specialist Advisory Group, chaired by Dick Ellis.

So how may we help you? May I offer three suggestions?

1. Check out our website www.lang.ltsn.ac.uk, especially the material in the Area Studies pages. We carry a great deal of information on teaching and learning issues which will be of interest to teachers of American Studies, and we are adding to it constantly.

2. Come to one of our events. We organise a programme of workshops and other events, some of which will be of direct interest to you. They are advertised on our website and elsewhere (for example, through the BAAS e-mailbase). In the past, our roadshows have offered a platform for one of the most interesting initiatives in teaching American studies — the FDTL Americanization project.

3. Join our mailing list. We send out regular e-mailings, updating colleagues on forthcoming activities. We also send out information packs, newsletters and other information though the post to our contacts. You can join the mailing list via the website, by e-mail or by writing to us.

We are acutely aware that Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies do not exhaust the disciplinary richness of American Studies. Fortunately, several of our partner subject centres also provide information and services that Americanists may find useful. You may sometimes find your own interests better served by our colleagues in the LTSN subject centres for English, or History and Archaeology, or Economics, or Sociology, Anthropology and Politics, or, again, Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences. We are co-operating closely with these centres to provide a higher level of support for disciplines related to Area Studies, and will shortly be announcing the beginning of a programme of joint activities. In addition to trying to ensure that Americanists and other Area Studies colleagues do not fall into the gaps between our disciplinary areas, we shall hope to make a more concerted response to the issues common to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies.

Paradoxical though it may seem, the main strength of the subject centres is not in the expertise we have collected together, but in our ability to put subject specialists in touch with each other. Americanists may well be the best people to help other Americanists. We know that you already have an active association, and other networks and events that support this purpose. The subject centres add another dimension to this supportive network, with a specific focus on tackling your teaching and learning concerns. It is a two-way process and we hope you will add to its effectiveness by contributing your ideas and expertise.

US International Students Tracking Fee

Emma Frearson
Coordinator for the American Studies Exchange Office, University of Wales, Swansea
e.frearson@swan.ac.uk

Last April the Times Higher Education Supplement reported that the US government ‘plans to charge international students a fee to fund an anti-terrorism monitoring system that will keep track of their address and academic status at all times’ (27 April 2001). Events of 11 September gave an acute sense of urgency to implement the tracking system, initially known as CIPRIS and more recently as SEVIS — Student Exchange and Visiting Information Service — as soon as possible. Originally scheduled to begin in 2003, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on 10 October that the swift progress of the anti-terrorism bill could mean that SEVIS is introduced in 2002. The scheme has already been piloted by some universities. This means that British students heading to the US for academic and semester programmes in 2002-03 will probably be required to pay the fee, which is expected to be about $95.

Students should be able to pay the fee on-line by credit card to the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) and need to obtain a receipt before applying for their J-1 or F-1 visas, which currently cost £32. Should a student’s visa application be denied, the $95 will not be refunded. BUTEX (British Universities Transatlantic Exchange Association) has been opposed to the fee since its inception, not least because of the additional, unreciprocated cost it puts on our students, the majority of whom are required, under the terms of their visa, to return to the UK to complete their studies, and who are closely monitored by both sending and receiving institutions.
It is inevitable that the fee will be introduced, even though international students make up less than 2% of all visitors to the USA each year. BUTEX is monitoring the issue closely through Nafsa: Association for International Educators and the Visa Section of the US Embassy in London. As soon as a date is known for the implementation of the fee, it will be posted on the BUTEX mailbase and website http://www.butex.ac.uk/butex

Exchange Programmes Talk Shop

Peter Boyle, University of Nottingham

Two main topics were covered, namely, BUTEX (British Universities TransAtlantic Exchange Association) and the establishment of new exchange partners. Annette Kratz, Head of the International Office at the University of Keele, which, since February 2001, has hosted the BUTEX Secretariat, outlined the work of BUTEX and recommended that those who wished further information should visit the BUTEX website when it becomes accessible in May at www.butex.ac.uk/butex.

A brief discussion was held on problems in establishing new exchange partners or increasing the number of students exchanged with existing partners, which was a problem which the University of Sussex was facing as a result of expanding its intake of American Studies students. Different views were expressed on this matter. Some recounted experiences of great difficulty in trying to recruit new partners, with the American universities who were approached expressing no interest, since they already had a sufficient number of exchange partners in Britain and were developing new exchanges in such countries as Australia rather than Britain. Others stated that, with a little perseverance, it proved not too difficult to find new exchange partners, while some American universities were quite willing to expand the number of students on existing exchanges. It was thought, however, that American universities which were available for new exchanges or expansion were not always of a high academic quality, while also the process of pursuing new exchange partners could be quite time-consuming, which made it possible for a department which had administrative assistance for exchanges but which made it more difficult for departments in which exchange programmes were run by an academic.

Peter Boyle stated that an Exchange Programmes web page had now been established on the BAAS website, which can be visited at http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site. Details of the exchange programmes of about fifteen institutions are listed on the web page. Exchange tutors in institutions which have exchange programmes and which are not listed on the web page are urged to send details (names of exchange partners, length and timing of the period of study on exchange) by e-mail attachment to Graham Thompson at gthompson@dmu.ac.uk. Useful information, as well as comment and opinion, on matters related to exchange programmes, should similarly be sent to Graham at the above e-mail address.

The Exchange Programme Talk Shop follows from similar lunchtime meetings at the BAAS conferences at Glasgow and Swansea. It is hoped that Talk Shops at the annual conference and the BAAS web page will provide a useful means for the communication of information and stimulation of discussion for exchange tutors.

BAAS Paperbacks: News from the Series Editors

George McKay, University of Central Lancashire

Having proudly seen in the past few months the publication of the tenth and eleventh books in this series from Edinburgh University Press, the editors thought it would be a good idea to elongate the feelgood factor by sharing a progress report with ASIB readers.

Since the first books appeared in 1997, the series has established itself as a significant contribution to American Studies scholarship by British and international specialists. This is recognised by Professor Douglas Tallack, who has called the series ‘a fine resource for students of the United States’. A common feature has been the interdisciplinarity of the studies — for example, Peter Townsend’s Jazz in American Culture weaves together discussion of music, literary and autobiographical representations, and historical context. Others, such as Kenneth Morgan’s Slavery and Servitude in North America, 1607-1800, have necessarily been more single-discipline oriented, in this instance in order to provide a detailed historical narrative of one defining feature of American identity.

Many of the books have been highly praised. Reviews have frequently commended features such as the clarity of writing and the helpfulness of the annotated bibliographies. Books published on cultural and literary studies have focused on film, music, visual culture, while we look forward to Paul Wells’ forthcoming book on American cartoon cultures, currently at press. As for reviews, according to The British Library journal, Stephen F. Mills’ The American Landscape is ‘a well-written book offer[ing] a substantive exploration of the creation, interpretation, representation and familiarization of American landscapes’.

In history and politics, the Paperbacks series has published on political scandals, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the decade of the Sixties. John Killick’s The United States and European Reconstruction, 1945-1960 was described in International Affairs as ‘a commendably well organised and clearly written account … an ideal first text on the issue’. Our most recent publication, Michael Heale’s The Sixties in America: History, Politics and Protest, was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement as ‘an authoritative and lucid guide to the public events of the 1960s and to the larger significance of the era’. Books under commission include a study of America’s role in World War Two, and one of the Vietnam War.

Key issues in American Studies have been the subject of other books-slavery, exceptionalism, religion, the West, for instance. Deborah Madsen’s American Exceptionalism was reviewed in these pages as ‘a clear and concise introduction … the inherent complexity of charting American exceptionalism as it influenced and was influenced by the evolution of diverse cultural identities, is accommodated in a coherent and comprehensive account’.

To date all books have been co-published in the USA by university and academic presses, which is a further sign of the solid reputation the series has established. The series editors are Professor Philip Davies, De Montfort University pjd@dmu.ac.uk and Professor George McKay, University of Central Lancashire gmckay@uclan.ac.uk. To give a provisional idea of where we may like the series to go, our priorities for future commissioning include books which deal with aspects of the South, Hollywood, American popular music, American literature, or perhaps key decades. We are happy to discuss these or other proposals and suggestions for the series. Do get in touch.

American Studies Resources Centre Annual Report 2000-2001

Ian Ralston, Director, American Studies Resources Centre
I.Ralston@livjm.ac.uk
www.americansc.org.uk

The academic year 2000-2001 has seen a number of important developments within the work of the ASRC as well as an increase in uptake, both nationally and internationally, of its services. This report will outline these developments, but will also identify changes – which we hope to be temporary – that will impact on all our future operations.

ASRC Conferences and Lectures
The annual ASRC schools/FE conference, held again at the Maritime Museum in Liverpool, attracted a capacity audience of 200 students and teachers, including groups from both JMU and LCC. The topic this year was the 2000 Presidential Election. The speakers were: Niall Palmer (Brunel University) who spoke on the role of the media in presidential elections; Edward Ashbee (Denstone College) on the process of the elections; and Esther Jubb (John Moores University) on building electoral coalitions. The final session of the day involved a lively debate between representatives of Republicans and Democrats Abroad. Andy Gordon (Democrats) and Joseph King (Republicans) responded to pre-fielded questions submitted by students and teachers. As with our previous election conferences, the debate covered both the domestic and foreign policy agenda.

The ASRC, in conjunction with the School of Media, Critical and Creative Arts also hosted lectures by a number of visiting US academics and writers. Worthy of note were the visits of the Pulitzer prize winning poet John Ashbery, who gave readings from his work, including his latest publication ‘Your Name Here’ and the writer and academic Todd Gitlin, who spoke on America in the 1960s. Both lectures were well attended by staff and students from JMU, LCC and other HE institutions on Merseyside.

Towards the end of the academic year the ASRC, in conjunction with the Institute for US Studies at the University of London, organised a one-day conference on classic Hollywood movies. Hosted by IUSS, the conference attracted not only a substantial audience, but also extensive media coverage on both national and local radio, as well as a report on a digital TV station and the national press. Speakers included the film critic Roger Ebert (who spoke on Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull), the writer and director Alex Cox (on Kubricks Dr Strangelove), as well as the academics and writers Ian Scott from the University of Manchester (speaking on Polanski’s Chinatown) and Brian Neve from the University of Bath (on Kazan’s On the Waterfront.)
The annual Thanksgiving Lecture at JMU was given by Steve Mills from the Department of American Studies at the University of Keele. Steve’s topic examined America’s love-hate relationship with the city through its representation in The Simpsons.

Our thanks go not only to all our speakers, but also to the School of Media, Critical and Creative Art for all their support.

ASRC Website (ARnet)
The ARnet website continues to grow, thanks not only to all its contributors, but also to the hard work of David Forster. By the end of the academic year the site had received nearly one million hits since its re-launch in March 1998. However, plans to include on-line teaching materials have been postponed. The reasons for this will be outlined at the end of this report.

Requests and Student Visits to the ASRC
At the end of last academic year the Centre relocated to a new base within the Aldham Robarts Building of JMU. This has given us not only significantly more room to expand, but also placed us in a more ideal location for both teacher and student visits. This has added to a very substantial increase in visits, both from school parties, and also JMU and LCC staff and students. The growth and success of the website and its on-line response forms, also contributed to a growth in the number of requests from all over the world.

Powell-Straw Exchange Programme
The ASRC was pleased to be asked to take part in a new exchange programme launched by US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, in June 2001. The ASRC helped identify one of the two students who took part. Ezekiel Taffari, from Liverpool Community College, and Saffina Ali, from Leeds City School, were accompanied by ASRC Director, Ian Ralston, on a week-long visit to Washington and New York.

During their visit, Saffina and Ezekiel spent a full day with Secretary Powell getting a ‘hands-on approach’ to the workings of US government. The maturity of the students was emphasised when Ezekiel read a press statement in front of the world’s media at a State Department briefing. The students also spent time in Congress with Senator Chuck Hagel, and visited the Supreme Court where they were met by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Briefings from representatives of various other US government agencies were also included in their programme. In addition, the students had guided tours of the Holocaust Museum by curator Bruce Butterworth, AOL head offices in Washington, the NYSE, a leading African American Radio station (where Ezekiel met with Isaac Hayes and station staff), as well as meeting with American high school students and attending a Baltimore Oriels baseball game as guests of the team owner. Ezekiel and Saffina also were guests of British Ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer, at the British Embassy.

A fuller report of the visit is carried on the ASRC website and Ezekiel and Saffina will add to this with personal reports. Needless to say, these events attracted major news coverage in both the US (on NBC television) and in the UK, where reports were carried in the national press and on BBC, ITV and Sky News.

2001-2
Despite these important developments, the ASRC will not be operating a full service in the coming academic year. This has been brought about by a partial withdrawal of support for our services by one of our sponsors, Liverpool Community College. ASRC staff are working closely with the University in order to resolve this problem. In the meantime, the ASRC will be operating on a more limited basis than in previous years, with the postponement of some projects.

Update on PGCE Applications and American Studies Students

Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, University of Central Lancashire

Colleagues may be aware of the debate regarding American Studies graduates and PGCE teacher training places. Below is an update of the report published in the last issue of ASIB. Professor Philip Davies wrote to Barry Sheerman, MP, in May, putting forward the American Studies community’s views on this matter. Mr Sheerman then contacted Mike Tomlinson, Chief Inspector of Schools, OFSTED, and Stephen Timms, Minister of State for School Standards, for their input.

Mr Tomlinson commented that the issues raised regarding PGCE places were mainly the province of the DfES and the TTA (Teacher Training Agency) rather than OFSTED, and so his comments must be seen in that light. Indeed, he noted quite clearly that OFSTED does not, in the current inspection programme, actually report on selection procedures (nor, it seems, does the DfES, leaving an important gap through which some of our graduates fall). Mr Tomlinson did stress that his team focused on the ‘output’ requirement of trainees: ‘provided that the course enables trainees to remedy any initial weaknesses in subject knowledge, providers have nothing to fear from OFSTED in recruiting people with relevant “non-standard” degrees’. He also insisted OFSTED has not ‘intentionally contributed’ to the confusion surrounding the interpretations of the DfES Circular 4/98, which sets out the requirements for initial teacher training, though he was aware that some quarters had attributed blame to OFSTED.

Mr Timms pointed out that nothing in the ‘Requirements for Courses of Initial Teacher Training’ prevented providers from accepting American Studies graduates onto their courses. Indeed, he noted that no graduates should be turned away simply because their degrees were not in a National Curriculum subject. From his perspective, the most important element in the mix was that a student met exit standards — something for which the PGCE providers themselves were clearly responsible. Indeed, this may appear to be part of the problem, and DfES is unwilling and unable to intervene in the way that providers accept or decline applicants. Mr Timms seemed to suggest that most American Studies applicants wished to undertake a History PGCE, a fact that is not entirely supported by our survey; if, however, this is a significant point, then it is worth pointing out to students that there is not currently a shortage of history teachers. Thus if they intend to pursue this route, they will be in competition with History graduates, whom panels may consider more qualified.
Anyone advising final year students who are intent on securing a PGCE place should have a look at the latest revised qualifications on the Teacher Training Agency website http://www.dfes.gov.uk/consultations/tta/index.htm

Americanization and the Teaching of American Studies (AMTAS): Workshops go Live!

Alan Rice, Project Manager for the Americanization Project (AMATAS)

The Americanization and the Teaching of American Studies Project (AMATAS), based at the University of Central Lancashire with partners at the University of Derby and King Alfred’s College, Winchester, is available for any British academic to use over the next year. It is not just available to departments of American Studies but can be accessed wherever it is felt to be useful. We have a variety of workshops that you are welcome to invite into your institution as samples of teaching American Studies through the lens of the Transatlantic and/or Americanization. You can integrate these two-hour sessions into your programme as a replacement for a week’s teaching on a module or access them as a special, extra session for your students. Lecturer, Jill Terry, reports on the success of the very first workshop the project presented, at Worcester College of Further Education: ‘The workshop on “The Titanic and the Transatlantic” was delivered by Dr Alan Rice to Media and Cultural Studies students in the third week of their first year course. The workshop enabled students to interrogate their personal constructions of the Titanic story and recognise that their version was merely one of many. From their exposure to a fascinating range of primary material – from a facsimile handkerchief for the use of mourning relatives, to a “street rap” recording on the sinking, it became abundantly clear that to historicise the disaster it is necessary to embrace the cultural myths that have been constructed by different groups with different national, racial and ethnic agendas on both sides of the Atlantic.

‘In particular the different versions constructed by American financiers, Northern Irish Shipbuilders and African Americans (in the main excluded as passengers and crew) provoked very productive work on representation. Consequently, we have been able to use the example of the Titanic as a reference point in subsequent classes in semiotics and myth. As many of the students at the workshop also take a first year module that introduces American writing, they have had the additional benefit of being able to draw on the workshop in discussions of “the American dream”, immigration, and racial politics. It has helped to make their work reflect an international rather than a narrow national perspective on culture. It was very useful and enjoyable for the students, and enabled them to have access to a different voice, and for us as teachers, for at least one week of a very busy semester, to be thoroughly engaged spectators rather than instructors.’

As you can see from the list below, the workshops encompass a variety of topics from many disciplines, including history, social studies, film studies, literary studies, visual studies and cultural studies. The teachers are all experts in their fields, who have been granted time off, or paid a consultancy fee by the project to write up dynamic workshops. They include distinguished professors in British Social History, Popular Music and Cultural History. For colleagues in England there is no cost. Unfortunately, because the project is funded by HEFCE, we are unable to pay the travelling costs for our workshop deliverers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The workshops delivered there, as elsewhere, will, however, accrue no other costs to the hosting institution.

The project has produced an attractive booklet with full descriptors of all the workshops, and this can be ordered direct from the project. We already have significant bookings, so please book early to avoid disappointment. You can book by use of the tear-off slip in the back of the booklet. Alternatively, book by e-mail arice@uclan.ac.uk or write to:

AMATAS
Department of Cultural Studies
University of Central Lancashire
Preston, PR1 2HE
tel: 01772 893125
fax: 01772 892924

Workshops:

Professor Andrew John Blake
‘Sonic Americanization (Americanization and Popular Music)’
King Alfred’s College of Higher Education
Availability: January-October 2002

Dr Neil Campbell
‘The Landscapes of Americanization/Transatlantic Photography’
University of Derby
Availability: December 2001-January 2002

Dr Jane Darcy
‘Disney and the European Fairy Tale’
University of Central Lancashire
Availability: From January 2002

Dr Jude Davies
‘American Princess? Diana Princess of Wales and the Paradoxes of Americanization’
King Alfred’s College of Higher Education
Availability: From May 2002

Dr Janet Floyd
‘The Quilt: Anglo-American Perspectives’
King Alfred’s College of Higher Education
Availability: February-November 2002

Dr Paul Grainge
‘Brand Identity and Resistance’
University of Nottingham
From January 2002

Dr Alasdair Kean
‘”Travelling Blues”: American Popular Music in Britain’
University of Derby
Availability: From January 2002

Dr Jason Lee
‘”New” Hollywood’s Europeanization-Americanization of the World’
University of Central Lancashire
Availability: From November 2001

Professor Scott Lucas
‘Americanization and the Cultural War’
University of Birmingham
Availability: to be advised

Professor George McKay
‘Americanization and Cultural Theory: Liberation and/or Cultural Imperialism?’
University of Central Lancashire
Availability: From October 2001

Dr Michael Paris
‘Inside Nazi Germany: The View From Hollywood’
University of Central Lancashire
Availability: From November 2001

Dr Alasdair Pettinger
‘Jim Crow in Britain’
University of Central Lancashire
Availability: From November 2001

Dr Eithne Quinn
‘Discourses of Americanization and Black Intellectuals in Europe: The Case of Chester Himes’
University of Central Lancashire
Availability: From November 2001

Dr Alan Rice
‘The Titanic and the Transatlantic Imagination’
University of Central Lancashire
Availability: From October 2001

Ms Carol R Smith
‘Portraying the Black Atlantic’
King Alfred’s College of Higher Education
Availability: From June 2002

Mr Alasdair Spark
‘Americanization and the Exchange Experiences of UK and US Exchange Students’
King Alfred’s College of Higher Education
Availability: March-November 2002

Dr John Walton
‘The Transatlantic Seaside’
University of Central Lancashire
Availability: From October 2001

Check out our website on www.amatas.org for latest news on the project. There is a discussion page which is providing a focus for views on the events of September 11 with international postings.

Travel Award Reports

Marcus Cunliffe Travel Award Report: Eric White, Clare College, Cambridge

I am pleased to report that my research trip of July-August 2001 to the Lockwood Memorial Library at the State University of New York, Buffalo, was a success on several levels. As anticipated, the resources available in the Lockwood collection have become a crucial component of my research.

The opportunity to examine original issues of Alfred Kreymborg’s Others (1915-1919), William Carlos Williams’ and Robert McAlmon’s Contact (1920-1923), and dozens of other contemporaneous little magazines has enhanced my arguments concerning the role that typography played in the development of American Modernist writing. These publications reveal the competing, yet often complimentary, visions for Modernist writing played out in the little magazine scene. In terms of format and content, Contact, the focus of my doctoral thesis, is in some respects a refinement of (and a departure from) the design and policies of Others. However, I found that Williams’ innovative method of branding and localising American Modernism is rooted in his tenure with Others, and that there are significant analogues between the publications. Such comparisons are borne out in the calculated typographic minimalism favoured by Williams, and in anecdotal details that emerge in the correspondence between the doctor-poet, Kreymborg, McAlmon, and Kenneth Burke.

Further unpublished letters to Williams from Maxwell Bodenheim, Edmund Brown (of Boston-based publishers The Four Seas Company), Ezra Pound, and Broom editors, Harold Loeb and Lola Ridge (to name but a few) proved a rich source of narrative evidence for my re-evaluation of Others and Contact as literary institutions. The extensive trail of manuscripts, paperwork and ephemera in the Lockwood collection provided me with a factual framework for this alternate reading. In addition, Williams’ own manuscripts dating from and concerning the Contact era, including an unpublished piece entitled ‘McAlmon’, are of particular literary importance to my thesis.

My time at the Poetry and Rare Books Room in the Lockwood Memorial Library has built a solid foundation for my PhD thesis, and I would like to thank the British Association of American Studies for enabling me to pursue an exceptional opportunity.

Annie Kirby, University of Wales, Swansea

Annie Kirby, University of Wales, Swansea

The funding generously supplied by BAAS and the University of Wales, Swansea Graduate School supported an essential trip to the US for research into Native American film enabling me to view films not only from the Library of Congress’s excellent collection of silent movies containing representations of Native Americans, but also their collection of Native American documentaries, including many contemporary films produced and directed by Native Americans. I was also able to take the opportunity to visit the Human Studies Film Archive at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, the Pequot Museum at Mashantucket in Connecticut and the Film and Video Center at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York. Study of these films is essential to my thesis, which analyses strategies for the subversion of the Hollywood Indian stereotype in film and literature. The opportunity provided by this funding was invaluable, allowing me access to over fifty films.
The silent films at the Library of Congress revealed fascinating variations on the invented Hollywood Indian stereotype which was to emerge later in the century. White Fawn’s Devotion (1910) was most probably directed by James Young Deer (Winnebago), a leading figure in the Pathe Frere Studio company, while The Silent Enemy (1930), which had a virtually all-Native American cast, included a prologue by Chauncey Yellow Robe (Rosebud Sioux) and depicted the struggle of a group of pre-contact Ojibwe to stave off starvation during a harsh winter.

The Vanishing American (1925) cast Richard Dix, a well-known white actor, to play the romantic Native American lead, but included Native American actors in a number of supporting roles and dealt with such controversial issues as the appropriation of reservation land and the mistreatment of Native American First World War Veterans. However, the film rationalized such white behaviour by depicting it as symptomatic of a natural process of Social Darwinism, with the Native American race doomed to vanish as a result of the emergence of the superior white race.

Other films, such as the Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1914), directed by DW Griffith, which portray Native Americans as dog-eating, bloodthirsty savages, reveal the depressing route which representations of Native Americans were to follow in later Westerns. Contemporary films directed by Native Americans provide a remarkably consistent framework for subversion of the invented Indian stereotype and the privileging of a Native American audience. George Burdeau (Blackfeet), in Backbone of the World (1997) and Pueblo Peoples: First Contact (1990), encircles his factual narratives within traditional stories recounted by tribal elders in Native American languages, and adopts a collaborative approach to filmmaking, mirroring the reciprocal, participatory orientation of oral literature and communal identity common in many Native American cultures.

Victor Masayesva (Hopi) framed the multi-media images in Imagining Indians (1992) within another type of story — a visit to the dentist by a Native American woman who is obliged to sit mute while the white dentist extracts a tooth and meditates on his ‘spiritual connection’ to Kevin Costner and the potential profitability of a Native American ‘sweat-lodge’ he is organising for rich white businessmen. The Native American patient, though literally and metaphorically speechless, finds an effective weapon to fight back — the dentist’s own drill, although unfortunately she doesn’t use it on the dentist, but on the stereotypical images which have sought to render her mute in contemporary society, as the dental treatment has compelled her silence in the dentist’s chair.

Masayesva and Shelley Niro (Mohawk), in Ritual Clowns (1988) and It Starts with a Whisper (1993), respectively explore the importance of sacred clowns in the structure and identity of some tribal communities while simultaneously undermining the stereotype of the stoical, humourless Indian. Cree playwright and director Shirley Cheechoo stars as a bottle-blonde Cree in her own disturbing 2000 feature Backroads, where a bear-walker wreaks malevolent havoc on the lives of four reservation sisters, proving that Native filmmakers can be scary too.

This research trip exceeded all expectations in terms of material accessed and networking opportunities. I would therefore like to thank BAAS for its generous support, not only financially, but also psychologically, in choosing to fund my research.

Gabriella Treglia, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University

In February 2001 I received an Award of £400 from BAAS to help finance a research trip to the US. At the time I was an MPhil student at Cambridge University, specialising in Native American history. My dissertation explored the so-called ‘New Deal’ for Native Americans that characterized US government policy towards indigenous peoples from 1933 to 1945, under the aegis of John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs during the Roosevelt era. My focus was on the ‘New Deal’ programmes pertaining to education, religion, and arts and crafts. Although the University Library at Cambridge is well-stocked with secondary literature relating to Native American history, the primary material upon which I hoped to base much of my dissertation, was located in the US, at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, New Haven. The papers are not available online, therefore a trans-Atlantic research trip was mandatory (and a welcome mid-term interlude).

The Sterling Memorial Library is an impressive building, both to look at and in terms of the facilities offered. The Office Files of John Collier, 1922-68, which were to constitute the bulk of my research, were available as a microfilmed collection, and I got to know the microfilm reading room at Sterling very well over the two weeks of my visit. As an added bonus, I discovered that the periodical ‘Indians at Work’ published by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) during Collier’s commissionership, is also held at the Sterling Memorial Library in microfiche form. This pamphlet series provides an interesting insight into the individual activities of BIA employees (notably schoolteachers and craft experts) and Native American cooperative groups on the reservations. For myself, it was particularly invaluable for the coverage devoted to the socio-cultural programmes implemented during the ‘New Deal’.
During my stay I also visited Columbia University in New York City. At the Oral History Research Office I viewed the transcript of an interview with Rene d’Harnoncourt, chairman of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board established by Collier, which sought to introduce Native American goods to wider markets and so both preserve traditional production methods and crafts, and provide financial benefit to Native American artists and craftsmen. Recorded in 1968, the interview offered a glimpse into the mindset of one of Collier’s ‘New Dealers’.

The research I conducted during my US trip constituted the backbone of my MPhil dissertation. The sheer extent and volume of the archives at Yale was very encouraging and I have chosen to spend the first year of my PhD there to continue researching the socio-cultural dimension of John Collier’s ‘New Deal’ for Native Americans. The award from BAAS was particularly welcome for my last trip, not only for the air fare, and rail travel from New Haven to New York, but also for the large photocopying bill I ran up as it became apparent that two weeks was by no means sufficient time to do justice to the Collier Files.

Conference Reports

European Historians of the United States

Peter Boyle, University of Nottingham

European Historians of the United States held their regular biennial conference at the Roosevelt Study Center in Middleburg in the Netherlands on 18-20 April 2001. The topic was ‘Nation on the Move: Mobility in US History’. Papers were presented on various aspects of this topic by historians of the United States from many countries, including Norway, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, France, Sweden, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The papers brought out the profound and varied political, social, economic, religious and ideological implications of the mobility of Americans. Papers covered topics from the colonial period to contemporary America, such as James Baird (USA) on the turnover of overseers on plantations in colonial Virginia, Joseph Smith (UK) on the travels of a British diplomat in the United States in the 1820s, Serge Ricard (France) on squatter expansionism and continental aggrandizement, Giovanni Fabbi (Italy) on black migration in South Carolina in World War I to Northern cities and to army camps, Klaus Vowe (Germany) on the Hollywood cult of mobility. The British contingent was well-represented among the presenters of papers, including Rob Lewis (Birmingham), Howell Harris (Durham), Joseph Smith (Exeter), Melvyn Stokes (UCL), David Brown (Northampton) and Louis Billingham (Hull). David Adams (Keele), the Founding Father of European Historians of the United States, and Steve Ickringill (Coleraine) chaired sessions, while Peter Boyle (Nottingham) acted as conference reporter.

It is hoped that a volume will be published of an edited selection of the papers, as has been done for previous conferences. The volumes for the first three conferences were on display at the Edinburgh University Press stand at the Keele BAAS conference at a special conference price of £8.00 each. Edited by David K Adams & Cornelius A van Minnen, the titles are: Reflections on American Exceptionalism, Aspects of War in American History, and Religious and Secular Reform in America.

The volume for the fourth conference was edited by Sylvia Hilton & Cornelius A van Minnen, Federalism, Citizenship and Collective Identity in U.S. History (Amsterdam: VU Press, 2000).

The conference of European Historians of the United States at the Roosevelt Study Center in Middleburg every second year has become well-established, since its first meeting in1993. The next meeting will be in April 2003. The topic will be announced and a call for papers will be made in due course.

De Montfort Teachers’ Conference, 6 October 2001

Kathryn Cooper, Head of History and Politics, Loreto Sixth Form College

In spite of missing a college open day and an England match, a colleague and I drove down to Leicester from Manchester on a sunny Saturday to attend a conference for teachers of history and politics. Even though we got stuck in an horrendous traffic jam on the way down and missed Beckham’s goal on the way back, it was a day well spent and thoroughly enjoyed.

The conference, organised by Jason McDonald, began with a presentation by Derrick Murphy of the current state of US topics in the new History and Politics AS and A level syllabuses. Derrick is familiar to many teachers having been the Chief Examiner for American history at AQA, and now fulfilling the same position at OCR. His introduction was a useful summary for anyone thinking of developing American topics, and for the university staff present to update them on the situation in schools and colleges. The heartening news for all enthusiasts of American Studies is that US topics are thriving, and even on the increase.

There followed a series of lectures on political and historical topics. As a history teacher I wanted lots of useful detail that I could pass on to students. I wanted my own knowledge to be confirmed and updated, but also increased with some new information or insights. This is what busy teachers want from most conferences. Lectures on esoteric research subjects are fun when we have the time, but for a busy weekend in a busy term I needed the De Montfort conference to help me do my job. It did. The history lectures were all on syllabus topics or topics students choose for coursework and the presentation was uniformly excellent.

Professor Tony Badger from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge gave a lecture entitled ‘The New Deal and the Great Society: Strengths and Weaknesses of American Liberal Reform’. He began with the seeming similarities of both programmes, and how the American right sees FDR and LBJ as the creators of big government. He then went on to highlight some notable differences, for example Johnson was working in a time of extraordinary affluence, where Roosevelt was tackling the worst Depression the USA had ever seen. Or how much of the New Deal legislation was from or a reaction to, Congress while the Great Society was very much top down from the Administration, and interestingly how change, especially in the area of rights, was coming from non-elected people such as judges. What I found most intriguing was the idea that while the New Deal showed how government could engineer solutions to problems, the Great Society’s inability to manage its programmes well was one of the reasons why people lost faith in the federal government’s ability to deliver improvements.

For a teacher of history I found this lecture drew some nice clear themes that I can develop with my students. My colleague, who teaches politics, also felt these themes were important to her student’s understanding of the development of federal power. But though the lecture was very useful, just as importantly, Professor Badger was, as always, simply very interesting to listen to.

The home team did itself proud with Jason McDonald and David Ryan giving us the historiography of the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War respectively.
Dr McDonald talked about the early liberal tradition that saw Civil Rights as a ‘top down’ movement, essentially led by King, that moved from Montgomery to Memphis in a straight line. This was replaced in the 1970s and 1980s with a revisionist view that went back further than 1955 and looked at the pressures from the grass roots Civil Rights Movement as well as the leadership. This view argues that even had King lived, the movement would have changed in 1968 because the legislation they had fought for had been achieved. The current consensus has focused around a post-revisionist view that the interaction of the leadership and the grass roots is what needs to be studied. Dr McDonald then went on to look at the major themes in Civil Rights; the status of African Americans in the USA, the attitudes of whites in the North and South, the role of the government, and the varieties of protest.

David Ryan followed a similar course looking at the historiography of the Cold War. He outlined the orthodox interpretation prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s that American policy was a reaction to Soviet expansion. This view was attacked in the 1960s by the revisionists who argued that US economic expansion was more aggressive. The post-revisionists in the 1970s, such as Gaddis, have tried to synthesise these two views, but also to look at personalities and domestic issues when explaining foreign policy. The 1980s and 1990s, unfortunately for students, have seen a plethora of differing interpretations (and one suspects that in the aftermath of the Afghan War this will increase still further). Dr Ryan also summarised the arguments of the latest writings on the Vietnam War since the mid-1990s, showing that there is just as much disagreement here. One crucial current question is whether the Vietnam War was a Cold War conflict or an imperial conflict.

I found both of these lectures not only fascinating but also immensely useful to me as a teacher. Teachers simply do not have the time these days to update themselves on current thinking and lectures like this are immeasurably helpful. (The list of web sites David Ryan gave us has simply been copied at my school and given straight to the students!) For any teacher just starting to teach either of these topics, the lectures could not have been a better introduction to the areas of debate.

During the two politics lectures I could sit back and just enjoy listening. My colleague, Colleen Harris, who is Chief Examiner for American politics at AQA seemed to find the talks as useful for her and her students as I did the history talks. Professor Philip Davies talked about Florida and the 2000 election. He talked about the situation in Florida and how it affected the overall election result, but he put the debacle into the wider context of voting in the USA. With many amusing anecdotes and the use of visual aids he effectively illustrated the complexity of American democracy. Dr Davies had ballot papers from several towns and states. Just looking at the number of posts to be elected and the propositions to be voted for made my brain hurt. The lecture raised fascinating questions about the nature of democracy, and in fact I have used some of the material with students studying parliamentary reform in nineteenth-century Britain to discuss just these kinds of questions.

Undoubtedly the lecture by Dr Edward Ashbee of Denstone College raised the most questions. He spoke on ‘September 11th: The Domestic Policy Consequences’. Dr Ashbee listed several possible effects of the attack, such as the probable economic slump and the coming together of the parties in a sense of patriotism. Most interesting was his argument that American government is frequently paralysed due to the nature of the system of checks and balances, and it is only when there is a crisis such as a war, the Depression, or an event like September 11 that things can be significantly moved on. It may be too soon to judge the effects of the attack in New York but Dr Ashbee gave us much to think about and to look for in the months ahead.
On top of all of this Dr McDonald and his team put on a very fine lunch and even gave us doggie bags to take some home in. Anybody knows the real test of a conference is the food, and De Montfort’s was delicious. But the other important thing about a conference is that it gives people the chance to meet. I know Colleen had some very useful conversations with other politics teachers, and I was able to discuss resource with teaching colleagues and ideas with the lecturers, as well as just chat over tea and biscuits.

It was a well-organised, well-presented and valuable day. My only suggestion is that in future if the history and politics lectures were run at the same time in separate rooms we might have more time for discussion. There were probably around two dozen teachers there and this was a shame as I know more would have found it useful. All of this sounds terribly positive and verges on the gushing, but it was quite simply a very good conference.

Conference, Workshop and Journal Announcements

US Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 2 of this new, fully-refereed e-journal is now available http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/usstudiesonline

Contents:
Sarah Wood, University College, London, ‘Private Properties, Public Nuisance: Arthur Mervyn and The Rise and Fall of a Republican Machine’

John Fagg, University of Nottingham, ‘Parody, Sincerity and the Martial Ideal in the Literary Impressionism of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage’

Zoe A Greer, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, ‘Jail-no-Bail Comes of Age: the Freedom Rides and the Use of Prison as a Platform for Racial Protest’

If you would like to submit an article for consideration by the journal please send three hard copies in the first instance to Graham Thompson, Editor, US Studies Online, Department of English, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH gthompson@dmu.ac.uk

Starbursts: Seminar in Early American Writing and Culture

The political independence of the USA, and its ensuing socio-cultural challenges, motivated writers to produce a number of intriguing narrative and discursive texts that sought to address, resolve, or reconfigure the political and ideological conflicts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Post-revolutionary, pre-industrial era fiction has been traditionally overlooked in studies of the United States because fiction of the early American Republic cannot easily be reduced to narratives of heroic national independence or the rise of capitalist industry. Outside of American Studies, the traditional framework of Romanticism, with its bias to poetry, has often ignored the flurry of creative output in North America.

To confront these research problems, we invite you to a new reading lab, ‘Starbursts: Seminar in Early American Writing and Culture’, which will begin in October 2001 under the auspices of the IUSS at Senate House.

The aims of the reading lab are threefold: to promote general familiarity with the period’s texts, with special dedication to those texts that are still not readily available or easily accessible to readers; to provide a common forum that will nurture a collegial network of early Americanists in England, Scotland, Wales, and the Irelands; and to forge new methods of approaching, researching, and teaching this material.
We will meet on Fridays at 4pm, on the 3rd floor of Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1. To facilitate advance reading, photocopies of the texts will be available (for the cost of the xeroxing) from the IUSS office, Senate House (020 7862 8693).

The lab will differ from other seminars in that we will not hear from an individual, presenting her or his research. Instead, meetings will be devoted to collective discussion and exploration of the texts as a means of generating a shared sense of the pertinent issues in ways that will nourish a collegial community.
We invite all to join, regardless of your academic background or affiliation, for what we hope will be the flowering of public and institutional interest in early American material.

Schedule for 2002:

Friday 8 February 2002 : Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism
Friday 1 March 2002: S.S.B.K. Wood’s Dorval, or, The Speculator
Friday 22 March 2002: Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker

For further details, please contact the convenors, Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick s.shapiro@warwick.ac.uk, Sarah Wood, UCL sarahfwood@yahoo.co.uk

‘Intersections’, Australia and New Zealand Association for American Studies Conference (ANZASA)

Deakin University, Geelong, Australia, July 2002

The next ANZASA Conference will have a particular interest in cross-disciplinary engagements and comparative studies — in ‘intersections’ — but the organising committee also welcomes proposals in any field of American (US) Studies that draws principally on a major discipline such as History, Literature, Sociology, Cultural Studies or Film Studies.

Proposals (with abstracts from 100 to 300 words) should be received by 30 November 2001. Offers can be directed to Brian Edwards at bje@deakin.edu.au or by regular mail to The Organising Committee, American Studies 2002, School of Social Inquiry, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria 3217, Australia, Fax: 61 3 5227 2916

‘WEB DuBois and Frantz Fanon: Postcolonial Linkages and Transatlantic Receptions’, An International, Inter-disciplinary Confere

University of Stirling, Scotland, 16-17 March 2002

Details for the submission of papers and can be found at http://www.commonwealthstudies.stir.ac.uk/DuBoisFanon.htm

Nathaniel Hawthorne Society Biennial Summer Conference

Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, 20-23 June 2002

While all Hawthorne-related proposals will be featured, the following themes exist:

• Hawthornian geographies: how does his work explore or illuminate the distinctive ‘spaces’ of nineteenth century culture — e.g., the terrains of leisure and tourism, Concord, England, Europe
• Hawthorne in the culture of letters: questions of reception, the literary career, critical history
• Hawthornian histories: new contextual work of all sorts
• Hawthorne and the writing of childhood

Sesquicentennial reflections: situated between last summer’s celebration of The Scarlet Letter at 150 and the 2004 celebration of Hawthorne’s bicentennial slated for Salem, this conference is our chance to consider anew the cultural force of The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and A Wonder-Book.

Registration materials and information on housing options, costs, etc. will be forthcoming in a separate mailing. Housing will be available inexpensively at a Smith College dormitory (with some meals available), and at nearby hotels and motels.
Smith College is located in the small city of Northampton, in western Massachusetts. It is served by Bradley International Airport (Hartford-Springfield), forty-five minutes away (both shuttle service and rental cars are available). It is a two-hour drive from Boston, a three-hour drive from New York City; bus service is available from both those cities.

For further information, please contact: Richard Millington, Department of English, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063 rmilling@smith.edu

‘Citizens, Nations, and Cultures: Transatlantic Perspectives—An Interdisciplinary Conference’

The Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies, Maastricht, The Netherlands, 16-19 October 2002

The Atlantic has been a crossing-point for people, ideas, and commodities for centuries. This conference will broadly explore what the ‘transatlantic’ means for the people of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. More specifically the conference will address three interlocking dimensions of the transatlantic experience. Firstly, it will consider the lessons of the dynamics of transatlantic relations. At a time when globalization, which for some has its origins in the history of the transatlantic experience, raises concerns about the impact of westernisation or, more specifically, Americanization on the rest of the world, the conference will ask what a study of the transatlantic can tell us about how people have adapted to cultural exchanges in the past. How have these exchanges impacted on cultures and identities in the transatlantic world? Secondly, the conference will examine the transatlantic experience as a focus of enquiry. Thus, contributions might consider how artists, scholars, and writers have come to explore transatlantic connections in the course of their work. Finally, the conference will ask what we can learn by the comparative experiences on the different sides of the Atlantic. What, for example, can comparative studies tell us about the relative experiences of citizenship, nation, and race?

Located at the Maastricht Center for Transatlantic Studies, Netherlands, the overall aim of the conference is to bring together scholars from across the world to discuss the development of citizens, nations, and cultures through the lens of the transatlantic relationship. The city of Maastricht has been a crossing-point for European cultures through history, and as 2002 marks the anniversary of the Treaty on European Union, signed in the city, and which formally established EU citizenship, it is both an ideal location and an opportune time to consider the changing relations between citizens, nations, and cultures.

The organisers invite contributions from any discipline. The organisers especially welcome contributions from young scholars and postgraduates. All papers must nevertheless have the transatlantic relationship as the underlying theme.
Further information from Neil Wynn or Andrew Thompson, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Glamorgan, Treforest, Rhondda Cynon Taff, CF37 1DL.

Transatlantic Studies Conference

Launch of the Transatlantic Studies Association and the Journal of Transatlantic Studies
West Park Conference Centre, Dundee, 8-11 July 2002

The Atlantic region forms a focus for research which the Journal of Transatlantic Studies will service as a dedicated publication. Lord Robertson, Secretary-General of NATO, has kindly agreed to speak. The aim of the conference, the Association and the journal (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming in 2003) is to stimulate multi- and interdisciplinary research in the field.

The Conference is sponsored by the University of Dundee, Scotland, and the University of Baylor, Texas.

Cost: £195, which includes the cost of two years’ subscription to the Journal and the Association.

Any queries to Professor Alan Dobson, Politics Department, University of Dundee a.p.dobson@dundee.ac.uk +44 (0)1382 344588. Conference Secretary: Carol Benoit-Ngassam c.j.benoitngassam@dundee.ac.uk +44 (0)1382 344648 [afternoons only]

The New England American Studies Association Conference, 2002 ‘Globalizations: Cultural, Economic, Democratic’

‘”The Tyranny of Facts”: Cultural Institutions and the Authority of Evidence’
Boston, 26-28 April 2002

To be held at the site of the Massachusetts Historical Society, one of the country’s oldest and most respected archives, the 2002 NEASA conference will explore the connections between cultural institutions, evidence, and the process of instituting culture throughout the American experience. The theme of this year’s meeting (the title of which comes from Warren Goldstein’s review of Dutch, the fictionalized biography of Ronald Reagan by Edmund Morris) raises such issues as:

• What ‘counts’ as facts, data, or evidence? How have ‘facts’ been used in American culture to construct mythologies of race, class, gender, or power?
• What is the role of evidence in academic research, and particularly in interdisciplinary approaches such as American Studies? When is it appropriate to interweave fact and fiction? How do we reconcile different elements of scholarship to create a ‘braided narrative’? How has the construction of a ‘usable past’ marked American thought, and American Studies scholarship?
• How (either historically, or now) do ‘gatekeepers’ of facts such as the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Smithsonian Museum, the United States Information Agency, or local historical societies, influence American culture? How have people in the United States and abroad responded to such cultural institutions?

As always, NEASA welcomes participation by public intellectuals and activists without university affiliations — e.g., secondary school teachers, journalists, community organizers, archivists, curators, artists, and independent scholars. To support broader participation in the conference, and to reward excellent papers (the award carries a stipend), NEASA again will offer the Mary [C.] Kelley Prize for the best paper by a graduate student or non-tenure track scholar.

Inquiries for the 2002 NEASA conference should be directed to Lisa MacFarlane, EASA Program Chair, Department of English, Hamilton Smith Hall, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824 lwm@cisunix.unh.edu

New Frontiers in Early American Literature’

University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA, 8-10 August 2002

The University of Virginia Library’s Electronic Text Center, with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, announces its ‘New Frontiers in Early American Literature’ conference which will bring together scholars exploring the Early American literary period in all its facets. Presentations on all authors and all genres are welcome. Interdisciplinary approaches are also encouraged.

This conference is inspired by our work in creating the ‘Electronic Archive of Early American Fiction’, an expansive on-line collection of American novels and short stories written between 1789 and 1875. The texts chosen for the project are drawn from the UVA Library’s world-renowned collection in Early American materials and include works by well-known authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Brockden Brown, as well as lesser-known writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Rufus Dawes.

Papers, poster sessions, and panel proposals from all areas of studies in Early American Literature will be considered, though possible topics include Exploring the Frontier, Popular and Domestic Fiction, the Literary Marketplace, Femininity and Masculinity, and Literature and the Civil War.

We also welcome papers related to these proposed sessions:

• Textual Editing
• Creating Digital Archives
• Using Digital Resources for Scholarship, Teaching, or Pleasure Reading

We encourage submissions from various constituencies, including graduate students, academic computing experts, and faculty members. Proposals for digital or multi-media presentations are welcome. If you require A/V equipment for your presentation, please include details in your proposal to facilitate room arrangements.

The conference will take place in the central grounds of the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. Participants and attendees will have the opportunity to attend a private tour of Jefferson’s Monticello and a dinner in the University of Virginia’s Rotunda.

We will be awarding 4 travel stipends of up to $250 to eligible graduate students. Please note on your submission that you would like to be considered for one of these travel grants. Please include your name, telephone number, e-mail address, and your institutional and departmental affiliation.

For more information about the Electronic Text Center’s Early American Fiction project, please visit http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eaf

One page abstracts are due 15 February 2002. Please e-mail to jennifer@virginia.edu or send to Jennifer McCarthy, Electronic Text Center, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, PO Box 400148, Charlottesville, VA 22904

New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: Cultures and Representations II

An International Conference to be held at The University of Nottingham, U.K., April 4-5 2003

Following the success of the first ‘New York, Chicago, Los Angeles Cultures and Representations’ Conference (Birmingham UK, Sept. 1999) which saw the participation of over 65 academics from 10 counties, the Three Cities project team is pleased to announce its final international conference, to be held April 4-5, 2003, at the University of Nottingham, UK. We invite papers from scholars working on New York, Chicago or Los Angeles in any period and from any disciplinary orientation.

The project members and many of our associates work on representations of urban space in literature, photography, fine art, visual culture, maps, architecture, popular art, advertising, television and film and many draw on contemporary work in urban and visual theory, cultural studies and cultural geography. We would be pleased to see papers reflecting these emphases. The project has developed the use of multimedia for the study of visual, literary and cultural representations of urban space and we would particularly welcome papers that seek to utilise or address the use of new technologies for the study of city spaces CitySites an electronic book was published in December 2000 and is currently available at www.citysites.org.uk

Although the primary foci of the conference will be the cities of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles we welcome comparative papers that set these cities in a wider national or international context.

Papers should be 25-30 minutes in length. We are open to papers that think creatively about the paper presentation – whether this is through the use of video, computer or visual presentation. We also welcome proposals for whole panels,
short roundtable discussion panels, or presentation and response sessions.

The deadline for proposals is 31 October 2002, and proposers will be informed of their acceptance by 15 December. Proposals should be submitted on paper and disc and should be no more than 300 words in length. The proposal should be accompanied by a covering letter detailing institutional affiliation (where appropriate), contact address and email address. Please sent to Dr Anna Notaro, School of American & Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD (UK). Proposals can also be submitted electronically
to Anna.Notaro@nottingham.ac.uk

Further details of the conference cost and plenary speakers will be posted in early January 2002. Further details on the Three Cities project can be found on the project’s web site at www.3cities.org.uk. Please check this site regularly for updates.

Book Reviews

Andrew Pepper, The Contemporary American Crime Novel: Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Class

Edinburgh University Press, 2000. ISBN 0 7486 1340 4 (paper).

U.S. hard-boiled crime fiction is perhaps one of that culture’s most distinctive literary forms and is still, in terms of the critical response to it, an under-explored area. Kathy Reichs’s Deadly Décisions starts off:

Her name was Emily Anne. She was nine years old, with black ringlets, long lashes, and caramel-colored skin. Her ears were pierced with tiny gold loops. Her forehead was pierced by two slugs from a Cobra 9-mm semiautomatic.

When we come across a narrative beginning like this, we immediately know what kind of generic world we enter, and (to an extent) what we can expect as we proceed. In his book, Pepper suggests that such expectations can be belied, as he critically charts something of the variety and ‘elasticity’ of the genre. Basically his argument moves in two related directions. His agenda is multiculturalist, and he is interested in the way that the various types of conflict and difference (see his sub-title) that play themselves out in what is, mainly, recent American crime fiction. He sees in the results, however, no ‘moralistic, preachy…homogeneity’ but ‘a fractured, hot-blooded, transgressive heterogeneity’ where textual inconsistencies act a sign of the ruptures and contradictions of the American social landscape.
Pepper is also interested, though, in the various critical arguments about the conservative or radical nature of the genre: the former aware of the role of the detective or policeman as s/he who reaffirms the dominant social order; the latter arguing (in Woody Haut’s words) for the genre’s destabilizing qualities, its ‘uncertainty, deviancy, moral ambiguity, iconoclasm and a narrative suggesting cultural and psychological fragmentation’. Pepper carefully steers his way between these two positions arguing that the genre is ambiguous and contradictory, most often characterised as neither ‘left’ nor ‘right’, ‘hegemonic’ nor ‘counter-hegemonic’, but possessing a ‘cultural politics [that] have always been deeply ambivalent’. Pepper is aware of the considerable differences, both ideological and aesthetic, that exist between the various novelists in this field. He chooses to focus his own interests, though, on ‘those novelists who deliberately steer their texts into rough, open waters, not ideologically safe harbours, and those detectives whose interventions transgress traditional boundaries, disrupt hierarchies, question traditions and traditional assumptions and provoke contradiction’, thus ‘opening up and exposing tensions at play in society as a whole’.

There is something at times a touch programmatic in Pepper’s focus on cultural diversity here, despite his real awareness that traditional axes of race, gender etc. are often very slippery indeed. He starts off looking at those white male writers that he sees as most revealingly illustrating ‘the uneasy relationship between American crime novels and the “dominant” culture’ (Hammett, Thompson, Behm, Ellroy). He then focuses on the particular issue of whiteness as a marker of cultural worth and the problematization and destabilizations of white identity, as it negotiates a broader social world, in fictions by Ellroy (again), Blauner, Price, and O’Conell. He also examines, in this same chapter, the work of female detective writers (Paretsky, Smith, Wilson, Hendricks) and, to conclude, the work of James Lee Burke, whose politicised vision, and crossings of the boundaries of race and class, are strongly praised.
Two chapters then follow on Black Crime Fiction. The first shows how African American writers, both female (Wesley, Neely, Carter) and male (Phillips, Haywood, Baxt, Phillips), utilise the codes of the genre but mould them to their own purposes. He also looks here at the work of James Sallis, whose fictions, and use, as a white writer, of an African American protagonist, are also praised (‘a daringly original body of work’). The chapter that follows, on ‘Social Protest and Racial Politics, gives extended treatment of Chester Himes – a figure whose importance in the American literary tradition is becoming increasingly recognised – and Walter Mosley. Pepper shows how both authors push at the boundaries of the crime fiction genre, as they look to use it as ‘a vehicle for black social commentary’, to the point that ‘it dissolves in their hands’.

The final chapter, ‘America’s Changing Colour: Towards A Multicultural Crime Fiction’ portrays something of the extreme diversity that marks the contemporary American crime novel, and extends his survey of the genre to include crime fictions written by Jewish Americans (Faye Kellerman, Freidman, Charyn) and by Latino / Hispanic Americans (Abella and Nava). The problem here, and throughout, of shunting disparate ethnic groups into a homogeneous category is clearly recognised, though (see below), not always entirely resolved. There also sections in this chapter crime fictions by and about Native American (Hillerman, laFavor) and by the Korean-American, Chang-Rae Lee.

Pepper’s organisational framework and the argument that runs through his book about ‘the fragmented, provisional nature of identities and the intersecting modalities of race, ethnicity, class gender, and sexuality’ are (despite his best efforts) in some tension with one another throughout this book. The material on reader response – reader, as much as author and critic, ‘reconfiguring the social and cultural landscape of the United States’ – is undeveloped. There is the odd tendency too toward the large-scale claim: that ‘hope for the future’, for instance, Pepper sees in the cross-racial bridges in Sallis’s novels. One might question the way, too, that ambiguity and contradiction are privileged as necessarily positive values. But this is still a useful and timely book. The list of authors given above suggests the range of Pepper’s interests and reading and, in this respect, he offers good guidance for those who wish further to explore the field. Both a survey of the genre, and one that offers a series of interesting, and generally acute, critical analyses of the texts with which it engages, this is a book that anyone interested in American crime fiction will want to read.

Peter Messent, University of Nottingham

Dayton Duncan, Miles from Nowhere: Tales from America’s Contemporary Frontier

Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. 320pp. ISBN 0-8032-6627-8. £11.50

What is it about Iowa? Is it by chance that America’s best travel writers (well, two anyway) have come from Iowa? If Dayton Duncan isn’t as funny or well-known as his compatriot Bill Bryson, he has the same eye for detail, penchant for the unusual, and storyteller’s grasp of the many and the varied. Where else would you find the fascinating fact that, on the whole, the elevation of sparsely populated places in the US exceeds their population? A compelling mixture of personal narrative, travelogue and regional history, Miles from Nowhere chronicles the fates of various inhabitants of America’s least inhabited places. Duncan begins with the 1890 census which historians have often used to signal the end of the American frontier, defined as an area that had less than two people per square mile; more than that number indicated a settled area. Today, 132 counties in the 48 contiguous states of the USA are still, by that definition, unsettled, and Duncan set out to examine them all.

His introduction provides his itinerary, motivation, and justification. He argues that America’s ‘contemporary frontier’ is not an ‘abstraction’ but ‘real’, and he drives 30,000 miles to prove it. His itinerary, he readily admits, is ‘the virtual opposite of most modern travelers’ — and all the richer for it. With only his twentieth century prairie schooner (a GMC Suburban) to accompany him, he sought out the least suburban places that the US had to offer. He notes the irony that many of these least inhabited places ‘conform to the popular image of what the old West looked like’ precisely because ‘so many television series and movies, from ‘The Lone Ranger’ to Dances With Wolves, were filmed there’. He doesn’t use the theoretical jargon of simulacra or hyper-reality, but the concepts underlie the surface of what he experiences on his year on the road.

Chapter One, ‘The Big Dry’, focuses on Jordan, Montana. After a catalogue of place names that belie the white settlers’ fears and experiences (‘Dirty Devil River’, ‘Hell’s Half-Acre’, ‘Skeleton Canyon’ and ‘Despair’ are representative examples), Duncan introduces the reader to his first ‘pioneer’ — Margaret Stafford, an 84-year old woman who lives without running water or electricity in a small hut 43 miles from the nearest town, the aforementioned Jordan (population 494). He then moves back in time 100 years to the founding of Jordan and an historical account of the American West, before returning to the present and the contemporary stories that make up his book. He is clear that the inhabitants of these small places do not consider themselves unfortunate, though their lives are hard. They know of the difficulties of unpeopled places — no hospitals, few doctors of any kind, one-room schools that seem unbelievably quaint, given that schools in urban places are overcrowded, violent, and policed. But they also know the benefits — good, individual education (if they can keep the teachers), no discernible crimes, and a sense of hard-won community. In Jordan, there is one of every thing — hair salon, drug store, funeral parlour — and seven churches. It has twice as many professional coyote trappers as lawyers. The narratives of the inhabitants, Duncan suggests, follow a familiar pattern: ‘hopeful arrival, the hard times, the neighbours’ departures, more hard times, the children’s departures’. The people who stay — far outnumbered by those who leave — see themselves as ‘living embodiments of America’s promise’ — both immigrant success stories and settlers of the West. In an era in which both of these narratives have been unpicked by academics, it seems startling to see them claimed so forcefully by the people themselves — yet claimed they are.

Chapter Two, ‘Violence’, examines the role of the ‘right to bear arms’ in the ‘cultural tradition’ of the West and focuses on De Baca County, New Mexico. Duncan gives an historical account of frontier violence, before examining contemporary ‘violent deaths’ — from car accidents, the lethal environment, hunting accident (few contemporary Western gun deaths are the result of murder). Finally, he retraces the convoluted narratives of Billy the Kid, from outlaw to legend to money-maker, for towns with no other discernible reason for existence. Chapter Three, ‘Escape’, begins by examining the religious and mystical reasons for living where few others do and focuses equally on the Mormons (and various polygamous offshoots) and New Age spiritualists. Primarily examining Saguache County, Colorado, this chapter also explores the tensions between wealthy investors selling an escapist fantasy, and local residents who live in such places year round. Duncan here also confronts the frontier’s historical (and contemporary) racism, giving the Seminole Negroes particular space. Since ‘Seminole’ means ‘runaway’, the implicit connection to ‘escape’ is forged — but really this is a narrative of capture. Seminole Negroes were, on the whole, freed or runaway slaves who found themselves servant and ally to the local Indian population. They acted as go-betweens with the local whites, and fought alongside the Indians in the infamous Seminole Wars, which they subsequently lost. Forced to emigrate from Florida to Oklahoma, many of them died along the way; others became Cavalry scouts when moved again to Mexico. That this was not an escape is patently clear. Yet this fits in with the ideas behind the chapter as a whole, which indicate that escape itself is not a general motive for moving to the frontier.

Chapter Four, ‘Boom and Bust’, examines the role of mining in relation to the frontier. Whether it’s gold or oil, what the inhospitable land can provide is a major motive in moving to an area, and various booms (always followed by busts) characterize the fluctuating population of these small towns. Here Duncan introduces his concept of ‘Municipal Darwinism’ and survival of the fittest, noting that in some of these counties, only the county seat now remains. Indeed, sometimes all it takes is advertising: one road, characterized as the ‘loneliest road in America’, saw a huge increase in traffic as contemporary travellers wanted to traverse it. As Duncan sardonically notes, ‘there are roads lonelier than Highway 50 and towns lonelier than Eureka.… But I’m not going to say where they are. It might set off a boomlet nobody could control’. In his wry refusal of the role of travel writer, Duncan injects the occasional humorous moment into his book.

Chapter Five is the shortest chapter of the book, and not surprisingly is called, ‘Below the Irreducible Minimum’. Exploring what happens to a place which shrinks so small that it is in danger of disappearing, this chapter analyses Mentone (inhabitants 17), in Loving County, Texas (the least populated county in the country with 107 people in total). Duncan notes that despite its name, Loving County was ‘the most socially claustrophobic and fractious place’ he had encountered on his journey, and was the one place where he couldn’t find a single cemetery; even the dead leave Loving County.

Chapter Six, ‘Rainbow of the West’, explores the ‘other’ frontier experiences: of women, and of people of colour. Duncan notes that the West was the first area of the US to give women political rights, including the vote, and while the frontier experience was (and is) measurably different for frontier women, it is also a place where individual rights, regardless of gender, are paramount. In contrast to the historical frontier, however, the contemporary frontier is more racially split, with many of the towns he visited containing only people of European extraction. Sadly, though, battles between local whites and Native Americans are as rife as ever, with issues such as poverty, lack of facilities, and lack of education exacerbating problems. Political solutions such as voting Native American officials into local government rarely appeal to the disenfranchised reservation inhabitants.

Chapter Seven, ‘El Despoblado’, takes its name from the desert area of southwest Texas. This is the least cohesive of the chapters, but interesting nonetheless in its exploration of workers (including ministers and UPS drivers) who have to cross vast spaces in a day’s work.

Chapter Eight, ‘Dumping Ground’, is the least optimistic, in its inexorable list of the hazards of living with ‘The Syndrome of Open Spaces’. In such places, one’s relatively weak political power means that the area is disproportionately full of waste dumps and high security prisons. It is subject to water grabs from more populated areas, and, famously, in Nevada, to nuclear testing and other military operations on a massive scale. In addition, the benefits of, say, tourism do not outweigh the drawbacks, and environmentalists who espouse the values of Buffalo Commons or other similar schemes are given short shrift by the locals — and by Duncan, who feels that they do not understand the contemporary experience of the frontier.
The final chapter, ‘Old Frontier, Contemporary Frontier’, explores the competing academic definitions of the frontier, and acknowledges that it is a convenient, if inaccurate, term for the area Duncan explored. It is, moreover, the ‘repository of many national myths’ – which is why, despite its small population, it retains a large space in the contemporary imagination, and in academic textbooks.

This is a fascinating mixture of sociological analysis, personal narrative, and history. The majority of the stories told are stories of white settlers, but Duncan does not neglect the harsher fates of Native and African Americans, though they are tellingly outnumbered by their white counterparts. Despite its occasional sombre note, Miles from Nowhere is an enjoyable book, and it attempts to give voice to the relatively voiceless. It doesn’t shy away from difficult political questions, but it also doesn’t attempt to give any final solutions. Published initially in 1993, this new paperback edition is as fresh as if it had been written yesterday, though one can’t help wondering if, in the last census, more or fewer places became ‘frontier’ country. If, in places, an Americanist may have wished for more cogent analysis, the lay reader will find it a source of many interesting anecdotes, historical facts, and captivating characters.

Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson, University of Central Lancashire

New Members

Dr David Anfam is commissioning Editor at Phaidon Press Ltd, London and special Adviser to C & M Arts, New York. His publications on American art include Abstract Expressionism (1990), Franz Kline: Black & White 1950-1961 (1994) and Clyfford Still: Paintings, 1944-1960 (2001). His Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas (1998) was the result of nine years of research in the US and received the 2000 Mitchell Prize for the History of Art. Currently Dr Anfam’s interests are focused on the art and culture of the Cold War era.

Sophy Anson is studying for a Masters in American Poetry at the University of Essex. She is most interested in the writing of the American South and in particular the work of Faulkner.

Michailidou Artemis is a doctoral candidate at the University of Exeter. Her research interests focus on American Modernism and Contemporary Women’s Writing.

Brian Baker is a lecturer in media at the North East Wales Institute of HE, Wrexham. He completed a PhD in postwar American dystopias in 1998 at the University of Liverpool, after completing an MA in American Studies at UEA. He has published on American science fiction and is currently researching screen masculinities and New Wave science fiction.

Emily Barker is currently undertaking a Masters in American Poetry and Prose at the University of Essex. She intends to proceed to doctoral study. Her subject of interest is American crime and detective novels, particularly Chandler, Hammett, Himes and, more recently, Paul Auster.

Denise Bassy, a doctoral student at Yale, is currently based in London conducting dissertation research on the British colony of Carolina for a project that examines North American-colonist relations with a focus on Native American labour, slavery and captivity. Her teaching and research interests are in Native American Studies, ethnohistorical methods and colonial North and Latin American histories.

Howard Cunnell is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of United States Studies, researching a study of contemporary American fiction writers whose work engages with and abrades dominant cultural ideas and expectations about gender, identity, race and class.

Anthony Emmerson is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Ulster. His research interests are in railroads and the West, the New Deal and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Andrew Flint is a PhD student at Anglia Polytechnic University. His doctoral research is on the presidency and post-presidential work of Jimmy Carter. This project will seek to present a new reading of Carter. Drawing extensively upon primary resource material housed in the Carter presidential library and invoking themes and ideas from International Relations and Economics, he will seek to valorise Carter’s conception of the modern presidency.

Heidi Funderburk is a doctoral candidate at the University of Northumbria, undertaking research into African American women playwrights.

Rebecca Griffin is currently studying for a PhD in American History at the University of Warwick. Her research is concerned with the discourses of love and romance that structured the internal world of African American slaves in nineteenth-century North Carolina. To this end, she has been based in North Carolina from September 2001 to December 2001.

Dr Deborah Lovatt recently completed her PhD on ‘Representations of the Sublime in a Selection of American Films, 1968-1992’. Her doctorate was awarded at the Nottingham Trent University in November 2000. She is currently teaching at Staffordshire University. Her particular interests are the Technological Sublime, Consumerism and Commodity Aesthetics. Current research interests: the ‘Cinema of Astonishment’ and the uses of special effects.

S. Putnam is Head of History at St Wilfrid’s CofE High School, Blackburn. She would welcome advice on available resources — free or otherwise — on American History and American Politics (which her school is commencing to teach in 2001).

Dr Alex Seago is Chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Richmond American International University in London. He completed his first degree at the University of Birmingham and an MA in American Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Burning the Box of Beautiful Things (OUP, 1995), a study of the influence of US graphic design on UK graphic designers in the 1950s and 1960s. He was winner of the Stone-Suderman Prize, awarded by MAASA for best American Studies article of 2000 for ‘”Where Hamburgers Sizzle on an Open Grill Night and Day”: Global Pop and Americanization’. His interests focus on music, graphic design and Americanization.

Members’ News

Mark Newman has recently seen through the publication of Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945-1995 (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, 2001). ISBN 0-8173-1060-6. The book was the winner of the Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize.

David Murray has been awarded a Chair at the University of Nottingham.

Margaret Walsh has been awarded a Chair at the University of Nottingham

American Studies Research at the University of Central Lancashire

Current research projects by the UCLAN team continue to place American Studies in an international context. In addition to directing the ongoing project on Americanization and the Teaching of American Studies (AMATAS), Alan Rice has completed a monograph, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic, to be published by Continuum in July 2002. New Perspectives in Transatlantic Studies, edited by Heidi Macpherson and Will Kaufman, will be published by the University Press of America in December. Further transatlantic developments include the key roles played by members of the team in the upcoming Transatlantic Studies conference to be held at Dundee in July. Will and Heidi will be organising a series of panels, and will participate in the launch of the Transatlantic Studies Association and the new Journal of Transatlantic Studies (Edinburgh University Press). Will Kaufman is series editor for the ABC-Clio Transatlantic Relations Encyclopaedia Series, which is to include volumes on the Black Atlantic (ed. Alan Rice), the Iberian Atlantic (ed. Mike Gonzalez), the French Atlantic (ed. Bill Marshall), and the British Atlantic (eds. Kaufman and Macpherson). Alasdair Pettinger, author of Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic, has been appointed Visiting Research Fellow, and the university has recently hosted the Leverhulme Visiting Professor, Gary Cross, from Penn State University. George McKay and Eithne Quinn have each received AHRB Small Research Grants, and Professor McKay is an editor of Social Protest Studies: A Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, to be launched in February 2002 by Taylor and Francis.

Miscellaneous News

Newberry Library Fellowships in the Humanities, 2002-03
The Newberry Library, an independent research library in Chicago, Illinois, invites applications for its 2002-03 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 (and Ph.D. candidates in the case of the Spencer and Kade Fellowships) 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 21, 2002; applications for most short-term fellowships are due February 20, 2002.

For more information or to download application materials, visit our Web site at www.newberry.org 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.

Dr Steven Casey informs us that, four years after BAAS provided him with a Marcus Cunliffe Award in 1997, enabling him to visit the FDR Library in Hyde Park in order to start work on his doctoral thesis, he has been able to get two publications out of this research that BAAS helped to fund: Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War against Nazi Germany, 1941-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)
‘Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, and the “S-Project”, June 1942-June 1944’, Journal of Contemporary History (2000). Dr Casey provided an acknowledgement in both pieces, but would like to take this opportunity to thank BAAS for their generous support.

Anthony Marasco informs us that the paper he presented at the BAAS Keele conference will be published in a book on New York edited by Bill Boelhower (Amsterdam UP). In the first note, he tells us, he included the following mention: ‘A working draft of this paper was read at the Annual Meeting of the British Association for American Studies at Keele, Staffordshire, April 7, 2001’.

BAAS Membership of Committees

(including co-opted members and invited observers)

Executive Committee Elected:
Professor Philip Davies (Chair, first elected 1998, term ends 2004)
Dr Nick Selby (Treasurer, first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Dr Jenel Virden (Secretary, first elected 1998, term ends 2002)
Professor Janet Beer (first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Professor Susan Castillo (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
Professor Dick Ellis (first elected 1999, term ends 2002)
Dr Paul Giles (first elected 1999, term ends 2002)
Dr Michael McDonnell (first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Dr Heidi Macpherson (first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Dr Simon Newman (first elected 1999, term ends 2002)
Dr Carol Smith (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
Dr Graham Thompson (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)

p/grad:
Ms Celeste-Marie Bernier (first elected 2000, term ends 2002)*

ex officio:
Professor Richard Gray (Editor, Journal, term ends 2001)
Dr Iain Wallace (Chair, Library & Resouces Subcommittee)

co-opted:
Ms Kathryn Cooper

Development sub committee
Dr Paul Giles (Chair)
Professor Phil Davies
Dr Heidi Macpherson
Dr Simon Newman
Ms Celeste-Marie Bernier (post-grad)
Dr Iain Wallace (ex-officio)

Publications sub committee
Professor Janet Beer (Chair)
Dr Jenel Virden
Professor Susan Castillo
Professor Dick Ellis (Editor, American Studies in Britain)
Dr Graham Thompson (webster)
Professor Richard Gray (Editor of Journal of American Studies)
Professor George McKay (Associate Editor of Paperbacks)
Professor Richard Simmons (Editor of BRRAM)
Ms Kathryn Cooper (co-opted)

Conference sub committee
Dr Michael McDonnell (Chair)
Dr Nick Selby
Dr Carol Smith
Miss Andrea Beighton (Oxford, Conference Secretary 2002)
Professor Alan Ryan (Oxford, Conference Secretary 2002)
Dr Tim Woods (Aberystwyth, Conference Secretary 2003)

Libraries and Resources Subcommittee
Dr Kevin Halliwell

BAAS representative to EAAS
Prof Mick Gidley (term ends 2002)*

[* indicates this person not eligible for re-election to this position. All co-optations must be reviewed annually.]

Sir Malcolm Bradbury, 1932-2000

At the time of his death Malcolm was working on three projects: a three-part drama-documentary based on the wartime encounters of Churchill and Roosevelt, a novel dealing with the travels of the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, and a second novel concerning the CIA’s financing of Britain’s post-war literary culture. The first was an Anglo-American TV enterprise, a big-budget affair—which it needed to be, given that the first episode required two battleships. The second appealed to him because Chateaubriand wrote his much-embellished account of his transatlantic adventures in Norfolk—in a house well known to Malcolm by virtue of belonging to a fellow Norfolk novelist and friend, Elizabeth Jane Howard. The third project intrigued him for personal reasons, not that he had ever knowingly received CIA money but because of the way American largesse (and who could say through what labyrinthine channels it came?) had shaped his own career and that of a whole generation of British American Studies scholars.

Malcolm came from what he once described as ‘that strange hinterland just above the working but not quite safely into the middle classes’. He started life as a sickly child. (He later became one of the first adults to undergo open-heart surgery.) Instead of playing games he spent a great deal of time in libraries. The 1940s were austere times: fuel was in short supply, sources of entertainment were few, and libraries warm places to linger. Even paper was rationed. Yet, surprisingly, in his local library he found generous deposits of literary reviews—The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, Partisan Review, even The American Scholar. How they came to be in a little Nottinghamshire library he did not enquire. But whatever the fairy godmother responsible (USIS?), they caught his attention. He was especially struck by the way Jewish writers—Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Norman Mailer, and Bernard Malamud—spoke up for humanistic values in spite of the horrors of the times. To Malcolm it seemed that American writing had an energy, a sense of intellectual abundance, not found in contemporary British writing.

In 1950, Malcolm went on to the University of Leicester, not even a proper redbrick but a provincial appendage of the University of London. American Literature was not on offer, literature as a whole being deemed to have ended sometime around the end of the nineteenth century. However, in his second year he did win a summer-vacation scholarship to visit the US and Canada with a view to comparing their broadcasting systems with that of Britain. The trip began with a two-day, land-hopping flight across the Atlantic in a canvas-topped Icelandic Airlines Dakota, one of whose engines failed along the way. Presumably this scholarship was not CIA-funded because on arrival at New York he learned that the awarding body had run out of money. He and his fellow travellers were given the choice of flying back to Britain or remaining penniless in North America. Having a ticket for Toronto, Malcolm took the latter option, spending most of the summer working for a gardening contractor mowing suburban lawns. With his earnings in his pocket he returned to New York. He had allowed himself a few days to see the sights before re-boarding his Dakota, but on arrival it turned out that the flight had been delayed for several days. So for a week he husbanded his money, slept at the YMCA, wandered the streets, sat on park benches, subsisted on 25 cent breakfasts at Horn and Hardart Automats, and attracted the attention of suspicious policemen.

Malcolm’s second visit, in 1955, began in an altogether more stately fashion. It paralleled the experience of a whole generation of aspiring scholars, journalists, writers, scientists, and politicians—practically the whole of Britain’s future elite—who travelled to America as Fulbright Fellows, bearing full-sized chest x-rays in sealed envelopes, and visas issued on the understanding that they were neither ‘perverts’ nor intent on overthrowing the United States Government by force. Then, and for many years afterwards, taking money out of Britain required Treasury approval, granted only in cases deemed of national importance. This was a category insufficiently broad to include scholarship, or, as in Malcolm’s case, teaching commas and full-stops to football jocks at Indiana University. But in those days American beneficence seemed limitless. So too did American plenitude. It impressed Malcolm the moment he stepped on board the Queen Mary. Even in economy class, the meals were of an amazing sumptuousness by the standards of post-war Britain. It struck him even more on arrival in New York. America was a wonderland of consumer splendours. Wandering into a friend’s kitchen he marvelled at the gadgets it contained. There was, he discovered, even a grinder in the middle of the sink for disposing of kitchen refuse. His astonishment conveyed itself to his host’s father, who, taking a chicken out of the refrigerator, thrust it down the grinder. Together they stood and watched it slowly disappear down the gurgling hole. ‘At that moment’, Malcolm later wrote, ‘I knew that I had seen America, and that it worked’.

After provincial Britain he found life in the United States liberating. It was not just the size and wealth of the country that impressed him but its optimism and openness to new ideas. His students were no great shakes, but among the faculty he found friends, and on trips he encountered fellow writers. It was in Indiana, Malcolm later claimed, that he first began to feel like a writer rather than like someone who merely wrote. Magazines accepted his stories. He bought a car for ten dollars and drove out West. The world, it seemed, was his oyster.

Other trips followed. In 1958-59 he spent a year at Yale on a BAAS scholarship, working on his Manchester PhD, and was offered a post in the English Department. Instead, his fiancée Elizabeth not much relishing the idea of life in New Haven, he returned to England, got married and took up a job teaching in the University of Hull’s extramural department. Two years later he moved to Birmingham, where he became involved in the foundation stages of Richard Hoggart’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This led him to think about ways of linking literary studies to history and sociology. Much of the most interesting work on interdisciplinary approaches had come out of America—Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam, and David Potter’s People of Plenty. It was thus a natural step, in 1965, for Malcolm to move to the University of East Anglia, where interdisciplinarity was built into the curriculum and, again with US financial assistance, moves were afoot to create an American Studies sector within what up to that time had been a School based on English History and Literature.

East Anglia had other attractions. One was a creative writing course run by Angus Wilson that Malcolm eventually took over. Another was his colleagues’ close association with BAAS and EAAS. It was largely as a result of the efforts of Chris Bigsby and Harry Allen that the Amsterdam-based, undemocratic and somewhat secretive EAAS (sitting, it was rumoured, on an accumulated fortune deriving from successive American grants) was persuaded to open its books and assume its present shape. As these UEA-EAAS links blossomed, Harry having been elected the first new-style EAAS President, Malcolm found himself becoming as much a Mid-European as a Mid-Atlantic Man. Soon he was as much at home in Hamburg and Budapest as in Boston and Denver. British Council assignments helped. But it was as much through his American interests as his British that he became involved in Eastern Europe. He loved travel, parties, and intellectual stimulation, all of which life behind the Iron Curtain, in spite of its privations, proved able to supply in abundance. Eastern Europe, he found, was full of oddities—strange people and peculiar situations—a treasure trove for a comic novelist like himself. It was presumably his absence on these travels that led to someone pencilling on the wall of one of UEA’s toilets: ‘QUESTION: What is the difference between Malcolm Bradbury and God? ANSWER: God is everywhere. Malcolm Bradbury is everywhere except here’. Although an inveterate traveller he was a singularly disorganised one, being in the habit of leaving passports, lecture notes and pieces of clothing in his wake. Having departed on one expedition he rang his wife Elizabeth to say ‘I’m at Liverpool Street Station. Where am I going?’ When Angus Wilson heard the story he said ‘I could have told him where he’s going. He’s going to the top’.

And to the top Malcolm went, as his knighthood and the avalanche of tributes from all over the world that followed his death bear witness. He was, of course, primarily a writer. What he wrote covered an extraordinary range: novels, TV and film scripts, literary history and criticism, stage plays, poems, satires, parodies, reviews, anthologies. His output was prodigious. Whenever one called on him, whether at home or in his office, he was writing. When he found time to read was a mystery. While working with him on the successive editions of our jointly-edited Introduction to American Studies I was continually astonished by his ability to sit down and re-write long passages of other people’s prose in what seemed the blink of an eye. It was high-handed, but no one ever complained. Perhaps our contributors were agreeably surprised by what they appeared to have written.

‘Human flesh’, The New York Times obituary quotes Malcolm as saying, ‘was intended as a highly imperfect and disappointingly mortal carapace for housing something a good deal better, the human mind’. Often it seemed that what went on inside his mind was more real to him than what went on outside. One of the most perceptive things he wrote about himself was in Unsent Letters, supposedly in reply to a question about how to be a writer’s wife. He advises his fictional correspondent against seeking to be either a muse or a fellow writer. Muses are fickle and writers are rivalrous. A writer’s wife, he explains, should dedicate herself to coping with the real world, paying bills, booking flights, dealing with the telephone, leaving the writer free to pursue the life of the mind. The tone is facetious but the portrait he paints of a writer’s ideal marriage and of a wife’s role within it bears a remarkable resemblance to his own and to the part played by Elizabeth in running an increasingly large establishment and keeping him regularly supplied with tobacco money.

Malcolm could never remember if he was present at the foundation of BAAS in 1955 or whether his first conference was the following year, but he was certainly a member virtually from the start and for a long time chaired its publications committee. He enjoyed BAAS conferences as much for the conviviality of late night drinking as for their formal sessions. Partly because writing is such a lonely business, but also because he was naturally gregarious, he delighted in the travel, the company, the beer, the gossip, the liberation of being away from his typewriter, the sense of participating in a moveable feast that brought old friends together once a year in diverse places and agreeably scholarly surroundings. Those who encountered him, whether over the bottles of wine he brought to dinner or in the bar afterwards, will recall the warmth of his company, his relish for new ideas, his amusement at other people’s pomposities, and his own lack of pretentiousness.

Although ill for almost a year, Malcolm continued to work with undiminished energy. Seeing him at the keyboard of his typewriter reminded one of the man at the Wurlitzer organ in the cinemas of his youth. The impression of virtuosity and versatility was alike. Only, instead of notes cascading out, it might be anything from episodes of Inspector Morse to reflections on the nature of post-modernism. Perhaps the Churchill-Roosevelt drama-documentary will one day appear on our screens, always providing someone can be found to put together the later episodes (and two battleships can be rustled up). The two novels, alas, were left in too unfinished a state for anyone to perform a like service. His friends will miss his congenial company. His distinctive chuckle will no longer be heard at late-night conference gatherings. The world, in short, has become a poorer place.

Howard Temperley

Report on PGCE Applications and American Studies Students

As a result of concern expressed by American Studies colleagues regarding a perceived evidence of bias against American Studies students in the admissions process for teacher training places, Philip Davies as Chair of BAAS undertook to write to all PGCE providers regarding their entrance criteria. In a letter sent in February of this year, Professor Davies noted that UCET, TTA and DfEE guidance did not preclude American Studies graduate applications, and asked individual providers to indicate their own stance towards American Studies students. The responses were mixed.

Of the 60 institutions approached, 22 provided replies within the deadline set by Davies. Responses were received from Anglia Polytechnic University, Bristol, Brunel, Exeter, Kingston, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool Hope, Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, Newcastle, North London, Nottingham, Nottingham Trent, Reading, Southampton, Sunderland, Sussex, University of Wales/Aberystwyth, University Wales/Swansea, Warwick and West of England. Their responses have been collated into a report here.

PGCE providers were aware that their responses would be circulated amongst the American Studies community; it is perhaps for this reason that several of the responses tended towards a political blandness. The most common response was that quality candidates from any field—so long as they fulfilled individual requirements—were welcomed; unfortunately, these responses rarely included detailed prospectuses or application information. Where they did so, their own requirements seemed to make it difficult for single honours American Studies students to pursue their courses. Joint or combined honours students appeared to fare better, especially when they had English or History as a complementary subject. This implicit bias against single honours American Studies students was sometimes the result, universities suggested, of increased competition for places, especially in History and the Social Sciences; as a result, it was possible for particular institutions to interpret DfEE guidelines quite rigidly. A number of universities commented that while DfEE had indicated that places were not restricted in principle, this was not always the case in fact; indeed, one went so far as to suggest that ‘DfEE have and TTA are being a little disingenuous’ when they claim that American Studies students are not being barred from PGCEs. Another suggested that ‘despite protestations of the DfEE that entry can be very flexible… providers are in competition with each other and that makes us cautious’. A third institution acknowledged that their entry requirements appeared restrictive, but pointed to DfEE and Ofsted instructions. Ominously, the letter ended on the final note, ‘I have no doubt that the messages you receive are very different to those that we receive, but we must act upon our own understanding of the situation’.

The fact is, American Studies is not a National Curriculum subject; the nearest to it are English, History, and Social Sciences, the three most popular and generally over-subscribed subjects on a PGCE. As one provider ruefully reported, ‘were mathematics included in American Studies, the situation would be different!’ Thus American Studies students face stiff competition for limited places, though two institutions (Leicester, Bristol) indicated that applications for English were falling, and American Studies students would have a better chance in that area. Conversely, Aberystwyth indicated that an American Studies degree would not be considered sufficient preparation for an English PGCE, but might be for a History one; clearly no general consensus exists.

On a more encouraging note, two universities positively welcomed American Studies applicants. The University of Nottingham was ‘delighted’ to accept them, precisely because of their interdisciplinarity. Indeed, Nottingham very clearly signalled that any rumour about American Studies students’ ineligibility for PGCE places was untrue. Swansea also favourably responded, saying that, on their History PGCE course, ‘some of our best students in the past have been American Studies students’ who ‘did indeed possess the cross-discipline skills mentioned in your letter’.

Reading also provided a positive response, and had a history of taking American Studies students on its History PGCE. Furthermore, they rightly acknowledged that ‘someone doing a pure Ancient History degree (even though acceptable as a ‘History Degree’) also has many gaps’ in National Curriculum knowledge, and is, therefore, no different from an American Studies applicant. However, as with most institutions, Reading required that applicants demonstrate that 50% of their degree was in History. Indeed, the requirement for 40-50% of an applicant’s degree to be in a National Curriculum subject was quoted by Aberystwyth, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool Hope, Manchester Metropolitan, Newcastle, Nottingham Trent and Sussex. MMU indicated that the 50% requirement was a discretionary one, in that each case was examined individually; however, most universities seemed to suggest that this was not a very flexible requirement. Helpfully, some gave strategies for American Studies students to prove that their degree was eligible; this information comes under ‘Strategy’ later in this report.

Nottingham Trent gave figures for primary PGCE applications which bear repeating. For 50 places, they had 289 applications, of which 9 included American Studies, 3 of whom were offered a place. While these are small numbers, percentage-wise this is a favourable result. Newcastle also suggested that primary PGCE places would be open to American Studies students. For secondary PGCE places, they recommended that applicants contact the relevant tutor in the first instance. Aberystwyth also welcomed American Studies applicants onto a primary PGCE.

Other responses were somewhat mixed. Brunel was willing to consider American Studies applicants, but did not provide any concrete details. Manchester, though noting that their courses were oversubscribed, indicated a willingness to receive applications from American Studies students. Sunderland would take American Studies students for History or English, provided they had a relevant A level, a good percentage of their degree in either subject, and a 2.1 average overall. Manchester Metropolitan University noted that American Studies students ‘need to make a strong case and demonstrate explicitly the relevance of their studies to the training subject’. Liverpool Hope confirmed that ‘in principle, applications from students with a degree in American Studies can gain access to ITT PGCE Secondary Courses’.

Some institutions clearly preferred to take American Studies students onto History degrees, others onto English or Media Studies. The information below is subject-specific.

History PGCE
Aberystwyth, Exeter, Kingston, Reading and Southampton were open to students doing a History PGCE. (Aberystwyth did not, however, support American Studies students doing English.) Exeter and Sussex both noted that from 2001 they are providing PGCE History with Citizenship, which American Studies students with significant history elements in their degrees might wish to undertake. This route would be easier than a straight History route. Exeter also stressed the importance of the Political Science elements of an American Studies degree.

English PGCE
The University of North London was prepared to take American Studies students onto its PGCE English with media/drama secondary course, so long as they could ‘demonstrate an ability to understand and critically analyse texts and show a knowledge of some texts taught in schools e.g. Shakespeare and those authors on the A level English Lit syllabuses’. Sussex was willing to consider American Studies students in principle, but would prefer students with a joint degree in English and American Literature; American Studies students would have to prove their case, and only ‘high-calibre’ candidates were likely to be taken on. Bristol indicated that English was soon to be designated a ‘shortage’ subject and, with additional independent or on-line study, American Studies students might be eligible for a place there.

Strategy
Helpfully, a number of universities offered concrete advice to students who are seeking places. Most focused on the GTTR form which students were asked to use to its fullest. As one tutor noted, ‘the clearer an applicant can be about the areas studied in his/her application, the more likely she/he is to be considered for an interview’. This also included the need to stress A level and any other subject-relevant background. A clear knowledge of National Curriculum topics was essential, as was, often, experience in schools, especially for primary PGCE applicants. As Newcastle noted, ‘we strongly recommend that candidates spend some time working alongside teachers in schools prior to application (and certainly before interview) to get a feel of the demands and expectations of modern primary teaching’.

Reading noted that applicants should indicate that they ‘have strategies in place which will allow them to gain the knowledge base they require for National Curriculum’ if it appears that their degree does not offer this. Furthermore, any compensatory skills or additional strengths should be highlighted; for American Studies students, this might include a focus on multi- or interdisciplinarity. Finally, of course, contact with the relevant tutor was seen as an essential way of gauging whether or not an application was likely to be looked upon favourably.

Conclusions
The message appears to be: American Studies students need to do their research before applying for PGCE places in order to avoid disappointment. They need to be upfront about their skills and knowledge base, highlighting National Curriculum subjects and selling themselves as thoroughly as they can. Clearly, joint or combined degree American Studies students may be better able to fulfil universities’ PGCE criteria depending on their other subjects plus some elements of their American Studies degree. Single honours students might have trouble achieving a 50% designation of National Curriculum subjects, and so need to be counselled early in their degrees on appropriate optional modules if they wish to pursue a teaching position, or at least be prepared to work independently to achieve a larger knowledge base. One strategy may be that students should pursue a dissertation with a title that can be ‘read’ as focusing on a National Curriculum subject (while maintaining, of course, the interdisciplinary focus which is often a requirement of final year projects in American Studies). The more knowingly a candidate approaches the application process, the more likely a teacher training institution will be to perceive the ‘additional strengths’ that can balance any partial lack of National Curriculum subject base.

Report compiled by Heidi Macpherson, Central Lancashire, from materials collected by Philip Davies, De Montfort.

American Studies, Placements and Residence Abroad

(with thanks to Phil Davies) It is becoming very apparent that placement procedures are coming under increased scrutiny in the general process of racking up processes of monitoring within higher education. For example, anyone who includes placements within their provision of the possibility of study abroad as part of their degree provision will need to look at the ‘QAA Draft Code of Practice: Placement Learning’. This can be found at http://www.qaa.ac.uk/public/cop/COPplacement/letter.htm. As John Randall points out in the covering letter: ‘This is a section of the overall Code of Practice which is being prepared by the QAA’. The draft code also points out that all institutions should be able to demonstrate their adherence to the code within one year of its publication.

This code on placement learning is intended to cover the ‘many forms’ available, ‘e.g. short, extended; full-time, part-time; paid, unpaid; and studying or working abroad’, in various locations, including ‘the enrolment of students on a course at an overseas university’. The placement code was distributed to ‘heads of HEIs’ for comment in December 2000, immediately before the Christmas break. You may already have seen the document if it has been distributed in your institution. However it is clear that some heads of HEIs have not associated the title ‘placement learning’ with ‘study abroad’. The deadline for feedback was 16 February 2001.

It may be that the new code on placements will lead to many of us rethinking our placement abroad procedures. If this is the case, then it may be worth considering drawing on the extensive developments that have occurred in recent years in terms of developing best practices in residence abroad. For example, preparation for residence abroad for students has been extensively developed in recent work by three FDTL (Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning) Languages Projects, but it has been recognised that the materials and methods developed and the best practice identified can be equally useful for students in other disciplines for whom study abroad forms part of their course. While these students may not have language learning as their principal motivation for spending time abroad they will certainly find themselves involved in cross-cultural exchanges and will encounter the many practical challenges of living, studying or working abroad.

It is now perhaps simply not enough to argue that students will learn about the culture, society and mores of the USA simply by the very process of being sent to America for a sustained period. This ‘osmotic theory’ of the benefits of placement abroad has been increasingly criticised in the QAA reviews that have occurred-especially in languages, where placement abroad was identified as an area in which best practice should be much more widely disseminated and adopted (though it also has to be said that the American Studies QAA did not highlight this issue). It is very probable that any future teaching/learning review processes in American Studies will want to examine this area much more intensively. And, anyway, it might be reasonably argued that we owe it to our students to enable them to get as much as they can out of their placment abroad, and the principle of ‘osmosis’ just does not guarantee this. It is perhaps the case that just ensuring our students are enrolled upon appropriate modules in the American University to which they are to be sent is not enough. (After all, we are not sending them to the USA solely to study modules taught by Americans in America, are we?)

To this end a workshop on residence abroad was set up in November last year by the Subject Centre in Language, Lingusitics and Area Studies. This drew upon the work done by two of the main residence abroad FDTL projects-LARA (Learning and Residence Abroad), Rapport (Residence Abroad at Portsmouth)-and the Interculture Project at Lancashire. It was intended to help staff prepare their students for residence abroad and to better integrate that experience into their course as a whole. It also considered issues relating to the accreditation of study abroad (this segment being led by Phil Davies and reciprocally offering some best practice guidelines to Language teachers who had often not considered these issues in as much detail as American Studies lecturers). Each project presented its work, concentrating in particular upon those aspects of it that related most closely to the needs of non-linguists. There were also case study presentations from non-language specialists who have experience in this field.

For further details of the projects see:
Rapport: http://www.hum.port.ac.uk/slas/rapport/traffic-light.html
LARA: http://lara.fdtl.ac.uk/lara/index.htm
Interculture: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/interculture/about.htm

It is just not possible to summarise all that occurred in the fascinating workshop that resulted, from which Phil Davies and I learned a great deal. (I will, however, summarily observe that Phil and I were the only two Americanists at this workshop, despite its being extensively publicised on the BAAS mailbase.) What follows, instead, are two articles drawing upon the FDTL projects (by Sylvie Toll & John Dunn and Celia Roberts). These are proceeded by a brief summary of some preliminary activities that a number of different institutions undertaken to prepare students for residence abroad that were identified as best practice in the QAA in Languages. LARA expands on some of the following. You might what to consider which (if any!) of the following would be worth adopting/adapting.

1. Introducing Learning Agreements. This involves a one-hour briefing session and two one-hour sessions with each student on an individual basis prior to departure, to draw up individual agreements on what they are seeking from studying abroad. On return students are debriefed on a one-to-one basis. This provides a possible way of assessing ‘transferable skills’. The Learning Agreement can be given credits.
2. Introducing Learning Packs. Produce a pack of study materials with tasks to perform and return to the department at regular intervals whilst abroad. Again this could be credit-rated.
3. For students going to a host university, exploring the issue of the marks awarded at the host university being out-of-kilter with marks awarded at the ‘home’ university. Prepare a pack or give some sessions familiarising students with the academic expectations of the host university and that university’s academic culture (what sort of classes are used; how to make the most of them; the host’s library structure). This can be accompanied by some tasks to be performed during the period of residence abroad, perhaps tasks playing to the particular strengths of the host university (e.g., special collections). Again, credit rating is a possibility.
4. Releasing staff to work on learning packs for the period of residence abroad. This could be a mix of learning tasks, diaries, log-books, etc. Again, credit rating is possible.
5. Devising a new, more detailed student report-possibly coupled to a staff visit during placement.
6. Devising a new residence abroad module for students-the careers and international office might be able to help set this up-elements could include:
   • Practical information sessions.
   • Elements of intercultural learning.
   • Background information.
   • Exercises to help students identity the kinds of transferable skills they might hope to acquire from residence abroad.
     Plainly, this should be credit rated and ideally would involve work when on placement.
7. Running a free, compulsory, weekend residential workshop on residence abroad, with sessions on all aspects of the year abroad, from role-play games exploring cultural issues or problem solving, to practical sessions on banking, insurance etc. Credit rating might be possible.
8. Making staff development your first move rather than curriculum change. Enrol key staff on the LARA Residence Abroad Project’s distance learning module and organise a number of sessions during the year for staff to suggest and explore different models of residence abroad preparation, for later discussion by the whole department.
9. Introducing a new course in Ethnography involving basic ethnographic skills and training students to observe the new culture in which they would find themselves as well as taking a close look at their own. This could involve an ethnographic project to be taken during the residence abroad period and be accredited on return. This could well include a learner agreement (see below) and would be credit rated.
10. Having a ‘Residence Abroad Fair’ at the start of Year Two and, perhaps, a follow-up event near the end of the year. Set up in the fair stalls/information points, ‘staffed’ by returning and/or exchange students for each of the exchange universities. Get as much information from returning students (including getting them to bring material back with them). Other activities linked to this could be Q&A sessions with returning students, careers services sessions, guest speakers (employer extolling exchange programme’s benefits; visitors from host university, etc.).
11. Introducing learner agreements to establish learning and personal objectives for students during their time abroad. This will require group sessions and individual discussions both before and after residence abroad. Could be credit rated.

What follows are descriptions of part of the activities of two of the FDTL projects on residence abroad.

Acquiring Intercultural Competence

A module for the Period of Residence Abroad. Developed within the context of the ‘Interculture Project’, http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/interculture/about.htm, the module is presently piloted at the University of Central Lancashire.

From 1997 to 2000, three FDTL projects on the Period of Residence Abroad (PRA) were developed concurrently: the RAPPORT project based at Portsmouth, LARA, based at Oxford Brookes and the Lancaster-based Interculture Project. Whereas the first two projects had quite broad remits, the Interculture Project focused on mapping out obstacles hindering students’ intercultural competence and on defining how they might best be prepared and supported.

The module described below was designed in the final year of the project in order to provide an appropriate vehicle for the pedagogical use of the ‘deliverables’ of the project. These include two large databases of student accounts of residence abroad, intercultural incidents, quizzes and a substantive report on the use of diaries as a learning tool. The module offers Year Abroad Tutors a model for developing a structured progression for students through the whole experience of residence abroad—before, during and after.

Owing to the original remit of the Interculture Project, the databases of students’ accounts of their experiences relate to sojourns in France, Spain and Germany. However, the module itself is adaptable to all students preparing to go abroad: its present intake in the Department of Languages at the University of Central Lancashire includes students preparing to go to China, Japan and Mexico. The programme relates to the practice of sending students on a year abroad, be it to a country where a foreign language is spoken predominantly or to an anglophone country.

The starting point for the module is the argument previously presented by Paige, Bennett, Jordan & Roberts, Cormeraie and others, that capability in one’s culture is a necessary starting point for developing cross-cultural capability. As a framework, the module uses Byram and Zarate’s ‘Savoirs’ model of Intercultural Competence.

The module, which is divided into two parts, spans the three stages of preparing for, experiencing and returning from the Period of Residence Abroad (PRA). Preparation during the semester preceding the PRA consists of twelve workshops. Since de-briefing is an integral part of the programme, the PRA is followed by six sessions, mostly in the workshop format.

The module as a whole is divided into five broad areas:

• diary and portfolio as tools for monitoring one’s intercultural learning
• introduction to cultural identity
• stereotypes and critical incidents
• sociolinguistic awareness and competence
• expectations, objectives, motivation

Tutorial support is provided by a Module Tutor, a Student Services Counsellor with a solid background in intercultural issues, Foreign Language teachers for the areas concerned by the PRA, and a Careers Tutor (following the PRA).

Students keep a personal log/diary, reflecting on the impact of the course and the experience of the residence abroad. The learning log spans the entire length of the module and forms the basis of an analytical account which is to be written at the end of the second half of the module.

A portfolio of activities is compiled during the semester preceding the PRA. Tasks include results of searches on PRA project websites, fieldwork undertaken in the area of sociolinguistics—English and the Foreign Language as appropriate—and a brief report on the impact which the first half of the module has had on the intercultural learning process.

The ‘Introduction to Cultural Identity’ forms the basis of three two-hourly workshops. The first two workshops (Topic One) deal with ‘The Self; Issues of Conformity; Norms of Behaviour’ and are led by a Student Services Counsellor. Although these workshops are not expected to be invasive, it is important to avoid a ‘DIY’ approach. Overall, the aims and objectives are to review meanings of ‘culture’, to define ‘home culture’, to enable students to understand the concept of intercultural awareness and identify causes of intercultural misunderstandings. This implies facilitating the process of self-reflection in terms of attitudinal issues, judgementalism, ethnocentrism: this is when long held assumptions are unpacked and challenged—awareness often only comes when these are challenged.

‘Subcultures and Micro-communities. Personal Sociogram’ (Topic Two) aims to challenge the idea of a ‘macro-culture’, by demonstrating that many cultures exist under the umbrella of one ‘culture’. It also gives the students the opportunity to reflect upon their adherence to diverse social circles and aims to enable them to develop attitudes and strategies which will help them adapt, via their own sociogram, to life in a foreign country and operate autonomously in that country.

The ‘Stereotypes and Critical Incidents’ workshops further address the issue of stereotyping, contrasting representations of the British to stereotypical representations of others. Intercultural Incidents are discussed and students reflect upon their preference for open ended or single solution incidents. The aims of these workshops are to challenge views which may hinder intercultural competence and to discuss the usefulness of certain stereotypes.

The area of ‘Sociolinguistic Awareness and Competence’ consists of two topics: ‘Linguistic Diversity in Home Culture’ and ‘Linguistic Diversity in Host Culture’. The former topic is eminently suitable for students preparing to spend their PRA in an anglophone country. The aim is to consider the importance of sociocultural factors which influence the choice of language used and to discourage students from making assumptions about linguistic correctness in encounters.

‘Expectations, motivations, objectives’ are key factors in the experience of residence abroad and feature in the programme both at preparation stage and on return. The workshops aim to enable students to clarify their objectives for personal and professional development, to identify opportunities offered by the PRA, to recognise personal skills affecting their ability to adapt to living abroad, to increase the potential for acquiring transferable organisational skills and enhance their employability.

On return, a Careers Tutor leads a workshop to enable students to define and audit the skills they acquired during the PRA and to translate those employability skills into real-life applications.

The assessment format consists of a portfolio (prior to the PRA), a presentation (as part of the de-briefing on return) and an analytical account based on the personal learning log (to be submitted at the end of part two of the module).

Full details of the module, suggested learning activities and all project ‘deliverables’ can be accessed on: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/interculture.

Sylvie Toll (Module Tutor: stoll@uclan.ac.uk)

John Dunn (Head of Counselling, Student Services: jcdunn@uclan.ac.uk)

Cultural Studies and Language Learning: An Ethnographic Approach to the Year Abroad

1. A taught module of 45 classroom hours in the second year of a four year languages degree (prior to going abroad). Combined basic anthropological and sociolinguistic concepts with a methodological component introducing ethnographic techniques. Weekly assignments-data collection & analysis. Students write a ‘home ethnography’ assignment as part of the assessment of this module-applying the ethnographic methods they have been taught.
2. An ethnographic study while abroad. Students go to two different countries, each for about 5 months and do an ethnographic study in one of the two, usually the first. Undertake extensive fieldwork, produce a highly focused textual account of a particular group or set of practices in that country. Visited by Ealing lecturer.
3. Writing up the ethnographic project (in the foreign language) on return from abroad (5-7,000 words) Tutorial support given. Project counts as part of the final degree.

Introduction to Ethnography Module Course Units:

1. Preparing for fieldwork
2. What is an ethnographic approach?
3. Non-verbal communication and social space
4. Shared cultural knowledge
5. Families and households
6. Gender relations
7. Ethnography of education
8. Participant observation
9. Ethnographic conversations
10. Ethnographic interviewing
11. From data collection to analysis
12. Data analysis-2
13. National identity and local boundaries
14. Language and social identities
15. Local-level politics
16. Belief and action-1: symbolic classification
17. Belief and action-2: discourse and power
18. Writing an ethnographic project

Example activity from unit 4: ‘Shared cultural knowledge’

Discussion point:
Four people sitting together in a restaurant get up from the table, having paid the bill, and leave a few coins on the table. As three of them leave the restaurant, the fourth goes to the ‘Ladies’. When she returns, she scoops up the money left on the table. What is going on?

Example activity from unit 16: ‘Belief and action-1: symbolic classification’

Discussion point:
Eating Habits: Taste or symbol?

References

Agar M (1986), Speaking of Ethnography. Sage Publications.

Barro, A, Byram M, et al (1993), ‘Cultural studies for advanced language learners’, in Graddol, Thompson & Byram (eds) Language Culture. BAAL Papers 7. Multilingual Matters.

Barro A, Jordan S & Roberts C (1998), ‘Cultural practice in everyday life: the language learner as ethnographer’, in Byram & Fleming (eds) Language Learning in Intercultural Perspective. CUP.

Hammersley, M & Atkinson, P (1983), Ethnography: Principles in Practice. Tavistock.

Jordan, S & Barro, A (1995), ‘The effect of ethnographic training on the year abroad’, in Parker & Rouxeville (eds) ‘The Year Abroad’: Preparation, Monitoring, Evaluation. CILT.

Roberts, C (1994), ‘Cultural studies & student exchange’, in Byram (ed) Culture and Language Learning in HE. Multilingual Matters.

Roberts, C, Byram, M, Barro, A, Jordan, S, & Street, B (Forthcoming), Language Learners as Ethnographers. To be published by Multilingual Matters later this year.

Spradley, J (1979), The Ethnographic Interview. Rinehart & Winston.

Representative statements from students:

• We’re living this ethnography project 24 hours a day, so we couldn’t stop if we wanted to… it’s made me much more aware of not just what people are saying, but also of how they’re saying it… I’ve been casting my net wide to get a feeling for what I want to look at, which has made me do a lot more, talk to people a lot more and go to places I would never have gone to otherwise.
• [At college] you get loads of facts. Most of it isn’t your own, but this is all my own, none of this is anyone else’s.
• I am more aware of the way I observe people, and observe myself in relation to those people.
• Their project [other Ealing students] was something that they could just go home after lectures and do for an hour or two… finish and that’s it, switch off. They would be researching it in books or whatever as well as pamphlets… But… ethnography is something you had to do all the time, so I felt it made my time there more productive for me.
• If someone goes abroad doing an ethnographic project, she is going to be talking all the time… the most I got to talk was when I did the interviews. I am really glad I did it because it was a conversation as well as the project… I would never have had the guts to go up to people to speak to them if I had not done ethnography.
• I like words. I like the use of words. I like playing with words. And before ethnography, I suppose I didn’t know that the same word would have to certain people slightly different meanings… I would tend to use the dictionary’s interpretation of certain words and okay, that’s very interesting, but what is even more interesting is how people see that word, rather than what the dictionary says.
• It did help because it forced me to go and talk to people, which I wouldn’t have done. I would have quite happily sat down at my desk and done my law work, taken my books. I would have quite happily done that because I felt so cut off when I arrived in Germany, that that’s basically what I would have done.
• The first thing is I think my language improved… because it made me approach situations differently. It made me more bold where perhaps I wouldn’t have been before. Regardless of my ability in the language I’d just, like, go for it, and so that helped ultimately.
• I think the greatest thing was that I really did get to know the people I was writing about… I think I got to know a lot more German people that way than I would have done doing another project-because you’re more involved. I mean you have to speak and you have to listen. I mean it’s not a matter of going to the library-you know get some books out and just sit in the library, you know you have to meet people and talk to people and that’s what I liked about it really… you get more enjoyment, more satisfaction yourself in doing it because you know it’s your own work, you know you’ve done it yourself and you really do know what you’re talking about… I had to listen a lot because I couldn’t record so I was really relying on my notes, which at the beginning I found quite difficult but later I sort of was able to take notes and if I wrote them up quickly afterwards I usually got most of the information.
• I started seeing things which I used to see all the time but never interpreted… which was presumably one of the main aims… looking for meaning and patterns and clues.
• It had never occurred to me before the project to look at things from other people’s point of view. That’s one thing I overcame through this ethnography project, not to use your own vision, your own terms to describe things as a first resort. It was a huge step not only to see and speak to people but communicate with them in their own terms which was an excellent thing and one of the long lasting effects.
• Another general effect it has had-the preparation and the whole ethnography terminology-is the effect of enabling me and I suppose all of us to handle ambivalence, ambiguity which is an important language learning skill.
• I think I learned to look at things differently, more carefully, not just to pass up things, not just to sit there and let it wash over me because I could have easily done that.
• [Here] … it’s more or less stuff out of a text book… there… it is you and the place, it is you and the people, you can’t not write yourself into it. I am the one doing the interviews, I am the one doing the observations.
• The element of being graceful or having grace came into it. So they were saying ‘well, that’s what differentiates them you know, they have to have grace’. So, I was thinking, I’ve got to look at this dance and I spent hours and hours-I mean I couldn’t tell you how many-maybe 20 or 30 a week-just watching the dance and trying to distinguish the elements of what ‘having grace’ meant.

Annual BAAS Conference 5-8 April 2002, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford

The BAAS Annual Conference will be hosted in 2002 by the new Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford from 5-8 April, in conjunction with St Anne’s College. No over-arching theme has at present been set for the conference, but we hope it will encompass as many aspects of the study of the United States as possible, including its history, society, literature, culture, politics, law, economy and international relations, through a varied programme of lectures, panel discussions and poster sessions. There will also be opportunities to explore the cultural attractions of Oxford itself, such as the Ashmolean and University Museums, walking tours of the colleges or the nearby Blenheim Palace and Park.

Further details regarding registration and the call for papers will be announced nearer the time, but please contact the BAAS Conference Secretary, Andrea Beighton, with any queries or suggestions in the meantime at: Rothermere American Institute, c/o Mansfield College, Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TF or email andrea.beighton@rai.ox.ac.uk. Our progress with conference preparations will also be advertised on the RAI website at www.rai.ox.ac.uk and on the BAAS website at http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site.

Conference Report BAAS 2001, University of Keele Staffordshire

This was a great success, standing as one of the biggest conferences BAAS has ever organized, and a conference with the most papers being delivered, ever. Many thanks on behalf of BAAS to John Dumbrell and all his helpers for the hard work inevitably involved.

The Conference Dinner saw, as usual, the announcement of the Marcus Cunliffe Award (Eric White); the John D. Lees Award (Nicola Caldwell); the Short Term Travel Award winners (Anne Kirby, Paul Marshall, Gabriella Treglia, Tatiani Rapatzikou, Joe Street, Stephanie Bateson); the BAAS essay prize winner (Martyn Bone); and the Arthur Miller prize winner (Nick Selby, for his ‘A Columbus of the Imagination’, European Journal of American Culture 19.2 (2000): 96-115. Certificates were presented in association with these awards. CUP donated a book to be presented to John Dumbrell in thanks for his acting as convenor of the conference. During the banquet diners generously contributed between £300-400 to launch the Bradbury Award.

At the Annual General Meeting Phil Davies was re-elected Chair and Carol Smith (Winchester), Graham Thompson (De Montfort) and Susan Castillo (Glasgow) were elected to the Executive.

The Report from the Chair to the Annual General Meeting of the British Association for American Studies, April 2001

The fact that 2000 was an important presidential election year gave me the opportunity to make a number of media appearances, as part of which I always tried to emphasise my role as Chair of BAAS. Having spoken on BBC Wales, BBC Scotland, the Asian Radio Network, local radio stations all around the UK, BBC News 24, and done an hour on BBC News Online, I knew that we had hit the jackpot when a producer from the ‘Today’ programme called. I was grilled for some considerable time on the most arcane details of US politics. I handled all the questions, pithily, without bluster—tight, self-contained responses making clear points. Then after a pause I heard, ‘That’s all really good—now, do you know anyone in the UK who could answer these questions just as well as you, but with an American accent?’

Fortunately the Association does not need the appropriate accent in order to be heard. Through the past year BAAS has continued to have a role in various national consultations. We have had a presence at a number of meetings, including a British Academy conference on Humanities, Social Sciences and Government Relations, and AHRB consultative symposium on the funding of research and postgraduate study. Ongoing projects by the British Academy and ESRC have included consultation with the Association. We take for granted that the exchange of information, and representation of American Studies interests through these consultations is always worthwhile, but it is not always tangible. It is gratifying, though, that when ESRC published its Thematic Priorities, research of the US experience was specifically mentioned in several places.

The effect of the Association’s contacts with the Quality Assurance Agency have been particularly notable in recent years. In 1997 without the action of our community American Studies would have been classified as a sub-theme of English. Instead we now have sitting a QAA Subject Benchmarking Group in Area Studies, which has brought together colleagues in American Studies and other Area Studies, and which has consulted widely with the Area Studies community, in the process of drafting a productive benchmark for the future of our subject. The QAA is also in the process of developing a Code of Practice for ‘placement learning’, to include study abroad. When it became clear that some colleague had not received the draft code, the Chief Executive of the QAA, John Randall, moved rapidly and most helpfully to create a clear channel for comment to be made by the American Studies community.

Our memberships of the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, and the Standing Conference on Arts and Social Sciences, give BAAS additional broad-band links into educational policy-making. The Co-ordinating Council of Area Studies Associations has had a very quiet period, but we are ready to take an energetic part in any reinvigorated Area Studies umbrella group. Meanwhile the Learning and Teaching Support Network in Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, especially the Area Studies section, has begun to develop as a valuable element in the subject landscape. There are, no doubt, still times when BAAS is not included in consultations where its contributions would be valuable, and we are all grateful when any member of BAAS brings any significant matter to general attention. The e-mail links that we maintain with American Studies programmes, and with the BAAS membership, have proved most valuable in this regard.

Consultation is a multilayered process. With the help of data from UCAS the Chair was able in a recent American Studies in Britain to update his earlier analysis of American Studies recruitment patterns into higher education. There is clearly a healthy interest in American Studies topics, but this is catered for in many ways—single, joint and combined honours degrees, major or minor elements of degrees, elective elements of degrees that are not called American Studies. Students sometimes arrive with knowledge from the American elements in History, Politics or Literature A/AS levels. Our secondary school members inevitably teach about the USA within a single discipline environment. Higher Education members can be either Americanists inside American Studies programmes, or within other named departments. Some are intellectually driven by the interdisciplinary possibilities of the subject, while others are engaged with a particular disciplinary approach focused on the USA. BAAS represents, and must continue to bring together, all of these practitioners of American Studies.

After consultation with BAAS, the Careers Research and Advisory Centre Degree Course Guide in American Studies, aimed at year 12/13 students and their teachers, was redrafted, including the insertion of a reference to BAAS. But the fear has been expressed that school teaching has itself become harder for American Studies graduates to enter.

Enquiries by Professor Douglas Tallack elicited opinions from the Department for Education and Employment, and the Teacher Training Agency that regulations relating to teaching entry to the national curriculum were in no way intended to discriminate against American Studies graduates. The Chair was prompted to attempt a survey of teacher training opportunities, and wrote to 59 providers of secondary teacher training in History and Literature. The responses so far received (over 20) have covered an interesting spectrum, from ‘some of our best PGCE students in the past have been American Studies graduates’, to the ‘DfEE and TTA are being a little disingenuous’. Even Schools of Education in institutions that also teach American Studies did not take a unified line, and American Studies programmes would be well advised to take this on at a local level. Perhaps the most valuable responses have explained how a student might best use the application form and process to enhance their chances of entry, and all of this advice will be included in the report that will be published for BAAS members.

The BAAS internet presence, managed by Professor Dick Ellis and Dr Graham Thompson, also hosted two virtual discussions between students nation-wide, and the former US Ambassador, Philip Lader. The relationship between the US Embassy and the academic community was very positive during Ambassador Lader’s term at the Court of St James, and we look forward to continuing this under the new administration. There is a regular change of personnel in foreign service positions, and we also have a new Cultural Attaché, Carol Lynn McCurdy. Recent Attachés, Robin Berrington and TJ Dowling, have been most helpful to BAAS. We are particularly grateful for the grant that has allowed us again this year to support postgraduate students attending the conference. I look forward to working with Carol Lynn, and the Assistant Cultural Attaché Matthew Gillen, while they are based in London. Our relationship with the Embassy has also benefited from the sheet anchor provided by Sue Wedlake, the UK assistant in the Embassy’s Cultural Office.

Our post-graduate representative on the BAAS executive Celeste-Marie Bernier, in collaboration with Dr Paul Giles, took on the management of the BAAS essay prize and the Short Term Awards scheme. They engaged in energetic promotion of these competitions, and, as one of the judges, I can confirm that the quality of Short Term Award entries was very high, leading the judges to make eight awards in December 2000, to be used during the current year.

The maintenance of the Short Term Award scheme depends entirely on continuing and growing donations to the Short Term Award fund. Many members donate annually when they renew their membership, and some generous individuals donate more regularly by standing order, including on a monthly basis. All award recipients, past and present, are grateful for this support. It is one small but absolutely direct way in which we can foster young and upcoming talent. I have asked my colleagues to consider ways in which funds can be raised to protect and maintain the programme of Short Term Awards. All your own ideas, contributions and donations will be very welcome.

As well as our own successful annual conference in Swansea, which was reported very positively in the THES, the Association co-operated on the annual November colloquium at the US Embassy, held in association with the American Politics Group. This year’s speakers were Tim Hames, leader writer of the Times, former Senator Gary Hart, Professor David Mayhew of Yale University, and the Chair of BAAS, whose challenge was to provide an analysis of the presidential election result even though at the time America was unable to provide one.

Among the year’s special successes was the launch of the ‘Americanisation’ FDTL project, managed by our colleagues at the University of Central Lancashire in co-operation with the American Studies programmes at the University of Derby and at King Alfred’s College in Winchester. Another superb launch was the publication of the digital ‘book’ that has resulted from the collaboration of Americanists at Nottingham and Birmingham Universities.

Member achievements in the past year include the promotion to Professor of Chris Bailey at Keele, Susan Castillo at Glasgow, John Dumbrell at Keele, Scott Lucas at Birmingham, George McKay at Central Lancashire and David Seed at Liverpool. Philip Melling was made Reader in the American Studies programme at Swansea. Robert Garson (Keele), Esther Jubb (Liverpool John Moores), Philip Davies (De Montfort) and Celeste-Marie Bernier (Nottingham) all became Fellows of the Salzburg Seminar. The Salzburg Seminar is held in one of the main shooting locations used years ago for ‘The Sound of Music’. In between challenging intellectual sessions, Fellows drift to the terrace overlooking the lake and mountains and almost inevitably find themselves humming a suitable tune.

Janet Beer (Manchester Metropolitan), Mike Heale (Lancaster), Mick Gidley (Leeds) and Helen Taylor (Exeter) have all served as members of AHRB review panels, with Helen serving in the Chair. Jay Kleinberg (Brunel), Judie Newman (Nottingham), Maggie Walsh (Nottingham) and Philip Davies (De Montfort) were elected Academicians of the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences. This latter elevation includes the right to put more letters after one’s name: AcSS. All those so honoured received a letter pointing out that the ‘c’ is quite important. In my case, presumably having received the letters for reaching my fourth decade of repeatedly mis-predicting US election results, I have my doubts about this instruction.

Malcolm Bradbury, who last gave a wonderfully entertaining paper to this conference just three years ago, and who last year was honoured with a well-deserved knighthood, died in 2000. Those who knew him well testified repeatedly to his charm and generosity. I chaired that last Bradbury session at East Anglia in 1997, and spent part of the morning with him. I was totally engaged by his wit, and intellectual curiosity, his questions as much as his answers, his warmth towards his colleagues and his love for his family, as the conversation ranged over research, teaching, children, farming and pubs. I left Norwich that day wishing I knew him much better. I did learn enough to say that everyone in American Studies lost a friend, whether or not we knew him personally. Malcolm’s wife and sons have agreed to a proposal from BAAS to name a Malcolm Bradbury Short Term Travel Award for the best award annually in American literature. Donations to this fund in memory of Malcolm are welcome.

The recent, unexpected death of Professor Mark Kaplanoff has shocked and saddened all his friends and colleagues at Cambridge and beyond.

The Chair was invited to the Charter meeting of the International American Studies Association, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, and held in Bellagio, Italy. It was hard work on Lake Como in Spring. As one colleague said of a slightly glazed looking photograph, ‘It catches a moment of spirituality in a week of intense effort’. The effort, by an international team brought together by Professor Djelal Kadir of Pennsylvania State University, resulted in the launch of the IASA. Professor Douglas Tallack and Dr Paul Giles have accepted invitations to serve on the executive committee of IASA, and BAAS is pleased to have hosted a panel by the group, who are aiming for their own first conference in a couple of years time.

In October 2000 I convened a speakers’ event at De Montfort University in advance of the US election. I invited my friends and colleagues, and I chaired while they spoke cogently and intelligently, engaged with audience, entered into debate, and predicted the election result (and resulting messy epilogue) with such startling accuracy that my credibility with the students at De Montfort has been enhanced remarkably without any serious effort on my part. Reflected glory—don’t knock it.

It is the same at BAAS. Susan Castillo has converted the BAAS Newsletter into American Studies in Britain, and passed it on to its new editor, Dick Ellis, in fine form. Douglas Tallack and Mick Gidley, ending their terms as elected committee members this year, have had enormous impact throughout the past six years they have served in those positions. I am pleased to point out that Mick will remain for another year as BAAS representative to EAAS. Karen Wilkinson, probably the first postgraduate student to be elected direct to the Executive of BAAS, has added immensely to our discussions, and set an example of enthusiasm that was a challenge to match. The subcommittee chairs, Douglas Tallack, Janet Beer, Iain Wallace and Simon Newman, the Association officers, Jenel Virden, Nick Selby, and Janet Beer, and the other elected and co-opted Executive Committee members, Paul Giles, Dick Ellis, Heidi Macpherson, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Mike McDonnell, Richard Gray and Kathryn Cooper, have worked consistently for the benefit of BAAS. They in their turn have drawn on the support of the subcommittees and other BAAS members who have given time and resources willingly. Any success that the Chair has to report is wholly a reflection of the combined and continuing effort of this American Studies community.

Philip John Davies

Conference Reports, Keele 2001

The following section consists of reports of events and papers delivered at the BAAS 2001 annual conference held at Keele University.

Peter Boyle (University of Nottingham) Exchange Programmes Talk Shop

Two main topics were covered, namely, BUTEX (British Universities TransAtlantic Exchange Association) and the establishment of new exchange partners. Annette Kratz, Head of the International Office at the University of Keele, which since February 2001 has hosted the BUTEX Secretariat, outlined the work of BUTEX and recommended that those who wished further information should visit the BUTEX web site when it becomes accessible in May at www.butex.ac.uk/butex

A brief discussion was held on the problems of establishing new exchange partners or increasing the number of students exchanged with existing partners, a problem which the University of Sussex was facing as a result of expanding its intake of American Studies students. Different views were expressed on this matter. Some recounted experiences of great difficulty in trying to recruit new partners—the American universities who were approached expressing no interest since they already had a sufficient number of exchange partners in Britain and were developing new exchanges in such countries as Australia rather than Britain. Others stated that, with a little perseverance, it proved not too difficult to find new exchange partners, while some American universities were quite willing to expand the number of students on existing exchanges. It was thought, however, that American universities which were available for new exchanges or expansion were not always of a high academic quality. Also the process of pursuing new exchange partners could be quite time-consuming, which made it possible for a department which had administrative assistance for exchanges, but more difficult for departments in which exchange programmes were run by academics.

Peter Boyle stated that an Exchange Programmes webpage had now been established on the BAAS website, which can be visited at http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site. Details of the exchange programmes of about fifteen institutions are listed on the webpage. Exchange tutors in institutions which have exchange programmes and which are not listed on the webpage are urged to send details (names of exchange partners, length and timing of the period of study on exchange) by e-mail attachment to Graham Thompson at gwthomp@globalnet.co.uk. Useful information as well as comment and opinion on matters related to exchange programmes, should similarly be sent to Graham at the above e-mail address.

The Exchange Programme Talk Shop follows from similar lunchtime meetings at the BAAS conferences at Glasgow and Swansea. It is hoped that Talk Shops at the annual conference and the BAAS webpage will provide a useful means for the communication of information and stimulation of discussion for exchange tutors.

Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies Project (AMATAS)

The Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies Project (AMATAS) held its launch party on the Saturday of the conference. Professor Philip Davies, Chair of BAAS welcomed the project as an excellent initiative by the University of Central Lancashire and consortium partners at Derby University and King Alfred’s College, Winchester, and urged all present to make use of the project, its website, workshops and resources. Over 60 academics representing about 30 institutions were present to hear project manager, Dr. Alan Rice, outline how important debates around Americanisation are to the subject in Europe. He described how the debate about the liberating potential/hegemonic power of the USA and its culture is a constant background noise in the British media. The project hoped to help interpret this background noise through workshops it is delivering which will be available from September 2001. These cover a large range of topics from Hollywood and Nazi Germany through Theorising Americanisation to TIME International, and will be available for American Studies providers in Britain. They will be outlined in a booklet available over the summer. He described how the project could either fit into existing curricula or could be brought in to provide dynamic external perspectives. The project is an exciting development in American Studies and is designed to benefit not just the project team but also the whole community. The project can be contacted through Dr. Alan Rice, Project Manager, AMATAS Project.

Individual Conference Paper Reports, Keele 2001

Yesim Basarir (Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir, Turkey): ‘Tales of Convergence: Writing and Identity in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy and Dialogic Perspective’

In The New York Trilogy Paul Auster questions the reflexive potentials of authorship and how the act of writing can problematise the conception of identity. He appropriates the generic patterns of mystery fiction to his literary quest to demonstrate that writing itself is a process of ‘investigation’ or ‘data-gathering’ toward the end of bringing the disparate pieces together for a coherent vision. Metaphorically speaking, the authorial act of text-building is nothing but acting as detective by collecting items of private observation and filling in the missing parts of text-as-suspense. The convergence of detective hero and writer can be better understood in the light of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic interaction/exchange between the author (self) and the hero (other): In City of Glass Auster transforms his authorial self into a fictional character of his own creation, Daniel Quinn. Still more, Quinn takes on the identities of other characters whom he investigates throughout the text, converging and merging with their voices and paces. This penetration of one character into the domain of the other continues in the last book of the volume, The Locked Room, where the nameless narrator is gradually absorbed into the life and works of his old friend, Fanshawe, in his investigatory dialogue with the past. The red notebook where Quinn records his private observations in City of Glass is deleted by the end of The Locked Room which suggests that writing and/or investigation has come to a full end and the case is closed. In both books, the reader observes that neither the text nor characters can preserve their physical boundaries and integrity; that both are inclined to obliterate themselves as the volume declares its physical finitude.

Anne-Marie Ford (Manchester Metropolitan): ‘Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard’

Following his first meeting with the New England poet, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote a letter to his wife in which he compared Dickinson’s family with the fictional representations of New England families in the novels of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard. Aside from this chance remark, there are a number of similarities in the lives and works of Dickinson and Stoddard, both of whom grew up in small New England towns. They were women who were deeply conscious of their own sexuality, and in their writings interrogated sexual boundaries and conventional religious values, employing unconventional, elliptical language. Both failed to achieve success, or in Dickinson’s case attempt it, in their own lifetimes. Their inconoclastic vision of literary production was one which was to prove problematic for their age. Stoddard’s novels, published in the 1860s, recount stories of New England life in which self-reliance, isolation and strangeness are synonymous with the landscape itself. Like Dickinson, she challenges our view of literary production in the mid-nineteenth century. Her unconventional prose style, and her focus on erotic desire and the sensual female, were to prove an unnerving experience for the readers of a time and place which also, paradoxically, inspired her New-Angled vision.

Francesco Gonzalez Garcia: ‘The Quest for an Illusion in Toni Morrison’s Paradise’

Undoubtedly, complexity is one of the main features in Toni Morrison’s Paradise but this complexity makes the novel one of the greatest achievements in the history of African American Literature. The concept of Paradise and its meaning in the novel is essential in any study of the book. In my opinion, most of the characters in Paradise share a common feature: the quest for an illusion. In this way, Ruby, the town, has to be studied according to this idea. Ruby seems to be a kind of Utopian illusion. It is considered a new Promised Land, and most of its inhabitants think that this town cannot show or tolerate any mistake or ‘misbehaviour’. Then, illusion of freedom and Utopian democracy becomes a reality in which submission and oppression seem to be the only possible attitudes. At the same time, the meaning of the Convent is very controversial because opposing ideas such as Purgatory and Paradise can be applied to it according to different points of view. The Convent is the place where different women arrive looking for their own illusion: the quest for identity as women. Finally, I have tried to analyse the idea of tradition as an ‘unreal’ paradise and an excuse in order to justify violence and aggressiveness as a common attitude in many people (mainly men) in Ruby. In short, the paper tried to show how Toni Morrison plays with complexity in Paradise when the readers try to apply the title of the book, Paradise, to the different characters and realities in the novel.

Paul Grainge (University of Derby): ‘Remembering the American Century: Media Memory and the TIME 100 List’

As part of the well-attended panel on ‘Culture Industries, Cultural Identities’, Paul Grainge focused on questions of global media, considering a series of Time special issues, published in 1998 and 1999, estimating the ‘people’ and ‘person’ of the century. Reading the series politically, the paper argued that Time engaged in a process of historical summary and cultural remembrance that serviced Henry Luce’s prophesy of an American Century, but that also aestheticised a national value system claiming primacy within the current, and prospective, climate of contemporary globalisation. The paper, entitled ‘Remembering the American Century: Media Memory and the TIME 100 List’, made two related arguments. Firstly, it situated the series in the context of Time magazine’s own, rather destabilised, position as a news source and shaper of public opinion. Secondly, it considered how the series developed a particular ‘common sense’ about the meaning and memory of the century, measuring individuals according to their relative advancement of, or impediment to, Time’s cardinal values of ‘free minds, free markets, free speech and free choice’. Critically, the article moved from the question of media economy to that of cultural and representational politics, complementing a provocative panel session on cultural life in 1990s America.

Sam Hitchmough (Canterbury Christ Church University College): ‘Missions of Patriotism: Joseph Jackson and Martin Luther King’

Presenting one of two papers in a session exploring the personality, philosophy and strategy of Martin Luther King by comparing him with another major figure in his life, Sam Hitchmough discussed the complex relationship between King and the Reverend Joseph H. Jackson, the powerful Chicago Baptist leader and King opponent. Joseph H. Jackson is often treated slightingly as a symbol of reaction in studies of King and the Civil Rights Movement, but he was an influential figure who merits close attention. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention, had once been a family friend, but had opposed King since 1961. The pre-eminent black leader in Chicago, and close to Mayor Daley, he was a major influence in the city when King took his campaign there in 1966. He may have had personal animosities towards King, but both men were deeply patriotic, despite differing on where the initiative in civil rights should come from: Jackson, with his faith in the NAACP and individual effort, wanted to work in an evolutionary way within the political system; King in contrast wanted to confront it. To Jackson, King’s methods were illegitimate and liable to produce a destructive backlash, and his opposition (as in denying the use of church facilities) served to delegitimise King and seriously hamper the Freedom Movement in Chicago. (Report by Michael Heale, Session Chair)

Elizabeth Ann Jacobs (University of Wales, Aberystwyth): ‘Multiculturalism and Chicana Poetry’

Part of the panel on Woman, Nationhood, Immigration and Expatriation, this paper situated selected poetic works by Chicanas (Mexican American women) within the context of debates surrounding national identity, constitutional democracy and multicultural politics in the United States. The first part of the paper contextualised Chicana poetic production in more specific terms in relation to the political and cultural dynamic of multiculturalism by discussing some of the major practical and theoretical issues surrounding the debate. Distinctions were drawn between the contrasting aims of multiculturalism as a radical theory of politics, global multiculturalism and the ‘melting pot’, while drawing attention to the structural position of the Mexican American community in the United States. The paper then went on to focus on selected poetic texts by Gloria Anzaldúa and Evangelina Vigil. These were read as offering diverse and representative responses to a range of multicultural issues, including women’s place within the political economy, the transnational migration of capital and labour and the multicultural aspects of Chicana/o literary expression. The paper also drew attention to the ways in which Chicana texts call into question and revise the patriarchal ideology characteristic of el movimiento, the cultural nationalist movement associated with Mexican Americans’ civil rights struggles during the 1960s and 1970s.

Will Kaufman (University of Central Lancashire): ‘Exploring Englishness and Britishness through an American Studies Lens’

This paper explored the contributions that discussions in American Studies have made to current debates about the constructions of Englishness and Britishness. Problems of English and British national identity, lately explored by Anthony Easthope and others, were referred back to conceptions of American exceptionalism uttered as early as de Crèvecoeur. Questions of Britishness versus Englishness-uncertainties arising from globalisation, Celtic devolutionary pressures, the UK’s membership in the EU, and the exportation of English identity-were mirrored in the American experience of globalisation, multiculturalism, regionalism, and shifting sites of cultural power and locations of identity. The perception of a ‘post-British identity’ was further explored through the prism of Paul Giles’s recent and forthcoming work on transnationalism in American Studies. The threatened dissolution of a perceived, unified British national identity-known to have galvanised at least three generations of Conservative politicians into near-hysterical rhetorical backlash-was paired with the American anxiety that found expression in (among other sources) Arthur Schlesinger’s The Disuniting of America and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.

Bill Lazenbatt (University of Ulster): ‘Pudd’nhead, Racechange and All that Jazz’

This paper offered a comparative reading of Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson and Morrison’s Jazz, exploring in part the complex pattern of intertextuality that exists between the two texts. Concentrating on the characters of Tom Driscoll and Golden Gray it argued that Morrison produces a racially positive version of Twain’s tale of switched identity and its attendant racial ironies. The predictable Twain ploy of ‘twinning’ was extended to suggest that Morrison, in responding to several Twain texts with a similar programme of re-writing, might herself feature as his ‘dark twin’. Further, Guber’s Racechanges was used to establish an even firmer creative relationship between the two writers. Musical dimensions too were involved in contrasting Twain’s borrowings from the crudely reductive ‘coon’ stereotype of minstrelsy with the later text’s blending of blues and jazz as particular black genres which enhance identity and encourage race pride. The paper suggested that Twain’s musical analogy remains in caricature and in a ‘blackface’ physical judgement of the individual; in contrast, Morrison’s musical analogy celebrates blackness, since the ethos created in Jazz is one which reflects the positive urban experience of the Harlem Renaissance and speaks instead of the reaffirmed humanity of her characters.

Peter Ling (University of Nottingham): ‘King and Gandhi: Models of Non-violence’

Peter Ling focused on the spiritual and non-violent beliefs of King and Mohandas Gandhi, whose example helped to inspire the American preacher. Both Gandhi and King believed that non-violence could force the oppressor to change, Ling argued, but in practice their campaigns showed more signs of a psychological transformation of the oppressed. They both recognised that non-violent direct action could both exploit factionalism inside a regime and damage its international standing. King learned about Gandhian non-violence between 1957 and 1960, but his reputation suffered in the early 1960s as Gandhian tenets were put into action by SNCC and CORE activists. The Birmingham campaign then gave him an opportunity to publicise his non-violent credentials. Several of Gandhi’s campaigns addressed economic grievances, inviting comparison with King’s Chicago campaign. Both emphasised the need for campaigners to maintain discipline, although King could never bring himself to follow Gandhi’s use of the fast-not to protest LBJ’s bombing of Vietnam. After all, they sprang from different cultures and possessed different personalities-King did not follow Gandhi’s example of voluntary celibacy either! (Report by Michael Heale, Session Chair)

Anthony Mann (University of Brighton): ‘Coping with widowhood in post-Revolutionary New England: Ann Appleton Storrow and Harmony Hall, 1794-96’

Ann Appleton Storrow was born in 1760 into the extended Wentworth clan, the dominant family of late colonial New Hampshire. In 1777, she married a British prisoner-of-war and embarked on a seventeen-year transatlantic odyssey to England, Jamaica and Canada in search of economic security. Widowed in 1794, she settled first with relatives in Boston before moving to Hingham to establish Harmony Hall, a residential school for girls. By her death, early in 1796, the school was over subscribed. Ann had prospered alone. This paper, based on letters held at Massachusetts Historical Society, explored particularly the engendered constraints within which Ann lived and the resources she used in her widowhood. Ann drew upon three key resources: her extended family, her own limited financial resources and finally her social skills, the cultural capital required to gain trust and win support from Hingham’s leading families and potential customers. It was the third of these resources that proved most valued, allowing Ann to borrow money necessary to her school’s success. Drawing on a rare collection of letters from Ann to her young daughter, the paper concluded with an insight into the rigid self-discipline she would require of her own children.

Brian Miller (University of Bristol): ‘The Transatlantic Cultural Nexus in Publishing before the advent of the Transnational Conglomerate Corporation’

This paper dealt with the transition from a largely social means of commissioning and fostering the production of books (parties held by or with publishers, book editors, authors and agents, in Manhattan and in London) towards a more internalised corporate process from the late 1960s on. Transatlantic ‘Society’ existed in part to facilitate professional contacts, and it is suggested that this process was at its height in publishing in the interwar, wartime and (for thirty years) postwar periods in the twentieth century, succeeded by the rapid advance of mergers and buy-outs as formerly independent publishers became corporate subsidiaries, and individual editors had to defer to the dictates of marketing, sales, and accounting departments. Thus the nature of transatlantic contact in one branch of culture became radically different as it became corporatised.

Mark Newman (University of Derby): ‘The National Council of Churches and the Civil Rights Movement in McComb, Mississippi’

Between 1964 and 1966, the National Council of Churches operated the McComb Ministers’ Project in southwest Mississippi. The National Council’s ability to deploy northern ministers, attract national publicity and communicate its concerns to high-ranking federal officials helped curtail the worst excesses of segregationist violence that plagued McComb during the summer of 1964. Project volunteers, who served for a week, assisted the Council of Federated Organisations, an alliance of the state’s civil rights groups, in citizenship training and voter registration. Over a dozen ministers were arrested as they accompanied African Americans who attempted to register. With little success, NCC clergymen tried to persuade local white officials and white ministers of the justice of the Civil Rights Movement’s goals and approach. Before NCC budget cuts forced its termination, the McComb Project had initiated nine Head Start centres for deprived preschool children in Pike County, solicited and administered bail funds for movement activists, established three co-operatives, and recruited black children to desegregate McComb’s white schools. Along with COFO, the project acted as a catalyst that led African Americans to challenge discrimination and inequality.

Tatiana Rapatzikou (University of East Anglia): ‘The Art of The Matrix: The Fusion of Electronics and Human Consciousness’

This paper discussed the imagery of The Matrix using a sequence of OHPs. It argued that the film interrogates the concept of Virtual Reality through an action which forms an extended mind game. Extensive use was made of the film’s storyboards which reflect the film’s strategy of estranging the viewer from familiar reality. Examples were given of how images shift from the mechanical to the biological and of how shading and closeup helped the film’s special effects. Among other themes analysed here were technological paranoia and body invasion. Above all, the notion of synthetic pleasure was discussed, taking bearings from critical commentary by Claudia Springer and Slavoj Zizek. Strong thematic links between all three papers helped to give this session a tight coherence. (Report by David Seed, Session Chair)

Lisa Rull (University of Nottingham): ‘A biographical pursuit of “Peggy Guggenheim”’

This paper discussed the problematic relationship between art and life as evidenced in portrayals of art collector and dealer Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979). Despite being a crucial figure in the shift of avant-garde cultural practices from Europe to the USA in the mid-twentieth century, this socioeconomically-enabled Jewish American woman has proven a difficult character for histories to deal with. My opening section briefly summarised the treatment of Guggenheim in biography (where her sexual relationships have dominated discussions) and art historical texts, including histories of patronage (where apart from studies of her collection, her personal relationships with artists and advisors have dominated). I then outlined the possibilities for recontextualising Guggenheim within her broader cultural moment, discussing the usefulness of ‘personal genealogy’ as development of the form ‘critical biography’. Instead of reading achievements as effects of personal experience, ‘personal genealogy’ reads all the available texts-including popular auto/biographical and anecdotal material-with and against each other, challenging singular finalised explanations of the subject. The paper concluded by applying this model to a preliminary study of Guggenheim’s reasons for opening a commercial sales gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in 1938. Ironically, in the subsequent discussion the responses both concerned Guggenheim’s personal relationships (plus ça change).

Liana Sakelliou (University of Athens): ‘H.D.’s Poetry: A Palimpsest on Her American Origins’

H.D. is an American who spent most of her life outside of her native land, yet it continued to be an influence on her poetry. Her early life in Pennsylvania was described, emphasising her upbringing in the Moravian religion. Her general American intellectual heritage can be seen at work in the simple style of the first Imagist poems written after she moved to London in 1911. Images in effect superimpose on images in the manner of a palimpsest. Even though she is usually categorized as an Imagist her poetry continued to grow and change. In her middle period (1920-WWII) the Moravian religion can be seen as a direct influence. In it the deity is feminine, and the poetry of this period presents a heightened sense of the feminine and of H.D.’s life. Her poetry expands to allow emotions to be superimposed on images and on other emotions. Then, from WWII onward, her poetry develops to create new myths of the feminine. She explicitly uses symbols and references to the Moravian religion to rewrite fundamental myths of Western culture, and recreate the idea of a woman. In each of these three periods H.D.’s American background is a guiding influence, her poetry itself being a palimpsest on it.

William Schultz (University of Athens): ‘“What is the Fate of the Self in the American Technological Landscape?” Some Indications in Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’

In the future described by Philip Dick the self is endangered. The dominance of media images and the replacement of direct human contact by media minimise the self. The use of the mood organ disintegrates the self into separate emotions while it relinquishes its self-control. Television shows and the religious fusion device respectively create popular feeling and ideals of life, both of which only reinforce the self-effacing conditions. Furthermore, the relationship of the human bounty hunter to the androids he kills becomes ambiguous, a fact which shows that the self is created in turn by its own creations. Throughout the book, there is a subplot of the bounty hunter wanting to earn enough to buy a living animal, though he ends up with only an electronic toad. The diminished sense of self and life becomes poignant. With Dick’s warnings in mind, I refer to the ideas of philosopher Susanne Langer, psychologist Rollo May, and sociologist Philip Slater to state measures to counter the dangers ahead for the self. To retain their humanity, people (Americans) need to preserve a sense of place and community, need to find personal meaning in work, need to engage in ritual and cultural activities, and need to have an interpretation of the meaning of life.

David Seed (University of Liverpool) : ‘Medical Technology and the Control of Violence in A Clockwork Orange and The Terminal Man’

This paper, illustrated with video clips from the two movies, examined the ways in which these works intervened in the ongoing public debate over medical intervention in convicted criminals. Anthony Burgess and after him Stanley Kubrick satirised the use of aversion therapy as removing the capacity to choose and therefore the subject’s moral sense. The topic was contextualised with brief discussions of B.F. Skinner and electronic brain stimulation. In comparing the novel and film versions of The Terminal Man it was argued that Michael Crichton’s heavy focus on hospital procedures made it impossible for him to develop the Gothic potential in his subject, whereas the film deployed a wealth of science fiction and Gothic allusions to present the medical treatment as a transgressive invasion of the self, leading ultimately to death.

Margaret Shaw (University of Wales, Lampeter): ‘The Postmodern Neo-melodramatic Television Text as a Challenge to the Post-Feminist Rhetoric of the 1980s’

This paper posed questions about the limits of a post-feminist label in relation to David E. Kelley’s 20th Century Fox television production of Ally McBeal. It questioned whether this series is representative of the post-feminist cultural turn, in that it is part of the American anti-feminist/post-feminist impetus since the 1980s; or, alternatively, whether it is more usefully seen as part of a postmodern cultural process, contained within a neo-melodramatic structure and informed by1990s feminist anxieties in American feminist identity. Through an analysis of the ‘Pilot’ episode of Ally McBeal, Shaw suggested that Ally McBeal should not be seen as a post-feminist text, and questioned the appropriateness of the term post-feminist in relation to contemporary television texts such as Ally McBeal and Sex and the City. The paper went on to suggest that this text is more appropriately seen as a postmodern, neo-melodramatic text, with all that implies. It further suggested that the phenomenal success of Ally McBeal depends upon strategies of mystification, ambiguity and incompleteness in terms of the construction of and audience identification with its central protagonist, at multiple levels and in complex ways. The neo-melodramatic medium, as it has evolved in the 1990s, is available to a diverse, multi-gendered, active audience and Ally McBeal’s success in achieving this commercial imperative is reflected through the strategies which construct its text’s multiple levels of appeal.

John Shapcott (Keele University): Jack Kerouac and Writing the Beat Environment’

Jack Kerouac’s 1950s texts were read as significant precursors of a developing Beat environmental agenda. His prose, poetry and letters were located within a form of Western Buddhism. His development of spontaneous prose was considered as translating from an urban to a rural environment. Referencing Old Angel Midnight, reader response was seen as analogous to the jazz improviser’s extemporaneous decision-making as sentient response to survival in the natural environment. Dharma Bums was positioned as the first of Kerouac’s published novels to look to nature for the raw material of textual construction. It stands within a tradition of nature writing spanning Fenimore Cooper through to Gary Snyder. The paper followed textual mouse droppings across three novels in mapping a recognition of ecological and spiritual interconnectedness. By the time of Big Sur’s 1961 publication, Kerouac’s mice were seen as prefiguring those emerging environmentalist texts-in particular Silent Spring (1962)-detailing the adverse effects of pesticides. Kerouac’s adaptation of the haiku form was explored in the context of epistolary exchange. They were read as challenging notions of literary categorisation and crossing boundaries of ecopoetic representation to offer a sense of dwelling, and empathy with animal being.

Michael Spindler (De Montfort University): ‘The Birth of Veblen’s Theory’

This paper focused on four of Veblen’s early articles-‘The Economic Theory of Women’s Dress’, ‘The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labor’, ‘The Beginnings of Ownership’, and ‘The Barbarian Status of Women’,-which share an emerging interpretive framework. Influenced by Lewis Morgan and other anthropologists Veblen sets out to theorise the source of central elements in contemporary social life, introducing his key terms, as well as his dualistic model of cultural evolution-the shift from a peaceable industrious phase to a predatory phase. He traces the ‘irksomeness of labor’ to the status differentiation in the predatory phase between exploit and productive work, and the notion of private property to ‘tenure by Prowess’, principally the seizure of female captives. From this arose ownership-marriage which is the origin of the patriarchal household. It is the wife’s role which endows her dress with an economic dimension, for it advertises the pecuniary strength of the home through ‘conspicuous expensiveness’ and ‘conspicuous waste’. The paper concluded that Veblen’s project in these articles was a radical, demythologising one. By focusing on various givens in social and economic thought, conventionally regarded as ‘natural’, he was able to demystify them and expose them as cultural artefacts.

Shuhei Takada (Kyushu Tokai University): ‘Some Features of Postmodernist Fiction as Illustrated through a Comparative Reading of Thomas Pynchon and Haruki Murakami’

Shuhei Takada offered a comparative discussion of postmodernism as exemplified in the works of Pynchon and Murakami, in relation to such topics as the decline of metanarrative, the degraded status of the human subject, cyborgs and cyberpunk, and the quest for a subjunctive world as refuge from manipulation. The lively subsequent Q&A session focused in part upon the author as detective, notions of surveillance, and the potential criminality of the intertextual process. (Report by Judie Newman, Session Chair)

Graham Thompson (De Montfort University): ‘Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs and Capital’s Transformations’

Graham Thompson argued that although science and technology now stand at the heart of much contemporary cultural criticism, it is the discourse of science together with technological hardware rather than software that have attracted most critical attention. While a similar hardware bias marked the early development of the American computing industry, by the 1990s the development and marketing of software had started to overshadow this hardware. This paper discussed Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs as an attempt to come to terms with the transformations produced once value in a capitalist economy is generated not by hardware but by computing software. Such a shift creates various spatial effects once the most important forms of architecture migrate from the spaces that surround us to the code that is invisible to us inside our computers. This paper concentrated on the migration to an architecture of code because of the opportunity it offers to refine a narrative of migration bound up with the American frontier. Thompson suggested some of the ways in which the migration to an architecture of code produces effects in Microserfs that help us understand this migration not as the next stage in an American development narrative, but rather as ‘an odd little nook of time and space’ that is experienced as a period of change and disorientation.

Graham Twemlow: ‘The Displaced America: Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954), Artist and Designer’

The paper discussed the important contribution which McKnight Kauffer made to visual culture in the 20th Century, making reference to the posters and book illustrations on display throughout the conference. Born in 1890 in the USA, Edward McKnight Kauffer came to Britain in 1914 with the intention of establishing a career as a painter. Early in 1915 he began to seek commercial design work and was commissioned to produce two posters for the London Underground Company. The design of these posters marked the beginning of his career as a commercial artist that was to span the next forty years. In 1940, due to pressures placed upon him as an American citizen resident in war-time Britain, he returned to the USA and continued to work as a graphic designer. The paper also addressed Kauffer’s interest in literature and his association with literary society. It remarked on the similar parallel lives of Kauffer and T.S. Eliot, who not only became a close friend but bore a facial resemblance to him. The paper was illustrated by slides showing examples of Kauffer’s work and photographic portraits of him by leading American photographers such as Francis Bruguiere, George Platt-Lynes and Arnold Newman.

Alan Wallach (The College of William and Mary): ‘Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills As Anti-Pastoral’

In 1843 Thomas Cole completed River in the Catskills, a view looking west from the artist’s house towards the Catskill mountains. Cole painted this view at least eleven times but River in the Catskills differs substantially from his other renditions of the scene. Here the artist has dispensed with framing trees and opened up the landscape. He has also included a tiny locomotive and string of cars, which make their way across a bridge in the middle distance. With few exceptions, scholars have interpreted River in the Catskills as a celebration of harmony between man, nature, and technology, arguing that Cole’s painting is, in the words of one writer, ‘a curious paradox’, that it somehow ‘consecrates’ the railroad in a landscape ‘extolling the pastoral vision of America’. Still, given Cole’s well-known hatred of ‘improvement’ and the wanton destruction of nature, it makes little sense to maintain that the artist would reverse himself in order to produce a painting that might be classified as ‘railroad pastoral’. Instead, I argue that Cole intended River in the Catskills as an anti-pastoral, a visual demonstration of the destruction wrought by the building of the railroad.

Sherryl Wilson (University of the West of England): ‘“It was a mascara runnin’ kinda day”: Oprah Winfrey, Confessional Discourse and the Management of Celebrity’

The paper offers a consideration of the huge popular appeal of The Oprah Winfrey Show. The paper argues that the persona of a talk show host has a significant impact on the way in which the programme is viewed. This being the case, and given that Oprah is the most watched of all TV talk shows, the Oprah persona is clearly of central importance to the programme itself. The paper explores the way in which the Oprah persona is predicated on an ‘ordinariness’ that transcends her celebrity status. Her practice of offering confessions to the audience works to (seemingly) position Oprah in alignment with the invited guests and, by implication, the viewers at home. In addition, Oprah has an affiliation with a group of black feminist writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou that is expressed through her various film roles and in advocating their writing to popular TV audiences. The work of these feminists articulates the importance of community ties, and recognises the political potential inherent within everyday experience. This is reflected in Oprah’s performance as a talk show host in which her authority is grounded in the substance of everyday, ‘ordinary’ kinds of struggles. Thus, Oprah adopts a confessional mode of address through which she contains the contradiction of being simultaneously ‘ordinary’ and famous, and which enables her to speak daily to a mass audience on a personal level.

Neil A. Wynn (University of Glamorgan): ‘The “Jazz Age” Revisited Once More’

The image of the 1920s as the ‘Jazz Age’ still survives despite several revisions. Students at all levels appear to find it particularly hard to ignore the influence of Scott Fitzgerald and Frederick Lewis Allen, and images of material growth, consumerism, new morality, new women, and the effects of prohibition retain their appeal. That the prosperity of the decade was neither as widespread nor as general as is often assumed is now almost a truism. Nonetheless the debates about standards of living still continue, and the problem of explaining why the decade appeared to be one of prosperity when millions lived in poverty still has to be resolved. Popular culture, media, and new technological developments offer some explanation, but politics too played apart. While the social and economic history of the decade has long been re-written by writers such as Dumenil who have underlined the continuities between the twenties and the pre-war years in terms of ethnic, racial, and gender experiences, the traditional view of the politics of the period as unremittingly conservative has only recently been dealt with by the revisionists. At the centre of the modified view of the Republican ascendancy, and the standard bearer of what might be called conservatism with a human face, is Herbert Hoover. Hoover’s attempts to encourage housing development and his concerns with child welfare are now well known. More recently a number of writers have found positive things to say about both Warren Harding and even Calvin Coolidge who is now seen as a victim of the hindsight developed in the Depression years. Paul Johnson has suggested that Coolidge’s inactivity was actually a positive policy decision along the lines of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. Robert Ferrell has also offered a more positive view of Coolidge than that generally accepted. In this view the politicians of the twenties, faced with economic growth and apparent prosperity, were right not to meddle. However, this logic is flawed-or different lines of historical argument are incompatible. Even if we accept that the Crash and its consequences could not have been foreseen, the problems of the city or the rural community, and of racial and ethnic minorities, were surely self-evident. One reason for federal inactivity (Hoover excluded) was, perhaps, because these problems were still being tackled at a local level. Following a historiographical survey, this paper drew on a variety of archival material, including WPA histories and individual case histories, and examined developments in one community, Bridgeport, Connecticut, in order to consider further some of the ongoing debates concerning the decade. In particular it suggested that social welfare and social policy issues continued to be significant, and moreover had an impact on the lives of many ordinary Americans. However, such developments were couched not so much in the language of Progressivism but shared aspects of the political tone of the ‘New Era’.

Mokhtar Ben Braka (University of Valenciennes): ‘The Christian Identity Movement and Right-wing Militias in America’

The 1996 Oklahoma City bombing brought an intense focus on the hundreds of right-wing militia and related survivalist groups that had formed in at least forty States. Though dating from the beginning of American history, militias proliferated only in the early 1990s. All these extremists, who call themselves Patriots, have in common their hatred of the federal government, which allegedly seeks to deprive average American citizens of their fundamental right to possess firearms. While the claims of these extremist groups often revolve around legal and political issues, their world-view rests on religious foundations. The Christian Identity Movement, the most significant religious manifestation on the extreme right, is based on three key beliefs: white ‘Aryans’ are descendants of the biblical tribes of Israel; Jews are the children of the Devil; and the world is on the verge of the final, apocalyptic struggle between good and evil. This presentation, examined Identity’s doctrinal antecedent-British Israelism, its major organisational characteristics, and links between the Christian Identity Movement and right-wing militias.

William D. Carrigan (Rowan University): ‘The Causes and Characteristics of Mexican American Lynching, 1848-1928’

In the twentieth century, most scholarly works on lynching have focused on African Americans in the American South. Even the most comprehensive works on mob violence have invariably conflated those not of African American descent into the single category of ‘white’. In reality, many lynching victims in the United States have been American Indians, Chinese immigrants, Mexican Americans and other ethnic minorities of the American West. No ethnic minority was lynched in larger numbers than were Mexican Americans. With the exception of a few case studies, mob violence against Mexican Americans has nonetheless received little attention. Historians of the American West have long recognised the violent nature of Anglo-Mexican relations in the United States. Few, however, have attempted to draw their disparate anecdotal evidence together into a systematic set of data on lynching in the West. Based on research into archival materials, government records, Spanish-language and English-language newspapers, published and unpublished diaries, memoirs, letters, and local histories, this essay reveals that at least 575 Mexican Americans were lynched in the United States between 1848 and 1928. This conservative calculation excludes a significant number of reported lynchings where it has proved impossible to verify specific data such as the date and the identity of the victims. An analysis of the data proves that the lynching of Mexican Americans was in truth a persistent legacy resulting from the conquest of the present-day South-western United States. The actions of the lynch mob represented a determined effort on the part of whites to assert their cultural supremacy over the American West.

Rachel Connor (University of Salford): ‘Thresholds of Desire: Bisexuality and Miscegenation in the Fiction of Carson McCullers’

In her paper Rachel Connor examined the intersections between gender, sexuality, race and geographical space in The Member of the Wedding (1946). Drawing on the notion that bisexuality is a ‘politics of location’, Connor outlined the ways in which McCullers constructs a series of bisexual spaces in her novel that trouble fixed definitions of gender and sexuality. Refuting criticism which locates The Member of the Wedding merely as an adolescent (and as a heterosexual) ‘rite of passage’ narrative, Connor suggested that the novel’s ending represents a temporary point in the oscillation between the multiple desiring positions of the main female protagonist. In this sense, McCullers’s text shares resonances with contemporary notions of a bisexual epistemology that constitutes ‘internal conversations about and between the contradictory and perhaps never unified positions within ourselves’ (Jo Eadie). The paper continued by positing that bisexual desire in the novel might be seen as a ‘miscegenate location’. Outlining the racialised discourse underpinning The Member of the Wedding, Connor sought, in particular, to problematise McCullers’s construction of normative heterosexuality as white. Whilst we need to be cautious of using bisexual theory as a universal means of unpicking all binary systems, such a reading challenges totalising categories and the significations of power in traditional constructions of sexual identity. Ultimately, Connor concluded, McCullers’s work offers a way of rethinking the interconnection between the politics of textual practice, (bi)sexual desire and the geographical space of the American South.

Jude Davies (King Alfred’s, Winchester): ‘Intractable Sexuality and Demands for Social Transformation in Chopin, Friedman, and Goldman’

This paper considered two novels from the turn of the nineteenth century, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), and By Bread Alone by Isaac Kahn Friedman (1901), examining how they can be read as calling for social transformations of various kinds through intertwined narratives of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class. The paper sought to negotiate current debates on the racial and gendered implications of The Awakening by charting the novel’s utilisation of a range of discourses of identity in connection with issues of bodily autonomy and agency. Particularly troubling are the ways in which Chopin’s depiction of autonomy is imbued with white supremacist codes and assumptions. I argued for a critical response that does not seek to apologise for, ignore, excuse, or redeem these elements. Rather, their acknowledgement can be supplemented by a reading of The Awakening, via the work of Judith Butler on performative sexuality, as problematising notions of self-present, autonomous subjectivity by evoking the structuring power of a heterosexual matrix. The paper continued by charting the workings of sexual desire across ethnicity and class in Friedman’s 1901 depiction of socialists and anarchists, emphasising how Friedman utilised codes of romantic attraction to resolve questions of class and ethnic power. The paper was framed by reference to Emma Goldman, whose political and autobiographical writings suggest a more positive resolution of problems of sexuality and agency.

Ruth Doughty (Keele University): ‘Sewing the Seeds and Fulfilling the Needs of a “Jazz Thing” — Spike Lee: cultural historian or Mo’ than likely missing the point?’

Jazz as a subject matter has been perpetually mistreated by both mainstream and independent cinema. The intricacies and subtle nuances of jazz as music frequently fail to manifest themselves when employed as a filmic subject. Typically jazz films involve stereotypes of over-sexed musicians combining their incurable thirst for women with their uncontrollable need for alcohol and narcotics. Hollywood has too often propagated its jazz heroes as insistently draining their associates with their childlike dependency, heading towards annihilation, as their genius remains unrecognised in an unrelenting world. In 1990, Spike Lee released his long awaited jazz movie Mo’ Better Blues. After Lee had openly criticised previous jazz movies there was great excitement surrounding the African American director’s interpretation of jazz and its players. Much of the anticipation could be assigned to Lee’s father being a working jazz musician and composer. Critics and scholars believed that Lee could offer an authentic insight into the ethos behind the music. Lee’s musical perspective promised a legitimacy previously untold, not directly due to his father’s musicianship but to Lee’s own heritage as an African American. This paper aims to ascertain whether Lee has created an authoritative and faithful portrayal of jazz or whether he is Mo’ than likely missing the point.

Martin Durham (University of Wolverhampton): ‘The Racist Right, the Patriot Movement and the Roots of the Militias’

The paper examined the militias which arose in 1994 following the deaths of 76 people during the FBI’s siege of a community in Waco, Texas. Many accounts have described the movement as racist but, the speaker argued, the evidence for this needs more careful examination. Many in the militias believe in conspiracy theories but these are not necessarily anti-Semitic. Racists are undeniably active within the movement but this should not be taken to mean that they dominate it. Instead, they are engaged in a battle for hegemony with other forces on the right, some of which have adopted a strongly anti-racist rhetoric. White supremacists have seen the militias as an opportunity to gain influence but, it was argued, they have also expressed considerable annoyance that the militias themselves have not taken a racist stance. The paper was one of four examining the militias and the broader Patriot movement of which they are part and the discussion that ensued explored a number of areas in what is a much discussed but too little studied area.

Jo Gill (Cheltenham & Gloucester College of Higher Education): ‘“A Memory of Belief”: Anne Sexton’s “Mystical Poetry”’

Although typically known as a confessional poet, Anne Sexton considered herself to be predominantly a religious writer. This paper took as its starting point, Sexton’s comment: ‘I think in time to come people will be more shocked by my mystical poetry than by my so-called confessional poetry’. The argument of the paper was that what makes Sexton’s ‘mystical poetry’ so ‘shocking’ is the way in which it yokes modern, secular, suburban and frankly sexual experience with the traditions and constraints of the past. The paper proceeded to explore Sexton’s revitalisation, inversion, rejection or transcendence of the figures and precedents (for example, motifs of the ocean/Atlantic crossing) offered by earlier New England writers and her development of a bold and distinctive religious idiom. The paper concluded that Sexton in her ‘mystical poetry’ straddles the boundary between the religious and the sacrilegious, the spiritual and the sceptical. Yet her subject is only ever able to attain the threshold of religious belief (metaphorically, the shore), and is perpetually denied the baptism she seeks.

George Lewis (University of Nottingham): ‘The Science of White Resistance: Wesley Critz George and the Eugenic Approach to Massive Resistance in North Carolina’

This paper concentrated on the intricacies of the southern, white, segregationist response to increased civil rights activity in the South of the United States during the 1950s and early 1960s, the period known as Massive Resistance. By concentrating on one individual segregationist leader, Wesley Critz George of North Carolina, it clearly showed that Massive Resistance was a more complex, multifaceted phenomenon than has often been recognised by historians. Segregationists were not the one-dimensional, monolithic reactionaries often portrayed in the historiography. George, for example, a eugenicist and a Professor of Embryology and Histology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, eschewed many of the more traditional weapons available to resisters in favour of racial science. He strongly believed that Massive Resisters had to reach out beyond the borders of the South in order to win the post-Brown battle for continued segregation, and convince all Americans-not just southerners-that integration would lead to the fall of American civilisation. For George, a reinvigorated racial science was the propaganda weapon with which that battle would be won.

Karen McNally: ‘Frank Sinatra’s 1950s’ Male: Celebrating the Loser in the Era of Success’

This paper considered how Frank Sinatra’s image in the 1950s placed him at odds with mainstream American culture’s promotion of the middle-class, Anglo-Saxon male. The paper established how Sinatra was associated with a working-class ethnicity which distinguished him from ideals of masculinity and lent him an image of alienation from America’s post-war success story. It considered how this persona was constructed via a range of interconnecting influences including Sinatra’s self-presentation, media reaction to his image, and his performances on screen. An examination of Herbert Gans’ The Urban Villagers revealed the extent to which working-class Italian-Americans continued to view Sinatra as a socially excluded outsider, despite the complicating issue of his unparalleled career success. The effect of Sinatra’s earlier career decline as it worked to destabilise his image as a successful male star was explained. The paper considered three film roles in which Sinatra’s image of alienated masculinity is particularly evident. Analysis of key scenes in ‘The Man with the Golden Arm’, ‘Young at Heart’ and ‘From Here to Eternity’ made clear the various elements of class and ethnic alienation reinforced by Sinatra’s extra-cinematic image which combined to characterise Sinatra as a loser in the context of America’s successful, middle-class, post-war culture.

Maria Proitsaki (Goteberg University, Sweden)

My poster was based on two overlapping papers, ‘A “Circus-Freak” and 20,000 Other Migrants in Rita Dove’s Museum’ and ‘Consolidation of Hierarchies of Difference in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence and Rita Dove’s Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove’. In the first paper I examine two poems from Dove’s Museum and interrogate the arbitrariness of the grounds on which othering attitudes thrive. Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove and Parsley expose variable definitions of otherness: Agosta portrays displayable rarities, including a circus freak, a perfectly normal black woman depicted in a painting by Christian Schad (1894-1982), while Parsley highlights how language can ultimately be employed for ethnic discrimination (‘shibboleth’). In my second paper I focus on visual representations of others and explore the hierarchies of difference which are implicit in and govern othering perspectives. I consider possible perceptions of the status of the German painter’s models in Dove’s poem in contrast to the way in which Banville’s protagonist perceives a portrait of a Renaissance lady and a maid he encounters at a friend’s mansion (one of which he will later destroy and the other murder), and trace the hierarchical structures in accordance with which the other is constructed, and representations of otherness take place.

Andrew Read: ‘Representing Violence in Toni Morrison’s Paradise’

In my paper I identified a tension between form and content in Paradise, caused by the political pressures affecting any African American novelist who writes about black violence. The form delegates interpretative responsibility to the reader, by using descriptions of the massacre of the Convent Women to frame the narrative, and allowing contesting voices to speak differing accounts of the events preceding it within this frame. This ensures that every account can be construed as a cause of the massacre, but none are endorsed as a definitive explanation for it by the limited narrator. However, throughout the text Morrison privileges a particular explanation for the massacre, insisting that the men of Ruby’s violence stems from prejudices and modes of self-fashioning which they have copied from white society. This culminates at the end when touchstone characters are permitted to offer a very certain interpretation of the massacre. Morrison compromises the formal openness of Paradise in this way to ensure that it cannot be interpreted as endorsing traditional stereotypes of African Americans as naturally violent, to suppress the disturbing sense that this brutal act has positive consequences, and that the Convent Women are a necessary sacrifice for the future survival of Ruby.

Theresa Saxon (Manchester Metropolitan University): ‘Place and Displacement in Henry James’s Roderick Hudson’

This paper discussed the significance of transatlantic movements in Henry James’s novel Roderick Hudson between America’s North-eastern corner and the ancient city of Rome, arguing that the Roman and New England settings serve a particular purpose for the narrative structure as a geographic emblem of an antithetical set of cultural forms-the new world of America versus the old world of Europe. The paper further contended that Roderick Hudson, the American artist transplanted to the old world scene of Rome, also functions in the narrative to displace the potential of the ‘American Artist’ to be regarded as a homogenous and unified entity. Roderick Hudson’s wayward excesses act as the antithesis in narrative strategy to another American artist in Rome, Sam Singleton, whose main personal attributes are hard work, patience and thrift. In conclusion, the paper argued that the opposition between these two American artists exemplifies James’s ambivalence to the new world/old world engagement in this novel; Rome does not threaten the American artist with destruction. Roderick Hudson, as a romantic, even melodramatic hero, has overindulged at James’s European ‘banquet of initiation’, and therefore stands as a warning to the American artist at this time to indulge very carefully in the European banquet.

Gerard Selbach (Universite de Paris 5): ‘American University Art Museums: Mission, Management and Funding: The case of the Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM)’

Making up one typology different from other art museums, the HUAM are open to the public but exhibitions are mounted for educational and research purposes involving the collaboration of curators, fine arts faculty and students at Harvard. Their mission statement is specific on acquisition policy and allocation of space. The governance system is that of a university department. The director meets the HU president and members of the Corporation for Finance and Planning once a month and has a PR and fund-raising function, whose objectives are the viability of the museums and their ability to carry out their educational mission. The day-to-day administration is performed by the Assistant Director. Their financial resources come mainly from the return on their $300m endowment, run by the University Company which provides for the museums’ operating budget, each museum being responsible for generating income to cover expenses. Donations, membership fees and money from publications and admissions are also received. Staff recruitment is specific: curators should be interested in research and teaching. The new $85m Museum of Contemporary Art by Renzo Piano will bring about a reorganisation.

Carol Smith (King Alfred’s College, Winchester): ‘White femininity in the White House: Hillary Rodham Clinton’

This paper mapped the gendered, classed, and racial discourses through which Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political career has been frustrated and fulfilled. I argued that, while in some respects Clinton was a beneficiary of social and cultural changes achieved by second-wave feminism, her political profile has also been circumscribed by typologies of class and race. I focused in particular on the signs of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s largely successful strategic deployment of these discourses in her public appearance and media representation. During the 1990s, Hillary’s preferred public persona combined the resonances of the traditional political hostess with the classed and racial heritage of second-wave feminism, and I argued that the ability to sustain this fusion was crucial to the successful Senate campaign of 2000. In closing, I speculated as to how her career will further articulate, and be articulated by, relays between the political body and the Body Politic.

Jill Terry (Worcester College of Higher Education): ‘Univocal Blues to Polyfocal Jazz: Gayl Jones and Postmodern Blackness’

This paper addressed Gayl Jones’s 1998 novel, The Healing. The novel represents a ‘comeback’ for Gayl Jones, as it is over twenty years since she published the controversial and groundbreaking Corregidora. The paper documented a development in Jones’s priorities from the assertion of African American female identity in the 1970s to the performance of identities in The Healing. In Corregidora the first person narrator is a blues singer who testifies to a legacy of abuse originating in slavery through her blues narrative; the novel represented a minority voice breaking silence. Jones releases her Healing narrator from 1970s’ compulsions to repeat the traumas of slavery and engagement with strategic essentialism. The novel constructs an indeterminate textual world where healing concerns faith not truth, and identity is performative not authentic. Jones’s postmodern awareness of the instability of categories of ethnicity and colour is exemplified through improvisatory jazz riffing as The Healing embraces a multi-ethnic range of characters whose colloquial voices are orchestrated through the lead of the narrator as she deliberates on representations of Americanness.

Wendy Toon (Keele University): ‘The Re-education of Defeated Nations: The Importance of Image and American Planning for the Occupations of Germany and Japan, 1944-1946’

Throughout World War II, Americans had contemplated the post-war future of Germany and Japan. There was consensus on only one point: they both had to be changed. A variety of alternatives were discussed ranging from punitive and vengeful policies to those which were educational and advocated reform. Re-education policy, which falls into the latter category, involved baggage. This baggage involved pre-conceived images. This paper discussed some of the images that developed during the war, and how these perceptions of the two enemy countries informed American belief in Germany and Japan’s potential for re-education. Both Germany and Japan were examined in view of the analogous administrative processes and the similarity in the design of policy towards each of the two former enemy powers. This approach was taken because there is little truly comparative work on the two Occupations. As well as neglecting the comparative dimension, studies have also tended to see the process of change in a one-sided way, ignoring the fact that US perceptions and attitudes towards the former enemy countries also developed and changed as a result of interaction between them. This issue is particularly interesting as the racial aspect of American thinking is not as evident in its contemplation of Germany and the Germans as it is of Japan and the Japanese.

Nick Yablon (University of Chicago): ‘Snapshots, Seismographs, and Psychologists: Capturing the Experience of Disaster’

For psychologists such as William James and George Malcolm Stratton, the San Francisco earthquake and fire of April 1906 offered an unprecedented opportunity to elucidate a new ‘psychology of catastrophe’. What particularly concerned these psychologists was whether, and how, traumatic experiences could cohere as discrete visual memories. For James, himself a survivor of the earthquake, the intensity and immediacy of the experience precluded any kind of objective grasping of the event. But his intellectual opponents, chiefly George Malcolm Stratton, disagreed, arguing that memory can in fact function photographically, and that furthermore disasters and other moments of extremity serve to sharpen that capacity. In elaborating this idea of ‘hypermnesia’ (an ‘abnormally vivid or complete memory or recall of the past’), Stratton employed the analogy of a particular kind of photographic effect: the snapshot. Invoking the new handheld cameras such as the Kodak ‘Brownie’, an apparatus widely used in San Francisco during the events of April 1906, Stratton developed a distinctive visual grammar with which to describe the experience of disaster.

Editor’s Note

Aficionados of ASIB will note there is a new approach to presenting the conference paper reports. This approach is being tested out this year as a way of streamlining publication and enabling ASIB to come out more or less on time. Previously, long delays occurred whilst the editor waited for session reports to come in from Chairs; now the onus is on the individual paper presenters to send in copy to a strict deadline. (It was felt it would be unfair on the individual paper presenters if, by imposing a strict deadline on Chairs, their papers were then left unreported.) The editor, however, would appreciate feedback about how BAAS members view this change, recognising that it makes the conference report less well structured than before.

Miscellany

2001 BAAS Postgraduate Awards

Marcus Cunliffe Award: Eric White (Cambridge University), for work on William Carlos Williams and Contact.
John D. Lees Award: Nicola Caldwell (Lancaster University), for research on the concept of an urban underclass in American society.
Short-term travel awards:
Anne Kirby (University of Wales, Swansea), for research on Native American film and literature.
Paul Marshall (University of Sussex), for research on the 1936 presidential election.
Gabriella Treglia (Cambridge University), for work on John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1933-45.
Tatiani Rapatzikou (University of East Anglia), for research on William Gibson and science fiction.
Joe Street (University of Sheffield), for research on the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project.
Stephanie Bateson (University of Sheffield), for research on issues of gender in relation to the American New Left of the 1960s.
Winner of BAAS Postgraduate Essay Prize, 2001: Martyn Bone (University of Nottingham and the English Institute, Copenhagen), for an essay entitled ‘New Jersey Real Estate and the Postsouthern Sense of Place: Richard Ford’s Independence Day’.

BAAS Short Term Travel Grants 2002

BAAS is happy to announce assistance for short-term visits to the USA during the year 2002 to 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 be awarded for the study of subjects where the principle aim is the study of American history, politics, society, literature, art, culture, etc. and not subjects with other aims, the data for which happen to be located in the USA.

The resources available are relatively modest. It is envisaged that grants will be supplemented by funds from other sources. The maximum of each grant will be £400. Although it is recognised that awards under this scheme may need to be supplemented, it is not intended that they should be used to supplement or extend long-term awards. The maximum duration of the award will be twelve weeks; visits longer than twelve weeks will not be considered.

Applications are invited from persons normally resident in the UK, and from scholars currently working at, or registered as postgraduate students at, UK universities and institutions of higher education. Preference will be given to those who have had no previous opportunities for research-related visits to the USA, and to young scholars, including postgraduate students. BAAS particularly welcomes applications from postgraduates needing to visit the USA for research purposes.

Some of the travel grants relate to named awards:

The Marcus Cunliffe Award will be given to the best proposal in the field of American Studies.

The John D. Lees Award will be given to the best proposal in the field of American political studies.

The Malcolm Bradbury Award will be given to the best proposal in the field of American literary studies.

The closing date for applications is 30 November 2001. Travel must take place between 1 February 2002 and 31 January 2003. Awards for travel will not be made retrospectively. Successful candidates are required to provide a brief report of their research trip for publication in American Studies in Britain, and they are requested to acknowledge the assistance of BAAS in any other publication that results from research carried out during the tenure of the award.

Application forms can be obtained from Dr Paul Giles, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, CB3 0DG, pdg23@cam.ac.uk They will also be available on the BAAS website: http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site

The BAAS Paperback Series

The BAAS Paperback series published by Edinburgh University Press continues to flourish. Proposals are still being sought so please do get in touch with either George McKay or Phil Davies if interested.

Titles published so far:
Mills: The American Landscape
Killick: The United States and European Reconstruction
Davies and Smith: Gender, Ethnicity and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film
Williams: Political Scandals in the USA
Madsen: American Exceptionalism
Venn: The New Deal
LeBeau: Religion in America to 1865
Campbell: The Cultures of the New American West
Townsend: Jazz in American Culture
Morgan: Slavery and Servitude in North America
Heale: The History and Politics of Sixties America

The BRRAM Collection

New microfilms brought out by Microform Academic Publishers include:
The Tudway of Wells Antiguan Estate Papers: Thirty reels of documents relating to the Parham plantation, a sugar estate in Antigua. The records cover three centuries, from the time of the glorious revolution through World War One.
The Letter Book of Henry Caner: The Rev Henry Caner (1700-1792) was a leading Church of England clergyman in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Caner wrote several vigorous defences of the Church of England and also suffered in the events leading up to the Revolution.

The Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies Project (AMATAS)

This Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL) project under the umbrella of the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) is the first funded teaching and learning project in the area of American Studies. It is housed in the Cultural Studies Department at the University of Central Lancashire with consortium partners at the University of Derby and King Alfred’s College, Winchester. We aim to spread dynamic curriculum ideas on Americanisation throughout the American Studies community and beyond. The project is also available to other subject areas such as English, Area Studies, Cultural Studies, Languages, Visual Arts, Media Studies and Music.

Background information to the Project: Crudely speaking, there are two reactions to the power of America globally. One delights in the liberational potential of American culture, the other feels threatened and reacts negatively to what is seen as cultural imperialism. American Studies as a discipline discusses both these responses and often negotiates between them. The famous Blues scholar, Paul Oliver, describes the life-changing experience of listening to black American G.I.’s on work patrols in East Anglia in the 1940s, and the way this opened a whole continent to him. Conversely the African American writer Richard Wright talks of the malignant influence of American popular culture on the indigenous culture of West Africa in the 1950s. In American Studies such encounters are the lifeblood of some of the most interesting debates in the discipline.

Precise Description of the Project: This project is developing the curriculum of American Studies within such a transatlantic framework. The American Studies teams are similarly interested in the Transatlantic and Americanisation. The aim is to develop teaching focused on studying the impact of the United States in Britain. The curriculum of American Studies is extended by taking America out of itself and considering issues of Americanisation, of the acceptance and resistance of the cultural and/or historical impact of the United States in regions of England. Students may combine class work with a field trip to a relevant local ‘site’ of American influence, and will present a case study of their findings for assessment. Teaching staff will enhance their skills in employing cultural theory in leading the analysis of culture and Americanisation. This is a project aimed at developing the curriculum theme of Americanisation within the American Studies community. It particularly focuses on cultural issues of Americanisation, both the export of American culture and its reception in Britain.

It will build on curriculum strengths in the teaching of Americanisation, the Transatlantic and Cultural Theory at Preston which were identified in the successful 1998 teaching inspection visit. Collaboration with other American Studies providers giving workshops will be a prime output of the project as will a website and occasional newsletter. The workshops will be run by experts in the field of Americanisation from the three institutions who will develop their best teaching practice in the field and disseminate it throughout the American Studies community. There were session dedicated to the project at the 2001 British Association for American Studies Conference at Keele 6-9 April and at the Midlands BAAS Meeting at Nottingham Trent University on 3 March which explained the project and outlined the kinds of approaches it will be foregrounding. In the late summer of 2002 there will be a conference on Americanisation and the teaching of American Studies at Preston which will, amongst other objectives, seek to assess the value of such approaches to the development of the subject and provide a summative account of the impact of the project. The website will provide resources to help with the teaching of Americanisation, exchanging good practice and information, with links to other sites that deal with the topic of Americanisation.

Bulletins from the Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies Project (AMATAS)

Website up and running
The website for the project went live this week. Do browse through it and be assured the amount of content will expand exponentially over the next few weeks. We are proud of the fact the site has been developed to BOBBY standard so that full access is guaranteed to all users. Now we want your input to make the site as useful a resource as possible. There are three initiatives you can contribute to right away www.amatas.org

1) Americanisation diaries:
One of the ways in which the website will gather material which will be of use to students is to ask academics and others from Europe, Asia and elsewhere to write short pieces on the impact of America on their own communities. These diaries could obviously be visual as well as written or a collage of both—a series of images that illustrate Americanisation (either positively or negatively) in your community or nation. These could be purely informational, witty, cutting or even plain daft. If you would like to contribute just send them direct to AMATAS arice@uclan.ac.uk or mataylor@uclan.ac.uk

There will be a prize for the best diaries received and these will be awarded on a quarterly basis starting on 30 April 2000 (subsequent closing dates: 30 June, 31 August and 30 November). The prize will be a book on Americanisation. The judging panel will consist of the Project Director, Manager and Administrator.

2) Resources:
If any academics or journalists would like to contribute their already published articles on Americanisation or sections from a book to the website we would love to receive them. It could be great free publicity for your work and useful materials for students in the wider American Studies community. Just write to us here at AMATAS arice@uclan.ac.uk

3) Media Log:
We want to keep you all up to date with the latest articles on Americanisation appearing in the world media. This will not be a comprehensive log but will try to keep abreast of major issues and events and commentary on them. Many of the articles so far logged are from the Manchester Guardian. Please feel free to send any other cuttings to us here at AMATAS arice@uclan.ac.uk and we will summarise and log them. Please make sure they have the date and place of publication attached.

Workshops
We now have about 15 workshops organised between the three partner institutions. These sessions, run by experts in their fields, investigate topics ranging from Transatlantic Seaside Resorts, through Hollywood and Nazi Germany, to Brand Identity and Resistance. From September they will become available to American Studies and cognate programmes in Britain. A syllabi pack will be sent out over the summer and the Preston office will co-ordinate links between the providers and clients. We see these as taster sessions in ways of integrating Americanisation into American Studies provision. They might either fit seamlessly into a current undergraduate program or act as a special session to add value to it. For more details about workshops see the website (from June) or email arice@uclan.ac.uk

Dr. Alan Rice
Project Manager, Americanisation Project (AMATAS)
Dept. of Cultural Studies
University of Central Lancashire
Preston, PR1 2HE
arice@uclan.ac.uk
01772 893020.

The Arthur Miller Centre Prize

The Arthur Miller Centre Prize of £500 is awarded annually by the American Studies Sector at the University of East Anglia for the best journal-length article published on any American Studies topic by a UK citizen based at home or abroad or by a non-UK citizen who publishes their essay in a UK journal, providing that the entrant is a member of the British Association of American Studies in the year of submission.

Those interested in entering an article for consideration should submit three copies of the essay including publication details to the Arthur Miller Centre Prize Committee, School of English and American Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK by 1 March in the year for which they wish to be considered for the Prize.

The Awarding Committee includes a representative from the American Studies Sector at UEA and the Chair of BAAS. In years which include an entry from a member of the UEA faculty, a past winner or BAAS Chair will be invited to take the place of the UEA representative. The winner will be announced at the British Association of American Studies Annual Conference. The Awarding Committee is unable to notify unsuccessful applicants or to return copies of articles submitted for consideration.

Benchmarking American Studies

American Studies is involved in the HE benchmarking exercise as part of the Area Studies benchmarking group. The chair of the benchmarking group is Phil Davies. To view benchmarking statements see: http://www.qaa.ac.uk/crntwork/benchmark/benchmarking.htm

The American Studies draft statement has not yet been posted, but soon will be. Phil Davies has submitted the following report:

Benchmarking Area Studies

The QAA subject benchmarking group in Area Studies held its final drafting meeting before the end May 2001. Since October 2000 the twelve members of the group have met on four occasions, and conducted an extensive email correspondence, on the way to the draft that will be published for consultation by the QAA.

The process has at all stages been interactive. The group’s membership includes colleagues from a wide variety of different area studies and disciplinary backgrounds. After two group meetings, and with the help of the LTSN Subject Centre that includes Area Studies, a day-long consultation seminar was held in London, where feedback on an early draft of the benchmark was presented and discussed. Written feedback was also invited, and received, and the early benchmark draft was made available on the LTSN Subject Centre website and to anyone who enquired.

The Area Studies benchmark group exists because of the efforts of the American Studies community. Protest against the QAA’s 1997 proposal that American Studies be considered a sub group of English was such that the Agency had to look for a different solution. This solution has created a valuable opportunity for whole Area Studies community.

The QAA guides its benchmark groups towards the idea of ‘mapping the territory’ of a subject, giving a general point of reference and positive statement of the subject. While it is clear that subject providers will use the benchmark as a backdrop for programme design and presentation, the process in under no circumstances intended to impose a pedagogical strait-jacket in higher education. The virtues and values of undertaking a programme in Area Studies should be at the core of the benchmark statement. The provision of these initial benchmark statements should itself be part of an ongoing process, with feedback from the community and from observation of the benchmarks in use, leading to future updates and revisions.

The group has used its drafting powers to create a benchmark that celebrates and promotes Area Studies. Subject programmes focus in many relevant ways on multi-disciplinary and multi-skilled approaches to teaching, learning and investigation. The benchmark group has maintained a keen awareness of the importance of providing a framework within which the strength and variety of the subject can be freely expressed.

The drafting process has been a very active exercise in exchange of ideas within the group and with the many members of the subject community who have taken part in the feedback opportunities. The Quality Assurance Agency will publish the consultation drafts of the statements during this summer. Only after a period of consultation will the subject groups and QAA agree the final publication of the benchmark. When the consultation drafts are made available a notice will appear on the BAAS website, so please keep checking

Philip Davies

New Opportunities for Collaborative Projects in Central and Eastern Europe: British Academy Announcement

New funding is now available to support joint research projects with Academies in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union.

Applications are invited for joint projects involving British scholars in collaboration with partners in one or possibly two other countries in this region. The projects should be organised through the framework of the inter-academy agreements, not between individual researchers alone. The British Academy has links with thirteen academies in the region.

Awards are offered for travel and maintenance expenses and have a maximum of £2,500 per year for up to three years.

The closing date for submitting applications is 30 April 2001. The countries covered are Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. For further information and application forms see the Academy’s website www.britac.ac.uk or consult the International Relations Department on 020 7969 5220 or overseas@britac.ac.uk

The British Academy, established by Royal Charter in 1902, is an independent learned society promoting the humanities and social sciences. It is composed of Fellows elected in recognition of their distinction as scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

For further press information:
Jonathan Breckon at the British Academy
020 7969 5263
jbreckon@britac.ac.uk
www.britac.ac.uk

Fulbright/Kennedy/Frank Knox: Awards and Fellowships Information

The number of international students in the US has been increasing steadily over the years, and the UK has contributed to that trend. During 1999-2000, there were 2,683 students from the UK doing postgraduate work in the US. The overall number of UK students in the US was 7,990—an increase of almost 3% on the previous year. The US is becoming an increasingly popular option for UK residents wishing to further their studies beyond undergraduate level.*

However, securing a postgraduate place at a US institution is not a straightforward process. Not only can competition for places be very high, but the degrees are usually far more expensive than their UK equivalents. It is estimated that only 50% of foreign graduate students in the US fund themselves; the other 50% must look to either university funding (e.g. Teaching/Research Assistantships) or independent sponsoring organisations. The Kennedy, Knox and Fulbright scholarships are examples of the latter.

The Fulbright Awards Programme was established in 1948 by Senator William J Fulbright to promote educational and cultural exchange between the UK and the US. Each year approximately 12-15 postgraduate grants are awarded to EU citizens who are resident in the UK. The grants cover approved tuition fees, a maintenance allowance, and health insurance for the first year of postgraduate study in the US. The programme selects academically outstanding candidates with leadership and ambassadorial qualities. Fulbright encourages applications from all UK universities.

The Kennedy Scholarships are part of the British National Memorial to President Kennedy. They are funded from donations made by the British public following the assassination of the President in 1963. The scholarships (usually 12 each year) are tenable at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They provide one year of full funding (details are on the website) for graduate study in any field offered by either of these institutions. The trustees are extremely keen to receive strong applications from students from all UK universities. Successful candidates will have an outstanding academic record, ambassadorial qualities and the potential to be leaders in their field in the future. Full details of eligibility and method of application can be found on the website www.kentrust.demon.co.uk

The Frank Knox Fellowship awards were first offered in 1944 and are funded by a donation made to Harvard University by Annie Reid Knox in memory of her husband Frank Knox, Secretary of the US Navy. In recent years about six awards have been made annually to British graduate students for study at Harvard. The scope of the fellowships is similar to that of the Kennedy and full eligibility criteria can be found on the website www.franknox.demon.co.uk

For more information on appropriate courses and universities, as well as awards and other sources of funding for study in the US, please contact the US Educational Advisory Service at the Fulbright Commission www.fulbright.co.uk

* Figures from IEE’s ‘Open Doors 2000’.

Anna Mason, Josephine Metcalf and Emma Cooney

Lance Banning/Leverhulme Visiting Professorship

The Leverhulme Trust has awarded to Lance Banning a Visiting Professorship at the University of Edinburgh. During his stay, September-December 2001, he will strengthen the study of America in Scotland, especially regarding the Early National period of American history.

Professor Lance Banning of the University of Kentucky is a major figure in his field. He is the author of numerous publications, including some thirty articles in scholarly journals, such as the William and Mary Quarterly. His books include The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (1978) and The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (1995), winner of the Merle Curti Award in American Intellectual History. He is co-editor of the University of Kansas Press book series, ‘American Political Thought’, which has more than twenty items in print.

In the course of his stay in Scotland, Professor Banning will deliver the Leverhulme Lectures. These will be on the theme ‘Revolution and Early Republic’, will reach out to a general audience, and will be delivered at several Scottish universities. The lectures will be given under the organisational umbrella of the BAAS affiliate, the Scottish Association for the Study of America. Professor Banning will also conduct a Master Class for postgraduate students in his field. This will be at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh.

Other events and activities are also planned, and will be announced in due course. To obtain, or ensure receipt of, further information, contact:

Professor Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
Department of History
University of Edinburgh
WRB, 50 George Square
Edinburgh EH 8 9 JY.
Jeffreys-Jones.Rhodri@ed.ac.uk

British Library Shock-Horror

The British Library is consulting about a proposal to restrict acquistion of books to those relating to the UK and UK experience. Members may wish to make representations to the Brituish Library about this proposal and its impact on the American Studies community.

US Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal Call for Papers

The purpose of this online journal is to enable postgraduate students at British universities to have their work published in a refereed environment at a time when the opportunity for postgraduates to publish in American Studies paper journals in Britain is becoming increasingly limited.

Each issue will try to cover a broad range of topics drawing upon the multi-disciplinarity of American Studies to incorporate History, Politics, Cultural Studies, Literature and Film.

This is a fully refereed e-journal and an editorial board of international standing is now in place.

Essays for the Spring edition of this e-journal are welcome. For more information about the journal, including e-notes for contributors, see http://http://www.baas.ac.uk/main/otherpublications/pgjourn.html

Please submit your articles, in hard copy or electronic format, to:

Graham Thompson
Department of English
De Montfort University
Leicester, LE1 9BH
gwthomp@globalnet.co.uk

Call for Book Reviews for American Studies Today

The American Studies Resources Centre at John Moores University is seeking colleagues who would be prepared to write book reviews for the magazine American Studies Today and for the ‘On line magazine/book reviews’ section of its website. The magazine is distributed to both high school/community college teachers in the UK and abroad, as well as individuals in higher education. The style and approach of any review would need to keep this broad readership in mind. If you are able to assist us, please contact Ian Ralston I.Ralston@livjm.ac.uk or David Forster D.Forster@livjm.ac.uk for details of what books are available.

Reviews should be about 300-400 words long, and submitted either:

a) word-processed single-spaced on A4 paper,
b) as a Microsoft Word or text file on a 3.5” pc disc, or
c) by e-mail to online@americansc.org.uk—you could send the text of the review as an attached Word file if you wish.

If submitting on disc, please indicate the filename of the review in a covering note. Your disc will be returned to you.

The deadline for submission of reviews is Friday 9 February 2001. Please note that this deadline is earlier than usual in order to take advantage of the offer to use the services of John Moores media studies students to produce the Newsletter as part of their studies. It is vital that we stick to this deadline, so, if you are unable to complete the review by then, please could you send the book back to me. We would be grateful if you could also please return the book, as obtaining review copies is one of the few ways in which the Centre is able to update the book stock.

Ian Ralston
American Studies Centre
Liverpool John Moores University
0151 231 3241 (tel/fax)
I.Ralston@livjm.ac.uk
www.americansc.org.uk

Diegesis: Call for Contributions
Diegesis: Journal of the Association for Research in Popular Fictions, Winter 2001: Chinese Fictions/Fictions of China

Contributions are sought from those working in the area of popular fiction for this edition, devoted to representations of China and Chinese popular fictions, in the form of scholarly essays (6000-7000 words), short extracts, book/film reviews and short creative pieces. For further information contact:

Dr. Joss West Burnham
Department of Humanities and Applied Social Studies
Manchester Metropolitan University
Crewe and Alsager Faculty
Alsager, ST7 2HL
0161-247-5410
J.West-Burnham@mmu.ac.uk)

Request for URL Links by the Transatlantic Studies Network

The Transatlantic Studies Network is establishing a webpage for links to other relevant webpages. If you or your colleagues have URL addresses for websites that are relevant to any aspect of Transatlantic Studies, and you would like them to be accessible as links through the Transatlantic Studies Network, please send the addresses and a brief description to tsnetwork@egroups.com

If you would like to subscribe to the Transatlantic Studies Network please send a message to tsnetwork-subscribe@egroups.com

Will Kaufman
Network Moderator

Conference Announcements

EAAS Biennial Conference 2002
‘The United States of/in Europe: Nationhood, Citizenship, and Culture’

22-25 March, in Bordeaux, France. The workshops for this biennial conference will be announced soon. For further information, visit the EAAS website using the link from the BAAS website http://http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site

The BAAS/EJAC Postgraduate Annual Conference ‘Another Country: New Locations for American and Canadian Studies’
First call for papers

24 November 2001 at the University of Birmingham, Department of American and Canadian Studies. (Sponsored by The British Association of American Studies & European Journal of American Culture). Send 250 word proposals to: Andrew Green greenaj@hhs.bham.ac.uk

Third MESEA Conference (MESEA: The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas (formerly MELUS Europe)) ‘Comparative Sites of Ethnicity: Europe and the Americas’
Call for papers

26-29 June 2002 at the University of Padua, Italy.

This conference will highlight the comparative aspects of ethnic sites between the Americas and Europe or within the Americas but with some kind of reference to Europe. In the spirit of MESEA, papers should be informed by a comparison between the Americas and Europe either on a thematic or on a methodological level. Proposals for workshops and papers may engage the following topics, among others: geographies of ethnic urbanisation, politics of location, ethnic authorship, literatures of immigration, ethnicity in literary theory, diversity in the classroom, nationalism and ethnic identities, ethnicity and the media, gendering ethnicity and space, ethno-archeology, sites as concept of criticism, theories of space and ethnicity, the topology of ethnic history or literature, sites of memory, ethnicising religions and culture.

Keynote speakers: Georgio Agamben (University of Venice), A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff (University of Illinois at Chicago), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Andrew Williams (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hills), Sau-Ling Wong (University of California at Berkeley). Performance by Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Hellmut Gottschild: TONGUE SMELL COLOR.

Only members of MESEA or MELUS US/India may present papers at this conference. For membership information please contact: Dr. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg), fischer-hornung@mesea.org or fischer-hornung@mesea.org

For current MESEA information, please check: www.mesea.org
Deadline for proposals: 10 January 2002. Send your c.v. and a one-page proposal to:

Dr. Heike Raphael-Hernandez
University of Maryland (European Division)
Im Bosseldorn 30
69126 Heidelberg
Germany
hraphael@faculty.ed.umuc.edu or raphael-hernandez@mesea.org

Miscellaneous Conference Reports

‘Taking Stock: The American Century and Beyond’ BAAS/EJAC 2000 Annual Postgraduate Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, 18 November 2000 (Conference Supported by BAAS Grants)

This annual postgraduate conference was jointly sponsored by the Manchester Metropolitan University, EJAC and the British Association of American Studies, with each providing support and the Manchester Metropolitan University underwriting the project. Over thirty people attended from various institutions throughout the country, including the Honorary European Trust Scholar at the Centre of International Studies, Cambridge University. Sixteen papers were presented all of which were thoroughly enjoyable, engaging and thought-provoking.

Papers ranged in period and topic, covering such relevant yet diverse areas as the impact of revolutionary war on migratory habits (Daniel Blackie (Brunel University), ‘Disabled Revolutionary War Veterans and Migration in the Early American Republic’); the location/dislocation of identity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Theresa Saxon (Manchester Metropolitan University), ‘“Monsieur is an American?”: Henry James’s Transatlantic Type’; Margaret Smith (Manchester Metropolitan University), ‘Philip Roth and the Holocaust’); art and the artist in America (Rob Stanton (University of Leeds), ‘“A Very Private Talent”: Rewriting Art and Solipsism in David Foster Wallace’s Church Not Made with Hands’; Mark Rawlinson (University of Nottingham), ‘Sheeler’s New York Stripped Bare: A Glorified Version of A Brave New World of Technology?’; G. Sami Gorgan Roodi (University of Sussex), ‘The Crisis of the American Dream in Clifford Odet’s Paradise Lost’); the female/feminine as subject (Lisa Rull (University of Nottingham), ‘A Biographical Pursuit of “Peggy Guggenheim”’; Susana Araujo (University of Sussex), ‘The Gothic-Grotesque of Joyce Carol Oates’); narratives of race (Celeste-Marie Bernier (University of Nottingham), ‘“Arms like polished iron”: A Comparative Exploration of Narrative Ambiguities in Frederick Douglass’s Two Versions of The Heroic Slave’; Andrew Warnes (University of Leeds), ‘The Political Uses of Hunger in Richard Wright’s Black Boy’; Mark Whalan (University of Exeter), ‘“A Vision of Health”: Eugenics, Race and Aesthetics in Early 1920s American Culture’; David Stirrup (University of Leeds), ‘Ritual and Community: Representations of Death in Contemporary Native American Fiction’); subverting family, (Ann Hurford (Nottingham Trent University), ‘Hitting the Target: (Re)membering Family Boundaries in Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant’) and developing democracy in the American Century (Charlie Whitam (University of Wales, Swansea), ‘Peace Initiative or Profiteering? The Anglo-American Trade Agreement of 1938’; Naveed S. Sheikh (Honorary European Trust Scholar, Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge), ‘Another American Century? Political Cosmology, New Worldism, and Contemporary U.S. Foreign Policy’).

The papers collectively engaged with the mighty task of taking stock in the American century and beyond! Between us, we tackled political, historical, cultural and literary issues connected to the conference theme. The panels were consistently stimulating and enjoyable. Thanks are due to members of the English Department at the Manchester Metropolitan University for their support and assistance, Dick Ellis and EJAC for regular assistance, and also the British Association of American Studies as an organisation. We would also like to thank those members of BAAS who turned up to support the conference, particularly Richard King (University of Nottingham) and Richard Hinchcliffe (University of Central Lancashire). Finally, it is essential especially to thank BAAS and the European Journal of American Culture for their support, and all those who gave papers and attended panels for their enthusiasm and active participation at all times throughout the conference.

Margaret Smith and Theresa Saxon, Conference Co-organisers (Manchester Metropolitan University)

‘Nation on the Move: Mobility in US History’ European Historians of the United States Biennial Conference Roosevelt Study Center, Middleburg, Netherlands, 18-20 April 2001

Papers were presented on various aspects of this topic by historians of the United States from many countries, including Norway, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, France, Sweden, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The papers brought out the profound and varied political, social, economic, religious and ideological implications of the mobility of Americans. Papers covered topics from the colonial period to contemporary America, such as James Baird (USA) on the turnover of overseers on plantations in colonial Virginia; Joseph Smith (UK) on the travels of a British diplomat in the United States in the 1820s; Serge Ricard (France) on squatter expansionism and continental aggrandisement; Giovanni Fabbi (Italy) on black migration in South Carolina in World War I to northern cities and to army camps; Klaus Vowe (Germany) on the Hollywood cult of mobility. The British contingent was well represented with papers, from Rob Lewis (Birmingham), Howell Harris (Durham), Joseph Smith (Exeter), Melvyn Stokes (UCL), David Brown (Northampton) and Louis Billingham (Hull). Both David Adams (Keele), the Founding Father of European Historians of the United States, and Steve Ickringill (Coleraine) chaired sessions, while Peter Boyle (Nottingham) acted as conference reporter.

It is hoped that a volume will be published of an edited selection of the papers, as for previous conferences. The volumes for the first three conferences were available at the Edinburgh University Press stand at the BAAS conference at Keele for a special conference price of £8.00 each. Edited by David K. Adams & Cornelius A. Van Minnen, the titles are: Reflections on American Exceptionalism; Aspects of War in American History; and Religious and Secular Reform in America. The volume of the fourth conference was edited by Sylvia Hilton & Cornelius A. van Minnen, Federalism, Citizenship and Collective Identity in U.S. History (Amsterdam: VU Press, 2000).

The conference of European Historians of the United States held at the Roosevelt Study Center in Middlesburg every second year has become well-established since its first meeting in 1993. The next meeting will be in April 2003. The topic will be announced and a call for papers will be made in due course.

Peter Boyle (University of Nottingham)

Book Reviews

D.J. Mulloy, ed., Homegrown Revolutionaries: An American Militia Reader (EAS Publishing, Arthur Miller Centre, Norwich 1999) £12.99, pp.480, ISBN 1-902913-02-7

Gathered here is a range of primary documents, including ‘interviews, pamphlets, articles, essays, congressional testimony, presidential statements, press accounts and monitoring agency reports’, relating to the growth of the militia movement in the 1990s. The aim ‘is to allow the various participants… to speak, in the main, for themselves’. Mulloy sees these militia movements, brought into focus by the Oklahoma bombing (1995), as a broad response to the widespread perception of an America in steep decline and, specifically, as a reaction to the siege of Randy Weaver and his family at Ruby Ridge in 1992, the Waco incident in 1993, and the ‘Brady Bill’ gun control legislation. Drawing on Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1963), Mulloy’s ‘Introduction’, and the collection as a whole, amply demonstrate the extent to which conspiracy theories and paranoia have long been the stuff of which American nightmares are made.

Mulloy opens with an account of an interview he conducted with the Missouri 51st Militia in Kansas City. Clustering in the West, but scattered throughout the States as they are, no single group (as Mulloy makes clear) can be representative of the militia. For this group, the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents exemplify the danger to middle America of what are regarded as an incontinent government and its heavily armed agencies. The responses to Mulloy’s questions, and the conversation in general, oscillate between predictable assessments of the political malaise (‘I don’t think you’d find enough moral ethics in the whole of Washington to fill a gnat’s belly button’) and an exposure to the miasmatic premises of gun culture: Jim, we are told, has ‘probably got 100 guns. Now why would he be any more dangerous tomorrow than he is today?’; ‘You can’t use but one at a time’, offers another.

The interview has been weakened as primary material by two editorial decisions: Mulloy has ‘removed many’ of his ‘own interventions in the conversation’, and ‘the pauses, repetitions, and momentary losses of thought, which are a normal part of everyday speech’, have been excised in the belief that ‘it is not possible to present the conversation exactly as it occurred’. Mulloy’s interventions cannot be disregarded as somehow neutral, and there are conventions for transcribing speech, however cumbersome these may be for the general reader. Judgements about the acrobatic casuistry and bizarre logic applied by militia groups, as well as the degree to which some of their positions reflect mainstream concerns about the power and unaccountability of federal government, can be made more easily from elsewhere in the material.

For the Missouri 51st, as for many other groups, the Second Amendment right to ‘bear arms’ and the power of Washington are the compelling issues. What also emerges in this volume, as the scriptures of the Founding Fathers are disputed with a cavalier intensity, is the careful fabrication of a continuity with the Revolutionary militia and its victory over the tyranny of Britain now (then) incarnated in the demonic Clinton and his federal cohorts. These ‘constitutional fundamentalists’, as Paul Glaskin calls them, have an eloquent and persuasive spokesman in Jon Roland of the ‘Texas Constitutional Militia’. ‘Democracy’, and its corrosion of the ‘constitutional republic’, is the issue in his ‘The Social Contract and Constitutional Republics’. The problem, Roland argues, is ‘the assumption by the national or central government of powers not delegated to it under the Constitution’. He believes that individual citizens have a duty, underwritten by natural law and the social contract, to bear arms and to defend the community from excessive government. The range and balance of Mulloy’s collection is evident in the ease with which the reader can move from this essay to the inflammatory rhetoric of such items as Operation Vampire Killer 2000 (1992). It is no small achievement that this indispensable book, often in an atmosphere of high fever and stupefying bombast, enables the reader to distinguish, even to arbitrate, between the shifting claims and interests of government officials, watchdogs, and the militias.

Peter Rawlings (University of the West of England)

Louise K. Barnett and James L. Thorson, eds, Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), xi + 319pp, notes, bibliography, index, cloth, $45.00

In 1977 Leslie Marmon Silko became the first Native American woman to have a novel published in the USA. Ceremony is a successful mingling of myth and realism in which individual sickness is put in the larger perspective of the ravaging of the land near Laguna Pueblo as a result of nuclear testing. (Shamoon Zamir’s 1993 essay on Ceremony is a major exposition of this theme and documents the creation of a National Sacrifice Area.) Silko’s literary career blossomed, attracting prominence beyond New Mexico and honours such as the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas lifetime achievement award.

Admiration of Silko’s multifaceted work has encouraged some of these contributors to strike a personal note. The response (in the Preface) of Robert Franklin Gish, like Silko a Native American from New Mexico, is to observe himself drawn back to ‘primordial intuitions’. Her writings on ethnicity and the land inspire in Gish thoughts about place, storytelling and naming. Subsequently Robert Nelson assesses the part that Silko’s New Mexico homeland has played in her life and work.

Leslie Silko was raised in Old Laguna village close to Route 66 (now Interstate 40) where, as her father the photographer Lee Marmon once told me, people from Laguna used to feed Dustbowl migrants in the 1930s. Her origins are Anglo and Keresan, and her ancestral inheritance is one of cultural interchange, educational achievement, community leadership and—through the Keresan oral tradition—storytelling. Like Gish, Nelson emphasises the way landscape in her formative years shaped her vision and her tales, but he adds her interest in photography (evident in Storyteller, 1981, with its distinctive verbal and pictorial textures) and more especially film making. Later in the volume David Moore notes her exploration of the photographic medium concluding that ‘her concerns with social and ecological justice influence her visual aesthetic’.

Barnett and Thorson’s collection includes essays on Silko’s short fiction and nonfiction, but the bulk of critical writing here is dedicated to her 1991 epic Almanac of the Dead. This is unequivocally an approach to be welcomed for, as Connie Thorson points out in her useful bibliographical essay, Almanac has so far received little examination apart from a few substantial reviews. Chosen topics in this volume include: the tropes of blood and witnessing; fetishism; the role of time in radical fiction; and the representation of homosexuality. Silko defines storytelling as ‘a whole way of being’ which relates individuals to each other as well as to nature and to history. A number of studies explore the formal elements of storytelling such as notebooks (including the ancient notebooks known as almanacs) and a linear geographical map of South-western USA and Northern Mexico which finds its corrupt centre in Tucson, Arizona.

Together these essays convey the richness of Silko’s expansive, prophetic novel. Since the collection takes cognisance of the earlier work, it functions as a necessary summation of a remarkable and still unfolding creative life.

Ralph Willett

BAAS Short-term Travel Grants: Reports

Tatiana Rapatzikou (University of East Anglia)

I would first of all like to thank BAAS for its kind support. The purpose of my research trip to the States was initially to visit the Eaton Collection of the University of California, Riverside (UCR).

The collection’s extensive catalogued material in the field of Science Fiction, and especially in the field of comic books and graphic novels, made it a worthwhile experience. The wealth of information and graphic novel titles available enabled me to collect much valuable and original material on the art of the graphic novel as well as to appreciate their aesthetic value towards the formation of the cyberfiction aesthetics. The difficulties and frustration arising from the amount and diversity of titles I had to inspect was often eased by the assistance and kindness that I received from the staff and librarians.

Whilst my work in the special collection was in progress, I was delighted to meet the computer artist Jody Zellen in Los Angeles. The meeting took place in her studio/lab where samples from her latest cyberart project, Ghost City, were on display. It was interesting to talk with the artist about the conceptualisation and rendering techniques involved in transforming a literary experience into a visual one via the intervention of the computer medium.

However, the most invaluable contact I made during my research trip was with the cyberfiction writer William Gibson whom I interviewed in Vancouver, Canada. With my entire thesis mainly focusing on Gibson’s novels, the interview and discussion that followed were significant experiences, offering me a different insight and perspective into his works and answering many of my queries that had proved troublesome during my research.

On the whole, during my research trip I managed to gather an amount of invaluable and original information, references, and photocopies. The entirety of the material, together with the interviews, will enable an understanding and appreciation of the visual motifs employed in Gibson’s works, and also facilitate the completion of my thesis.

I would once more like to express my gratitude to BAAS for its help and support for the realisation of this trip.

Joe Street (University of Sheffield)

I received a travel grant to facilitate research into the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project (SFCRP) papers and the personal papers of Anne Romaine in the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Established by Romaine and Bernice Johnson Reagon, the SFCRP intended to use folk culture to promote the aims of the Civil Rights Movement. Developing out of the Southern Student Organizing Committee, it emphasised the value of both white and black culture, and resisted the influence of black nationalism to continue presenting performances from African American and white musicians until the 1980s. I intended to explore the concept behind the SFCRP and discover why and how they utilised folk culture in such a way during the 1960s.

Much has been made of the use and significance of the freedom songs in the Civil Rights Movement. However, until now, almost no research has been conducted on the SFCRP, mainly due to the unavailability of the papers and an indifference to an organisation that found itself out of step with the racial zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The bulk of the material in the SFCRP files was from the 1970s and 1980s, reflecting the relatively small size of the organisation during the 1960s. Similarly, the material in Romaine’s personal papers leaned heavily in favour of her later years. Despite this material being less extensive than I had hoped, I was able to collect enough material on the SFCRP to warrant inclusion in my thesis and I was pleased to discover that this material confirmed my theories about the organisation. In addition, Romaine’s papers contained her notes for an unpublished book on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. These notes were in the form of interviews with a number of movement activists and contained some valuable information that will be a suitable supplement to my work on the movement in Mississippi.

Since I was able to complete my work on the SFCRP material more swiftly than expected, I was able to take advantage of other excellent material held in the Wilson Library of UNC-Chapel Hill. I examined two fascinating interviews with Septima Poinsette Clark in the Southern Oral History Project, which contained a large amount of material pertinent to my study of the SCLC’s Citizenship Education Project, and a large amount of correspondence between Clark and the Highlander Folk School. Also included in the Southern Oral History project were interviews with Ella Baker and Mary King, which were less relevant to my work, but provided some interesting vignettes. With the help of the Southern Folklife Collection archivist, Amy Davis, I accessed a number of recordings that Guy Carawan made of a 1964 workshop on the role of freedom songs in the Civil Rights Movement. Much of the collection consisted of entertaining recordings of the song meetings, but there was scant material on the workshop discussion groups. However, one of the tapes contained a speech given by activist and comedian Dick Gregory in Greenwood, Mississippi during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. This gave a fascinating insight into the type of material that Gregory used at this time and also included the reaction of his audience, which was similarly illuminating. I am very grateful to Ms Davis for giving me access to these tapes, some of which had not previously been available to researchers. Finding myself with a spare couple of hours whilst copies of tapes were being made for me, I decided to investigate UNC-Chapel Hill’s microfilm holdings of the papers of Fannie Lou Hamer. Knowing that Hamer had been instructed by Septima Clark in citizenship school education, I hoped to locate material on the schools that Hamer had taught. Unfortunately, her collection only featured a limited amount of material on the citizenship education project of the Delta Ministry that Hamer was involved in, and focused almost exclusively on its financial details.

My trip to Chapel Hill provided me with a wealth of useful and diverse material, which will undoubtedly strengthen my thesis in ways that I had not envisaged at the outset. I was also able to meet with postgraduate members of Chapel Hill’s lively and highly regarded history department to partake in some liquid refreshment—a weekly ritual in that part of the world. I wish to offer members of BAAS my most sincere thanks for their generosity in making this trip affordable and express my gratitude to the BAAS Committee for deeming this project worthy of support.

Paul M. Marshall (University of Sussex)

I would like to thank the generous support granted to me from the BAAS, which allowed me to visit the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks to continue research into my doctoral thesis, ‘The Union Party and the 1936 Presidential Election’. The visit to North Dakota was particularly important for my research, as the UND Library holds the papers of the Union Party’s presidential candidate, Representative William Lemke.

The intended purpose of my visit was to seek to understand the extent to which William Lemke had contributed to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential election victory; why and how Lemke was distanced from Roosevelt between 1932 and 1936; and how this eventually resulted in Lemke becoming the presidential candidate of a new political party, the Union Party, in 1936. I was not disappointed with the papers I found at the library, which provide a window into the life and workings of a dedicated and hardworking Representative. Of particular importance for my thesis are a series of letters between Lemke and his friends Cornelius Vanderbilt and Covington Hall that spans the entire period of my interest. This correspondence offers an amazing insight into Lemke’s initial enthusiasm for FDR; his frustration as FDR moved away from him; his growing desire from 1934 for a liberal candidate to emerge to oppose FDR in 1936; and his final decision to form a third party and to stand as its candidate.

To date, one of the greatest difficulties with my emerging thesis has been finding a clear link between the death of likely 1936 third party candidate Senator Huey Long in September 1935 and the launch of the Union Party on June 17, 1936. However, I believe that correspondence in the Lemke papers between the Representative and Republican Party Presidential hopeful Senator William Borah has provided this link. I now believe that had Borah won the Republican nomination the previous week, the Union Party would not have been created. The next stage of my research will now be to undertake research into the William Borah papers at the Library of Congress, in order to elaborate upon this link.

In addition to my research into the Lemke papers, I also found a small amount of time at the library to undertake research into the representation of the Union Party campaign in the North Dakota press and in the New York Times. This research has provided a valuable backdrop to my primary research.

Overall, my work in North Dakota produced a large amount of fascinating material, and I thank the BAAS again for their support without which the visit would not have been possible.

Membership News

David Adams received an honorary D.Litt. from Keele University.
Chris Bailey has been made Professor at University of Keele
Celeste-Marie Bernier (Nottingham) became a Salzburg Fellow.
Susan Castillo was made a Professor at the University of Glasgow.
Philip Davies became a Salzburg Fellow
John Dumbrell was made a Professor at Keele University.
Robert Garson (Keele) became a Salzburg Fellow
Mark Jancovich became a Reader at the University of Nottingham.
Esther Jubb (Liverpool John Moores) became a Salzburg Fellow
Will Kaufman has been made Reader at University of Central Lancashire
Scott Lucas has been made a Professor at the University of Birmingham
George McKay has been made Professor At Univeristy of Central Lancashire
Phil Melling has been made a Reader at University of Wales Swansea
David Seed has been made Professor at Univeristy of Liverpool
Helen Taylor has been appointed to the AHRB board.

The following hold appointments within the AHRB currently:

Janet Beer (Manchester Metropolitan)
Mike Heale
Mick Gidley (Leeds)
Helen Taylor (Chair)

New Members of BAAS

Kimberley Anthill (University of Nottingham): Postgraduate.
Erica Arthur
James Ashmore (The Nottingham Trent University): Postgraduate researching into The Literature of New York City in the 1980s and 1990s.
Jamal Assadi (The Academic Arab College for Education, Haifa): Lecturer, research interest in Saul Bellow.
Jim Barton (University of Nottingham): Postgraduate researching into race and public policy in the urban context.
Robert Busby (Liverpool Hope University): Lecturer, research interests in the American Presidency, scandal politics and public opinion.
Alan Cardew (University of Essex): Director of the Enlightenment in the School of Humanities. Research interests include the founding fathers and the enlightenment/classicism, US architecture, and Jefferson.
Sigrid Clerk (University of Dundee): Postgraduate researching Moravian missionary influence and the Delaware Indians.
Gareth Davies (St Anne’s College Oxford): University Lecturer.
David Deverick (University of Nottingham): Postgraduate working on Ulysses S. Grant as a military commander.
Nathalie Gegout (University of Birmingham): Postgraduate.
David Greenham (University of Nottingham): Postgraduate researching the influence and continuing importance of Romantic aesthetics and philosophy for an understanding of radical American thought.
Francoise Hamlin (Yale University): Postgraduate researching the Civil Rights Movement in Cahoma County, Mississippi.
Jan Hoare (University of Warwick): Postgraduate researching comparatively into slavery in Jamaica and North America.
Larry Hudson (University of Rochester): Associate Professor, researching comparative slavery, race and ethnicity, the Civil War, and African American families.
Rosalind Inglis (University of Nottingham): Postgraduate.
Andrew Johnstone (University of Birmingham): Postgraduate.
Katie Pearson
Eileen Riddiford (Open University): Postgraduate.
Mara Keire (Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford): Post-doctoral Fellow.
Emma Louise Kilkelly (University of Nottingham): Postgraduate.
Annie Kirby (University of Wales, Swansea): Postgraduate.
Susie J. Lee (Cornell University): Postgraduate researching US Imperialism during the Great Depression.
Anthony Marasco (University of California, Berkeley): Postgraduate.
Eddie Marcus (University of North London): Postgraduate researching the history of critcal commentary on Edgar Allan Poe.
Karen McNally (University of Nottingham): Postgraduate researching masculinity in film, the 1950s, Frank Sinatra, Billy Wilder, star images and the issue of American identity.
Olga Nunez Miret (University of Sussex): Postgraduate.
Debbie Pavitt (Brunel University): Postgraduate.
Monica Pearl (Keele University): Lecturer.
Andrew Preston (Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge): Postgraduate researching US Foreign relations 1898-1999 (especially 1945-1965).
Sarah Robertson (Keele University): Postgraduate researching contemporary Southern women writers.
Julian Salisbury (Keele University): Postgraduate researching the US Federal election commission.
John Shapcott (Keele University): Postgraduate researching the Beats.
David Stirrup (University of Leeds): Postgraduate.
Claire Stocks (Keele University): Postgraduate.
Rachel Van Duyvenbode (University of Sheffield): Postgraduate researching the representation of white women in African American women’s texts.
Astrid Wind (Somerville College Oxford): Postgraduate researching ideas of cultural and political nationalism.
Nicholas Yablon (University of Chicago): Postgraduate studying the history of visual culture (architecture, urbanism and consumption).
Nahem Yousaf (The Nottingham Trent University): Lecturer researching postcolonial literatures/texts.

BAAS Membership of Committees: (including co-opted members and invited observers)

Executive Committee

elected:

Professor Philip Davies (Chair, first elected 1998, term ends 2004)
Dr Nick Selby (Treasurer, first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Dr Jenel Virden (Secretary, first elected 1998, term ends 2002)
Professor Janet Beer (first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Professor Susan Castillo (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
Professor Dick Ellis (first elected 1999, term ends 2002)
Dr Paul Giles (first elected 1999, term ends 2002)
Dr Michael McDonnell (first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Dr Heidi Macpherson (first elected 2000, term ends 2003)
Dr Simon Newman (first elected 1999, term ends 2002)
Dr Carol Smith (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
Dr Graham Thompson (first elected 2001, term ends 2004)
p/grad Ms Celeste-Marie Bernier (first elected 2000, term ends 2002)*

ex officio:

Professor Richard Gray (Editor, Journal, term ends 2001)
Dr Iain Wallace (Chair, Library & Resouces Subcommittee)
co-opted: Ms Kathryn Cooper

Development sub committee

Dr Paul Giles (Chair)
Professor Phil Davies
Dr Heidi Macpherson
Dr Simon Newman
Ms Celeste-Marie Bernier (post-grad)
Dr Iain Wallace (ex-officio)

Publications sub committee

Professor Janet Beer (Chair)
Dr Jenel Virden
Professor Susan Castillo
Professor Dick Ellis (Editor, American Studies in Britain)
Dr Graham Thompson (webster)
Professor Richard Gray (Editor of Journal of American Studies)
Professor George McKay (Associate Editor of Paperbacks)
Professor Richard Simmons (Editor of BRRAM)
Ms Kathryn Cooper (co-opted)

Conference sub committee

Dr Michael McDonnell (Chair)
Dr Nick Selby
Dr Carol Smith
Miss Andrea Beighton (Oxford, Conference Secretary 2002)
Professor Alan Ryan (Oxford, Conference Secretary 2002)
Dr Tim Woods (Aberystwyth, Conference Secretary 2003)

Libraries and Resources Subcommittee

Dr Kevin Halliwell

BAAS representative to EAAS

Prof Mick Gidley (term ends 2002)*
[* indicates this person not eligible for re-election to this position. All co-optations must be reviewed annually.]

Journal of American Studies

Applications are invited from BAAS members for the posts of Editor and
Associate Editor of the Journal of American Studies. These positions are for a 5-year term, beginning 1 January 2002. The Associate Editor is eligible to apply for the post of Editor. Applications, consisting of a curriculum vitae and short statement, should be sent by Wednesday 18 July 2001 to the Chair of the BAAS Publications Sub-Committee, Professor Janet Beer (J.Beer@mmu.ac.uk) at the following address: Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University, Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond St. West, Manchester M15 6LL

Editorial

The cover of this issue, featuring Old Blue Eyes, seems singly appropriate, now that the I Did It My Way moment has arrived. It is not without nostalgia that I edit my final issue of American Studies in Britain. This issue includes two pieces on the internationalization of American Studies, first a report by BAAS President Philip Davies on the recent Bellagio meeting at which the International American Studies Association was created, and second a meditation/provocation by my colleague John Coyle on multiculturalism and transnationalism in American Studies. This issue also offers an expanded postgraduate section, thanks to the excellent work of the BAAS postgraduate representative, Marie-Celeste Bernier, as well as the usual book reviews, news from American Studies Centers, and so forth.

For the past three years, the editorship of American Studies in Britain has allowed me to keep a finger on the pulse of our discipline, and has enabled me to get to know many of you, some in person, others in cyberspace. Definitely, the job has had its moments; I remember with particular vividness the occasion when the contents of an entire issue were devoured by a computer virus, only to be recovered by a local IT whiz, to whom I shall be eternally grateful. More recently, as the present issue was being prepared, the University server was undergoing problems, with emails vanishing right and left, which has given me cause for endless paranoia about missing items. If this is the case with any of you, my apologies to those concerned. These difficulties notwithstanding, it’s been a great three years, in which I have discovered the generosity and warmth of the American Studies subject community. Particular thanks are due to the members of the BAAS Executive, for their helpful suggestions and contributions; to the BAAS postgrads, for their valuable input; to two successive Deans of the Arts Faculty at Glasgow University, Professors John Caughie and Mark Ward, for their support of ASIB; to my fellow Glaswegian Americanists Simon Newman, Marina Moskowitz, Andrew Hook, Nick Selby and John Coyle for their collegiality and friendship. Most of all, however, thanks are due to my wonderful Editorial Assistants Marie Tate and Sean Groundwater for their generosity of spirit, graphic flair and IT know-how. American Studies in Britain in its present form could never have come into being without their help. Many, many thanks!

And now, the end is near… I am delighted to hand over American Studies in Britain to the our new Editor, Dick Ellis. All articles, announcements, review copies, and so forth for the Spring issue, should be sent to him either by email (r.j.ellis@ntu.ac.uk) or regular mail: Dr. Dick Ellis, Department of English and Media Studies, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham NG11 8NS. I know that Dick will do an outstanding job, and I could not be leaving ASIB in more competent hands.

In conclusion, my thanks once again to all of you, and my warmest wishes to you and your families for the upcoming holiday season.

Susan Castillo

Forum: Hyphenating American Studies

The vice-dean of a major British university once correctly identified me as not an Americanist but a comparatist. He picked his terms, if not his moment, well. (The occasion was a job interview.)

I was reminded of this by Richard Ellis’s projects for a ‘not-BAAS’^[1]  an intervention which echoes Janice Radway’s 1998 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association^[2]  in opening up a speculative discussion of the names of bodies of Americanists in order to resist the ‘imperial’ gestures inherent in the presentation of a coherent national identity. Both Ellis and Radway notice, correctly, that concepts of ‘The American’ are always relationally defined and urge Americanists towards a practice of the field which is linguistically polyglot and methodologically comparatist in orientation; this in keeping with the recognition that the culture of the United States is in fact multicultural and irreducibly fissured in its identities. For all that this gives occasion for celebrating difference and a further opening out of the canon, however the rhetorical teleology of Radway’s address must still offer a sense of the ‘American’ as banner and umbrella.

Politically one sees efforts to contain this multiculturalism in the handling and representation of the Elian Gonzalez affair, where the actions of a group of Cuban Americans were, for the moment, in violent opposition to official American policy. One side issue of this was the identification of ‘hyphenated Americans’ as a type of enemy within, in so far as their atavistic allegiances run counter to their sense of civic loyalty. Beyond this, of course, lies the troubling recognition that all Americans are hyphenated, even the WASPs. There are, we are reminded, no Americans per se, only Italian-Americans, African-Americans, Irish-Americans and so on (while of course, such being the way of things, WASPs get more than their fair share of hyphens, and Native Americans would appear to have lost theirs.) The most talismanic sportsman of his generation Tiger Woods, the cat in the WASPs’ nest, has more hyphens in his self-description than would be par for the course. At the same time Pat Buchanan’s campaign manifesto on “The Education of America’s Children” undertakes to “Reject ‘multicultural’ curricula that denigrate our history and teach our children to identify themselves as hyphenated Americans and members of ethnic subclasses rather than citizens of one nation under God.”^[3]  ( And we can be sure that if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for Pat.)

The above is, of course, just the sort of snide, supercilious remark one might expect from an effete Brit, denizen of a dark and Godless place. I would like to argue, however, that a place should be kept on the curriculum to entertain prejudice, misunderstanding, suspicion, insult and scorn. Gerald Graff argues convincingly in his Beyond the Culture Wars,^[4]  that out of the exhausting battles around the canon, multiculturalism and cultural studies fruitful debate and, most importantly, a renewed sense of the relevance of literature can emerge. Graff cites both his own series of conversions and the helpfulness in classtime of this sense of relevant debate.

Both Radway’s presidential address and Clinton’s presidential actions enact, on different planes, cultural tensions which used to be matters of foreign policy but which have now been internalised. This phenomenon of the internalisation of difference has, I believe, some ramifications for British and European students and teachers engaged in the study of the United States.

Baldly put, the problem is this: while American Studies, and indeed America itself, are now to be understood as cohering more in a chain of differences than in an attempt towards unity, the problem within a British pedagogical context is that the study of American literature in particular arrives already nested within another system of differences; of various Englishes and approaches to English which are themselves engaged (as we all tend to write wishfully) in productive and non-hierarchical dialogue. American studies programmes are more often than not located within departments of English which are themselves fissile, tending both to devolve into more localised cultural formations and to encourage broader definitions/consider a wider and less elitist range of cultural productions generally. With America, then, becoming more hyphenated and English becoming, in some institutions at least, regarded as just one branch of Cultural Studies, and indeed one with its own history of embarrassing omissions and occlusions, one is faced not only with the emancipatory pleasures associated with the act of opening out, but also with the concomitant dangers of decentring, leading to what one might call shoppers’ panic or the panic of the hypertextual. With the best will in the world, it is difficult to keep up with the shifting grounds of positionality which are involved here. American Studies are, as we all know, themselves marginal within the discipline of English as taught and practised within British universities, and the history of American literature and culture has had to take its place, often undiscussed and untheorised, within a revision of the English canon more attendant (and again quite properly and understandably so) on the ramifications for ‘Britishness’ and ‘Englishness’ of our own postcolonial condition. The constitution of courses studying the United States and its productions is accordingly taken too much for granted among those not directly working in the field, so that there is a sense of reluctance to rake over old ground, to engage in supposedly outmoded debates. Over Anglo-American issues a polite and diplomatic silence is maintained, for all that some of the most crucial issues of our time involve the lazy equation of global consumer capitalism with ‘Americanisation’, for all that ‘English’ must inevitably end up on the Pepsi side in the linguistic cola wars, for all that Hugh Kenner is able to say, in A Sinking Island, that ‘The mother-country of ‘English’ [has] become the headquarters forarticulate Philistia’^[5] , and for all that the proposed defections of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie to the United States can still elicit howls of disapprobation among British journalists.

In his introduction to American Fiction Since 1940^[6] Tony Hilfer is surely right to identify one of the major cultural patterns in America in the last 60 years as being ‘the play between the margins and the unstable centre’, but a question often left unaddressed is how the further hyphenation of British American studies fits into this pattern of negotiation with the Other. Within the American academy, this is not a matter of primary attention, and for good reason; as I have spelled out, there are sufficient internal differences within the field to render any turning of the eye eastward superfluous, but beyond this there are three overriding reasons why discussions of whither American Studies should tend to ignore a European dimension. The first is the legacy of a long-fought war of cultural independence which sought to liberate American literature from definitions of its being parasitic on or tributary to the hegemonic ‘English Literature’ – to resuscitate such a dialogue, it may be felt, would be to pay lip service to an outmoded set of prejudices. The second is a consequence of another culture war, that which saw the marshalling of a whole generation of American intellectuals into a defence of Western values against the Soviet threat. The discovery of the blatancy of these efforts, from the Encounter scandals of the 1960s to Frances Stonor Saunders’ chronicle of the cultural Cold Wars^[7] , to an often facile shorthand which equates the new criticism, say, or abstract Expressionism, reductively and exclusively with American Imperialism, leads to a residual embarrassment at addressing the matter of Anglo-American cultural relations. On the one side, British and Europeans are reluctant to be fooled again, on the other, a debacle in the field of foreign policy often leads to a renewed and isolationist attention to domestic issues. What is to be feared and avoided on both accounts is another multi-hyphenated phenomenon, that of knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Third, a hard-fought resistance to ‘Eurocentrism’ leads to a deferral of discussion of the European aspect, even if such discussion were to be proposed from the margins. The ‘Euro-‘ is thrown out with the ‘-centric’ in the demonisation of DWEMs.

One reason for this avoidance is a (quite proper) shame at entertaining prejudice, even by way of analysis. Prejudice, being ignorance on horseback, is something which the intellectual should rightly regard as infra dig. Yet a fully aware and differential account of literary and cultural relations between Britain and the US should not ignore the history of prejudices, and one’s experience of teaching American Literature to British undergraduates shows many such prejudices to remain beneath the surface, unquestioned and therefore intact. The following is of course a standard moan for teachers of literature, but one is especially struck by a reluctance to contextualise American texts, either out of ignorance or out of timidity. This might be remedied by a reading of Russell Reising’s The Unusable Past^[8]  which warns against narratives of the individualist and the Adamic and might put paid to dreary readings of Willy Loman and Gatsby as lone strugglers for the American Dream.

Another, more complex phenomenon is the unearned identification with victimhood which blights and simplifies readings of texts from the margins. It is all too easy to read Toni Morrison, or Maya Angelou, or Rita Dove in terms of a critique of white American values which has as much to do with European fear than with an informed local knowledge of African-American history. For all that one is delighted to foster an interest in alternative versions of American literature, one occasionally suspects a hypostasis of resentment against official, white Americanism, against racism or uniculturalism. To say that there exists today a glamour of the marginal is not to accede to reactionary polemic about ‘political correctness’ but to acknowledge that a powerful current of resentment of Empire drives audiences to become constituencies of interest. It seeks in the history and spectacle of American history’s occlusions an answer to its own doubts about being forgotten. To put the story another way, the internalised doubts of the most powerful nation on earth provide a model of resistance to Empire. In such readings the buck stops with America and with Dumb Americans. Again one sees here the hypostasis of residual fears of the cultural Other, and the spectacle of identification without engagement, which sees racism, say, or rampant capitalism as generally American phenomena with no relevant local or European counterparts.

All this explains why it is important to encourage a comparatist dimension, according to which, as George McKay rightly proposes, the workings of American cultural power on a global scale are open to exploration and analysis, and in which the dialogue between the United States and Europe remains a live issue. (This is of course supplementary to American studies, or whatever we choose to call it, still being engaged in as a discrete national discipline.)

As Malcolm Bradbury has pointed out in his Dangerous Pilgrimages^[9] , the parallel study of American and European Literature shows how America has always presented itself as a speculative fiction to Europeans, and this continues to the present day ruminations of Baudrillard, Derrida and Eco of America as, respectively, simulacrum, deconstruction and hyperreality. Bradbury also shows that the traffic is two-way, with America having consistently fashioned its own self-identity on fictions of Europe. The study of American Literature can only gain by exploiting an awareness of cross-cultural positioning such as is found in Andrew Hook’s exploration, in From Goosecreek to Ganderscleugh^[10] , of the Braveheart myth and its sinister reworkings of a fantasy of Scotland within certain constituencies of the United States. Hook’s successful hyphenation of Scottish-American studies offers a model for those of us who are willing to read Brigadoon as a document of Social Realism, and who are trained to see in perceptions of Otherness an important cultural truth. Brigadoon may be a kitsch working out of an American nostalgia for the pre-urban, the pre-industrial, but one might equally have some hard words to say of, say, Wenders’ Paris, Texas or, even and maybe especially, Baudrillard’s America.

Americanists ought not to be afraid to address incompatibilities of viewpoint, cultural discontinuities, unquestioned prejudices about cultural attitude or intent. Of course there is another reluctance, another diplomacy to be engaged in when writing about and working around a culture at once one’s own and foreign, and this is to do with the embarrassment one feels at being regarded as an official representative of something of which one feels representatively unrepresentative. When I have taught in Eastern and Central Europe on behalf of, at the behest of, all right, using the money of, the British Council, I have been uncomfortably reminded that, as a Glaswegian-Irish Scot, I could not provide the representative truths of what it means to be British that were demanded of me. My own marginality would manifest itself, not, I hope, in ignorance of contesting definitions of Britishness, nor ( I hope even more) in the oppositional espousal of my own special set of differences, but rather in a refusal, learnt from bad example, to Whitmanise. A refusal, in other words, to indulge in this kind of stuff:

The Great Pizza

(I swear that I am not making this up, although I will spare for the moment the name and the occasion)

‘Pizza is a borrowing from Italy and is fabulously successful in America. Its base is a crust something like pita bread, thin and crunchy or thick and chewy, as you prefer, topped with tomato sauce, generously sprinkled with a variety of cheeses and all manner of vegetables, spice (especially oregano), sausages and bits of fish and meat. All this is popped into an oven and baked until it mixes and the cheese has melted, then sliced and eaten with the fingers. Traditionally it is accompanied by a glass or two of beer. I first encountered it in St Louis in the company of my wife and Chianti.’

(Would that this were all, but the author continues:)

‘I trust no one would dispute the notion that Americans have plenty of crust. The profusion of different cultures that have conributed to our toppings havelent all manner of richnesses to our poetry. True, just as in the extremer cases of pizza – say where the cook has left bones in the fish or stems on the peppers – you may face the occasional need to spit or strain to swallow. Part of Whitman’s legacy is his inclusiveness. Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Poe and others adapted the traditional crust of English prosody to their uses; Whitman insisted that we have not only the opportunity to top it as we wish but, indeed, own such a responsibility. Whitman truly opened the door and windows to America’s pizza house of poetry. Include the body, he said. Let in at least some of the words used by common people, the body democratic: glory in their familiar strangeness. They are the stuff of poetry.’

They are also the stuff of adcult, the representative cultural form of the American Century, the stuffed cheesy crust of a discourse which desercves better than to be stigmatised as typically American, which should rather be seen as the spectacle of European horrors of mercantilism reflected back on itself. I remain interested in the way in which American writers negotiate this kin of cultural mirroring, especially when the mirrors are distorting ones. Of course the European Theme as explored by Henry James is an old on, but James’s sense, particularly in The Ambassadors, of necessary diplomacies and representations, of interdependent influences and of the available roles of the ambassador, the tourist, the émigré, the spy and the huckster remain more than ever pertinent. Of more contemporary writers, Don DeLillo seems to have the best idea of America’s real and perceived, real because thus perceived, function in the world. He, like James, has no time for the faux-innocence of culinary metaphor:“America is the world’s living myth. There’s no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We’are here to accommmodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing. People expect us to absorb the impact of their grievances. Interesting, when I talk to a Mideastern businessman who expresses affection and respect for the U.S., I automatically assume he’s either a fool or a liar. The sense of grievance affects all of us, one way or another.^[11]

And two hundred pages later in the same novel.

‘If America is the world’s living myth, then the CIA is America’s myth’[^12] 

For DeLillo as for James, it seems, there are two ways of being in this world. Either one is a tourist or one is an ambassador Hence the stupendous knowingness of DeLillo’s male protagonists, wordly-wise, disciplined in a state of constant readiness, on the qui vive; alert as if to danger. Hence also the characteristic dialogues, impossibly poised and articulate; not the tough guy masking his inner wound but tougher than that, inscrutably observant like a poker player, an agent, a player of the system of differences.

While my invocation of terms like difference, discourse and Derrida might have some distinguished scholars leaning on their shift keys in despair, an attention to the prejudices, and more importantly the conditions productive of such prejudice within our own context, seem to me to be necessary both in terms of politics and (AND!) of Realpolitik.

John Coyle
University of Glasgow

[1] In ‘ American Studies at the Millennium-Some Thoughts’, American Studies in Britain, Autumn/Winter 1999, p. 7.
[2] ‘What’s in a Name’ , American Quarterly, March 1999, pp. 1-32.
[3] This can be found at http://www.gopatgo.org
[4] Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture wars :How Teaching the Conflicts can Revitalize American Education, New York, N.Y. ; London : Norton, 1992.
[5] Hugh Kenner, A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, p.6.
[6] Tony Hilfer, American Fiction Since 1940, London: Longman, 1992, p.5.
[7] Francis Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, London: Granta Books, 1999.
[8] Russell J. Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature, London: Methuen 1986
[9] Malcolm Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages : Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, 1995
[10] Andrew Hook, ‘The South, Scotland and William Faulkner’ in From Goosecreek to Ganderscleugh: Studies in Scottish-American Literary and Cultural History, East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999, pp.193-212.
[11] Don DeLillo, The Names, London: Picador, 1987, p.114.
[12] Ibid., p.317.

BAAS AGM, Keele 2001

The Annual General Meeting of the British Association for American Studies will be held on Sunday 8th April 2001 at Keele University.

Agenda:

1. Elections: Chair, 3 committee members, any other offices that fall vacant before the AGM
2. Treasurer’s Report
3. Chair’s Report
4. Amendments to the Constitution
5. Annual Conferences 2002-2004
6. Report of the Publications Sub-Committee
7. Report of the Developoment Sub-Committee
8. Report of the Libraries and Resources Sub-Committee
9. Report of the Representative to EAAS
10. Any other business

Members are reminded that the Treasurer may come to the AGM to propose a change in subscription rates for calendar year 2002.

At the 2001 AGM elections will be held for three positions on the Committee (three year term), for the Chair of the Association (three year term), and for any other 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 nomination is as follows. Nominations should reach the Secretary, Jenel Virden, by 12:00 noon on Sunday 8th 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. 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.

An amendment to the consitution will also be proposed at this AGM. Section 7(a) of the constitution to be amended to read:

In addition to the 3 elected officers, the committee shall select a member of the executive as Vice-Chair, who shall aid the Chair in the performance of his/her duties.

Dr Jenel Virden
Head of Department
American Studies
University of Hull
Hull HU6 7RX
UNITED KINGDOM
01482-465303 (fax or phone)
J.Virden@amstuds.hull.ac.uk

The Conference Scene

EAAS in Bordeaux March 22-25, 2002 – “The United States of / in Europe: Nationhood, Citizenship, Culture”

EAAS in Bordeaux in 2002: Call for Proposals for Parallel Lectures and Workshop Sessions

The theme of the 2002 EAAS conference, to be held in Bordeaux, March 22-25, is “The United States of / in Europe: Nationhood, Citizenship, Culture”. The theme of the conference offers opportunities for a multi- and inter-disciplinary investigation of the American experience from a European perspective, at a time when a new Europe is being constructed.

Workshops, scholarly presentations and debates are expected to be largely informed by comparative analysis and assessment of American and European social, political and cultural life of the past and of the present. Ideas, concepts, notions and processes to be considered may range widely and can include: development of nationhood and citizenship; individualism and communities; plurality and pluralism; federalism and federalization; the means, ways, and products of democratization; spirituality and religions; building a civil society; continental exchange of thought and ideologies; mobility and regional transformations; issues of justice and security; consumerism and commodification of life; impact of the media and of advertising; the role of education, research and technology; cultural literacy; the place and status of the acts and of literature, concepts of historiography, etc.

The general discussion and the shoptalks at the conference should help understand and define the specificities of European American Studies and contribute to the recognition of their relevance as an educational program and a field of research in academic communities and institutions throughout our continent.

At the same time, chances for international exchange should be actively looked for a fertile space for professional cooperation both within and beyond Europe should be created.

Please send your proposal for a parallel / dialogue lecture to the EAAS President, Josef Jarab, by January 31, 2001, with a copy to the UK EAAS delegate, Mick Gidley, School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT.
Emails: jarab@ffnw.upol.cz / g.m.gidley@leeds.ac.uk
Faxes:+420-68-563-3111 / 0113-233-4774

Proposals for workshop sessions (and their organizers) should be submitted to the EAAS Secretary, Walter Hoelbling, by January 31, 2001, with copies to the UK EAAS delegate, Mick Gidley (details above).
Email: walter.hoelbling@kfunigraz.ac.at
Fax: +43-316-380-9768

The Association of Research in Popular Fictions and the Science Fiction Foundation, University of Reading, 7-9 April 2001 – ‘Television and the Fantastic’

Television and the Fantastic: to be held at the University of Reading, England, 7-9 April 2001. The Association of Research in Popular Fictions and the Science Fiction Foundation are calling for papers on all aspects of television and the fantastic. Papers are welcomed on specific programmes, on themes or on the technological issues faced by fantastical television, in addition to considerations of globalization and culturally specific television fantasy. Abstracts should be sent to Dr. Farah Mendlesohn, Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR, UK or e mailed to Farah3@mdx.ac.uk by 1 December 2000.

The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, 23 May, 2001 – ‘Lord Lothianís Moment: The Anglo-American Establishment and the Saving of Britain, 1939-1941’

This colloquium will be held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, on Wednesday, 23 May, 2001. It is designed to take advantage of the presence in Edinburgh of Dr Priscilla Roberts. Dr Roberts is Director of the Centre of American Studies at the University of Hong Kong, and was in 1997 the winner of the Arthur Miller/BAAS Prize for the best article in American studies, “The Anglo-American Theme.” In May-June 2001, Dr Roberts will hold a Universitas 21 Fellowship in the Department of History in Edinburgh. Her project will be “Lord Lothian and the Atlantic World” and her broader research Programme has to do with the links between the British and American foreign-policy establishments, and with the connections between Atlanticism and The European Idea.

It is hoped that, in conjunction with the colloquium, the National Archives of Scotland in harness with SASA will host an induction session at which postgraduates and other scholars will learn about the Lothian archive, the Lothian website and about other NAS Americanist holdings.

To register your interest and obtain further details when they are ready, please send a note of your name, Email address and further particulars to:

E-Mail: Jeffreys-Jones.Rhodri@ed.ac.uk

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
Professor of American History
Department of History
University of Edinburgh
William Robertson Building
50 George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9JY
SCOTLAND, U.K.

Office +44 131 650 3773 (sec.: 3780)
Fax: +44 131 650 3784

The Internationalization of American Studies

Werner Sollors (Harvard University http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~amciv)

Insiders and Outsiders in the domain of knowledge, unite. You have nothing to lose but your claims.

You have a world of understanding to win.—Robert K. Merton, “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge” (1972)

The formal scholarly organization of American Studies is about half a century old. Its beginnings are thus at about the same distance in time from us as is the subject of a good historical novel. So far, there have been two distinct chapters in American Studies—the Cold War and the age of Multiculturalism. A third chapter has been in the making for some time now; for what both chapters one and two had in common was a predominantly national organization of the field, with the American Studies Association of the USA (ASA) at the center. Only in Europe was an international association created, but this European Association for American Studies (EAAS) was limited to European member associations and individuals. There are many scholars—both outside of and within the United States—who have made the case for internationalizing the field.

In the past decade, a part of this discussion has been the call for founding an international association for the field of American Studies that would complement the work of the ASA International Committee and of many national associations, follow the example of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), and create a new post-Cold War atmosphere of international cooperation on a global scale. How could such an intellectual agenda and professional organization be imagined? How would it lead to new approaches to its subject? How could it be helped by the many existing efforts at international exchanges? How in turn could it help them? Might even the subject of American Studies—the United States of America—change in hemispheric perspectives on “the Americas” and in transnational approaches to issues of modernity?

It was in order to address these issues and to draw institutional consequences from them that Djela l Kadir (Penn State University) convened a working conference at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Conference and Study Center in Bellagio (Italy), at which twenty-two participants from twelve countries (and also members of eleven national and multinational American Studies associations) founded the new International American Studies Association, the IASA. The intense, three-day meeting, uninterrupted by any excursions into the temptingly beautiful Lake Como environment, opened with the question posed by IASA Founding President and Charter Member on the Governing Board of the International Foundation for Global Studies Djelal Kadir, “Why has there not been an international association for American Studies?” He criticized the “wedding of ontology and exception” permeating the field and pleaded for the creation of a new association that would become an “agora of ideas.” The contribution of the International American Studies Association may reside in its capacity to divert American Studies from the perils of redundancy. Because, the difference between American American Studies and International American Studies amounts to a difference between the circling wagons of tautology, on the one hand, and the truly emancipatory plurality of openness.

Jie Tao (Peking University http://www.pku.edu.cn/academic/asc/index.html) described the development of the field in China and expressed the hope that a new international association would help exchanges in all directions. ASA President-Elect Michael Frisch (SUNY Buffalo) was skeptical of the implicit assumption of a simple progress narrative—American Studies moving from national to transnational over time. He offered instead a model of this and other dimensions as axes of scholarship interacting over time, their changing configuration defining the evolution of American Studies. From this vantage, he was hopeful that a new international association could support and propel this evolution, and he placed particular emphasis on the necessary role of a fully deployed interdisciplinarity in this process.

Gonul Pultar (Bilkent University), the Associate President of the American Studies Association of Turkey (http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~jast/ASAT.html) gave an account of American Studies in Turkey vis-a-vis US foreign and cultural policy during the Cold War and since, and hoped that an international association would be able to define values that would help prevent its co-optation. Cristina Giorcelli (University of Rome), a former President of the Italian Association for North American Studies and Vice President of the EAAS, wished for a focus on the Americas as the object of American Studies and also called attention to the desirability of a close relationship with the ASA International Committee’s planned conference in New Zealand in January 2001.

Winfried Fluck (Free University Berlin) gave a detailed list of points that could help define and make useful a new association based on individual membership, among them, the primary focus on the area that is now the United States, full interdisciplinarity (including the social sciences), and resistance to a single defining intellectual agenda; conceived this way, an IASA could create more of a balance between US-based and non-US-based scholarship and stimulate a growing dialogue on “versions of America.” It could (and should) be more assertive in carrying the idea of American Studies into the public sphere, where discourses about the U.S. are currently dominated almost exclusively by journalists and certain professional elites. Philip Davies (De Montfort University), President of the British Association for American Studies (http://http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site), noted the potential for an IASA.

Lois Parkinson Zamora (University of Houston) gave an account of the difficulties with such terms as “America” or “the United States” and emphasized the need for “transculturation discourse” (Ortiz) and the increased contacts of scholars; the IASA would achieve institutional usefulness by national, hemispheric, and global perspectives. Theo D’haen (Leiden University) sketched the great advantages of approaches to what he called the “relationality” in the Americas that would cross national borders and such language boundaries as French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese, transform the structural weakness of outside perspectives into strength, and contribute to what Glissant called “mondialization.”

Maureen Montgomery (University of Canterbury, New Zealand) gave an account of her planning for the January 2001 International American Studies Conference in New Zealand, a conference that goes back to an initiative of the ASA International Committee; she saw as a model for decentered communication the image of a wheel in which communication would not start from the hub but from, and continuing among, the spokes, thus permitting more lateral communication and exchanges in all directions. Montgomery also hoped that a new IASA would set itself the task to do what existing associations do not or cannot do. Hiroko Sato (Tokyo Woman’s Christina University), the President of the Japanese Association for American Studies, gave a historical account of American Studies in Japan where it is popular among foreign-language students, and noted that fact that one book a day is published on the US.

Josef Jarab (University of Olomouc), President of the Czech and Slovak American Studies Association and President-Elect of the EAAS, outlined how the US always served as an alternative world (for better or worse) in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe; he suggested a hyphenated vision for international approaches to the plurality of values coexisting within the US, and hoped for an IASA that would serve as a forum for an exchange of ideas as well as of experiences with American Studies, thus not necessarily redefining, but analyzing and monitoring the field. Sonia Torres (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niteroi), President of the Brazilian Association for American Studies http://www.uff.br/ceg/abea.htm , described tendencies in American Studies in Brazil, where language studies cooperate with social sciences; she also called for interdisciplinary and international appreciation.

The debates were intense, both in the general forum, and during the breaks for meals, and many different versions of internationalizing American Studies were proposed by the twenty-two scholar assembled in Bellagio. Yet there were also many shared themes that emerged. Among them were the wish for: bringing about more exchanges of scholars, students, and ideas; strengthening, not competing with, all ongoing efforts to bring about internationalization; realizing a full interdisciplinarity, with a focus not only on culture and literature, but on historical, political, social, and natural science perspectives; supporting the study of America regionally and hemispherically, nationally, and transnationally; stimulating comparative approaches on all levels; crossing language barriers and stimulating translation processes; and increasing a sense of a political and ethical responsibility in an international organization.

There was such unanimity concerning the need for an international association at this point that the scholars unanimously adopted the following public declaration.

Bellagio, June 1, 2000

The International American Studies Association (IASA) was founded today by twenty-two scholars from around the world, committed to the study of America – regionally, hemispherically, nationally, and transnationally.

Rooted in various fields of study, the IASA will provide a space for interdisciplinary dialogues about American culture and society. To this purpose, it will promote international exchanges of teachers, scholars, and students and generate debates, publications, and conferences.

Convened by Professor Djelal Kadir (Penn State University, USA) at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Conference and Study Center, in Bellagio, Italy, were participants from twelve countries and members of eleven national and multinational American Studies Associations. Those present were: Greg C. Cuthbertson (South Africa), Philip Davies (United Kingdom), Theo D’haen (Netherlands), Emory Elliott (USA), Winfried Fluck (Germany), Michael Frisch (USA), Cristina Giorcelli (Italy), Ramon Gutierrez (USA), Heinz Ickstadt (Germany), Josef Jarab (Czech Republic), Mary Kelley (USA), Rob Kroes (Netherlands), Maureen Montgomery (New Zealand), Carla Mulford (USA), Gonal Pultar (Turkey), Hiroko Sato (Japan), Neusa da Silva Matte (Brazil), Werner Sollors (Germany), Tao Jie (China), Sonia Torres (Brazil), and Lois Parkinson Zamora (USA).

They are members of the following associations: American Studies Association (USA), American Studies Association of Turkey, Associação Brasileira de Estudos Americanos, Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani, Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, British Association for American Studies, Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien, European Association for American Studies, Japanese Association for American Studies, and the Netherlands American Studies Association.

The work of IASA will support, complement, and internationalize ongoing efforts by regional, national, and multinational associations of American Studies. The IASA welcomes individual, institutional, and associational memberships to its ranks from all professional Americanists in the social and natural sciences, the humanities and the arts, from intellectuals, artists, journalists, public officials, and all those active in matters concerning the study of America.

The IASA plans to hold its first international conference in the year 2003.

More information about the International American Studies Association, the 2003 conference, planned publications, and membership applications are available from Professor Djelal Kadir, Founding President, IASA, Penn State University, University Park PA 16802-6204, USA. Email: IASA@psu.edu

American Studies Recruitment

Earlier this year I circulated a paper on American Studies recruitment based on the 1996-1999 figures available on the UCAS website. These statistics relate to UCAS courses coded Q4 – very predominantly, though not wholly, single subject American Studies programmes.

As I stated at the time, while the time series data gave a reliable indication of the changes that might be affecting American Studies recruitment, I was not at all convinced that the gross figures gave a proper indication of the current health of the subject at undergraduate level.

UCAS cannot release data on individual courses and subjects at individual universities, except to those particular universities, but it can release aggregate data, where individual data cannot be specifically identified. Using the Eccles Centre listing of American Studies undergraduate programmes I compiled two lists – one of programmes that seemed to me to be single honours American Studies, and one of programmes that were American Studies joint honours with one other subject, or American Studies as part of a degree combining three subjects, or were American Studies under a different guise (for example an American History and Politics degree, or an English and American literature degree, offered out of an American Studies programme). These hand lists may not have been comprehensive, but they gave pretty good coverage. A researcher at UCAS has been most helpful in compiling the statistics for these aggregrate lists as fully as he could manage.

The results were as follows:

List 1 – a specific list of institutions and courses – American Studies single subject degree courses, 1999

List 2 – a specific list of institutions and courses – American Studies combined subject degree courses, 1999, including balanced elements of another subject, or a minor element of American Studies

This appears to confirm that American Studies is being offered in many varied forms, and that the different forms have appeal to substantial numbers of students.

These statistics also suggest that applications remain more healthy than seems to be the case in the earlier, more limited, figures. The application to accepted ratio for List 1 is 2.29:1, and for List 2 is 4:1. It may be that there is more risk of double counting on a hand list of this kind, and only your institution and your programme can have accurate long term figures for your own application and conversion figures.

The figures do confirm the feminisation of the American Studies undergraduate population. Among accepteds the female to male ratio in List 1 is 1.75:1, and in List 2 it is 1.94:1.

Not all of the American Studies programmes that I identified could be included in this aggregation. Some university and college programmes combining subjects operate under generic coding that does not identify the subject elements, and therefore American Studies statistics cannot be squeezed out of the totals. For example I suspect that De Montfort University’s Combined Honours Humanities and Social Sciences programme (a combination of three subjects, of which American Studies may be one), falls into this category – yet this is a programme that attracts about one-third of DMU’s American Studies students. Therefore official figures still leave us underestimating the number of students undertaking American Studies at UK universities.

The above lists gives a total of 1,413 entrants in 1999. They are hand drawn lists, and while I was careful, they are almost certainly not totally comprehensive. They do not include combined programmes where the codes do not allow the identification of students specifically undertaking American Studies. Simply multiplied by 3, this low estimate gives us a total undergraduate student population of 4,239. But some programmes are four-year, which increases the total further, and further upward adjustment is needed to correct for the acknowledged missing data. Still working conservatively, one is soon in a range that might give us an undergraduate population to be estimated around 6,000. At the risk of repetition of a well-established point, there are also many more students on programmes that are not called ‘American Studies’ who take American options wither within their own programmes, or offered by American Studies staff.

The data have indicated that there is no room for complacency, but there is plenty of health in American Studies, and that students are interested in American topics. It is clear that universities and colleges are responding to this. For 2000 entry UCAS records that 595 American Studies course options were available, for 2001 this has increased to 624!

Philip John Davies
Chair, British Association for American Studies
Professor of American Studies, De Montfort University Leicester, UK

News from American Studies Centres

American Studies Resources Centre: Annual Report 1999-2000

This academic year has seen yet another period of extensive developments in the operations of the American Studies Centre, involving both an increased uptake in the Centre’s services, visits from US academics and others, conferences, website and student development.

ASRC Conferences/Lectures

The annual schools/FE conference took place in October, again at the Conference Centre of Merseyside Maritime Museum. The topic this year was Herbert Hoover, Franklin D.Roosevelt and the New Deal. Another capacity audience heard lectures from John Kentleton (Liverpool University) on ‘The Ordeal of Herbert Hoover’, Niall Palmer (Brunel University) on ‘Maestro in the White House: FDR as President’ and Tony Badger (Cambridge University) on ‘How did the New Deal change America?’ The purpose of the conference, as with all the ASRC school/FE events, was to support areas identified by teachers as being of relevance to their students study. The day proved to be a great success and achieved its aim of not only supporting student needs but also in encouraging students to hopefully follow an American Studies pathway in higher education. An information stand by the American Studies Section of JMU was accompanied by leaflets from other universities offering similar programmes. As the traditional arts/humanities subjects (in HE) have been affected by the changing loan/fee situation and a significant decline in mature students selecting strictly non vocational routes, it seems that general publicity and encouragement to follow an American Studies route is becoming an increasingly important issue to address. Our thanks go to not only all our speakers, but also to Dilys Horwich and her staff at the Museum. For the academic year 2000-2001, the schools conference will consider the upcoming Presidential election. The conference will take place on October 18th and will hopefully include presentations by representatives from both Republicans and Democrats Abroad.

In November the ASRC, in conjunction with the University of Westminster and the Smithsonian Institution, presented a one-day conference at the US Embassy in London. Entitled ‘Deconstructing Hollywood: Developments in Mass Culture since 1945 ‘the conference examined a broad range of issues. Lonnie Bunch (Smithsonian) examined the manner in which Hollywood has historically represented African Americans. This was followed by a lecture by Kasia Boddy (University of Dundee) on the representation of gender in Hollywood films on boxing themes. The final lecture by Ian Wall (Film Education) considered the manner in which Hollywood has marketed its films and the changes brought about by the new technology. The final session involved a live TV link up with the writers and lecturers Lenny Quart and Al Auster in New York. A full report by Claire Horrocks (Edge Hill University) is carried in both this years issue of American Studies Today and in the ‘Conference’ section of the ASRC web site. Our thanks for making this conference such a resounding success go to all the participants as well as Sue Wedlake, Claire Parvin and T.J.Dowling at the US Embassy and Chris Brookeman and Alan Morrison at the University of Westminster.

The ASRC also played host to visits from Professor Lenny Quart (CUNY), Professor James Horton (George Washington University) and Professor Lois Horton (George Mason University.) Guest lectures were presented on how Hollywood has represented the inner city (Lenny Quart) and how African American History and slavery has been presented in the public arena. (James Horton.) Further details of these visits can be found later in this report.

In June 2000 the ASRC also supported an important schools conference, organised by the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham, for teachers of literature and history. The topic was Puritanism and The Crucible. The ASRC’s contribution to the day examined the availability of resources for students and teachers in this area. An extensive internet resources web page was set up by the ASRC to highlight the wealth of material available to assist the study of Miller, the play itself, McCarthyism, America in the Fifties, as well as the Salem Witch Trials. This page will remain on the ASRC web site for future reference.

This academic years’ Thanksgiving Lecture at JMU was presented by Dr.Peter Thompson of Oxford University. Entitled ‘Rum, Punch and Revolution’ (and based on his book of the same title) Peter looked, appropriately, at the patterns of ‘tavern going’ in the Revolutionary period. This was followed by a traditional Thanksgiving meal for audience of JMU students, staff and guests.

As well as the earlier noted forthcoming conference on the Presidential Election, the ASRC is also in discussions regarding a further two events. Although these are not finalised, it is hoped that conferences on American Film in the 1950s and 60s, and on Latino America will take place. Details of these will be placed on the ASRC web site as soon as they are finalised.

US Visitors

As noted in the section of this report dealing with the conference and lecture programme, the ASRC was visited this year by Lenny Quart and James and Lois Horton. After their guest lectures, both sets of visitors took in other aspects of Liverpool life and the US-Liverpool connection. James and Lois visited the Slavery Gallery at the Maritime Museum where they were guided by Mike Boyle of the ASRC’s Advisory Panel and Dilys Horwich of the Education Sectionn of the Museum. They also met with the curator of the Gallery, Tony Tibbles and had discussions on potential joint research programmes involving the ASRC and the Museum.

The ASRC was also host to two visits from the US Embassy… although one was a ‘virtual’ visit involving Poilitics students from JMU discussing the upcoming Presidential election on an Internet discussion room with Ambassador Philip Lader. (The Ambassador had at the end of last academic year also received an Honorary Fellowship from the School of Media, Critical and Creative Arts at JMU.) This had been preceded by a visit from the Cultural Attache at the Embassy, T.J. Dowling. As well as taking in the sites of Liverpool and attending a welcome celebration at the Town Hall (accompanied by University Vice Chancellor Professor Peter Toyne) for the new conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, T.J. also spent time in the ASRC discussing the progress and development of its programmes and services.

ASRC Website

Now renamed ARNET, the ASRC website has gone from strength to strength. The number of hits the site has received has increased dramatically, with over 25,000 hits in March 2000 alone. By the beginning of July 2000 the total number of hits since the site was re-launched in February 1998 had reached over 370,000. This success has been achieved through extensive additions to the online materials. On an average day the site receives hits from around 40 different countries. The development of online services in ongoing and next academic year the ASRC will be sponsoring selected teachers to add teaching materials in a new ‘Teaching American Studies’ section. Full details will be announced on the website. Our thanks to David Forster for all his hard work on ARNET.

Student Placements

This year also saw the start of a work experience module from JMU American Studies students in the ASRC. During their placement the students not only supported the work of th ASRC in dealing with requests from teachers, lecturers and students, but also contributed to the organisation of the conference programme. The students also received extensive training on research techniques, particularly via the Internet, and were also introduced to web design and authoring by David Forster. A major improvement and increase in computer facilities within the ASRC also helped assist this development. From the ASRC point of view their help and support was invaluable. From the students perspective, not only did they develop their own research, interpersonal and communication skills, but they also produced study packs that would assist their own studies in other modules, as well as providing valuable information for helping deal with requests on specific American Studies topics in the ASRC. It is hoped that next academic year students from the Journalism Section will also be able to gain work experience in the ASRC, working on the ARNET website and preparing the 2001 edition of our magazine, American Studies Today.

Requests and student visits to ASRC

Although written and e-mailed requests for information to the ASRC continue to grow, the number of requests for audio-visual materials has declined significantly this year. Whilst there is no clear answer to why this should be, it is felt that the growth of student/teacher use of the Internet may be a contributing factor. Although the Centre continues to update its collection of video material, major problems with satellite reception hardware has meant a significant reduction in the availability of new material. Whilst it is anticipated that this will be overcome in the near future, it is clear that a new trend is in progress that will see a shift towards web based learning as opposed to the traditional materials.

Visits to the ASRC by JMU and LCC students have continued to grow, often requiring the ASRC to remain open for longer periods. Whilst this has placed even greater demands on staff time, it is anticipated that this issue will be successfully addressed for next academic year. Visits by students/teachers from outside the University and College have also remained at a high level.

Relocation of the ASRC

Over the summer break, the ASRC will be moving to a new and bigger location within the Robarts Centre. The phone/fax numbers and postal address will remain unchanged.

In conclusion, our thanks go again to all those who have contributed to making this another successful year. In particular, David Forster for his development work on ARNET, The British Association of American Studies (BAAS) for their continued support of the ASRC schools conference programme, the members of the ASRC Management Group, as well as all others mentioned earlier in this report.

Ian Ralston, Director American Studies Resources Centre
Email: I.Ralston@livjm/ac/uk
Website: www.americansc.org.uk

University of Central Lancashire: “Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies” Project

American Studies at Preston has just been awarded £150,000 to manage a HEFCE Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning project on “Americanisation and the Teaching of American Studies”. The project will be run in conjunction with departments at King Alfred’s Winchester and Derby and focuses on the dissemination throughout the American studies community of innovative teaching on the theme of Americanisation. It will build on curriculum strengths in the teaching of Americanisation, the Transatlantic and Cultural Theory at Preston which were identified in the successful 1998 TQA visit. Visits to other American Studies providers giving workshops will be a prime output of the project as will a Web site and occasional newsletter. The workshops will be run by experts in the field of Americanisation who will develop their best teaching practice in the field and disseminate it throughout the American Studies community. There will be a session dedicated to the project at the 2001 British Association for American Studies conference at Keele in April to explain the project and outline the kinds of approaches the project will be foregrounding. In early 2002 there will be a conference on Americanisation and the teaching of American Studies here at Preston which will, amongst other objectives, seek to assess the value of such approaches to the development of the subject. The newsletter/website will provide resources to help the teaching of Americanisation, exchanging good practice and information. The project started in September and runs for two years. Any colleagues in the American Studies community who would like to be kept in touch or to contribute to the project as it develops should in the first instance contact the project manager

Dr. Alan Rice
Project Manager, Americanisation Project
Dept. of Cultural Studies
University of Central Lancashire
Preston
PR1 2HE
arice@uclan.ac.uk
01772 893020

News from Members

James Beeby was recently appointed Assistant Professor of History at West Virginia Wesleyan College, West Virginia, where he will teach U.S., Southern and African American History.

Announcements

BAAS Paperbacks

BAAS Paperbacks is a series produced by the Assoiciation in co-operation with Edinburgh University Press. The series editors are George McKay and Philip Davies. The volumes in the series are about 60,000 words, and are aimed to sell into the established undergraduate market. As such the style and level are appropriate for an undergraduate readership. All those published so far (see below for a list of titles published and forthcoming) have been co-published in the United States.

The commissioning editor at EUP, Nicola Carr, has surveyed the modules being taught in American Studies programmes nationally. The following rough hand list resulted.

1st Year:
introduction to American History (Revolution to Civil War to Present)
Introduction to American Government & Politics
Introduction to American Studies

Upper Level Modules:
American South history/cultural representation
American West history/cultural representation
African American history/culture
Native American history/culture
Civil Rights Movement
Civil War
20th century American Politics
Foreign policy
Presidency, executive, policy-making periods in American history
19th century American literature
20th century American literature
American women writers
Introduction to American popular culture
American film
American culture and society

These topics may act as an initial indication of areas towards which publications could be aimed. If you are interested in making a proposal based on these topics, or on another idea that you feel would have a value for the American Studies community and a viable publishing market, please contact either of the series editors, or EUPs commissioning editor at the addresses below. Guidelines for the presentation of proposals can be obtained from Nicola Carr at EUP.

All proposals will of course go through the normal full EUP refereeing process (details of which are given in the proposal guidelines).

BAAS Paperbacks Published or Forthcoming:

The American Landscape
The United States and European Reconstruction
Gender, Ethnicity and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film
Political Scandals in the USA
American Exceptionalism
The New Deal
Religion in America to 1865
The Cultures of the New American West
Jazz in American Culture
Animation in American Society
Religion in America from 1865 to the present
Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America

Professor Philip Davies
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
De Montford University
Leicester LE1 9BH
Tel: 0116 257 7398
Fax: 0116 257 7199
Email: pjd@dmu.ac.uk

Professor George McKay
Department of Cultural Studies
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
Tel: 01772 893038
Fax: 01772 892924
Mobile: 0771 356 4706
Email: g.mckay@uclan.ac.uk

Nicola Carr
Senior Commissioning Editor
Edinburgh University Press
22 George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LF
Tel: 0131 650 6206
Fax: 0131 662 0053
Email: nicola.carr@eup.ed.ac.uk
Website: www.eup.ed.ac.uk

British Records Relating to America in Microform (BRRAM)

Readers of the Newsletter may be interested to have an update on our recent activities and some reminder of the large number of important titles that are currently available. These cover many aspects of American, Caribbean and British colonial and imperial history. The material ranges in time from the colonial period to the twentieth century. Topics covered include immigration and settlement, slavery and antislavery, political and military affairs, trade, industry, plantations, agriculture and ranching, Most are accompanied by an introductory/index booklet.

The following new titles have been published in the last two years:

Tudway of Wells Antiguan Estate papers (1689-1920) Ref 97569. Format: 30 reels of 35mm microfilm and printed guide. Editor: Kenneth Morgan, Brunel University. These papers, on deposit in the Somerset Record Office, relate to the Parham plantation, a sugar estate in Antigua owned by the Tudway Family. They include comprehensive financial accounts, correspondence and material on the operating procedures of the plantation.

William Davenport & Co., 1745-1797, Liverpool merchants. Ref 97562. Format: 3 reels of 35mm microfilm and printed guide. Editor: David Richardson, Hull University. William Davenport was a Liverpool merchant and British slave trader. From the late 1740s until the early 1790s, he invested regularly in the African slave trade and was a partner in slaving ventures with other leading merchant Liverpool families.

Henry Caner Letterbook
Ref. No: 97577. Format: 1 reel of 35mm microfilm.
Editor: R. C. Simmons, University of Birmingham. The Rev. Henry Caner (1700-1792) was a leading Church of England clergyman in Connecticut and Massachusetts, rector of Kings Chapel Boston from 1747 until 1776, when he was forced into exile. The letterbook, from Bristol University Library, contains about 700 letters. Among his correspondents were the Bishops Edmund Gibson, Thomas Sherlock and William Warburton, Archbishop Thomas Secker, and many other members of the Anglo-American Anglican network. This is one of the few surviving letterbooks of an American Church of England clergyman and the letters provide fascinating insights into his official and personal life in America and as a loyalist refugee.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Collection.
Ref No: 97571. Format: 2 reels of 35mm microfilm. Editor: Brian Harding, University of Birmingham. These papers, from the Alexander Ireland Collection in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, help document the English response to Emersons works for the half century following his first visit to England in 1833, providing a unique record of the interest aroused by his lectures and writings.

Sharples family material and Ellen Sharples Diary
Format: estimated 5 reels of 35mm microfilm.Editor: Diane Waggoner, Yale University. Letters, diaries and travel account of the Sharples, Anglo-American artists, of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. English-born James Sharples (c. 1751-1811) built his career on drawing pastel portraits and became known for his portraits of George and Martha Washington and other eminent Americans. Ellen Sharples (1769-1849) copied her husbands portraits on commission and taught herself to paint miniatures. The couple trained Jamess son by his second wife, Felix (c. 1786-after 1824), and their own two children, James Jr.(c. 1788-1839) and Rolinda (c. 1793-1838), all of whom became successful portrait painters. Ellen Sharpless diary and letter book spans the years 1803 to 1836 and 1840 to 1845; the collection also includes a large number of personal and legal papers. All these provide an intimate account of the life of a cultured woman and her daughter, in both England and America, with information on her artistic pursuits, her daughters education, her appetite for the literature of the day, other personal matters and the familys financial affairs.

The American Papers of Charles Vaughan.
Format: estimated 20 reels of 35mm microfilm.
Editor: R. C. Simmons, University of Birmingham. Material from the Charles Vaughan papers at All Souls, Oxford, covering Vaughans period as British Minister to the USA during the years 1825-1830 and all the other material relating to America in his political, official and personal correspondence, journals and commonplace books.

Liverpool Customs Bills of Entry 1820-1939
Format: estimated 70 reels of 35mm microfilm.
Editor: Kenneth Morgan, Brunel University. This collection from the Liverpool Record Office and the Liverpool Maritime Museum provides shipping registers and maritime trading lists for ships docking in the port of Liverpool, giving a comprehensive overview of goods inwards and outwards, together with information on ships names, crews, etc. A rich source for maritime and economic history.

Besides these new publications, I would like to highlight some of the “ best-sellers” from our existing list.

American Material in the Archives of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Introduction by Isobel Pridmore, former Archivist to the U.S.P.G. Series A: Letter Books, Vols. 126, 17021737. 8 Reels Series B: Letter Books, Vols.1-25,17011786. 14 Reels Series C: 18th Century Copy Letters, Vols. 1-15. 5 Reels Index to Series A, B and C. 1 Reel.

American Prisoners of War, (18121815) From the Public Record Office, London. Introduction by Ira Dye, University of Virginia. These records, relating to Americans taken prisoner by British forces during the War of 1812-15, were generated in the course of the administrative process of receiving, clothing, housing and feeding prisoners of war, then keeping track of them as they passed through the prison ship and depot system until they were finally discharged, exchanged or released (or in some cases, until they died while prisoners). 11 reels. With Introductory/Index booklet

British Pamphlets Relating to The American Revolution… 1764-1783. All available British and Irish pamphlets, broadsides and controversial books printed in Great Britain between 1 January 1764 and 31 December 1783 that are relevant to the various aspects of the American Revolution, whether devoted in their entirety to the subject or simply containing a paragraph or more, are contained in this microfilm. Also included are those American and European pamphlets that were reprinted in Britain between 1764 and 1783, as well as British parliamentary speeches published for outside readers and public reports and papers. The importance of these pamphlets has long been appreciated and the richness of their contents suspected but heretofore they have not all been readily accessible and some have been virtually unknown. This microfilm edition brings them together for the first time; there are 1161 in all. 49 Reels – please apply for special prices. With Introductory/Index booklet and set of 1161 Library Catalogue Cards.

Estlin Papers (1840-1844). From Dr. Williamss Library, London. Introduction by Dr. Clare Taylor, University College of Wales. These papers illustrate the close connection between British and American antislavery reformers in the middle of the 19th century. 6 Reels

Hobhouse Letters (1722-1755). From Bristol Central Library and Bristol Record Office. Introduction by Professor W. E. Minchinton, University of Exeter. Letters and other papers of Isaac Hobhouse & Co., Bristol Merchants. 1 Reel

Rhodes House Anti-slavery Papers (1836-1842) From Rhodes House Library, Oxford. Introduction by Professor Howard Temperley, University of East Anglia. Includes the Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. 2 Reels

Charles Townshend Papers in The Buccleuch And Queensberry Muniments, (1765-1767) From Dalkeith House, Midlothian. Introduction by Professor T. C. Smout, University of Edinburgh. Giving an insight into Townshends policy, which helps to explain the colonial reaction to imperial government. 3 Reels.

The American Papers of The 2nd Earl of Dartmouth. From the Staffordshire Record Office. Introduction by Prof. Colin Bonwick, Keele University. These papers are a central source for British policy in the era of the American Revolution and for 18th-century British government and politics. 16 Reels.

Full details of these and all other titles in the BRRAM series are available from:

Microform Imaging Ltd.
Main Street, East Ardsley
Wakefield WF3 2AT, United Kingdom
Email: info@microform.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 1924 825700
Fax: +44 (0) 1924 871005
Website: www.microform.co.uk

Suggestions for new titles are always welcome and should be sent to: R. C. Simmons r.c.simmons@bham.ac.uk General Editor

Book Reviews

Forecaast, Hamburg 1999

Justine Tallys brief and insightful study of Toni Morrisons Paradise (1998) is provocative and multi-dimensional. It usefully situates the novel in relation to Morrisons oeuvre especially to Jazz (1992) and Beloved (1987) the two earlier novels in her trilogy about post-emancipation African American culture and society and to Morrisons own critical writing which suffuses her discussion. This makes the book as much a summary of where Morrison has taken us to at centurys end as a specific critique of her latest novel. There is a welcome use of Morrison scholarship from Europe, too often ignored by Morrisonians in America, although there are some surprising Stateside ommissions. Philip Pages wonderful Dangerous Freedom (1997) is not cited and Jill Matuss Toni Morrison (1998) with its interesting work on trauma which could have illuminated aspects of the discussion here is ignored (too late to use?). Meanwhile, Linden Peachs rather derivative discussions – in Toni Morrison (1995) – are afforded too much space.

As would be expected considering the novels recent provenance, there is much use of newspaper and magazine reviews that Tally skilfully utilises to show the often narrow nature of their concern with Morrison and their inability to deal with the complexity of a difficult novel. Tally astutely foregrounds “History” in its numerous guises as key to a discussion of Paradise giving the reader useful contextualisation and yet showing the limitations of a traditional literary historical approach to such a demanding postmodern novel. Most interestingly she discusses how important arguments about essentialism are to understanding this novel, making what is often an arcane discussion, clearcut and stimulating. Morrison is often accused of being difficult, Tallys clearly written and sensitively argued monograph supplies some dynamic answers to these postmodern puzzles.

Alan Rice, University of Central Lancashire

Kudos

Jay Kleinberg, Philip Davies and Judie Newman have been elected Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences (AcSS).

In Print

Robert Burchell, United States of America, World Bibliographical Series, Volume 16 (Oxford and Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO Ltd, 2000). Pp.xiv + 424. ISBN 1 85109 164 5.

David Stafford and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (both University of Edinburgh) have edited ABC: American-British-Canadian Intelligence Relations, 1939-2000 (Frank Cass, 2000. Cloth: ISBN 07146 51036, UK pounds, 45. Paper: ISBN 07146 8142 3, UK pounds 18.50).

Rebecca Starrs Articulating America: the Fashioning of a National Political Culture in the Early Republic , a collection of essays honouring the distinguished BAAS member J.R. Pole (Madison: House Publishers, Inc., 2000) will be published later this year.

Spencer C. Tucker, Jinwung Kim, Michael R. Nichols, Paul G. Pierpaoli, Jr., Priscilla Roberts, and Norman R. Zehr, eds. Encyclopedia of the Korean War: A Political, Social, and Military History. 3 vols. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio Press, 2000. xlii + 1123 pages. ISBN 1-57607-029-8.

Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, eds. The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). ISBN 0-6312-1124-1.

Short-term Travel Reports

Zoe A. Greer, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne

I would like to open by thanking BAAS for its support of my doctoral research on the use of prison as a platform for racial protest in the civil rights and black power eras. The purpose of my trip to the States was to research the first section of my thesis on the arrest and imprisonment of civil rights workers in Mississippi. My work focused upon the way in which the Movement adopted jail-no-bail as both a value and a tactic and the way in which, for many, imprisonment became a deeply empowering experience. The trip lasted a total of ten weeks (albeit with an unscheduled return to the UK half way through) and covered libraries and archives in Mississippi, Washington DC and Charlottesville, Virginia.

Essentially, my work in Mississippi concentrated upon researching the civil rights movement on a local level, whilst my visits to Virginia and the Library of Congress in Washington DC enabled me to use the records of the national civil rights organisations. During my time at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, I was able to take advantage of the massive microfilm collection, including the papers of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Congress of Racial Equality, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and various national newspapers. These collections documented the day-to-day physical and mental torture that protesters often suffered at the hands of their jailers very well.

Whilst my work on the national organisations was vital to my thesis, it was my research in Mississippi that provided the most fascinating and original material. In particular, the collections at Tougaloo College, Jackson, Mississippi, provided a wealth of information and I had the unusual pleasure of having the special collections room entirely to myself, free to explore the archives. I was delighted to discover a collection of letters written on toilet paper by an imprisoned protester in a Mississippi jail. Although my research was occasionally frustrated by the fact that documents had either been lost or misplaced, the warm welcome and assistance that I received from the staff made the College the most enjoyable place I visited. Whilst in Jackson, I was able to interview Rev. Ed King, a leading figure in the Jackson Movement, who was imprisoned on numerous occasions in Mississippi. This interview led to an invite to visit a local African American church one Sunday where those who had been part of the Jackson Movement came together to educate the local children about the civil rights era. These contacts with the local community were absolutely invaluable to my research: the resulting interviews and discussions provided me with insights into the way in which prison affected individuals that could not have been gleamed in any written record.

Overall, my work in the States produced a large amount of fascinating material. I am now moving on to research the second part of my thesis, which analyses the relationship between the black power movement and the black prison population.

Ruth Percy, Department of History, University College London

Research trip to the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., 20 August- 27 August 2000

Firstly I would like to thank you for the generous support you have given me. The additional money you gave me enabled me to undertake a research trip to the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. which, as with the trip to the Schlesinger Library, was very successful.

The library holds papers of the Womens Trade Union League (WTUL) additional to those in the Schlesinger Library, American Federation of Labor papers and those of Cornelia Bryce Pinchot. I was able to get through the WTUL papers, which consisted of letters, speeches, convention proceedings, and publications. This, coupled with the work I did at the Schlesinger Library, means that I have now have very little left of the WTUL papers to study, those of Agnes Nestor held at the Chicago Historical Society being the most important remaining collection. The WTUL papers are foundational to my research of labour feminism, for the organization at times proved to be a bridge between the labour and the feminist movements

As the Library of Congress closed at 5pm every day I took advantage of the fact that the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, were open until 9pm on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. There I began work on the extensive records of the Womens Bureau of the Department of Labor, established first as a temporary measure in 1918 as the Women in Industry Service, and then becoming permanent and gaining its new name in 1920. These papers unfortunately have not on the whole been catalogued and on a future trip I will have to just pull boxes and work through them accordingly. Due to the time constraints of this trip I pulled the sections that have been catalogued and managed to get through six of the boxes from the collection of the Director, Mary Anderson. This work lies parallel to that I have already done at the Public Record Office in London. These governmental papers form an important part of my research. The relationship of trade unions and working women to the governmental process, especially regarding labour legislation in the case of America, is important in the study of the construction of labour feminism. The debate over legislation pitted sections of the feminist movement against those representing labour, and the papers of Mary Anderson reveal that she tried to find a balance between the two, thus constructing a kind of labour feminism.

And finally, thank you once again for your support without which these trips would not have been possible.

Postgraduate News

This section includes information on all areas specifically related to postgraduate members of BAAS. It is hoped that it will provide a forum for improving communication links both between postgraduates and other members of BAAS, as well as supplying information on the numerous awards, prizes and publication opportunities available within the association. As these pages are in their formative stages, please send any comments or queries (including suggestions for improvement) to the Postgraduate Representative at the following contact address:

Celeste-Marie Bernier
School of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
University Park
Nottingham
NG7 2RD
E-Mail: aaxcb1@nottingham.ac.uk

Special thanks goes to Graham Thompson for providing much of this material, which can also be found on the website at the following address: http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site

BAAS Postgraduate Essay Prize

The prize is awarded annually 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 institution in Britain. The essay may have been completed prior to registration as a postgraduate student. The value of the prize shall be determined on each occasion, but will normally be of the order of 100 pounds sterling.

Candidates should submit 4 copies of the essay in typescript to Dr. Paul Giles, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, CB3 ODG. Closing date for entries is 1 February 2001.

The essay should be between 3000 and 5000 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.

The essay should form a self-contained piece of writing, suitable for publication as an article in a professional journal. Care should accordingly be taken with matters of presentation and documentation.

Prize-winning essays will be offered publication in U.S. Studies Online, the BAAS Postgraduate Journal, and may also be considered for publication in the Journal of American Studies. Please note that publication in the Journal of American Studies cannot be guaranteed.

The Association reserves the right not to make an award in the event of no essay being judged of suitable calibre, or to make more than one award, where more than one outstanding piece of work is received. The Judges will be drawn from the BAAS Executive Committee.

There was no prize awarded in 2000. The winner of the 1999 prize was Graham Thompson, The Nottingham Trent University, for an essay entitled “Dead Letters … Dead Men”: The Rhetoric of the Office in Melvilles Bartleby, the Scrivener.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Preparations are underway for the launch of a postgraduate e-journal that will be incorporated within the BAAS website. The purpose of this online journal is to enable postgraduate students at British universities to have their work published in a refereed environment at a time when the opportunity for postgraduates to publish in American Studies paper journals in Britain is becoming increasingly limited.

Entitled U.S. Studies Online, this will be a fully refereed e-journal and an editorial board of international standing is in the process of being established. This is crucial as it not only provides a quality threshold that ensures the value of the journal, but also allows postgraduates to demonstrate the value of their own work to potential employers and funding bodies.

Initially the journal will be published bi-annually in the Autumn and Spring – commencing Autumn 2000 – and, because of the lack of restriction on length that is facilitated by hypertext publication, will consist of five or six essay-length (5000-6000 word) articles. Each issue will try to cover a broad range of topics drawing upon the multi-disciplinarity of American Studies to incorporate History, Politics, Cultural Studies, Literature and Film. If the number of submissions for publication and the standard of these submissions is sufficiently high, then in the future the journal might be published tri-annually. Each issue of the journal will be archived on the BAAS website.

It is envisaged that editorial work on the journal will be carried out by either one nominated postgraduate student or by a small group of nominated postgraduates. Editorial tenure will last for four issues, or two years if the journal comes to be published tri-annually. The editor/s will work in close association with the BAAS webster to ensure that the journal is carefully prepared for publication and that traditional online publishing rubrics are followed. An E-Notes for Contributors will be made available on the BAAS website for postgraduates wishing to submit articles. For the initial two issues of the journal and to oversee its launch Graham Thompson will be the Editor.

Articles for publication in the first issue are now welcome. Please send submissions to either the BAAS Webster R.J. Ellis or Graham Thompson. Dick Ellis is based at the Department of English and Media Studies, The Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham, NG11 8NS. Graham Thompson can be found at the Department of English, Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH.

E-Notes for Contributors

Postgraduate Status: Articles submitted to U.S. Studies Online are considered to be eligible if they were written at the time that the author was registered for a postgraduate degree (MPhil, PhD, MA) at a United Kingdom institution of higher education.

Submitting: Articles should be the original work of the author and not currently under consideration for publication by any other publication. Articles should be a maximum of 5000 words long (excluding notes) and should be submitted initially in hard copy, printed on one side only and double spaced. If the article is accepted for publication the author will be asked to submit an electronic version in both Microsoft Word (PC or Mac) and Text Only format.

Format: Automatic footnoting should be avoided. The Editor(s) will return files that do not follow this instruction and ask that the electronic version be amended accordingly. In general footnotes should be used sparingly.

Illustrations: Illustrations are welcomed. If an article containing illustrations is accepted for publication the author will be asked to provide each illustration as a separate file together with the text file. Pictures should be in any of the following formats: jpeg, gif, bmp.

References: References in footnotes should adhere to the following format:

Books: Author Name, Book Title (in italics), Place of Publication, Publisher, Year (these last three should be bracketed), Page Reference. For example: Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 141.

Journal Articles: Author Name, Article Title (in single quotation marks), Journal Title (in italics), Volume and Issue Number, Date (bracketed), Page Reference. For example: Peter Stoneley, Rewriting the Gold Rush: Twain, Harte and Homosociality, Journal of American Studies, 30:2 (1996), 189-209.

Authors should not submit a supplementary bibliography. All bibliographic material should be contained in the footnotes.

BAAS Short Term Travel Grants

This programme contributes considerably to fostering talent among the American Studies community in the UK. It depends for its funds entirely on public contributions, and can only have a long term impact if BAAS members and other interested persons continue to be generous with donations. The Treasurer of BAAS welcomes contributions small and large, and invites anyone wishing to support BAAS in maintaining its work in this area to contact him. The awards are made annually, with a deadline of November 30th 2000.

BAAS is happy to announce assistance for short-term visits to the USA during the academic year 2000-2001 to 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 be awarded for the study of subjects where the principle aim is the study of American history, politics, society, literature, art, culture, etc. and not subjects with other aims, the data for which happen to be located in the United States.

The John D. Lees Award will be given to the best proposal accepted by the judges in the field of American political studies.

The resources available are relatively modest. It is envisaged that grants will be supplemented by, or will supplement, funds from other sources. The maximum of each grant will be £400.

Among qualified applicants, preference will be given to those who have had no previous opportunities for research-related visits to the USA and to young scholars, including postgraduate students. BAAS would particularly welcome applications from postgraduate students needing to visit the United States for research purposes.

Applications are invited from UK citizens, from persons normally resident in the UK, and from scholars currently working at, or registered as postgraduate students at UK universities and institutions of higher education.

Although it is recognized that awards under this scheme may need to be supplemented it is not intended that they should be used to supplement or extend long-term awards.

Application forms can be obtained from:
Dr Paul Giles
Fitzwilliam College
Cambridge CB3 0DG
pdg23@cam.ac.uk

Alternatively, view and print a copy from the baas website: http://http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site

Please enclose a stamped addressed envelope if you wish to be notified in the case of your application being unsuccessful.

Winners of the 1999/2000 BAAS Short-Term Travel Awards

Marcus Cunliffe Award: Celeste-Marie Bernier (Nottingham) for research into the slave ship Creole revolt (1841).

John Lees Award: Rosie Wild (Sheffield) for research into the NAACPís role in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56.

BAAS Short Term Awards:

Zoe Ann Greer (Newcastle) for work on the African American Prison Experience, 1945-1975.

Ruth Percy(University College London) for research into the Womens Labor Movement in 1920s Britain and America.

Barbara Stevens for giving a paper at a conference“Going to the Territory: Filling space with Myth”.

European Association for American Studies – EAAS Travel Grants 2001-2002 for Study in the U.S.

The EAAS is pleased to announce the institution of EAAS travel grants for postgraduate students in the Humanities and Social Sciences who are registered for a higher research degree at any European University. Two kinds of grants are available, the Transatlantic Grant and the Intra-European Grant. It is expected that between four and ten scholarships will be available each year. The scholarships will be aimed predominantly at young scholars in Eastern and Central Europe. The maximum single award granted will be $6000.

The Transatlantic Grant will permit the holder to conduct research which illuminates some aspect of the relationship between the United States and Europe, or between the United States and a country or countries within Europe in a designated university in the United States.

The term of the grant will be between three weeks (minimum) and eight weeks (maximum). Successful applicants will receive a grant intended to cover return travel, living expenses, and a limited amount of travel within the United States where appropriate. Health insurance will also be provided. Only students registered for a Ph.D. are eligible to apply for the Transatlantic Grants.

The Intra-European Grant will allow the recipient to conduct research for a period of up to four weeks in an American Studies Centre or University library in Europe. Graduate students who are registered either for a Ph.D. or a Masters degree by research are eligible to apply for the Intra-European Grants.

The Intra-European Grants are also available for institutional research projects involving up to three scholars (M. A. or Ph.D.) based on the co-operation between two American Studies institutes in Eastern and Western Europe. In this case, applications may be made collectively; each (sub)-project, however, will also be evaluated individually.

Although the EAAS grant program is especially meant to encourage American Studies research in Eastern Europe, applications from Western European scholars will be welcome if they are part of an institutional project as outlined above.

Applications must be made on the official form and should include written confirmation from the host institution that the researcher will have access to the necessary resource materials, and a letter from the students academic supervisor. Applicants will be required to supply a detailed estimate of the cost of their visit, including the cost of travel, subsistence, and incidentals. They should also state the minimum amount of money needed to make the trip possible. Applicants are encouraged to seek supporting or matching funding wherever possible.

Grantee recipients will be responsible for making their own arrangements for travel and accommodation. Travel must be completed within twelve months of the grantee being notified of the award. Grantees will be required to make a report to the grant committee, normally within thirty days of returning from their research visit.

The strict closing date for applications is March 3, 2001.

Successful applicants will be informed in April 2000. Application forms are available from the EAAS Board representatives of constituent associations (see relevant addresses in this issue of American Studies in Europe). Forms may also be downloaded from the EAAS home page on the World Wide Web, at http://www.let.uu.nl/eaas/grant.htm.

Winners of the 1999/2000 EAAS Travel Grants

Rachel Bell (Reading)

Eva Fernandez de Pinedo (Warwick)

Conferences

Of particular interest to postgraduates are the following forthcoming conferences:

Taking Stock: The American Century and Beyond, An Interdisciplinary American Studies Conference to be held at Manchester Metropolitan University, Saturday 18 November 2000. For further information contact Theresa Saxon and Margaret Smith, Conference Co-ordinators, Manchester Metropolitan University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Department of English, Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond Street West, off Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6LL or by E-Mail: jandt0@breathE-Mail.net or mms6956@aol.com

A conference is also being organised by the Midlands BAAS Committee to be held at De Montfort University in Leicester, March 2001 so remember to check the website for advertisements of a Call for Papers nearer the time. This conference welcomes contributions from both staff and postgraduates: in particular, the organisers express a commitment to securing substantial postgraduate representation.

Postgraduate Members

Below is a working list of current BAAS postgraduate members, accompanied by a brief line of their research interests and institutional affiliation where known. This list is extremely incomplete and I would be very grateful if those of you who are not mentioned or for whom I have no information regarding dissertation topic and E-Mail address, could get in touch with me at my E-Mail address given below as soon as possible with this information. Please contact me at: aaxcb1@nottingham.ac.uk

Susan Allan, Glasgow University
E-Mail: 9404748a@student.gla.ac.uk

Neil Allsop, Sheffield University
E-Mail: HIP95NCA@sheffield.ac.uk

Susana Isabel A. N. Costa Araujo, Sussex University
Dissertation area: Contemporary American literature and film; Popular fiction; American womens culture; Postcolonialism and American multi-ethnic literature.
E-Mail: ecp95@sussex.ac.uk

Jamal Assadi, E-Mail: Jamela@netvision.net.il

Frances Barry, E-Mail: fabarry@portsmouth007.freeserve.co.uk

Stephanie Bateson, Sheffield University; E-Mail: Hip99slb@sheffield.ac.uk

Birgit Behrendt, E-Mail: Behrendt@stud-mailer.uni-marburg.de

Celeste-Marie Bernier, American Studies Dept., Nottingham University; Dissertation area: 19th century slave narratives and different literary and historical versions of a slave ship revolt. E-Mail: aaxcb1@nottingham.ac.uk

Gary Blohm, Exeter University Dissertation area: The works of Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver. Interest in how their work represents the individual in the mid-to late-twentieth century, particularly in the context of marginality and centrality, and how this affects their respective narrative form. E-Mail: G. Blohm@exeter.ac.uk

Martyn Bone, American Studies Dept., Nottingham University Dissertation area: Work on the Postsouthern “Sense of Place”. Writers considered include Walker Percy, Richard, Ford, Anne Rivers Siddons, Tom Wolfe, Toni Cade Bambara (for the last three, particular attention is paid to literary geographies of Atlanta). E-Mail: aagersnap@mobilixnet.dk

Jane Bryson, Liverpool University. Dissertation area: The utopian and domestic in Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zora Neale Hurston and Marge Piercy. E-Mail: JBRYSON@liv.ac.uk

Janice Burrow, Newcastle University. Dissertation area: Representations of the Supernatural in Contemporary Literature of Slavery. E-Mail: Janice.Burrow@ncl.ac.uk

James Campbell, Nottingham University Dissertation area: The history of the antebellum South. In particular issues of crime and punishment; urban slavery and the interaction of class and racial relations. E-Mail: jmcamp1@hotmail.com

Nicola Caldwell, University of Lancaster. E-Mail: n.caldwell@lancaster.ac.uk

Peter Cottrell

Sue Currell, Sussex University. Dissertation area: The problem of Leisure in the Great Depression. E-Mail: sue.currell@virgin.net

Gail Danvers, Sussex University. Dissertation area: Contact, Conflict and Cultural Disintegration on the New York Colonial Frontier: The Iroquois and Sir William Johnson, 1744-1774.

David Evans, Hull University. Dissertation area: The Contemporary American Novel and the Liminal Aesthetic. E-Mail: D.J.EVANS@amstuds.hull.ac.uk

Bridget Falconer-Salkeld, Institute of United States Studies, University of London Dissertation area: The role of the MacDowell colony in the development of American Music.

Diane Fare, Department of Cultural Studies, University of Central Lancashire. Dissertation area: Kathy Acker, feminist theory, abjection, anarchism. E-mail: dmfare@uclan.ac.uk

Rachel Farebrother, Leeds University. Dissertation area: Harlem Renaissance. E-Mail: engrlf@ARTS-01.NOVELL.LEEDS.AC.UK

Eva Fernandez de Pinedo, English Department, Warwick University. Dissertation area: Popular culture and Chicano/a literature. E-Mail: enrdc@csv.warwick.ac.uk

Paraic Finnerty, School of English, University of Kent

Johnny Finnigan, Glasgow University. Dissertation area: Edith Wharton and Henry James and their writings of New York City. E-Mail: Johnny.Finnigan@btinternet.com

Ruth Frendo, Essex University. Dissertation area: Religion and Representation of the Body in Flannery OConnor, Caroline Gordon and Katherine Anne Porter. E-Mail: refren@essex.ac.uk

Lincoln Geraghty

Jo Gill, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education. Dissertation area: Confessional poetry and the work of Anne Sexton. Additional interests in Edith Wharton, Sylvia Plath, Biography, Autobiography and Letters, and contemporary confessional prose. E-Mail: Jo@gillstevens.madasafish.com

Ozlem Gorey, Leicester University. Dissertation area: Twentieth Century Womens poetry. E-Mail: ozlemgorey@superonline.com

Zoe Greer, Newcastle University. Dissertation area: The African American Prison Experience 1945-1975. E-Mail: z.a.greer@ncl.ac.uk

Helen Grice, University of Aberystwyth. E-Mail: hhg95@aber.ac.uk

Angela Groth, English Dept., University of Kent at Canterbury. Dissertation area: Interests in 19th century American authors, especially Hawthorne, in relation to biography as a genre. E-Mail: ag15@ukc.ac.uk

Simon Hall, University of Cambridge. E-Mail: sdh25@cam.ac.uk

Peter Hammond, Nottingham University. Dissertation area: Race, Class and Culture. E-Mail: aaxph@nottingham.ac.uk

Tim Hanson, University of Maryland, College Park. Dissertation area: Scottish Emigrants in North Carolina in the 18th century. It focuses on the portability of culture in the North Atlantic world, especially concentrating on political and community culture and the construction of Scottish identity in the colonial world. E-Mail: Timothy_R_HANSON@umail.umd.edu (th69)

Richard Haw, English Department, University of Leeds. E-Mail: ENGRH@LEEDS.AC.UK

Jonathan Hills, Sunderland University. E-Mail: oa6jhi@zen.sunderland.ac.uk

Cathy Ann Hoult. E-Mail: CAH21@LEICESTER.ac.uk

Ann Hurford, Nottingham Trent University. Dissertation area: Research into Anne Tyler with particular reference to the relationship between her fiction and how eccentricity and liminality interact in her works. E-Mail: Ann.Hurford@nottingham.ac.uk

Anthony Hutchinson, Nottingham University. Dissertation area: Telling the Story of American Liberalism: Novel Understanding of a Political Tradition. E-Mail: aaxah@nottingham.ac.uk

Richard Ings, Nottingham University. Dissertation area: Harlem Photography.

Rossita Ivanova, Dept of English and Comparative Literature, Warwick University. Dissertation area: Contemporary Native American Texts and Films 1970s-1990s. E-Mail: wspeeAcsv.warwick.ac.uk

Donna Jackson. E-Mail: dondrt@globalnet.co.uk

Elizabeth Anne Jacobs, University of Wales in Aberystwyth University. Dissertation area: Contemporary Chicana Literature. E-Mail: eaf92@aber.ac.uk

Cynthia Jesner, Glasgow University. Dissertation area: English language laws (making English the official language of some states), bilingualism, nativism and immigrants. E-Mail: cjesner@compuserve.com

Stephanie Jones

David Kennedy, University of Exeter. E-Mail: d.r.kennedy@exeter.ac.uk

Stephen Kenny, School of Media Critical and Creative Arts, Liverpool John Moores University. E-Mail: S.C.KENNY@LIVJM.AC.UK

Mark Ledwidge

Michelle Leung. E-Mail: menhir@interlog.com

Alison McDowall. E-Mail: MCCAMCDOW@livjm.ac.uk

Tiffany McKirdy, Glasgow University. Dissertation area: Cormac MacCarthy.

Sam Maddra. E-Mail: 9706651m@student.gla.ac.uk

Nicolas Maffei, Royal College of Art. Dissertation area: Norman Bel Geddes, Practical Visionary: American Industrial Design, Modernism and Consumption, 1915-1945. E-Mail: nicmaffei@hotmail.com

Ian Margeson

Laurence Marriott

Sarah Martin. E-Mail: enp01sjm@gold.ac.uk

Annette Matton. E-Mail: a.matton@exeter.ac.uk

Josephine Metcalf. E-Mail: eng8jc3m@leeds.ac.uk

Brian Miller. E-Mail: b.g.miller@bris.ac.uk

Darren Mulloy. E-Mail: D.Mulloy@uea.ac.uk

Stephanie Munro, Sheffield University. Dissertation area: African American womens writing, trauma, narrative, witnessing, white feminism, and psychoanalysis. E-Mail: stephanie.m@blueyonder.co.uk

Kathryn Napier, Glasgow University. Dissertation Area: American Colonial Literature. E-Mail: 9390151n@student.gla.ac.uk

Kathryn Nicol. E-Mail: eliknp@srvo.arts.ed.ac.uk

Joao-Paulo Nunes. E-Mail: Jpnunes@hotmail.com

Robert Orr, Newcastle University. E-Mail: R.M.J.ORR@ncl.ac.uk

Constantina Papoulias. E-Mail: c.papoulias@uel.ac.uk

Nicholas Patsides

Christopher Pierce, School of Architecture, Liverpool University. E-Mail: pierce@caad.ed.ac.uk

Alessanndro Pirolini, Institute of United States Studies. Dissertation area: American film history on the American screenwriter and director Preston Sturges; interest in the narrative and stylistic issues in American Film History. E-Mail: alx@alxalx.net

Luca Prono, Nottingham University. Dissertation area: Representations of Chicago in Ethnic Literature and Sociology. E-Mail: aaxlp@nottingham.ac.uk

Paul D. Quigley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dissertation area: The antebellum South: intellectual and cultural history; in particular the problem of southern versus American national identities. E-Mail: pquigley@E-Mail.unc.edu

Danielle Ramsay, Nottingham University. Dissertation area: Henry Louis Gates, Signifying and Nineteenth century African American Writers. E-Mail: danielle@dramsay.demon.co.uk

Tatiani Rapatzikos, School of English and American Studies, University of East Anglia. E-Mail: T. Rapatzikos@uea.ac.uk

Mark Rawlinson, Nottingham University. Dissertation area: Early American Modernism, Charles Sheeler, Theodore Adornos Aesthetic Theory. E-Mail: aaxmsr@nottingham.ac.uk

Owen Robinson, Essex University (also Book Reviews Editor for Journal of American Studies). Dissertation area: A study of William Faulkners Yoknapatawpha County from the perspective of reader-writer relations both between Faulkner and the reader, and within the fiction itself. E-Mail: orobin@essex.ac.uk

Lisa Rull, American and Canadian Studies Dept., Nottingham University Dissertation area: Subversion, Conformity, Redemption and Re-evaluating the Historiography of a Mid-20th century movement through a study of Peggy Guggenheim. E-Mail: lisarull@yahoo.com

Markku Ruotsila, St. Johns College, Cambridge University

Dominic Sandbrook, Jesus College, Cambridge University. Dissertation area: Liberalism and Democratic politics from Truman to Reagan; the 1960s; the Vietnam War and its opponents; Eugene McCarthy. E-Mail: dcs23@cam.ac.uk

Theresa Saxon, Manchester Metropolitan University. E-Mail: jandt0@breathE-Mail.net

Birgit Schoenig, Fachbereich f¸r Neuere Fremdsprachen of the Philipps-Universit‰t Marburg. Dissertation area: Early American Romantic Writers: a comparative analysis of romantic topics with a focus on Washington Irving and his perception of a romantic 19th century Spain. E-Mail: schoenig@scm.de

Sachiko Shikoda, Nottingham University. Disertation area: Film adaptation as cross cultural translation on Truffauts adaptations from American Pulp Fiction. E-Mail: arxss1@nottingham.ac.uk

Daniel Short, School of English, Leeds University. E-Mail: engdas@leeds.ac.uk

Gemma Slade. E-Mail: gslade@mcmail.com

Margaret Smith. E-Mail: Dsmith6956@aol.com

John Soutter

Robert David Stanton, School of English, University of Leeds. E-Mail: engrds@english.novell.leeds.ac.uk

Barbara Stevens

Maureen Still, Glasgow University. E-Mail: 9608994m@student.gla.ac.uk

Joe Street, History Department, Sheffield University. Dissertation area: The relationships between the African American civil rights movement and popular culture 1945-1972, including such cultural forms as music, literature, art and religion. E-Mail: HIP99JS@sheffield.ac.uk

Jennifer Terry, English Department, Warwick University. Dissertation area: In second year of Ph.d on works by Toni Morrison. The focus is on the representation of forced displacement (in the context of overarching considerations such as The Middle Passage, slavery, racism, patriarchy etc.) and explores Morrisons use of dislocation as narrative strategy. She is currently on a placement with the Warwick/Wisconsin Graduate Exchange Fellowship to work with Nellie McKay. E-Mail: enscd@warwick.ac.uk

Anne-Marie Trudgill, Manchester Metropolitan University. Dissertation area: Works of the 19th century New England writer Elizabeth Stoddard. E-Mail: AnneTrudgill@compuserve.com

Aliki Varvogli, English and American Studies Dept, University of East Anglia. E-Mail: a.varvogli@uea.ac.uk

Robert P. Ward, Leeds University. E-Mail: engrpw@english.leeds.ac.uk

Andrew Warnes, Leeds University. E-Mail: engawa@leeds.ac.uk

Jonathan Watson. E-Mail: Jon@watson7496.freeserve.co.uk

Saranne Weller, Warwick University. Dissertation area: Uncle Toms Cabin, the anti-Tom tradition, race literature and southern authorship in the 19th century. E-Mail: ENSBQ@snow.csv.warwick.ac.uk

Guy Westwell, Dept. of Theatre, Film and Television, Glasgow University. E-Mail: 9406224W@arts.gla.ac.uk

Mark Whalan, Exeter University. Dissertation area: The short story cycle in American Modernist Literature, specifically with reference to Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner. E-Mail: M.Whalan@exeter.ac.uk

Lynn Wharton

Karen Wilkinson, Manchester Metropolitan University Dissertation area: The interplay of gender religion and class in Nineteenth Century America, and how these issues are dealt with in the writing of Susan Warner (1819 -1885). E-Mail: Karen@wilkinsonk96.freeserve.co.uk

Nerys Williams, Sussex University. Dissertation area: Redefinition of the lyric in contemporary American poetics through strategies of linguistic “failure” and “error”. Works under discussion by Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Jorie Graham, Lyn Hejinian and C. K. Williams. E-Mail: neryso.williams@virgin.net

John Wills, Bristol University. Dissertation area: An Environmental History of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, California. E-Mail: John. Wills@Bristol.ac.uk

Karen Wills, Bristol University. Dissertation area: American Environmental History, specifically Wildlife in US and Canadian National Parks. E-Mail: K.R.Wills@Bristol.ac.uk

Sherryl Wilson, University of West of England. Dissertation area: popular culture with a particular reference to TV. Explorations into the ways in which individuals express selfhood on the Oprah Winfrey Show, and within the cultural context of late capitalism. E-Mail: sherryl.wilson@uwe.ac.uk

Tracey Wismayer, Sheffield University. Dissertation area: Robert Kennedy and the Civil Rights Movement. E-Mail: HIP99TW@sheffield.ac.uk

Jayne Wood. E-Mail: jaynewood@hotmail.com

Sarah Wood, University College London. Dissertation area: Origins and Originality in the Works of Washington Irving. E-Mail: scott.button@wadham.oxford.ac.uk

Nigel Woodcock. E-Mail: nigel@eagle.u-net.com

Barbara Wyllie. E-Mail: bwylie@msn.com

Kevin Yuill, Nottingham University. Dissertation area: The Nixon Administration and the Origins of Affirmative Action. E-Mail: Kevin.yuill@virgin.net

New Members

Bella Adams is based in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear.

Susan Allan is a postgraduate at Glasgow University.

Nicola Caldwell is a postgraduate in the Department of History at Lancaster University.

Jess Edwards lectures in English Literature at the University of North London, with a special interest in the literature of travel and landscape.

Ozzlem Gorey is carrying out postgraduate research in the Department of English, Leicester.

Angela Groth is a postgraduate student in English at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Dr. Kevin Halliwell is Curator or US and Commonwealth Collections at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.

Sandra Heap is Head of History at Bolton School, Girls Division.

Sarah Anne Heaton is based in Chester, with interests in Cultural Studies, Literature, and Media Studies.

Jayne Hoare is responsible for Collection Development (American History) with the Accessions Department, Cambridge University Library.

Jason Laverock is a teacher of American History in a West Midlands secondary school.

Michelle Leung is a student with the Department of History, University of Toronto.

Ronald Lewis is Eberly Professor of History at West Virginia University.

Nicholas Maffei is a postgraduate at the Royal College of Art.

Brian Gilbert Miller is a postgraduate in the Department of Historical Studies at Bristol.

Brian Neve is based at the Department of European Studies, University of Bath.

John E. Owens is Reader in United States Government and Politics at the University of Westminster. He is currently researching floor amending activity and theories of legislative participation and amendment sponsorship in the US Congress.

Constantina Papoulias is doing postgraduate work at the University of East London, Department of Cultural Studies.

Andrew Pepper lectures in American Studies at Middlesex University.

Steven Trevor Price lectures in the English Department of the University of Wales at Bangor.

Lee Sartain is a postgraduate working on the role of women in the NAACP, 1920-1954, at Edge Hill University College.

Sachiko Shikoda is a postgraduate at the Institute of Film Studies, American and Canadian Studies, Nottingham.

Robert David Stanton is a postgraduate student at Leeds University.

Julian Stringer lectures in Nottinghams School of American and Canadian Studies.

Mark Taylor is a PhD student at the University of Hull

Jonathan Watson is a postgraduate at the University of Sussex.

Marjorie Spruill Wheeler is Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Editorial

As I write this, most of us are bleary-eyed with Finals marking and examiners’ meetings, and the Swansea BAAS conference seems a very long time ago. It seems to be the general consensus, however, that Swansea was one of the best BAAS conferences ever, attracting about 300 delegates from all over the UK, from over half the states of the USA, and from about fifteen other countries including the Czech Republic, Hungary, India and Japan. That the conference was such a real success, was largely due to the untiring efforts and wonderful organizational skills of Mike McDonnell and his team of helpers. The conference program was extremely well put together, the quality of the papers in general was outstanding, and the social side of things was Simply the Best.

As we look back at Swansea, it’s intriguing to conjecture about the reasons that underly the remarkable feeling of collegiality and community which exist in BAAS. There is, of course, the Is There Any factor (as in: ‘I teach American history/literature/politics.’ Response: ‘Is there any?’). Indeed, we are colleagues in a discipline which has in most institutions until fairly recently been placed in the necessity of continually justifying its own scholarly legitimacy and often its very existence. The positive aspect of this is that as a result we are for the most part very supportive of one another; younger scholars presenting papers for the first time at BAAS have remarked on how warm and constructive the atmosphere is, and how established scholars go out of their way to put them at ease. Those of us who came of age in the Sixties enjoy not only the vaguely subversive side of American Studies but also the refreshing lack of pomposity among our members. BAAS Swansea was a wonderful demonstration of the fact that intellectual rigor does not have to be accompanied by stuffiness or obsession with hierarchies, as the scene on the dance floor at the disco evenings would confirm, or the grace and stoicism with which non-dancing colleagues endured the forays of the Dance Police.

On our cover this month is an image of Althea Gibson, the first African-American woman to win not only Wimbledon but also at the US national tennis championship. My thanks go, as always, to my Editorial Assistants Marie Tate and Sean Groundwater for their hard work, intelligent ideas and unfailing good humour. Thanks are due to John Caughie, Dean of the Arts Faculty of Glasgow University, for his continued support of American Studies in Britain.

My very best wishes to all of you for a relaxing summer holiday.

Susan Castillo, Editor
Department of English Literature
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ
Tel: 0141-330 639
Fax: 0141-330 4601
E-mail: S.Castillo@englit.arts.gla.ac.uk

BAAS Annual Conference—Swansea 2000

Chair’s Annual Report, presented to BAAS AGM, April 2000

Early in his career Alistair Cooke was apparently assigned to update his newspaper’s obituary file, and part of the work included consulting celebrities who were still breathing on the content of the columns in which they would be commemorated. Cooke immediately checked the file for his hero, H.L. Mencken, and found that the entry had been composed early in that writers prodigious career, and was years out of date. The young Cooke seized the opportunity to initiate a correspondence, by sending Mencken the extant copy, and requesting help to refresh it. Mencken responded and did expand the entry. He added, things continued much the same.

And so too, to some extent, for BAAS, which continued through 1999 and into 2000 pursuing its traditional role of promoting and defending American Studies in all sectors of UK education. But in our case continuity is not so much same- ness, as development and initiative.

Communication is a key element of BAAS’s work. American Studies in Britain, other publications, official consultations, the web-site, and conferences are all part of a communications network linking members, official bodies and the broader public constituency who have Americanist interests. Media coverage can also be valuable, bringing BAAS and American Studies to a broader audience. There are dangers. Reports in The Times and the THES have relied on QAA and RAE results that give a limited vision of the extent of American Studies, indicating the potentially misleading impact of government evidence. In other cases journalists do report on the basis of solid research, and it is comforting when one can depend on mention of BAAS appearing in a context of reliability.

BAAS pursues a full and active professional role. Our nominees were placed on the Research Assessment (RAE) panels on American Studies, History and English. The panels on Politics and International Relations, and Media and Cultural Studies, did not include our nominees, but did take note of our representations that panellists should include persons with some Americanist expertise. BAAS has responded constructively, helpfully and effectively to subsequent consultation letters from the RAE panel.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce) has also consulted BAAS on the future of RAE/research review and funding policies. Our reply read in part, ‘The RAE timetable is coming to resemble the US presidential election process in which there is no “down time” from the permanent campaign. In our experience universities are devoting considerable internal resource, and demanding considerable time from their staff, in a constant round of internal research censuses, mock exercises, strategic analysis, and post-assessment reviews. This is more than monitoring, is diverting resources, and threatens to influence colleagues increasingly into short term research and publication projects. The process threatens therefore not just to stimulate more output, but to distort the nature of that output. In order to encourage the more long term and mature work that is characteristic of some disciplines the period between Research Assessments should be significantly extended.’

The Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (Shefc) also approached BAAS for comment in its parallel consultation on the future of research review. The Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA), the newly formed national branch of BAAS, has constructed a response to this consultation, which will be returned to Shefc co-signed by BAAS and SASA.

SASA emerged strongly from the BAAS Glasgow conference, and is making a real contribution to American Studies. The regional branch, Midlands BAAS remains very active, and thanks are due to Dr Peter Ling and Dr Elizabeth Clapp who have guided the group with great skill, but who are now standing down to let others take over. The North West may regain a branch, though this remains more of a virtual collective right now, there are moves to institute a branch in the South East, and this conference has seen a meeting that may generate a Welsh national branch.

The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) Advisory Group on Multi-disciplinary and Modular Programmes, on which Professor Douglas Tallack of BAAS represented an Americanist perspective, has now published its report, which is accessible on the web at the QAA site. The QAA has not yet moved to establish the bench-marking group on non-language based Area Studies, but BAAS will be looking for strong representation on this group when it is formed.

In another initiative, BAAS has linked with colleagues in languages and linguistics to make a successful bid for funding a Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN). Alerted by Dr George McKay, BAAS made strong representations to Hefce and to the bidding consortium for the necessary inclusion of non- language based Area Studies, and this was eventually made a condition of a successful bid by the funding body. The bid having been successful, the management structure is now being put into place. The BAAS nominee, Professor Dick Ellis has been made chair of the Area Studies Committee-one of three committees guiding this LTSN.

BAAS has also been consulted in the past year by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) regarding future funding priorities, and by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) on nominations for relevant panels. After BAAS approaches to AHRB and to the Co-ordinating Council for Area Studies there is shortly to be a joint AHRB/CCASA symposium on the AHRB funding of area studies.

The US Embassy in London once again hosted the annual APG/BAAS colloquium last November. APG has a new chair, Dr. Alan Grant, and a new vice chair, Dr. John Dumbrell, and we will be co- operating again to discuss the 2000 election results, at this year’s colloquium, to be held on 17th November. We are also grateful to the Embassy for its support for BAAS conferences.

In co-operation with the Embassy, and at the suggestion of Ambassador Philip Lader, BAAS (in the form of Professor Dick Ellis and Graham Thompson) provided the technical facilities and expertise for a one hour on-line e-conversation between Ambassador Lader and American Studies and US politics students throughout the UK. The event received coverage in the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) and in the local press, although the THES didn’t manage to credit BAAS for its part.

The US Embassy has also hosted a number of American Studies-related events and celebrations benefiting many parts of the American Studies community. A funny thing happened to me on the way to the Embassy for one of these. A routine visit to the optician escalated rapidly into my being asked to check into hospital. I demurred, pointing out that I had a schedule to keep, only to be told that if I insisted on going anywhere I risked what I think the Department of Defence once endearingly called one hundred per cent health reversal. I still was not wholly convinced, but decided not to go anywhere for the moment. I was escorted to a ward and briefed by a reassuring nurse about ward arrangements. She realised I would probably be remaining over the weekend, when some arrangements differed. Saturday, she said, if you’re still with us….. I only mention this story as the THES thought the episode engaging, and this time did include a mention of BAAS. Regardless of my loyalty to the Association this is not an effort the like of which I shall put in regularly.

BAAS was present at the launch of the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences (ALSISS), an organisation noted not only by the press, but also by Education Secretary, David Blunkett. We are eligible to make recommendations for academicians to this new organisation, and I would be pleased to receive suggestions of suitable Americanists from members of BAAS.

On the suggestion of Professor Gary McDowell, and on the premises of the Institute for United States Studies (IUSS) in London, BAAS helped sponsor a meeting of heads of American Studies programmes to discuss matters of common interest. Attendance was excellent and discussion vigorous. In pursuit of one shared interest I have been collecting data on recruitment, and a report, and further meetings, will follow.

Five BAAS short term travel grants were awarded in 1999, including the Marcus Cunliffe Award to Celeste-Marie Bernier, and the John Lees Award to Rosie Wild.

Having generously offered BAAS free committee meeting space for some years, the British Library in its new premises has adopted a more business oriented approach. Rather than accept a huge increase of management charges that would have rebounded on to the membership, BAAS approached a number of institutions to request the donation of occasional free meeting space. Manchester Metropolitan University and University College London have hosted BAAS meetings in recent years, and Nottingham Trent University, the University of Hull, Kings College London, the IUSS in London, and Rhodes House/Rothermere Institute, Oxford have all offered to host future meetings. We are grateful for these offers, and I hope that all of will be taken up in due course.

The chairs of the BAAS subcommittees present separate reports to the AGM, but I would like to note success all round. Under publications subcommittee The Journal of American Studies (in co-operation with Cambridge University Press), BAAS Paperbacks (in co-operation with Edinburgh University Press), and British Records Relating to America in Microform (in co-operation with Microform) all contribute mightily to the profession. Our own American Studies in Britain develops strength with each issue. And there are prospects for a schools-targeted series, and for an e-journal. BAAS’s identity on the web will become stronger with the adoption of our BAAS.ac.uk address.

Under Development subcommittee mini-conferences have been supported in Edinburgh, Brunel, Liverpool, Nottingham, and Lancaster, and more are in prospect. Grants favour, but are not restricted to, conferences that are geared to serve postgraduates, and schools. Guidelines are available to those who would like to apply for support. The Libraries and Resources Subcommittee plans its own conference during the coming year.

The Conference subcommittee does a terrific job, tidying up the final details of the last conference, planning the current meeting, and pre-planning for future years. We are always looking to the future-2004 and 2005 are still open, so please get your bids in shortly. Our first conference was held in 1955, making 2004 the 50th conference, and 2005 the 50th anniversary-I hope we can look forward to a great doubleheader. We are looking for ways of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary, and of resourcing those celebrations, and would welcome suggestions. Mike McDonnell, has been a consistent point of calm in the maelstrom of preparations for this Swansea conference. Our particular thanks are due to him, and his support team who have forsaken the evident pleasures of the beaches of Wales to provide the foundations for this annual conference.

American Studies was represented in an Honours List again, when Professor Malcolm Bradbury, a former member of the BAAS executive, was knighted. Professorships not new to the holders, but new to Nottingham, were created when John Ashworth and Judie Newman migrated to the midlands. Nottingham also elevated Peter Messent to a professorship. Nottingham Trent recognised the contributions of Professor R.J. (Dick) Ellis. Keele’s John Dumbrell accepted a Readership some time ago, and has in the past year Chris Bailey has also been made Reader in the same department. Durhams Head of Politics, an American specialist, became Professor R.J. (Bob) Williams.

Hugh Brogan has served six years on the executive committee of BAAS, recently as a most effective and active chair of Publications subcommittee. His warm and sincere feeling for American Studies has always been evident on the committee, and he will be missed. Thanks are also due to Kasia Boddy and Nick Selby, who have each served one term on the executive committee.

BAAS’s first elected postgraduate representative, Richard Hinchcliffe, has used his term in office successfully to establish the position within the Executive committee and the Development Subcommittee. Our co-opted committee member, Kathryn Cooper, of Loreto 6th Form College, Manchester, has continued the energetic and crucial input on American Studies in schools that the Association needs in order to serve the American Studies community as well as possible.

Janet Beer, who is vacating the Treasurers’ post, has proved a most effective and appreciated officer of the Association, and as well as showing consummate skill with its moneys, and its membership database, has supported and represented the Association in many valuable ways.

Since terms of office are staggered, the Secretary, Jenel Virden, the Chairs of the other subcommittees, Douglas Tallack (Development), Simon Newman (Conference) and Iain Wallace (Libraries and Resources), and the representative to EAAS (Mick Gidley) will continue to offer their inestimable talents to the Association. I am deeply grateful, and full of thanks, for the all of the support, intellectual impact, time, resources and sheer grunt effort that all of our colleagues on these committees volunteer to the British Association for American Studies.

In the course of my research this year for BAAS I have discovered from UCAS that there are about 2,800 full time single honours American Studies students registered at UK universities. Figures for Joint and Combined Honours are harder to find, but a brief look at the 50 or so universities that provide American Studies suggests that there will be many more students than those doing single honours. There are in addition undergraduate Americanist degrees that do not include “American Studies” in their title, and postgraduate programmes. Our constituency, in the universities and colleges alone, is clearly thousands strong.

BAAS is the one and only professional association that works unremittingly and solely for the whole American Studies constituency, throughout the UK, and at all levels. Your support for BAAS is necessary and appreciated. Your membership, your activities and your subscriptions underpin everything that BAAS does. Please continue that support, and work actively to bring into the Association all your colleagues whose progress and livelihoods are affected by the strength and development of our subject. If we don’t fight our corner there is no one else out there to do so.

We take every opportunity to serve our core constituency, and to expand awareness to a broader pool. I was recently invited to appear on a day time TV show, Collectors Lot, to display and discuss an archive that I have built over the years of thousands of examples of US elections materials. Excitement at the idea of reaching a substantial audience of potential Americanists was kept in check when I found myself sandwiched between the president of the Meat Loaf fan club, and an American lady collector of all things to do with Halloween, who referred unnervingly to her love of little vegetable people. But still there has been a tangible response, and it gives me pleasure to learn that I have extended a greater awareness of the Association and its place in the world to several BAAS members’ Mums.

Philip Davies, Chair, BAAS

Conference Banquet

The Conference Banquet was held on the final evening of the Swansea conference. The banquet was preceded by a very successful reception, complete with harpist, generously sponsored by Keele University, the hosts for the meeting to be held in 2001, and by the current hosts. Teifi Edwards, Emeritus Professor of Welsh at Swansea, spoke following the banquet.

We were pleased to have among our guests on the evening, Eileen Boris and Maxine Hong Kingston, two of the conference plenary speakers, Barry Sheerman MP, and representatives from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and from the US Embassy.

The dinner was followed by a number of announcements:

Short Term Travel Grants recipients:
Marcus Cunliffe Award: Celeste-Marie Bernier
John D Lees Award: Rosie Wild
BAAS Awards: Zoe Ann Greer, Ruth Percy, Barbara Stevens
Arthur Miller Essay Prize: Professor Douglas Tallack

On behalf of the American Studies programme at Swansea a special presentation was made to Professor Warren French for his contribution to American Studies on both sides of the Atlantic over the last 50 years.

Mike McDonnell authored a note of thanks for the chair to deliver: BAAS and the conference convenor want to express the most generous thanks to ALL of the staff and faculty of the American Studies Department, as well as the many individuals from the department of History, Literature and Politics who have helped out with the organisation of the conference in so many ways. Also the students, undergraduate and postgraduate, who have provided vital help before, during (and hopefully) after the conference, as well as a much needed breath of fresh air and welcome hospitality. And, though the number of people to be thanked are far too many to name here, we would particularly like to thank Jon Roper and Phil Melling for their invaluable support and advice about the conference, and their work in putting together some very special events. Bill Jones, from Cardiff University provided valuable advice on places for conferees to visit and who selflessly volunteered to run the larger excursions. Heather Akerman, Bev Evans, Angela Jones and Emma Frearson have worked tirelessly around the clock and far beyond the call of duty before and throughout the conference. This fulsome, and deserved message of thanks is incomplete without mention of the enormous contribution made by this years conference convenor, Mike McDonnell. Mike has at all times remained calm under pressure, and has engineered a meeting that combined smooth running and intellectual stimulation. The facilities have matched the needs, the details have been thought out in advance, and requests that emerged at the meeting have met an immediate and positive response. The whole has been a superbly enjoyable visit to Swansea, and we owe huge thanks to Mike McDonnell, who has been central to this.

Philip Davies, Chair, BAAS

Swansea Conference 2000 Panel Reports

Cultural Dialogues: Native American, Europeans and the United States

Chair: Mick Gidley (University of Leeds)
Gail Danvers (University of Sussex)
“‘Our Different Way of Living’: Iroquois Conceptions of Ethnic and Racial Difference”
Susan Castillo (University of Glasgow)
“Heterologues: Staging Encounters with Alterity in New World Literatures”
Martin Padget (University of Wales, Aberystwyth)
“‘American Indian Detours off the Beaten Track’: Tourism, Modernity and the construction of Ethnicity in the Southwest’s ‘Land of Enchantment'”

This stimulating session, which covered two episodes of cultural exchange from the colonial period and one of the early twentieth century, both introduced its audience to much new material and aired a number of important conceptual issues. Gail Danvers (Ph.D. student, University of Sussex; Lecturer in History, American Studies, Kings College London) spoke on “‘Our Different Way of Living’: Iroquois Conceptions of Ethnic and Racial Difference”. Confining herself to the mid-Eighteenth Century, but adverting to Iroquois myths of much older vintage, she showed how Iroquois dealings with whites affected their conceptions of their own cultural identity. From treaty records and other evidence it is possible to construe Iroquois positions and to see them in dialogue with-not simply superseded or suppressed by-European peoples and powers. Susan Castillo (English Department, University of Glasgow), speaking on “Heterologues: Staging Encounters with Alterity in New World Literatures”, gave a reading of the travel narrative of Louis Lom d’Arce, Baron of Lahontan, first published in 1703. She concentrated on his Dialogue with Adario, an account of his conversation with a Huron chief. She showed that, as in the case of other philosophical dialogues, we cannot take the two men’s speeches as raw evidence; the genre to some extent determined the way the two speakers were represented. Nevertheless, the Dialogues present fascinating material on religion, sexuality, law and the like. This enables us to see these representatives of two contrasting cultures in a reciprocal relationship. The final paper, given by Martin Padgett, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, “‘American Indian Detours off the Beaten Track’: Tourism, Modernity and the construction of Ethnicity in the Southwest’s ‘Land of Enchantment'”, was also about reciprocity. The Fred Harvey chain and the Santa Fé Railroad did bring inevitable changes to indigenous New Mexico Indian cultures, but these cultures, while undoubtedly commodified by tourism, were also dynamic: as they were ostensibly appropriated they were able to resist wholesale change on the invaders’ terms. The discussion which followed the papers was wide-ranging, lively, informed, and appreciative.

Representation and Equality in American History and Politics

Chair: Michael Les Benedict (Sussex University / Ohio State University)
James H. Read (St. Benedict/St. John’s University)
“Diversity, Homogeneity, and Statemanship in the thought of John C Colqhoun”
James M. Beeby (Bowling Green State University, Ohio)
“‘Equal Rights to all and Special Privileges to None’: Grassroots Populism in North Carolina”
G. Wayne Peak (Colorado State University, Fort Collins)
“Representation and Equality in the US Senate”

The session “Representation and Equality in American History and Politics” had an audience of 20-25. Each panelist delivered a clear, twenty-minute exposition of a longer paper. James H. Read of St. Benedict/St. John’s University both explicated and criticised John C. Calhoun’s theory of concurrent majorities. The theory relied upon a very high standard of statesmanship to avoid deadlock. The theory was arbitrary in deciding what interests deserved a veto and required similarly high statesmanship to foster necessary solidarity within the interests represented. If one achieved such statesmanship, he wondered, was the concurrent-majority mechanism necessary? James M. Beeby of Bowling Green State University (Ohio) argued that commitment to fair democratic procedures providing equal political access to all was the central commitment of rank-and-file Populists, rather than any particular economic interest. G. Wayne Peak of Colorado State University (Fort Collins) pointed out how radically the system of representation in the U.S. Senate malapportioned political power, suggesting its replacement by a system of proportional representation. Lively audience comment elucidated discussions of how likely a Senate reform would be, and how radically opposed were Calhoun’s philosophy and the philosophy underlying Professor Peak’s observations and suggestions.

Society and Politics in the New Deal Era: Right Wing Activism on the Pacific Coast during the 1930s

Chair: Michael Heale (University of Lancaster)
Robert W. Cherny
“Anti-Communist Networks on the Pacific Coast during the 1930s”
William Issel
“Catholic Action on the Political and Cultural Fronts: The Case of San Francisco Labor, 1934-1958”
Comment: Michael Heale (University of Lancaster)

This session might have been better entitled ‘Anti-Communist Activism on the Pacific Coast in the 1930s and 1940s’. Not all anti-communists are right wing, or at least would not so regard themselves, and the session investigated a complex political sociology on the West Coast.

Robert W. Cherny spoke on ‘Anti-Communist Networks on the Pacific Coast during the 1930s.’ In a fascinating paper, ranging across the states of California, Oregon, and Washington (with an occasional glance at Hawaii), he identified eight anti-communist groups in action by the late 1930s: the American Legion, police red squads, national guard or military intelligence officers, business leaders, a few INS officials, organised labour, the non-communist Left, and the Catholic church. A striking feature was that around 1940 the FBI came to displace these local groups in the function of political surveillance. While some of these groups had been driven by a right-wing patriotism, others had a more sophisticated and constructive agenda, a theme taken up by William Issel in his paper on ‘Catholic Action on the Political and Cultural Fronts: The Case of San Francisco Labor, 1934-1958.’ He explored the role of Roman Catholic activists from the mid-1930s in resisting excessive individualism on the one hand and communism or class conflict on the other. They sought to build a moral economy (a ‘Third Way’?) in which trade unions, business groups and government would each have a role. The paper focussed largely on labour activity, which involved combating communist influence, but these activists spurned crude red scare tactics and offered their own positive vision to union members, one inspired by Catholic ideology. They enjoyed a fair degree of success, and one implication of this intriguing paper was that the deradicalisation of American labour was well under way at an earlier date than usually assumed.

Michael Heale offered a brief commentary on these papers, noting, among other things, how the popular front configurations on the Pacific Coast in the 1930s rendered the region vulnerable to anti-communist activity once the political climate moved to the right. He quickly gave way to a general discussion, which demonstrated the appreciation of the historians present for a session rooted in authentic archival research and which explored historical questions of real import.

Marketing the Body

Chair: Alan Bilton (University of Wales Swansea)
Bill Osgerby (Southampton Institute)
“A Cast, A Culture, A Market: Youth, Lifestyle and Marketing Practice in Post-War America”
Amy E Farrell (University of East Anglia)
“‘Are you Corpulent?’: Fat and the Origins of the Diet Industry in the United States”

The two papers examined representations of the body in advertising copy drawn from the turn of the last century and the 1950’s respectively, exploring the marketing of gender, youth and wealth. Drawing primarily from LIFE Magazine, a weekly humour periodical published at the turn of the century, Amy Farrell’s paper argued that the foundations for the budding diet industry were set much earlier than the 1920, the date conventionally given. While fat continued to be a marker of prosperity, health and social status for white men, for women it was linked to unfeminine demeanour and possible suffragist leanings. Bill Osgerby’s paper explored the relationship between the iconography of youth and wider social and cultural shifts during the 1950’s and 1960’s, giving particular regard to the rise of a new lifestyle sensibility within an emergent faction of the American middle class. The subsequent lively discussion questioned the ‘radical’ (or otherwise) credentials of the ‘flapper’ in the twenties, and counterculture advertising in the sixties. The homoerotic connotations of images of male bonding in advertising, and the relative merits of gendered and class-based approaches, were also debated.

Race, Ethnicity and Assimilation in American Popular Culture

Chair: Eithne Quinn (University of Central Lancashire)
W. Bruce Leslie (SUNY Brockport / University of Aarhus)
“Repressed Deutschum or Successful Assimilation? The Fate of German America, 1871-1941”
Gary D. Keller (Arizona State University)
“Interethnic Rivalries and Romances in United States Film from its Beginnings through the Urban Interethnic Movies of Joseph P. Kennedy”
James Lyons (University of Nottingham)
“‘I don’t think I’ve ever met a brother from Seattle in my life, man’ . . . Seattle and the Representation of Race”

This panel proved enjoyable, historically well-founded and surprisingly cohesive, as panelists grappled with questions of assimilation and difference in American popular culture (broadly defined).

Bruce Leslie provided a richly descriptive account of German- American culture, between 1871 and 1941, in order to identify the reasons why this immigrant group relinquished so much of its cultural specificity and sense of group identity. What propelled German Americans into a position of cultural invisibility and into divesting their ethnic roots? Despite the apparent clue in his time- line, which ends in 1941, Leslie ultimately refused the repressed Deutschum thesis: that they were forced to conceal and reject their ethnic roots with the onset of war. Instead, he argued that German Americans actively embraced assimilation, spurred by its perceived social, economic, and even cultural benefits. Leslie dubbed this a carrot rather than stick process of acculturation (a carrot readily available to white ethnics such as Germans but, of course, not to other racially demarcated groups). Interestingly, Leslie remarked on the shortfall in scholarship on German America, leading him to observe that scholars have been preoccupied with the authenticity of cultural difference far more than with stories of assimilation (the latter he termed, provocatively, the real story of American identity).

Gary Keller pursued this revisionist line of enquiry in his detailed account of narratives about interethnic rivalries and romances in early, pre-sound American cinema. Drawing on a wealth of examples, he argued that, from its very beginnings, American film served as a locus of numerous ideological struggles over identity. Despite the abundant use of ethnic stereotypes in films like The Cohens and the Kellys (1926) and Clancys Kosher Wedding 1927), these texts often endorsed and even celebrated ethnic interaction and difference. Focusing on narratives of Jewish/Catholic-Irish romantic liaisons, Keller argued that such film cycles (which catered to white ethnic immigrant audiences) held forth a promise of transethnic unities as one way to achieve the American Dream. His discussion of the highly successful play and film The Melting Pot 1915) led to the fascinating insight that this metaphor so in American Studies spheres today has not always served as a model for unifying and homogenizing processes of American identity formation (whether real or mythic). Instead, Keller argued, in the 1910s the popular term melting pot connoted robust ethnic, racial, and social-class diversity and contestation.

The 1990s saw Seattle emerge as one of the most symbolically resonant cities in the American cultural landscape (think Grunge music, Frazier, Sleepless in Seattle, the pervasive but place-based corporate image of Microsoft and Starbucks, etc.). In the final paper, James Lyons identified and explored the striking disparity between the actual social make-up of contemporary Seattle and its popularly perceived racial contours. Film and television imagery have conjured a city that is largely devoid of non-white inhabitants, despite the city’s demographic plurality. Not only does Seattle come to exemplify white urban space, but, Lyons argued persuasively, this apparently neutral image of whiteness actually serves, perversely, to foster the image of Seattle as a racially tolerant bastion of liberal-mindedness. Like Bruce Leslie, Lyons redirected the critical scrutiny away from marginalized identities and groups and towards the complex but often unexamined category of whiteness (in line with theoretical openings in cultural studies). The papers title quotation (taken from The Larry Sanders Show nicely captures the multiple mediations of Seattle’s whitewashed topography. The knowing comment takes aim at our tacit assumptions about Seattle, deftly exposing the implied viewer’s media informed perceptions ‘ a perceptual landscape that indeed apportions little space to non-white Seattleans.

A lively discussion followed the papers, with questions addressed to all three panelists.

Misery and Triumph: The Fates of Workers in Early America

Chair: Billy G. Smith (Montana State University)
Leslie Patrick (Bucknell University)
“Triumph over Injustice: The Narrative of Patrick Lyon, the Ingenious Blacksmith”
Susan E. Klepp (Rider University)
“Malthusian Miseries and the Working Poor in Philadelphia, 1780-1830: A Study of Infant Mortality”

“Misery and Triumph: The Fates of Workers in Early America” was a very lively session with two very good papers followed by a very informative discussion. Leslie Patrick, from Bucknell University, read her essay on “Triumph over Injustice: The Narrative of Patrick Lyon, the Ingenious Blacksmith.” The paper focused on the fascinating story of Patrick Lyon, a blacksmith falsely accused of robbing the Bank of Pennsylvania during the chaos of the 1798 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. Lyon left one of the earliest and most informative first-hand accounts of a prisoner in Pennsylvania’s newly reformed punishment system. In addition to analyzing Lyon’s narrative, Professor Patrick dissected a well-known portrait of “Pat Lyon at the Forge,” painted by John Neagle in 1826. That Lyon decided to have himself depicted as a blacksmith rather than as the wealthy “gentleman” he had become was a telling comment about the way in which he defined himself.

Susan E. Klepp of Rider University read her essay on “Malthusian Miseries and the Working Poor in Philadelphia, 1780-1830: A Study of Infant Mortality.” This study challenged the widely held belief that health was not correlated with economic circumstance in early America. Using infant mortality as an index of health, Professor Klepp argued that class was very important in determining the physical well-being of urban Americans, and that differences in the quality of health intensified along class lines in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Another interesting finding was the gender difference in child mortality. A disproportionately high number of boys died in laboring families (when compared to wealthier households), suggesting that poorer Philadelphians may have valued girls more highly than boys, while wealthier families perhaps valued, consciously or unconsciously, boys more than girls.

Memory and the Construction of Nature in American Life

Chair: Stephen McVeigh (University of Wales Swansea)
Alice Nash (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
“Tercentenary of an Indian Raid, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1704-2004”
Eric Sandeen (University of Wyoming, Laramie)
“Nature and History in America’s National Parks: Resettling the Grand Tetons National Park”
Subarno Chattarji (St. Stephen’s College, Delhi)
“Poetry and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Towards a More Discriminating Remembrance”

During BAAS 2000, I had the pleasure of chairing a panel entitled ‘Memory and the Construction of Nature in American Life’. The well attended panel began with a paper by Alice Nash (University of Massachusetts, Amherst). The paper, ‘Tercentenary of an Indian Raid, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 1704-2004’ was a lively and entertaining exploration of the plans for the celebration of a problematic historical event, and the nature of the evolving memory of the raid itself.

Eric Sandeen (University of Wyoming, Laramie) in his paper ‘Nature and History in America’s National Parks: Resettling the Grand Tetons National Park’ offered a fascinating examination of the history and management of this public space, illuminated with a collection of magnificent slides.

Subarno Chattarji (St. Stephen’s College, Delhi) delivered a thoughtful and provocative discussion of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that was concerned to a large degree with the memorial’s inability to deal with the nature of the war itself.

At the end of the session there were several useful questions and comments, with Subarno’s paper generating the bulk of the discussion.

What emerged from a panel that, on paper at least, seemed too disjointed to necessarily cohere, was a rich and diverse but fundamentally connected examination of the management of public memory and space in the contemporary American experience.

Evangelicals, Fundamentalists And American Culture

Chair: Phil Melling, American Studies, University of Wales, Swansea
Kelly Willis Mendiola (University of Texas at Austin)
“‘On to Victory She Goes’: Amanda Berry Smith and the Transformation of the Nineteenth Century Holiness Movement”
Robert Brinkmeyer (University of Mississippi)
“Religious Fundamentalism, Narrative and Recent Southern Literature”
James W. Boyd (Colorado State University )
“Creationism versus Evolution in Kansas”
Comment: Phil Melling (University of Wales Swansea)

This panel examined the roots and resurgence of religious fundamentalism in the United States. It indicated the extent to which conservative religion is a major dynamic in American culture-from the penetcostal crusades of the late nineteenth century to the philosophical conflicts and debates of the present day. Robert Brinkmeyer discussed the importance of Christian narrative in contemporary southern literature at a time of religious renaissance in the South and southern disgrace in the White House. He contrasted the work of southern artists of faith with the gothic scepticism of Flannery O’Connor, suggesting that in spite of a southern preoccupation with evil and sin, southern writers of faith accept the need for Jesus to exist as a figure of hope and moral renewal. James Boyd explored the religious fervour which underpins the debate between creationism and evolution in American culture. He suggested that the philosophical structure of this debate is anticipated in the fundamentalist approach to the Bible and the book of Genesis, in particular, and that the controversy between creationsim and evolution in the public schools in states like Kansas is rooted in an experiential approach to language and truth. Kelly Willis Mendiola looked at the links between ethnicity and religiion in the Holiness movement of the late nineteenth century. She examined the life of Amanda Barry Smith who utilised the idea of empowerment through sanctification to heal the painful racial and class divisions she experienced in New York City. Mendiola argued that Amanda Berry Smith provides one of the missing pieces in the transformation of nineteenth century Holiness thought to American Pentecostalism in the present day. The panel provoked a lively debate and threw up a number of useful links and connections between the papers.

Roundtable Discussion: Narcissism and Lyric in American Poetry

Chair: Nick Selby (University of Wales Swansea)
Nerys Williams (University of Sussex)
“Introduction to the show me business: Error in the poetry of Charles Bernstein”
Jo Gill (Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education)
“From ‘inverted bowl’ to ‘convex mirror’: Narcissism in post-war American Poetry”
Liana Sakelliou (University of Athens)
“The Deep Longing for a Greater Significance in American Life: How Denise Levertov Helps to Satisfy It”
Frances Barry (University of Sussex)
“‘Incoherent inaccessible muddled inaudible speech was a cry for action’: Susan Howe articulating anger”

The four excellent papers in this lively and fascinating session stimulated an extremely engaging discussion. Despite the very great differences between the poets discussed, many common themes and preoccupations were exposed. This demonstrated that the so-called ‘poetry wars’ between different factions of the American poetry scene have, perhaps, been overplayed by critics, poets and publishers.

Nerys Williams’ paper examined the role played by ‘error’ in the work of Charles Bernstein. The paper argued that the incidental slippages on the page that one encounters in his poetry belie a significant relationship to his conceptualisation of language. This leads one into the problematics of reading what often seem to be a series of assiduously defaced lyrics. The paper concluded by suggesting that reading error in Bersntein is to question convention whilst retaining a generous gesture towards a communal enterprise.

Jo Gill’s paper drew on Linda Hutcheon’s (1984) distinction between mimesis of process and mimesis of product in order to support the thesis that the narcissism (or ‘insistent mirroring’) of which the confessional poet Anne Sexton stands accused, should be read as a textual rather than an autobiographical phenomenon. It attended to the-perhaps unexpected-parallels between Sexton’s poem ‘For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further’ and John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’. This comparison allowed for a discussion of how Sexton’s problematisation of reference and privileging of process, exceed the boundaries of the confessional mode, and anticipate the concerns of contemporary and postmodern poetry.

Liana Sakelliou argued that, like many poets of the 1990s, Denise Levertov writes new poems about nature, spirit, and their unity in order to present visions of a positive alternative to a techologised culture. The paper explored Levertov’s Welsh background and her references to the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas. In so doing, Levertov’s poetic quest was shown to be a model for the renewal of the American sense of a manifest destiny that would reorient technology by ethics, art, and personal values.

The final paper of the session, given by Frances Barry talked through some of the difficulties encountered in the work of ‘Language’ poet, Susan Howe, specifically how Howe expresses anger. By working ‘against the colloquial free verse lyric that occupies the mainstream’, the paper argued that Howe’s poetry moves the focus away from the transparency of language to its materiality. Rather, though, than moving away from personal articulation, the paper’s close reading of sections from Singularities, demonstrated the extent to which Howe’s work is invested with her gendered, political, fully conscious ‘ego’.

A Lifeline or a Fetter: The Black Atlantic’s Relevance to American Studies

Chair: Alan Rice (Central Lancashire)
Alan Rice (Central Lancashire University)
“Hidden Voices of the Black Atlantic”
Carol Smith (King Alfred’s College, Winchester)
“Portraying the Black Atlantic: Olaudah Equiano”
Richard Crownshaw (London)
“Memorialising the Black-Jewish Atlantic”
Jenny Terry (University of Warwick)
“‘Shuttles in the rocking loom of history’: The Deployment of the Middle Passage Ship in the Work of Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall and Paul Gilroy”

This was a most lively session to an enthusiastic and packed audience. Dr. Alan Rice kicked off with an introductory paper which took as its starting point visits to Gold Coast castles by black British and African American politicians before describing how we might discover voices of Africans within the slave ships through the ellipses in Slavers’ journals. Dr. Carol Smith traced the image of Olaudah Equiano from a reputed contemporary portrait to his appearence in the faith zone of the Millenium Dome, interrogating the various uses made of the portrait and hence of the personality of this key black Atlantic figure. Dr. Richard Crownshaw described the various ways the traumas of the middle passage and the Shoah have been memorialised in exhibitions here and in America. In a highly theorised paper he described the workings of a Jewish Atlantic which interfaces with Gilroy’s conception of a black Atlantic. Jenny Terry managed to say something new and challenging about Beloved, showing oceanic valencies in Sethe’s house in Ohio which indicate the Middle Passage literally shaking and haunting long after the journey itself. Her paper showed how Gilroy’s work has much to teach us in even the most land-locked areas of American Studies. The wide-ranging discussion afterwords ranged from Afrocentrism through Gilroy’s relation to Thatcherism to whether this work was actually cultural rather than American Studies

Special Focus Session: Rethinking the Multiple Meanings of the American Revolution

Chair: Steve Sarson (University of Wales Swansea)
Anthony Hutchison (PhD student, University of Nottingham)
“The Republican Persuasion: Hannah Arendt’s American Revolution”.
Trevor Burnard (Brunel University)
“Freedom, Migration and the American Revolution”.
John Schlotterbeck (DePauw University, Indiana)
“The Revolution in Northern Piedmont Virginia, 1760-1800”.
Neva Specht (Appalachian State University, North Carolina)
“‘Being a peaceable man, I have suffered much persecution’: The American Revolution and its Effects on Quaker Migration and Community Formation in the Western Country”
Emily Blanck (PhD student, Emory University)
“Freedom Suits in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1764-1783”.

Examining one theme from five very different angles, the papers constituting this Special Focus Session showed what a complex, multi- layered and endlessly fascinating subject the meanings of the American Revolution is. Anthony Hutchison began where the current historiography of American republicanism began: with intellectual history. Hutchison critiqued Hannah Arendt’s stress on American republicanism’s establishment of social and political stability and continuity in light of long-term historical change attributable to the Revolution. By contrast, Trevor Burnard casts doubt on the idea of the American Revolution’s enhancement of freedom, particularly as southern enslavement grew more entrenched until violently overthrown while Britain abolished slavery peacefully. Burnard enhanced the power of his American-British counterpoint by examining the fates of black and white migrants across the British Empire from the 1780s to the 1840s. John Schlotterbeck’s study of Orange County uncovered considerable local social upheaval during the American Revolution, but found it ultimately replaced with greater cohesion and consensus among free whites caused by long-term trends such as out-migration, economic diversification, the rise of a plantocracy and entrenchment of slavery. Emily Blanck also explored the complexities of race and class. Her examination of freedom suits shows how in Massachusetts, unlike Virginia, white enlightenment and black aspiration for liberty became entwined, and yet how the former was deeply ambiguous and the latter greatly compromised. Neva Specht examined the contradictory experiences of a particular group in the American Revolution. She showed how pressures put on Quakers during a period of conflict weeded out those less committed to the Society’s Discipline but strengthened the resolve of those who were and who began to carve out new lives in Ohio and elsewhere. Whether encompassing Atlantic intellectual currents or the global migration of peoples, or relating local and particular phenomena to larger and general trends and events, these papers exemplified the best in American revolution scholarship. They also show that, notwithstanding the long pedigree of this scholarship, there is still much to learn.

Special Symposium: “Reporting War”

Chair: Jon Roper (University of Wales Swansea)
Jack Laurence, Charles Mahar, Charles Wheeler

War and its impact upon American politics, society and culture has long been a research interest and strength of the Department at Swansea, which both arranged and sponsored this special symposium. It brought together two eminent journalists, and the current air-attache at the US Embassy. Jack Laurence started by showing footage of his report from Hue City for CBS, made during the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968. He used this to illustrate ways in which the relationship between the military and the media works in times of war. Reflecting on his personal experiences as a pilot in the Gulf War, Mike Mahar gave a forceful defence of the military’s desire to ensure that war reporting does not erode the legitimate need to maintain silence on matters of security. Charles Wheeler commented upon changes in technology and news-gathering techniques which have in turn impacted on the media’s ability to present a balanced view of war. The ensuing panel discussion and questions from the audience turned rapidly into a lively debate which addressed the issues raised. In sum, a good panel.

Writing and Imagining New York City

Chair: Dave R Bewley-Taylor (University of Wales Swansea)
Richard Haw (Pg student, University of Leeds)
“Brooklyn Bridge: The Ideology of the Opening Day”
Barry Atkins (Manchester Metropolitan University)
“Failed Histories and Imagined Futures: John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer”

This highly stimulating and enjoyable session involved Richard Haw, a postgraduate from the University of Leeds, and Dr. Barry Atkins from the English Department at Manchester Metropolitan University. Richard’s paper, Brooklyn Bridge: The Ideology of the Opening Day, examined what is considered by many to be the defining moment in the history of nineteenth century technology; the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge to the public in May 1883. His paper explored the various concerns, tropes and rhetorical strategies that marked the literature of this event. He also provided links with the currently burgeoning work on parades and other civic occasions in both the early republic and the twentieth century and suggested crucial differences. What emerged, Richard lucidly argued, can be seen to occupy a unique place within, what Sacvan Bercovitch has termed the American ritual of consensus simultaneously providing a link between popular civic occasions of the pre-Civil War era and the tightly controlled pseudo-events described by Daniel Boorstin in the twentieth century. Richards paper was complemented superbly by Barry’s discussion of ‘Failed Histories and Imagined Futures: John Dos Passos Manhattan Transfer’. Barry’s paper explored the extent to which critics of Dos Passos novels have seized upon the authors self-deprecating claim to be a second-rate historian and missed the full significance of the ways in which he looks for new ways to narrate an American future when confronted with a failure of any historical narrative to fully represent the observed world. Specifically Barry explored the ways in which Dos Passos looks not to the past, but to the representation of an American future in Manhattan Transfer. He cleverly argued that this work is not just a damning critique of a variety of modes of American capitalism, as some critics have argued, but instead represents a critique of a variety of modes of historical representation even as it offers up new ways in which it might be possible to narrate an American future. The quality of the papers was matched by the calibre of questions and comments during the discussion. Indeed, the overall success of the session is probably best illustrated by the fact that while comprising of only two panellists, the session lasted for eighty-five minutes and ran out of chairs and floor space for the participants.

Black /Slave Narratives

Chair: Kasia Boddy (University of Dundee)
Cindy Hamilton (Manchester Metropolitan University)
“Models of Agency: Frederick Douglass and ‘The Heroic Slave'”
Stephanie Browner (Berea College, Kentucky)
“‘Social Surgery’: Race, Literature and Medicine at the Turn of the Century”
George Hutchinson (University of Tennessee at Knoxville)
“The Negro Renaissance versus The Negro Vogue”

This fascinating session consisted of papers on diverse topics of African American literature and history from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s. Cindy Hamilton (from Manchester Metropolitan University) provided a new and detailed reading of Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’ which considered how Douglass self-consciously challenged the prevalent sentimental construction of the slave as passive victim. Stephanie Browner (from Berea College) then presented a paper which drew on turn of the century works including The House Behind the Cedars and Iola Le Roy to consider the literary response to the (white and black) medical profession’s relationship to debates within racial ‘science’. The final paper, from George Hutchinson (of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville) argued, with special reference to Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea, against many of the myths perpetuated about the Harlem Renaissance. Both its impact and its duration were greater than it commonly acknowledged, and its characteristic works were more likely to be satires or tragedies than works of ‘uplift’. A lively discussion continued into lunch.

Embodying American Studies: Literary and Historical Approaches

Chair: Janet Beer (Manchester Metropilitan University)
Simon Newman (University of Glasgow)
“Reading Life and Society in Death: The Bodies of Philadelphia’s Poor, 1790-1810”
Tatiana Rapatzikou (University of East Anglia)
“Visualisations of Cyber-Gothic Bodies in William Gibson’s Trilogy and the Art of the Graphic Novel”

In her paper, ‘Visualisations of Cyber-gothic bodies in William Gibson’s Trilogy and the Art of the Graphic Novel’, Tatiana Rapatzikou brought together text and visual image in order to examine the motifs linking cyber-gothic fiction and graphic sources. She explored the the fusion of the human body with electronic technology in the horror motif of the cyborg/zombie in William Gibson’s trilogy (“Neuromancer”, “Count Zero”, “Mona Lisa Overdrive”), placing Gibson’s texts beside the graphic art design of Mike Saenz in order to focus on the formation of electronically engineered alter egos in the trilogy. In this paper it was suggested that the dense narrative style of Gibson’s trilogy can be seen in dialogue with the visual density of the graphic representations.

In his paper, ‘Reading Life and Society in Death: The Bodies of Philadelphia’s Poor, 1790-1810’, Simon Newman explored the burial records kept by the Reverend Nicholas Collin, the pastor of Gloria Dei Church in Southwark, Philadelphia. With a highly developed interest in medical practise and research, Collin kept extremely detailed records of the people that he buried, many of whom were drawn from the ranks of the labouring poor in early national Philadelphia. The records show extremely high rates of infant mortality, and then as survivors grew older childbirth and related infections and illnesses took the lives of many young adult women, while job-related injuries killed many younger men. However, while these records demonstrate the fragility of life amongst the poor in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century urban America, Collin was careful to temper this with a sense of the myriad ways in which people coped with and indeed enjoyed life, from children’s street games to alcoholic carousing and festive celebration.

Vietnam War and the Homefront

Chair: Craig Phelan (University of Wales Swansea)
Sylvia Ellis (University of Sunderland)
“‘One Hell of a Situation’: The Wilson-Kosygin Peace Initiative of February 1967”
Rodri Jeffrys-Jones (University of Edinburgh)
“‘The WORM and the Vietnam War”

The early Saturday afternoon session in the Callaghan building on “The Vietnam War and the Homefront” was well attended and sparked a remarkably sprited debate. Sylvia Ellis from the University of Sunderland read a paper chronicling the Wilson-Kosygin Peace Initiative of February 1967, a failed opportunity to pursue peace during the Johnson administration. Rodri Jeffrys-Jones from the University of Edinburgh discussed antiwar protest and argued that one point of agreement among the diverse groups of protesters was that Vietnam was a war conducted by the “WORM” (White Old Rich Men). Much of the debate that followed focused on the extent to which the antiwar movement can be credited with forcing an end to the war. Dr. Jeffrys-Jones articulated the view of those who believed that protest did hasten US withdrawal, but several members of the audience strenuously resisted his arguments, and the debate continued well after the session had ended.

Gender in Contemporary American Culture

Chair: Ann Heilmann (University of Wales Swansea)
Jeff Walsh (Manchester Metropolitan University)
“Elite Women Warriors and Dog Soldiers: Gender Reversals in Contemporary Hollywood War Films”
Sue Ellen Charlton (Colorado State University at Fort Collins)
“Gender and Sex in American Political Culture”
William Schultz (University of Athens)
“The Possible End of Gender Differences in America: Utopia or Dystopia?”

With its ideally matched papers on current debates about gender and sexuality, this proved a lively and stimulating panel which generated an animated discussion.

The opening paper was presented by Jeff Walsh (Manchester Metropolitan University) on the subject of ‘Elite Women Warriors and Dog Soldiers: Gender Reversals in Contemporary Hollywood War Films’. While films like ‘G.I. Jane’ and ‘Courage Under Fire’ represented a new departure in Hollywood cinema in that they experimented with gender roles by constructing woman as warrior, Walsh drew attention to the highly ambivalent nature of this figure, whose greatest feat of heroism appeared to consist in her feminine capacity for endurance and self-sacrifice.

The political repercussions of the contemporary crisis of the sex/gender dichtomy which has underpinned so much of the conceptual and legal framework of American society was explored by Sue Ellen Charlton (Colorado State University at Fort Collins). Her paper on ‘Gender and Sex in American Political Culture’ argued that recent sexual harassment cases (Tailhook, the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings) and current battles over bisexuals from any protected status) indicate the erosion of the line between private and public.

In his paper on ‘The Possible End of Gender Differences in America’ William Schultz (University of Athens) examined the utopian and/or dystopian potential of androgyny state legislation on gay rights (such as steps undertaken in Colorado to bar gays, lesbians and as represented in contemporary science fiction film (THX1138). Androgyny was imaged almost exclusively as the absence of gender and sexuality, and was therefore constructed as the loss of individuality: in film, it was typically linked with alienation and the dehumanisation of society. By contrast, conventional representations of gender (such as NASA’s space message) evoked a more optimistic outlook by celebrating a difference premised on the conflation of cultural and physiological attributes (hair length reflecting anatomical specificity).

Walt Whitman and His Legacy

Chair: Paul Giles (Cambridge University)
M. Wynn Thomas (University of Wales Swansea)
“Whitman, and 1850s New York”
William V Davies (Baylor University, Texas)
“Bruised by God: Charles Wright’s Apocalyptic Pilgrimage”
Kenneth Price (College of William and Mary)
“Cultural memory and the Politics of Desire: Representing Walt Whitman in Film, 1980-2000”

This session on Whitman offered three particularly stimulating and well-received papers. In ‘Whitman and 1850s New York,’ M. Wynn Thomas argued that the idea of spontaneity in Whitman could be seen as a political term and that many of the catalogues in Leaves of Grass might be likened to Fourth of July parades. Thomas contrasted Whitman’s method of naturalizing immigrants with the different attitudes of politicians in New York during the 1850s. In ‘Bruised by God: Charles Wright’s Apocalyptic Pilgrimage’, William V. Davis took up various aspects of Whitman’s artistic legacy in terms of Wright’s poetics of prophecy. Finally, in “Cultural memory and the Politics of Desire: Representing Walt Whitman in Film, 1980-2000”, Kenneth Price demonstrated the extent to which Whitman has become an icon within American popular culture over the last twenty years. In the subsequent discussion period, Price argued that the “erotics of discipleship” needs more attention from Whitman scholars, and all of these papers explored contemporary approaches to Whitman’s work to great effect.

Special Keynote Speaker

Chair: Phil Melling (University of Wales Swansea)
Maxine Hong-Kingston (University of California, Berkeley)

A Fifth Book of Peace

Maxine Hong-Kingston framed her talk with two readings. The first was an account of the loss of an original manuscript in the fire which engulfed her home and those of her neighbours in northern California in the early 1990s. Unable to find her bearings in a devastated landscape Hong-Kingston described her realization that everything she owned in the house was gone, including the manuscript. Encountering a journalist she explains the fire as divine retribution for America’s bombing of innocent civilians in the Gulf War, a comment which brought her severe censure in the local and national media. Hong-Kingston explained that, for her, America’s record in recent military theatres is a thing of enduring shame. The great moral tragedy is still Vietnam and Hong-Kingston’s personal act of reparation is a programme of work with Vietnam veterans in California. Hong-Kingston balanced her fire story with a water story, a lovely reading of ‘A Sea Worry’, from Hawaii One Summer. Here she recalls watching her son catch the waves in Sandy Beach, Hawaii. The contemplative tone of the reading allowed her audience the chance to cool down after the intense heat of A Fifth Book of Peace. Hawaii One Summer, a collection of eleven newspaper articles written in the form of seasonal vignettes, is set in Hawaii and was originally published by Meadow Press as a limited edition in 1987. It has since been reissued by the University of Hawaii Press (1998).

American Indian Treaty Making and Negotiation

Chair: Martin Padget (University of Wales Aberystwyth)
Benjamin Ramirez-schkwegnaabi (Central Michigan University, Saginaw Band of Chippewa)
“United States Negotiation and Treaty Making”
Carol Green-Devens (Central Michigan University)
“Gender Roles in Ojibwe Negotiation and Leadership”
Brian Alan Baker (Cornell University, Bad River Chippewa)
“Ojibwe Treaty Rights in the United States and Canada”

This panel provided a rich and illuminating focus on treaty making and negotiation as conducted by Ojibwe (or Anishinaabe or Chippewa) Indians during the nineteenth century. Benjamin Ramirez-schkwegnaabi (Saginaw Band of Chippewa), who teaches Native American history and the Ojibwe language at Central Michigan University, provided a comparison of Ojibwe and US negotiating strategies in the nineteenth century. Focusing his attention on an 1855 treaty between the US Government and the Ojibwe in Michigan, Ramirez-schkwegnaabi argued that treaty journals from this period provide an invaluable resource for analyzing the differing ways in which Ojibwe and US representatives understood time and language in their negotiations. Dealing with US bureaucrats who based their thinking on linear models of time and decision making proved difficult for a people for whom time was cyclical and decision making consensual. Carol Green-Devens, who also teaches at Central Michigan University and is the author of Countering Colonization: Native American Women and Great Lakes Missions, 1630-1900, gave a talk on the participation of Ojibwe women in the consensus-based decision making of their communities and nations. Arguing that historians have tended to overlook the key role played by women in diplomatic negotiations between Native Americans and the US, Green-Devens illustrated the various ways in which Ojibwe women participated in the diplomatic process and provided political leadership of their own. Brian Alan Baker (Bad River Chippewa), who teaches in the American Indian Programme at Cornell University, spoke about the fortunes of Ojibwe bands in the Lake Superior region who were drawn into different national political structures on either side of the US-Canada border. Baker focused on strategies proposed by the Ojibwe to share their land with other peoples at key points of their history over the past three hundred years. He paid particular attention to treaty making during the nineteenth century, when the Ojibwe used symbiosis to argue for the maintenance of their fishing, hunting and occupancy rights on land that US representatives considered had been ceded to their own government. Taken together, the three papers were representative of the many exciting developments that are ongoing in the areas of Native American Studies and ethnohistory.

Tourism, Imagined Cities and Failed Dreams

Chair: David Seed (University of Liverpool)
Christopher Pierce (University of Liverpool)
“Heuristic Instrument: The Directors City”
Jerry Foust (Loyola University)
“South Haven by the ‘Sea’: Community and Tourism in South Haven, Michigan, 1869-1930”
Ann McFerrin (Archivist, Kansas City, Missouri Parks, Recreation and Boulevards)
“The City Beautiful Movement: Study of the Kansas City Missouri Parks and Boulevard System”

Christoher Pierce opened the session with a discussion of the Dutch West India Company’s pentagonal plan for New Amsterdam. Citing a prototype in Philipville, he argued that we should not exclude religious and political issues from consideration, and proposed an interpretation of the plan as a design for an ideal castle in a new world Eden. Jerry Foust then followed with an account of South Haven, Michigan, stressing the role of tourism in the growth of that community. The town promoted itself as a refuge from nearby urban complexes. Ann McFerrin completed the session with an outline history of the parks in Kansas City showing the impact of the City Beautiful Movement on the construction of a boulevard plan. All three papers tied in with each other around the concept of planned construction and urban models.

New Perspectives in Welsh-American history

Chair: Bill Jones (University of Wales, Cardiff)
Lloyd Johnson (Campbell University)
“Welsh ethnicity on the South Carolina Frontier 1735-1800”
Ronald Lewis (West Virginia)
“Welsh Miners, American Coal and the Loss of Memory”
Aled Jones (Aberystwyth)
“Drych and American Welsh Identities 1851-1951”

This conference Special Session opened with Bill Jones’s shorter opening paper which briefly surveyed some of the distinctive features of the history of the Welsh in America. It also suggested that in recent years increased interest has been shown in the subject, revealing a more diverse and complex picture of immigration, settlement and acculturation.

Each of the remaining three speakers explored new directions in Welsh American history. Lloyd Johnson focus was on the Welsh- and English speaking Welsh migrants from Pennsylvania and Delaware who stamped a strong Welsh identity on the Pee Dee region of South Carolina in 1730s and 1740s. His is the first in depth study of this group so his contribution was especially welcome.

Ron Lewis addressed a familiar theme from a stimulating new perspective. During the nineteenth century knowledge of work skills won the Welsh leadership in American coalfield society and institutions, but by the 1920s structural changes had dissolved their competitive edge. He argued that the immigrants’ initial success was accompanied by the demise of the work culture which had provided them with cultural cohesion and identity. It also led to a loss of collective memory of that culture among their descendants.

Finally, Aled Jones examined another Welsh American success story, the newspaper Y Drych [The Mirror], founded in 1851 and still being published. Discussing the current University of Wales collaborative project on the paper’s historical role and function, he showed how research findings are revealing valuable insights into the ways in which it reflected and shaped an American Welsh identity during this period.

The presentations were followed by a lively discussion which ranged widely over aspects of Welsh ethnicity and identity in America.

Sentimentalism, Gender, and the Development of the Middle Class

Chair: Simon Middleton (University of East Anglia)
Sarah Knott (Royal Holloway College, University of London/Wolfson College, Oxford)
“‘Provedore to the Sentimentalists’: Robert Bell and Sentimental Readership in the Early Republic”
Charlene Avallone (Independent Scholar, Hawaii)
“Studied as an Art’: Conversation Crosses the Atlantic”
Marina Moskowitz (University of Glasgow)
“Recording the Middle-Class: Fact and Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century”

Sarah Knott (Royal Holloway College, University of London/Wolfson College, Oxford) provided a stimulating opening with her discussion of urban print culture and sentimentalism via the career of the Philadelphian bookseller, Robert Bell (1768-1784). Sentimentalism pervaded genres as diverse as history, conduct literature, travel accounts and medicine and extended reading to a popular audience of women and men. Charlene Avallone (Independent Scholar, Hawaii) examined the ways in which American perceptions of the art of English conversation guided Republican adaptations of salon culture and conduct literature in domestic tutelage into the more or less systematic disciplining of girls and women in conversing. Marina Moskowitz (University of Glasgow) closed with an enlightening discussion of “Recording the Middle-Class: Fact and Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century,” which managed what had at first seemed impossible, and united all the papers around central themes of sentimentalism, gender, and the development of the middle class.

Sexualities and Post-War American Literature and Culture

Chair: Richard J. Ellis, Nottingham Trent University
Denis Flannery (University of Leeds)
“‘The Blessed Wolf: Cormac McCarthy, Sibling Love and Homoeroticism”
Maria Lauret (University of Sussex)
“‘It’s for this we risk the wrath of God and Man’: recent black gay writing and the tradition”
Graham Thompson (Nottingham Trent University)
“The Anxiety of Organisation: Straight Male Fear, Paranoia and Self-Pity in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened”
Agnieszka Rzepa (Adam Mickiewicz University)
“Textual Anrdoyny? Susan Sontag’s the Volcano Lovers as an Androgynous Text”
Jude Davies (King Alfred’s College, Winchester)
“‘I’m in trouble, George … bad trouble’: Sex Matters in Dreiser’s Novels and Films”

Denis Flannery’s paper, ‘Cormac McCarthy, Sibling Love, and Queer Subjectivity’ considered McCarthy’s work-particularly The Crossing-from an approach informed by the historically complex and mutually determining relationship between sibling love and the literary articulation of queer, specifically homoerotic, possibilities. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler and others, Flannery considered the way in which sibling love in McCarthy is recurrently an initiatory signal for queer sexual and cultural possibilities. Flannery proposed that this could be recognised in The Crossing in the way the bond between the two brothers in the novel was one itself eroticised through the figure of the wolf.

Maria Lauret’s thoughtful, exploratory paper examined the relationship between recent black gay writing of the late 1980s and the 1990s to earlier writing by black gay men such as Richard Bruce Nugent and Langston Hughes of the Harlem Renaissance and James Baldwin some forty years later. The recent appearance of several anthologies of black gay writing and the inclusion of the work of Essex Hemphill and Randall Kenan in the Norton and Riverside anthologies of African American Literature suggested that what was emerging might be construed as a tradition, that could be traced back to these roots/routes, but Lauret instead proposed that such inclusion might be premature: a ‘tradition’ of African American gay writing may be in the making, but is as yet still an obscure object of desire, even if the writing that may be starting to found it is often strikingly complex and compelling.

Graham Thompson’s paper explored the ways in which surveillance and self-surveillance operate in the narrative of Joseph Heller’s Something Happened in terms of fear, paranoia, and self-pity and how these categories produce knowledge and information about an anxious straight male sexuality in the post-war corporate world, where fear of latency helped structure an unstable homosocial homophobia.

Agnieszka Rzepa’s analysis of Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lovers (1992) viewed it as an ‘androgynous text’-the concept of the androgynous text being based mostly on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism and the work of Hélène Cixous. An androgynous text, Rzepa contended, is defined chiefly in terms of its formal structure, in which individual characterization is not as important as a specific ‘orchestration’ of characters as ‘voices’ (in the Bakhtinian sense), in an open textual dialogue. Another essential element of an androgynous text is the impact, which the text might exert on the reader by defamiliarising of gender stereotypes. Sontag’s novel was presented as an exemplary androgynous text.

Jude Davies’ paper analysed the representation of sexuality and subjectivity in Theodore Dreiser’s novels Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925), and the film adaptations A Place in the Sun (1951) and Carrie (1952). The paper recontextualised historical receptions of this material as (naturalistic) ‘pictures of conditions’ and as ‘social problem’ texts by reference to an interest in sexual activity and its regulation as a set of social practices at the borders of the cultural and the biological. An engagement with contemporary work on sexuality by Judith Butler was used to unpack issues of centralisation/marginality, and commodified and romantic desire.

This excellent set of papers, and a series of stimulating questions, ensured the BAAS Swansea conference ended on high note for all present.

The Self in American Literature and Poetry

Chair: Bill Lazenblatt (University of Ulster)
Justin Quinn (University of Prague)
Frank Bidart and the Fate of Lyric
Carolyn Masel (University of Manchester)
’Cloudless the morning. It is he’: The Return of the Figural in Wallace Stevens’ Apocalypses
Nick Selby (University of Wales, Swansea)
Desiring Texts: ‘Language Poetry’ and the Erotics of Domestic Space
Richard Hinchcliffe (University of Central Lancashire)
The Millencholic Wilderness: Testing the Self in Contemporary America
Natalie Dykstra (Hope College, Michigan)
Dressing Up: Representation of the Self in Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes

As if to demonstrate that last is by no means least, the BAAS Special Focus session on The Self in American Literature and Poetry was kept to the very end of the Conference, on Sunday afternoon. And were it not for the fact that trains, boats and planes were waiting to return the speakers and their very appreciative audience to various parts of the globe, the discussion would probably still be going on. The first three papers in this crowded session dealt with poetry, with Justin Quinn of the University of Prague identifying in the lyrics of Frank Bidert ways of fastening the voice to the page in order to create a poetic self. For Carolyn Masel of the University of Manchester, Wallace Stevens achieved a voice of poetical authority in Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction by rediscovering self through the return of the figural. Nick Selby of the University of Wales, Swansea, considered the interception of domestic, cultural and bodily spaces in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and Rosmarie Waldrop’s Inserting the Mirror, to illustrate how desire operates as a discursive site through which the two poets articulate an imaginary, unified subjectivity. All three papers made effective use of close readings and demonstrated that, though the writing self may be problematized, reading selves were acute and authoritative.

The prose papers which rounded off the session were likewise perceptive, with Richard Hinchcliffe of the University of Central Lancashire reminding us of the morally etiolated souls of Brett Easton Ellis’s bratpack in Less Than Zero, where selfhood has become as commodified as everything else in LA. Finally, at breakneck speed and with breathless delivery, Natalie Dykstra of Hope College, Michigan, explored the ways in which Elizabeth Keckley dressed up her own views in Behind the Scenes, in order to ventriloquate them through the voice of the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln.

The Future of American Studies

Chair: Paul Giles (Cambridge University)
Warren French (Honorary Professor, University of Wales Swansea)
American Studies in the New Millennium
Barbara Shaw-Perry (University of Maryland, College Park)
Migrations of a Subject: (Re)Naming ‘American Studies’, ‘Part III (IV?, V?)
Comment: Susan Castillo (University of Glasgow)

In the last session of the conference, Warren French, who had the previous evening received a special award for his contributions to American Studies over the years, described his hopes and fears for the future of this field. French wants to locate American Studies specifically within an experiential context, and he offered illuminating insights into discrepancies between American Studies scholarship and the way life is lived in the United States today. He was followed by Barbara Shaw-Perry, an American graduate student from Maryland currently working at the University of Birmingham, who, coming at the subject from a different generational perspective, also raised important questions about the future of American Studies from an institutional point of view. Susan Castillo, from the University of Glasgow, then responded to these papers by describing various feedback she had received from members of the BAAS Executive about the future organization of this field, and subsequent discussion focussed largely on administrative challenges for American Studies within the complex bureaucratic world of the modern university.

Exchange Programme Meeting

Fifteen exchange tutors attended the Exchange Programme meeting at the BAAS conference at Swansea. A splendid buffet lunch was provided to facilitate the arrangement of a lunchtime Talk Shop, and the session proved to be very useful. The main topic was exchange of marks and grades in exchange programmes, but finance and other matters were touched upon. It was agreed that the BAAS homepage should be developed further as a means of disseminating information about student exchange programmes. BAAS members who are interested in exchange programmes should visit the BAAS homepage http://http://cc.webspaceworld.me/new-baas-site

The Conference Scene

BAAS Annual Conference—6-9 April 2001 University of Keele, Staffordshire, England: Call for Papers

The conference of the British Association for American Studies is the most comprehensive annual American Studies meeting held in Britain. The last annual conference attracted 300 delegates from all over the UK, from over half the states of the USA, and from 15 other countries.

Come and join us for our next conference, in 2001.We are now calling for paper proposals for the next meeting,to be held at Keele University on April 6-9, 2001. Proposals are welcome on any topic in American Studies. Themes may be multidisciplinary, or interdisplinary, or may examine a topic from the perspective of literature, culture, history, politics or any other approach to the study of America.

Proposals should be no longer than one page, and should include a provisional title. Individually paper proposals will be organised into appropriate panels. Panel proposals by two or more paper-givers, sharing a common theme, are also invited. Proposals are welcome from all researchers in the field, from senior colleagues to postgraduates.

Proposals should be submitted by 31st October, 2000, to:

Dr John Dumbrell
BAAS Conference Secretary
Department of American Studies
Keele University
Keele, Staffordshire ST5 5BG
Fax: 01782 583460 (international: +44 1782 583460)
E-mail: asa09@ams.keele.ac.uk

50th Anniversary BAAS Conferences

The first BAAS conference was held at Cambridge in 1955, which means that the 50th conference will take place in 2004, and we can continue the year-long celebrations with a 50th anniversary year conference in 2005.

The Conference Sub-committee and BAAS Executive invite proposals to host the 2004 and 2005 conferences. We would welcome any ideas for new and different initiatives that would build on the conference form, for example through the involvement of partner institutions and organisations who would welcome the chance to help sponsor and celebrate the Association’s anniversary.

We are keen to hear suggestions and ideas for innovation from BAAS members. Members of the Executive Committee will be happy to discuss any ideas, and informal proposals may be sent by letter to

Dr. Simon P. Newman
Director, Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies
University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ
Scotland
E-mail: S.Newman@modhist.arts.gla.ac.uk

EAAS CFP: “Nation on the Move: Mobility in U.S. History”, Fifth Middelburg Conference of European Historians of the United States, 18-20 April 2001

On 18-20 April 2001 the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, The Netherlands, will host for the fifth time the biennial conference of European Historians of the United States. The theme for this “Middelburg 5” conference is: “Nation on the Move: Mobility in U.S. History”.

The conference aims to explore economic, political, religious and other motives of individual or collective mobility (geographical explorations, travels, adventures, tourism, economic migration, deportation or forced migration, commuting patterns), modes of transportation (horse, ship, railway, car, plane), and developments in routes and transport technology (rivers, cattle trails, construction of roads, canals, railways, airports, car industry) and their impact on American society and culture from colonial times to the present. The focus is on mobility within the U.S.A., not immigration into the country. Literary sources may be used subject to historiographical methods.

Historians interested in presenting a paper are invited to send a one-page proposal before 15 October 2000 to the conference organizers:

Dr. Cornelis A. van Minnen and Professor Sylvia L. Hilton
Roosevelt Study Center
P.O. Box 6001
4330 LA Middelburg
The Netherlands
E-mail: rsc@zeeland.nl
Fax: 31-118-631593

The organizers will make every effort to maintain the plenary character of all sessions, and to schedule sufficient time in the program for discussion.

To this end, individual oral presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. Selections of papers originally presented at preceding “Middelburg conferences” have been published in conference volumes, and although a guarantee cannot be given, we again envision a publication. To be acceptable for publication revised conference papers should be between twenty and thirty pages double-spaced, written according to the guidelines of The Chicago Manual of Style, and submitted as a Word for Windows document. Scholars interested in participating in the conference without presenting a paper are requested to contact the Roosevelt Study Center for a registration form (available from 1 December 2000 on). Hotel expenses of the speakers at the conference will be covered. Other participants are expected to cover their own expenses.

Conference volumes of the preceding four Middelburg conferences:-David K. Adams and Cornelis A. van Minnen, eds., Reflections on American Exceptionalism (Keele: Keele University Press, 1994).-David K. Adams and Cornelis A. van Minnen, eds., Aspects of War in American History (Keele: Keele University Press, 1997).-David K. Adams and Cornelis A. van Minnen, eds., Religious and Secular Reform in America: Ideas, Beliefs and Social Change (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and New York: New York University Press, 1999).-Cornelis A. van Minnen and Sylvia L. Hilton, eds., Federalism, Citizenship and Collective Identities in U.S. History (forthcoming: Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2000).

The Middleburg conference has become an established biennial occasion, on alternate years to the EAAS conference. The previous four conferences have attracted historians from a large number of countries in Europe, as well as some from the United States. The cosy atmosphere of a relatively small number (about seventy-five) in the delightful setting of a charming, provincial Dutch town, have made these conferences extremely enjoyable as well as academically stimulating. The British contingent has usually been significant in size, so that it might be expected that both as paper-givers and attenders BAAS members will be well-represented.

The Omohundro Institute—Seventh Annual Conference, July 10-16, 2001

Call for Proposals for Papers and Panels: Seventh Annual Institute Conference

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture invites proposals for papers for its seventh annual conference to be held July 10-16, 2001. The conference is sponsored jointly by the Institute and by the University of Glasgow, which will be celebrating its 550th anniversary. The meeting will take place in Glasgow, with optional conference events at the Universities of Edinburgh and Stirling.

Conference Themes:

The Institute’s field of interest encompasses all aspects of the lives of North America’s indigenous and immigrant peoples during the colonial, Revolutionary, and early national periods of the United States, and the related histories of Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America, the British Isles, Europe and Africa from the sixteenth century to approximately 1815. Given Glasgow’s historic connections with early America, the conference will have a general theme of the Atlantic World, and the members of the program committee are particularly eager to receive paper and session proposals focussing on researching and teaching early America from an Atlantic World perspective. However, proposals in all fields of early American history and culture will be welcome. The Institute, the program committee, and the University of Glasgow expect this conference to allow American and European scholars to gather together and re-examine early American history and culture in new ways and from new vantage points.

Glasgow:

The University of Glasgow, founded in 1451, is one of Britain’s five ‘ancient’ (medieval) universities. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shipbuilding and trade with the Americas encouraged Glasgow’s growth into the ‘second city’ of the British Empire. Hundreds of thousands of Highland and Lowland Scots passed through the city on their way to the New World, while others remained to service the coal, steel and shipbuilding industries that created both tremendous wealth and great poverty. Over the past quarter-century the city has enjoyed a spectacular revival: as European City of Culture in 1990, and UK City of Architecture and Design in 1999, the city has remade itself, although its mercantile roots remain evident in the grand Georgian and Victorian architecture of the Merchant City. Glasgow remains Scotland’s largest city, but lies amidst some of the most beautiful hill country in south west Scotland. Less than one hour from Edinburgh and Stirling, Glasgow has excellent train, bus and boat connections to the Highlands and Western Islands, as well as to Belfast and Northern Ireland.

Proposals:

Individual submissions should include a one-page proposal and a one-page curriculum vitae. Proposals for entire panels should be submitted in one packet by the designated organizer, with a one-page curriculum vitae and a one page proposal for each presenter, together with a one-page cover-sheet giving the title and theme of the panel, and a listing of all participants. Proposals should be sent to Dr. Simon Newman, Director, Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies, 2 University Gardens, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland. These should arrive no later than September 15, 2000. Please do not send submissions by fax or by e-mail. Questions may be sent by e-mail to: oieah&c@arts.gla.ac.uk

Elmira 2001: The 4th International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies, August 16-18, 2001

Two BAAS members, Peter Stoneley and Peter Messent, are chairing respectively the ‘Mark Twain and the Body’ (bodies in pain, racialised bodies, genderered bodies, transformed bodies etc.) and the ‘Mark Twain in Pieces’ (short stories, essays, letters, sketches, maxims etc.) panels. Twenty minute papers to be sent to Gretchen Sharlow, Mark Twain Center, Elmira College, Elmira, New York 14901 by January 2001 for selection by open competition. British Mark Twain scholars are encouraged to submit.

Slave Passages and Liberating Sojourns

On May 8th last year a special one-day colloquium was held at the University of Central Lancashire. Organised by the American Studies Research Group it was the first in a series of colloquia featuring the research interests of the team. It aimed to foreground the Transatlantic study of African American culture through a series of papers on the Black Atlantic refracted through museum culture, local Lancashire history, travel narratives and African communities based in Europe. Sabine Broeck from Bremen discussed the Transatlantic implications of Nancy Cunards seminal collection The Negro whilst Alasdair Pettinger showed how her family firm had discriminated against the free passage of actual non-whites throughout the nineteenth century. Melinda Elder discussed the slaving voyages undertaken from Lancaster and the Fylde ports that implicated even the smallest of ports in the iniquitous trade whilst Tony Tibbles discussed whether such crimes Against Human Dignity could ever be adequately memorialised using his own work in curating the slavery gallery at the Merseyside Maritime Museum as his exemplar. Patrick Hagopian from Lancaster University discussed the kinds of contention that could arise at such sites as Williamsburg whose recreations of slave auctions were recently hotly debated in African American communities. Shamoon Zamir from Kings College, London interrogated the politics of Zora Neale Hurstons Caribbean sojourns whilst Michelle Maria Wright from Carnegie Mellon discussed the multifarious journeys of the Afro-Germanic population.

The stentorian presence of Wilson Harris illuminated the day especially when he delivered a lunchtime speech on the relevance of ethnic cleansing to Race at the end of the millennium and read from his novels. A poster display on the Manx Slave Trade from Frances Wilkins illuminated the foyer showing how slave merchant networks reached out into the Irish Sea and were fundamentally important to the development of Lancashire ports as leading players in the British slave trade. A book of essays is being compiled including these papers and others. Some students from Alan Rices Narratives of the Black Atlantic course were enthusiastic participants in an audience of about 50 which included curators, academics and local historians. The sessions were lively and sometimes controversial and showed the importance of moving beyond National boundaries in talking about the cultures of the Black Atlantic. We were able to have such a dynamic day thanks to sponsorship from the Merseyside Maritime Museum, Cassell Academic and the British Association for American Studies. The next colloquium from the Preston team will be on Transatlantic Studies: New Perspectives, held in Maastricht, the Netherlands at the Center for Transatlantic Studies 12-14 October. Details from the organisers, Heidi Macpherson (h.r.s.machpherson@uclan.ac.uk) and Will Kaufman (w.kaufman@uclan.ac.uk).

The BAAS/OVERhere 1999 Annual Post-Graduate Conference—Report

By/passing: an interdisciplinary American Studies Conference-the BAAS/OVERhere 1999 Annual Post-Graduate Conference, The Nottingham Trent University, Saturday 6 November 1999

This annual postgraduate conference was jointly sponsored by The Nottingham Trent University, OVERhere and BAAS, with each providing a measure of support and the Nottingham Trent University underwriting the project. Over forty people attended from all over the country-from the University of Glasgow to the University of Sussex. Twenty-eight post-graduates gave papers, which in every case proved to be provocative, thoughtful and challenging-testimony in itself to the continuing health of American Studies in Britain.

Topics ranged in period from the war of 1812 (Jonathan Hills, A Martial Image? The United States Militia and the Visual Medium in the War of 1812, University of Sunderland ) through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Theresa Saxon, Friendship and Fraternity: The Location of the American Male in Roderick Hudson, MMU; Mark Rawlinson, Charles Sheeler, Adorno and the Relation of Art to Society, University of Nottingham) to the contemporary (Maria Noriega Sanchez, Chicanas in the Borderlands: Towards the New Mestiza, University of Sheffield), whilst subjects ranged from the literary and historical (Alice Hiller, Paradise Traduced: The Coded Landscape of Fanny Kemble’s Journey into Slavery) to contemporary cultural studies (Justin Crouch, Animation and New York, University of Birmingham; Rachel Jennings, Here Be Elvis Impersonators: Route Maps in Contemporary Road Books on the USA, University of Warwick) with frequent cross-overs also occurring (Graham Thompson, ‘Opaque Glass Bricks’: Sloan Wilson’s Gray Flannel Man in the Queer Organization, The Nottingham Trent University).

In this process, by/passing moved through a series of meanings and shadesof meaning, engaging issues of race (and passing), liminality and often passing between disciplines and genres. Three of the papers were selected for publication in the final issue of OVERhere (before it moves into a new period of its history as the European Journal of American Culture): Sarah Wood, Foul Contagions and Precarious Asylums: The Role of the Refugee in Ormond & Arthur Mervyn; Simon Topping, The Election of 1936 and the Emergence of African-American Political Power, University of Hull; Andrew Green, Postnational Fictions: Don DeLillo & Cormac McCarthy, Birmingham University.

The conference was constantly stimulating and enjoyable, and it is only a shame I cannot detail here all the papers given. Thanks are due to The Nottingham Trent University, OVERhere and especially BAAS as an organisation. I’d like to introduce a slightly critical note, however: it would nice to see a few more BAAS members turning up who are drawn not from the postgraduate community but from the ‘full fee paying’ category (i.e., those in jobs), providing another very valuable and very valued form of support to this annual conference.

Next year’s equivalent event will be held at the Manchester Metropolitan University (on 18 November 2000), and organised by Theresa Saxon and Margaret Smith. Please do contact them about this conference, to be entitled ‘Taking Stock: The American Century and Beyond’ (email: jandt@brethemail.net). We are also currently seeking a host for the 2001 conference. Contact r.j.ellis@ntu.ac.uk.

R. J. Ellis

Report on European Association for American Studies (EAAS)

I was unable to report on EAAS in person in 1999 because the Glasgow conference clashed with the EAAS Board meeting, held in Olomouc in the Czech Republic.

At Olomouc the main items of discussion were:

1) Relations with emerging eastern European associations, one of which, the Belarus Association, was admitted to EAAS.

2) The establishment of a new travel scheme to support interchange between, especially, eastern Europe and the US, and eastern and western Europe, in the field of American studies; for a full account of the scheme and application procedure, see American Studies in Europe, No 43 (September 1999), p.2.

3) The programme for the Graz conference in April 2000. Here the UK did particularly well-especially considering our relatively poor attendance at EAAS conferences-with the appointment of two parallel lecturers (Peter Coates of Bristol and Paul Giles of Cambridge) and several workshop convenors or co-convenors, namely John Dumbrell (Keele), Robert Lewis (Birmingham), George McKay (Central Lancashire), Chris Mulvey (King Alfred’s College), and Carol Smith (King Alfred’s College).

4) The location for the 2002 conference was settled: Bordeaux, France.

The EAAS 2000 conference in Graz is taking place 13-16 April 2000. It is devoted to the theme “Nature’s Nation?” Anyone who has kept up with the EAAS email list, or who has read the Times Higher Education Supplement will know that this meeting-overshadowed by the inclusion of the Freedom Party in the Austrian government-has occasioned quite heated debate, with protagonists urging positions from total boycott to claims that the Austrian government is of no concern to American studies academics. My own view, which concurs with that of the EAAS President and all vocal Board members, is that we should attend and that we should take opportunities to express disquiet over the Austrian political situation. (It has already been agreed that conference time will be made available for appropriate discussion.) I would like to have BAAS support for this position, as expressed in the following resolution . [Text of resolution.]

Addenda: As it happened, while there was general support for the resolution put to the AGM, in the ensuing discussion a number of technical objections were raised about its precise wording, and it was agreed that the BAAS Executive Committee should formulate a resolution that took such objections into account. This was done at the final committee meeting in Swansea, and the agreed wording follows:

BAAS wishes to express its concern and anxiety at the participation of the Freedom Party in the Austrian government. The rhetoric of this party appears inimical to the values associated with academic freedom. BAAS calls on the President and Board of EAAS, during its conference in Graz, to make a public statement or statements to convey this disquiet. BAAS trusts that the Board of EAAS will make plain that EAAS, as a community of scholars, will not allow itself to be associated with any event, including social receptions, that could accrue to the credit of the Austrian government.

Members will be interested to learn that at meetings of the Board and at the special forum for debate of these matters a wide range of views was expressed. A number of other national associations, including those of France and Italy, submitted resolutions similar to ours. Ultimately there was virtually unanimous support for the following, which was put out as a press release to the Austrian and international media (I have abbreviated it slightly):

EAAS is a professional academic organisation, the umbrella organisation of European Americanists from a great number of European countries. It is also an association committed in its own structures and proceedings to democratic principles and democratic process. It should therefore be clear that EAAS is fundamentally opposed to Mr. Haider and what he stands for. It rejects any attempt to restrict or violate the individual rights of any citizens or to discriminate against anybody on the basis of ethnic or racial difference. It has decided to convene its biennial conference in Graz out of solidarity with its Austrian colleagues who share the same principles and commitments, and to demonstrate its awareness that the danger represented by Mr. Haider and his politics cannot be treated as being the problem of one country alone since it is a European problem that has to be confronted in all societies with equal determination.

Mick Gidley, BAAS delegate to the Board of EAAS

Recruitment Patterns in American Studies

Philip John Davies, Chair, British Association for American Studies, Professor of American Studies, De Montfort University Leicester

At an open meeting for leaders of American Studies programmes, hosted at the Institute for US Studies at the University of London, and co-sponsored by the British Association for American Studies, those present discussed their recent experiences of student recruitment in American Studies. The meeting requested me to write to American Studies programmes requesting information, opinions and comment. Our thanks for responses are due to American Studies colleagues at the following institutions: Birmingham, Brunel, Central Lancashire, De Montfort, Derby, East Anglia, Glamorgan, Hull, Leicester, Liverpool Hope, Liverpool John Moores, Manchester, Middlesex, Northampton, Nottingham, Oxford, Queen’s Belfast, Ripon & York, Sussex, Warwick. I also collected information from the UCAS website. Figures are not always consistent from page to page on the UCAS website. I presume this reflects the failure to collect every data item from every applicant, but that the data that has been collected is the best available.

According to figures culled from the UCAS website, trends in American Studies (Q4) Single Honours applications and acceptances from 1996 to 1999 are as follows:

Table 1

American Studies Singles Honours, applicants, acceptances, showing breakdown by gender and persons over 25 years old

Source: http://www.ucas.ac.uk

These figures show that from 1996 to 1999 the total number of American Studies single honours applicants declined by 25.8%, while the total number of acceptances declined by 5.4%. Over this period the decline was sharpest among males, where applications were down by 35.9%, and acceptances down 18.6%. Female applications were down by 18.8%, but the total number of females accepted was up by 4.2%. Applications from students over 25 years fell during this period by 63.6%, and the total number of these mature students accepted onto single honours American Studies degree courses fell by 59.1% over the same period.

The figures show that 1997 was the peak year for overall applications and acceptances in this four year period. If the rates of decline are calculated from 1997 to 1999 we find an overall fall in applications of 33.7% (40.5% among males, 29.3% among females). The simultaneous fall in the total number of students accepted was 15.2% (22.4% among males, 10.4% among females).

Table 2

Total UCAS Applicants and Acceptances, all subjects

Source as Table 1

For comparison the total number of applicants and acceptances to all subjects through UCAS from 1996 to 1999 are given in Table 2. A very substantial jump is evident in overall applications and acceptances in 1997, as it is in American Studies. There is a drop in overall applications after 1997, but this is not so marked as it has been in American Studies. The ratio of applicants to accepts for overall figures has seen a gradual decline over these years (and before-in 1995 it was 1.44:1, in 1994 1.50:1), but while the ratio for American Studies was similar to the overall figure in 1996 and 1997, it had fallen into a lower range in 1998 and 1999 (see Table 3).

The numerical trends in American Studies single honours also contain shifts in the demography of the student pool (see Table 3). The number of men applying for and entering the subject has declined much more sharply than the number of women. In 1996 women made up 59.2% of applicants, and 57.9% of acceptances. These percentages increased steadily over this four year period. In 1999 women made up 64.7% of applicants, and 63.8% of acceptances.

Table 3

Ratios and proportions

Calculated from Table 1

Over the same period the proportion of applicants and accepted students aged 25 years and older fell steadily. Entrants over the age of 25 years made up 9.1% of the total accepted in 1996. By 1999 this group had fallen to 3.9% of the total.

Competition for places in American Studies, on a sector-wide scale, has also changed. While in 1996 and 1997 the number accepted is around 25% lower than the number applying, in 1998 and 1999 the numbers accepted were, respectively, only 5.7% and 4.4% lower than the number applying.

The above figures in Tables 1 and 3 are calculated from UCAS statistics for single honours American Studies (Q4). Many students undertake American Studies in some form as part of a larger degree. Different universities offer American Studies as a Joint, Combined, Major, Minor, or with some other designation. Some universities offer degrees not called American Studies, concentrating perhaps on a particular disciplinary approach or combination of approaches, that we would recognise as American Studies, but which might not be classified as such by UCAS coding. While a UCAS researcher has devoted some time to this problem, it has proved impossible so far to aggregate UCAS data in a way that illuminates what is happening in these programmes.

It is also difficult to generalise from particular examples about the state of American Studies in its varied joint and combined forms. Students in some institutions must take Joint or Combined degrees to undertake American Studies. Some institutions offer both Single Honours and other options, in which portfolio the Single Honours has by far the smaller take up. Some institutions also have a portfolio of offerings, but in fact take very few students outside the Single Honours route. There is no common pattern, except to say that students are being given an increasingly varied range of ways to undertake American Studies.

I circulated an email questionnaire to American Studies programmes throughout the UK. The twenty responses varied from detailed statistical reviews to more general commentaries. They form the basis of the rest of this report.

All the universities and colleges that provided a statistical review of applications showed a noticeable fall through the 1990s. In some cases these falls were sharper than the UCAS overall figures for American Studies single honours applicants. However comparison of institutional experience of applications with global numbers of applicants over time can be misleading. You will all be aware that the applications process changed considerably during the 1990s. At the start of that decade universities and polytechnics and colleges had separated applications systems. Students often applied into both systems. By the end of the 1990s there had been a rationalisation into a single UCAS system. These structural changes mean that the same number of applicants generated far more applications in the early 1990s that they did by 1999. Even within UCAS, in 1994 the average applicant made 6.4 applications, while in 1999 the average applicant made 4.5 applications. In an applicant group of, say 1,000 persons that would mean that 1,900 applications would simply disappear from the system between 1994 and 1999, while the number of potential students remained the same. There are fewer American Studies single honours applicants, but those applications in the pool are being seen by fewer universities and colleges. This will in part account for the fact that while 1997 was the year with most students applying to UK universities (and a good year for single honours American Studies), colleagues have reported their peak years for American Studies applications as having been earlier in the 1990s.

It does seem clear that in American Studies as in other subjects, the introduction of fees prompted a surge in 1997 applications as potential students were prompted to act in their own financial interest. However the subsequent decline in applications has been very marked in American Studies single honours. Nonetheless many institutions that have seen a decline in applications still report healthy competition for places. Among the pre-reform universities there are plenty reporting their most recent application rates ranging between five and sixteen per place available. In the colleges and former polytechnics there was a wider range of evidence. Application to admission ratios as high as around 8 applicants per place were reported by some, but others have seen their applicant pool fall markedly in the last half of the 1990s, to 2 or 3 applicants per place, and have also seen their conversion rate from offer to place weakening sharply. The last couple of cohorts especially have resulted in very modest entry numbers in some institutions.

Some of those institutions that continue to receive many applications per place have increased, and are continuing to increase their intake, either as a planned policy of enlargement of American Studies or addition of new courses including American Studies, or as a temporary response to a good A level year, or as a pragmatic, but regular, response to demand. In a situation where the overall pool of applicants may be static or declining it does mean that some institutions find it difficult to maintain previous rates of recruitment.

In those institutions where disciplinary streams within American Studies could be tracked it appeared most common that the culture/media/literary streams were somewhat more buoyant than the history/social science streams. However this was not a uniform pattern, and in a couple of cases the trend was away from the cultural/literary options, while history and social science options were holding steady.

There were several reports that the representation of mature students was declining, and this is borne out very clearly by the UCAS evidence for American Studies single honours. This reflects in part a general decline in mature student application and entry. Responses mentioned the abolition of the mature student grant, the introduction of fees, and the decline in Access courses as roots of this decline. American Studies has generally attracted a lower level of mature entry than the UCAS overall figure, and the decline in mature entry has been a little sharper in American Studies. According to figures on the UCAS website applicants and acceptances over the age of 25 years made up respectively 14.6% and 13.1% of total UCAS figures in 1996, falling to 11.7% and 10.2% in 1999.

While the response was not uniform, most places reported that the existence of exchange programmes had not appeared to have a marked negative impact on recruitment in recent years. Places that had introduced or substantially redesigned study abroad options in the 1990s reported that applications for the study abroad opportunities increased and improved their pool of students, even though at some of these institutions only a minority of students opted for the study abroad route. Many universities and colleges have diversified their offerings in order to facilitate American Studies degrees with and without exchange participation at the same institution, and certainly the earlier tradition of insisting that all students study in the USA where programmes incorporate an exchange period seems to have been replaced by a more flexible range of options. Even some institutions currently devoted to 100% study abroad programmes, and reporting no evidence so far of applications being influenced by study abroad, are planning future course ranges including non-study abroad routes.

Some institutions, especially those that have traditionally attracted mature students, and less affluent students, did report that the year abroad is beginning to have a deterrent effect on some potential students. In some of these cases applications have declined, since the introduction of fees, more sharply on courses with a year abroad than on parallel courses without the extra time and costs involved.

Several responses referred to the marketing of American Studies and related programmes. One institution mentioned an intensive effort in the use of web pages and open days as a foundation of its good recruitment record. Many institutions pointed to the increasing range of American Studies routes (3 year/4 year, semester/year/no time abroad, interdisciplinary/disciplinary streamed, single/joint/major/combined/minor/ subsidiary) that are offered within single institutions. Some institutions emphasised that within this variety they are presenting particular approaches to American Studies as their strength, aiming for a niche that will properly reflect what they have to offer, and attract an appropriate student body.

While the introduction of choice is sometimes helping to maintain American Studies, it also provides other options. Two institutions offered examples of a shift in choices from American Studies as a major, to American Studies as a minor/subsidiary, as other popular subject offerings came on stream. In another institution the popularity of American Studies introductory modules as optional choices for students from many other subject areas has meant that up to 85% of the students on the modules are not registered as American Studies students.

American Studies remains popular, but it is not currently growing at least as a single honours subject. Provision has expanded considerably in recent years, and most providers find that the modules they provide recruit well. The recruits on to those modules are not necessarily single honours American Studies. The single honours pool has fallen, with especially marked slippage among male and mature applicants. Many institutions can still boast a very high application per place ratio. The overall increase in provision has left some institutions with a particular downturn in student demand.

Some institutions report a similar decline in joint and combined applicant pools, but this data is not clear, and the evidence is not uniform. Some institutions reported that joint/combined and other options were more attractive to students in the aftermath of fees introduction. Almost all institutions indicated their interest in offering a range of ways of undertaking an American Studies programme.

News from American Studies Centres

The David Bruce Centre for American Studies, Keele University

The Centre’s seventh international colloquium on the subject of Writing Southern Poverty Between the Wars will be held at Keele from 7-10 September, 2000. Inquiries should be addressed to Professor Richard Godden or Dr Martin Crawford, David Bruce Centre for American Studies, Keele University, Keele, Staffs. ST5 5BG

Two volumes of essays, originating in earlier colloquia, were published in 1999. They were Robert Garson and Stuart S Kidd, eds., The Roosevelt Years: New Perspectives on American History, 1933-45 (Edinburgh University Press) and Martin Crawford and Alan Rice, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (University of Georgia Press). The Centre also served as a sponsor of David K Adams and Cornelis A van Minnen, eds., Religious and Secular Reform in America: Ideas, Beliefs and Social Change (Edinburgh and New York University Press).

The first number of the Centre’s Occasional Papers was published. The Papers stem from the regular seminar series held in the Bruce Centre. A limited number of copies, featuring an essay by Pricilla Roberts on “I Begin to Think of Myself as a Marco Polo”: David Bruce in China, 1973-1974, are available on request and receipt of a large stamped addressed envelope.

The Centre sponsored the visit to Keele of Professor Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine, and Professor Melton McLaurin, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, who served as Bruce Centre Fellow. Professor Noel Polk, Professor of American Literature, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, visits as Fellow in March 2000.

The Centre is also collating an inventory of research materials in American Studies held at Keele. It hopes that its endeavour will stimulate similar enterprises in other institutions, so that a comprehensive list of University research holdings will be generally available.

A number of research travel awards for registered research students were granted. Inquiries about research opportinities from prospective graduate students are welcome.

Robert Garson, Director, David Bruce Centre

Developments at Leeds

Ann Massa (BAAS Conference Secretary for 1996) has taken early retirement. She is being joined in this-for her-happy state by three other colleagues who have taught American literature over the years: Wayne Paton, Brian Scobie, and Alistair Stead. Since American literature was designated an area for development when I was appointed to the chair in 1995, it has been possible to make two new permanent appointments: Bridget Bennett (formerly of Warwick) in January 1999 and Jay Prosser (formerly of Leicester) in September 1999. Bridget is the author of The Damnation of Harold Frederic (1997) and Jay of Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (1998). A further appointment is in train.

At our initiative, David E. Nye, Director of the American Studies Center at Odense University, Denmark, was awarded a senior Visiting Leverhulme Fellowship to conduct his own research and work with us; he was resident from January-August 1998 and for January 1999.

September 1999 saw the first successful completion of our new MA in American Literature and Culture with European Study. Jayne Wood, who is shortly to begin a Ph.D. on the popular regionalist writer Louis Bromfield, spent the second semester of her MA at the Kennedy Institute in Berlin. Since the application rate for this programme-which offers a period of study at one of 8 different institutions on the continental mainland-seems to be increasing, we are looking into more secure forms of funding for it.

In November 1999 I gave my inaugural lecture-a little late as several friends remarked-under the title “On Native Grounds: Indian Episodes in American Culture”. More than 180 people attended and the occasion went well. I was simply glad to get it over. A genuinely gratifying aspect of it was that a goodly number of BAAS friends invited from Yorkshire and a little further afield were able to be there.

Mick Gidley

University of Nottingham

“I Fought the War in Indiana: Forty Years of Vietnam in American Elections”

To mark the initiation of a new Joint Honours degree in Politics and American Studies, the University of Nottingham invited the Chair of BAAS, Professor Philip Davies of DeMonfort University, to give a Public Lecture on a topic in American Politics. Phil’s presentation filled the bill admirably, with an illustrated lecture on the Vietnam War in American presidential elections from Kennedy to Clinton. The 120 slides which were used, constitute a tiny fraction of Phil’s vast collection of election memorabilia, while the video clip-the Daisy girl in the 1964 election-illustrated a classic campaign commercial. As for the title, there are no prizes for guessing the mystery name, but, just in case, we shall give you a clue-J. Danforth who spells potatoe with an e. Phil’s lecture was an excellent inauguration of the Politics/American Studies degree at Nottingham, to add to the existing degrees in American Studies; History/American Studies; English/American Studies; and Philosophy/American Studies.

Peter Boyle, University of Nottingham

News from Members

An update on the activities of Alun Munslow, who served as BAAS Newsletter Editor (1985-1990) and BAAS Treasurer (1991 through 1996): Alun founded the Routledge journal “Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory & Practice”, published two further books-“Deconstructing History”(1997) and “The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies” (2000-but out now)-and was awarded a Professorship (Professor of History and Historical Theory) at Staffordshire. He is also about to embark on the General Editorship of a ten volume series on the nature of History for Longman (for which he will be seeking contributors, and is currently planning a biography of the 19th Century radical liberal Henry D. Lloyd. Colleagues who wish to know more about the history series project can contact Alun on e-mail at: am7@staffs.ac.uk

Judie Newman and John Ashworth joined the School of American & Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham in the Spring semester, 2000, as Professor of American Literature and Professor of American History respectively. Judie, a former chair of BAAS, has come from the University of Newcastle, while John has come from the University of Hull. In the Autumn semester, 1999-2000, two other appointments were made at Nottingham, Sharon Monteith, Senior Lecturer in American Literature, and Julian Stringer, Lecturer in American Film.

Bernard Aspinwall is Senior Research Fellow in Scottish History at Strathclyde University as well as university liaison officer to North American Colleges and Universities. He gave a lecture on ‘Sir William Drummond Stewart, Scotland and America’ to the annual general meeting of the The Friends of Glasgow University Library.

Announcements

ALSISS

BAAS is a founder member of ALSISS, the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences. ALSISS is steadily creating a College of Academicians, projected eventually to number some 300 scholars and practitioners. Any nominee to the Academy should be:

an outstanding contributor as a scholar or practitioner in a branch of the social sciences; committed to promote excellence in the social sciences through research, education, and service to the community; willing to represent the interests of social science.

We would like to be sure that Americanists with social science interests are properly recognised in the Academy. Should you have any recommendations for nominees to the Academy, please contact any member of the BAAS executive with your suggestion.

Philip Davies, Chair, BAAS

The Arthur Miller Prize/City Sites

This year’s Arthur Miller Prize for the best article-length work on American Studies scheduled for publication in the UK, has been awarded to Professor Douglas Tallack of Nottingham University for his essay, “The Rhetoric of Space: Jacob Riis and the Lower East Side.” The Arthur Miller Centre at the University of East Anglia and the United States Information Service sponsor the prize which carries an award of £500. Professor Tallack’s essay will appear in M. Blashaw, A. Notaro, L. Kennedy, and D Tallack, eds., City Sites: Multimedia Essays on New York and Chicago, 1870s-1930s, An Electronic Book (University of Birmignham Press, 2000).

City Sites is an innovative web-based multimedia research collaboration that explores the meanings and forms of American urbanism in New York and Chicago in the modern period. The project is at the centre of 3 Cities project based at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham which seeks to foster new modes of analysing urban culture as well as developing a network of international scholars working on American urbanism. Colleagues are invited to follow the development of this innovative project at www.nottingham.ac.uk/3cities/

The Arthur Miller Centre is keen to encourage entries for the 2001 competition. Qualification and submission details and deadlines are available at the Centre’s webpage, www.uea.ac.uk/eas/intro/centre/miller/intro.htm.

Indigenous Peoples During WWII History Project

Documenting the Experiences of American Indians During the WWII Era
Robert J Clark, Director, PO Box 315, Granite City, Il 62040, USA

I’m an American Indian decent person researching indigenous peoples during the WWII era. I’m writing to American and North American Studies Departments, and American interest societies in different parts of the world in hope of obtaining assistance or correspondence on the topic of America’s indigenous peoples during WWII. Indigenous refers to American Indians, Native Hawaiians, Chamorro (Guam natives), Alaskan Natives, Aleuts, Eskimo/Inuit, American Somoans, Metis and Afro-Carib Indian blacks of the US Virgina Islands. I would be interested in corresponding with anyone who can provide information on the following.

Did any military, Red Cross or civilian persons from your country interact with indigenous ethnic Americans during the war years? This could have been as a result of military invasion or occupation, military cooperation (having US troops domicile temporarily in a country prior to being moved elsewhere), Red Cross interaction, being interned as POWs together or being a POW in the USA, or having met such persons while visiting the USA or its’ territories. Did any such Americans visit your nations’ territories or colonies?

What did your nation’s culture think of indigenous Americans? In the 1940s wre indigenous Americans used in advertising, regional cinema, etc? How did world history classes view these populations, if they were mentioned at all? How did your country’s citizens view American Indians and other indigenous groups?

Were there any organizations in your country circa 1930s-40s that were “interest groups” that focused on American Indian, Native Hawaiian, etc, cultures for charitable, academic, recreational/hobbyist interests, etc?

Indigenous peoples of the Americas played a vital role during WWII. Any assistance in learning more on how these people were viewed by other cultures is very important. If anyone knows of resources or of any elderly person who as an adult or child during the 1930s-40s have memories to share, please how can I contact such a person?

There were thousands of American and Canadian service personel in the British Isles during WWII. What publications or organizations should I write in order to get recollections from British families that might have befriended these GIs? Hopefully amongst all those British families that hosted “Yanks” will be a few who’ll remember if any of these folks were American or Canadian Indians.

The Fulbright Commission

Success in the US: Applying for postgraduate study in the United States Wednesday 6th September, 2000 1.00-6.15pm, University of Westminster, London

The Fulbright Commission’s US Educational Advisory Service is holding a half-day seminar on 6th September for anyone considering applying for a postgraduate degree in the United States. The seminar will feature guest speakers from US universities, a test training organisation and a funding organisation, as well as a panel of students who have successfully completed the application process. The seminar costs £9 including handouts and a reception.

For further information on this and other aspects of studying in the US, please see the Commission’s web site at http://www.fulbright.co.uk/eas1.htm, or e-mail education@fulbright.co.uk or telephone 020-7404-6994.

The Fulbright Commission’s Educational Advisory Service gives out information and advice, free of charge, on all aspects of studying in the United States and the US education system. We are currently updating our pre-departure handbook, which gives practical information and advice on living and studying in the US, including information on the academic and cultural environment, travel in the US, communications, money, health insurance and so on. The guide is free of charge, and comes with a $10 AT&T calling card. Anyone wanting a copy only has to cover postage costs.

The Fulbright Commission’s Educational Advisory Service is in the process of revising its 65-page pre-departure handbook. The handbook provides practical information and advice for British-educated students headed to the US to study for a semester, year or full degree. They have obtained sponsorship for the guide from AT&T and are therefore able to offer it free of charge (in previous years it has cost £4.50), along with a $10 AT&T calling card. Anyone wanting a single copy of the guide just has to send a stamped A4-size SAE with 77p in postage to the address below. For multiple copies of the guide please contact the Educational Advisory Service directly for details of postage required.

Pre-departure Guide
Educational Advisory Service
The US-UK Fulbright Commission
62 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LS
Telephone enquiries: 020-7404-6994
(T-F 10.30am-4pm, M 1.30pm-7pm, first M of month 5-7pm only)
E-mail: education@fulbright.co.uk
Web site: http://www.fulbright.co.uk

Louise Cook, Director, Educational Advisory Service
The US-UK Fulbright Commission
62 Doughty Street
London WC1N 2LS
Direct line: 020-7539-4401
Student enquiries: 020-7404-6994
Fax: 020-7404-6874
Web site: http://www.fulbright.co.uk

Book Reviews

US Politics Today, by Edward Ashbee and Nigel Ashford

US Politics Today is an excellent introductory text for students of US Government and Politics at A-level or undergraduate level. Ashbee and Ashford do well in outlining processes and illustrate these with current and recent controversies-the student reader will certainly benefit from the stimulation that comes from the detail used to illustrate. The structure of the book is highly appropriate, beginning with three necessary chapters on the context and history of US society and history with a clear link to the institutions and issues that underpin US Government today.

For academic courses at colleges and universities, US Politics Today is also useful as a reference text, processes, ideas and concepts are analysed with vigour and more vital concepts are presented in tabular form as an aide memoire, which makes for a quick referencing through the detail fo US Government.

For those who require a greater depth of study, US Politics Today affords plenty of references and direction to other sources. It is also useful for those who want to read generally on US Government. Ashbee and Ashford have dealt concisely with a superb range of topics relevant to US Government, which is a far more pleasurable read for the student. I shall certainly recommend this book strongly as vital reading for my students.

David Craik, Kidderminister College

The Roosevelt Years: New Perspectives on American History, 1933-1945, Robert A Garson and Stuart S Kidd (eds.)

Edinburgh University Press. Pp207. ISBN 0-7486-1183-5

These essays, says Dr Garson in his epilogue, serve as a Festschrift for David Adams; he hopes they are “a fitting swan song”. I do not share this hope. Professor Adams was in excellent health when I last saw him (ten days ago as I write) and I hope his swan song will be long deferred. As to the young swans who have celebrated him so successfully, surely they have decades of work ahead before they lift their voices for the last time?

Festschriften are of two kinds: the indispensable and the intolerable. This volume is outstanding among the first sort. No one volume, whatever its length, could hope to do justice to the sweep and detail of the Roosevelt years, but any university teacher will want students to consult this one (it would do them good to read it right through0 and one or two items might even benefit the sixth form Ð I think particularly of William Leuchtenburg’s amusing essay on the Clintons and the Roosevelts, though that will appeal even more to any who have read Professor Leuchtenburg’s In the Shadow of FDR, or who habitually follow the extraordinary contortions of President Clinton’s career. Such experts will also find much to rip them in the other essays (twelve in all).

They are of an impressively uniform standard, which makes it unfair to single any out. But no-one knows everything, not even a reviewer, and perhaps therefore I may confess, without offending anyone, that my own ignorance was most valuably corrected by Margaret Walsh on public policy and transport during the depression and war; by Jaap Kooijman on FDR and national health insurance; by Gareth Davies on “the Unsuspected Radicalism of the Social Security Act”, which rather takes issue with the contentions of Jay Kleinberg’s equally interesting article on “Widows’ Welfare in the Great Depression”; by Patricia Clavin on “FDR, the Depression and Europe, 1932-6”, and by Michaela Honicke on the Morgenthau Plan-these last two are perhaps the most Adamsesque of the contributions. Perhaps a reviewer ought always to have one complaint, to make his praise convincing, so I will just hint that some of the contributors are a little too interested in bureaucratic manoeuvring, and not enough in politics; but it would be ungrateful to name names. ALL the articles are valuable.

Generally speaking, the volume is timely. The United States is (as I write) still enjoying the Clinton boom; in a period of such prosperity it is not surprising that many feel that they may safely dismantle New Deal programmes devised for a time of desperate poverty. And the United States, as the twenty-first century approaches, seems more powerful and invulnerable than ever before in its history. In principle, it can do no harm to remind readers that things have not always been so rosy, and to itemize the reasoning which shaped Roosevelt’s course both in the thirties and the forties, and to compel reflection on whether it is wise to reject his legacy of generous and enlightened government (nothing in these pages will support the belief that it was necessary or just to end the support for dependent children programme, for instance). And if once again the rude whirlwind should rise, here will be found many of the considerations which ought to guide those who will have to weather the storm. In short, this is a book fully worthy of its dedicatee.

Hugh Brogan, University of Essex

Fundamentalism in America, by P. Melling

Edinburgh University Press, 1999, £16.95, ISBN 07486-0978-4

The term fundamentalism is a remarkably protean one. Strictly, it refers to the movement that emerged in the United States in the early twentieth century in opposition to the rise of modernism within the Protestant churches. But it has been applied more widely to characterise strands within any of the world’s religious faiths that have emerged to do battle with modernity, and this study stretches even further to encompass both developments in American Chritaianity before the twentieth century and the rise of new religions and New Age thinking as the old millennium came towards its end. In considering these diverse developments, Melling ranges widely. Academic studies are brought alongside British and American newspaper accounts and discussions of films vie for our attention with consideration of novels. The bizarre beliefs of the Christian Identity movement, that whites are the Israelites of the Bible (and Jews the creation of Satan), are compared with the early Puritan fascination with the native American as a possible offshoot of God’s chosen people, and while we too may have seen the ‘astral fairytale’, Contact (if not agreeing with Melling’s complaints about Jodie Foster’s acting), it is very unlikely tha twe will have come across the remarkable account in the Tallahasee Democrat of the desperate hopes of the audience for an ‘End-Time Handmaidens’ convention in Washington in 1997 that at last the Lord will come to save them. This is a fascinating study that many will benefit from reading and may well be beyond the powers of any one reviewer to fully evaluate. But if there is much to praise, this cannot be without some reservation. Melling is concerned, among much else, with the organised right in American politics. Surprisingly for someone so obviously opposed to it, he is at pains to dispute the claim tha tfundamentalism is steeped in anti-Semitism. (Indeed, it could be argued that he goes too far in appearing to reject the argument that leading evangelist Pat Robertson’s controversial best-seller The New World Order shows any sign of anti-Semitic influence at all.) But if he is generous to the Christian Right, no such inclination appears in discussing those who have gathered together in the militia movement. A careful study of this movement would show its ideological diversity. Sadly, Melling reproduces the misleading conventional wisdom on the movement, and consigns it to the anti-Semitic fever swamp where some-but far from all of its adherents-belong.

Martin Durham, University of Wolverhampton

Producing American Races: Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, by Patricia McKee

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999, $17.95. Pp. 240. ISBN 0-8223-2363-X

Patricia McKee argues strenuously, and on occasion a li tle laboriously, that in so far as characters in James, Faulkner, and Morrison “search for identity, they search for racial identity,” for “the very structure of individual consciousness is one of race.” The concentration is on six novels-The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Sula, and Jazz-a juxtaposition which McKee has had “difficulty in locating among recent studies of race.” This may be an unusual configuration of texts but they are all, nonetheless, popular performers in the arena of American Studies. Both Faulkner and Morrison-and even James, enigmatically, after the work of Jonathan Freedman, Sara Blair, and others-collocate unsurprisingly with race. What distinguishes Producing American Races, in any event, is its preoccupation with “whiteness” and the “different cultural media”-mostly visual in James and Faulkner, and “oral and aural” in Morrison-of “racial identity.”

Specifically, for McKee, “visual culture” has “reproduced racial distinctions that privilege whiteness . . . because the kind of symbolic construction that produces whiteness is the sort that produces twentieth-century visual culture.” (Incidentally, this plodding, pleonastic style soon palls: muted and restrained, and with a weakness for hampering relative pronouns, it is in dire need of syntactical variety and relieving dashes of colour.) “Racial whiteness” is “unmarked,” it is “visualized” rather than “visible,” and this “domination of visuality . . . has been critical” to the white “domination of political and cultural media.” The “nonvisual elements of racial identity” are “assigned to history in Morrison,” whereas in James and Faulkner “white characters cultivate an invisibility through more abstract representations of various kinds.” Isolating music from image, from the visual, is a potentially Procrustean manoeuvre and, McKee’s attempts to escape from discourse and what it compels, are mostly unpersuasive. None of these characters, who are imbued in this discussion with an autonomy from narrative control which disperses authorial and textual responsibilities, “sees,” or “hears” anything, in fact; and the reader’s immediate access, so to speak, is only to the concealing, coercive, processes of writing.

McKee succumbs to a taut narrative line. In The Wings of the Dove, Milly (again, the drab verbal repetition is typical) “reproduces her whiteness as a whitewash and reproduces American character as a void,” using icons, such as the “dove,” to “serve as her cover.” The Golden Bowl, by contrast, “marks an increased abstraction of American consciousness and American nonrace” as the “marginality of Fanny and the Ververs allows them . . . to exploit the discounted images they reproduce.” Why the shift? What has happened in James, America, or anywhere else, in the months separating the two novels? The argument reaches unnecessarily, and certainly unsuccessfully, for the hypotactical. Similarly, the “modernist consciousness” of individual white males is at issue in The Sound and the Fury as distinct from the focus on “community” in Light in August. Morrison’s Sula is a “center, a mass, of negation and to the limited extent “that the community bonds,” “it does so by means of Sula.”. In Jazz, however, music is identified “as a medium of black culture” as “history” is replaced by “tempo,” with its insistence on the “communal constituents of individual identity and on the capacity of response to provide identity.” It appears that in the world of Sula, music was unavailable, or ineffectual, or both, and that Light in August represents a disavowal of the atomistic “modernist consciousness” celebrated in The Sound and the Fury, but the lacunae abound.

What McKee largely fails to confront in a silence which constitutes part of her book’s rhetorical extravagance, is the inclusion of Henry James in this company. Race may not be that marginal to The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, yet it still lacks the unequivocally central position it has in, say, Morrison. All critics occupy the margins now, revelling in geometrical ingenuities frequently exasperating to students seeking at least an initial anchorage in the liberating territory of the non-peripheral, but James cannot simply be appropriated as a producer of “whiteness,” at least on these terms. The “dark” prince of The Golden Bowl is conscripted into the fray, for example, by means of a slippage from “racial blackness” to “racial darkness” on which McKee, elsewhere, would have seized rapaciously.

Peter Rawlings, Kyushu University, Japan

Living and Working in America: How to gain entry and how to settle when you are there, 5th edition by Steve Mills

Oxford: How To Books Limited, 1998, £12.99. Pp. 270. ISBN 1-85703-377-9

As the Pilgrim Fathers found of America, this book is not the panacea for those seeking a new life of affluence and happiness in the New World. This is a book for the educated and/or talented who wish to pursue their life and career in America in the short or long-term.

The text informs the reader that America is not a bigger and brasher version of Britain, but something which is now wholly different; it touches upon the great discernible cultural differences; and most importantly clearly outlines the obstacles which have to be overcome in order to take your place within the ‘fusion’ that is America.

Arguably, the section on ‘Visas and Immigration’ is the most important. The greatest obstacle to most who wish to work in America is how to obtain that all important visa. For those who wish to spend more than a cursory few weeks partaking of the cultural mash that is America, the thrust and parry of the visa trail is a necessary evil and Mills navigates without offering the false hope inherent in unequivocal statements. But Mills does give us the ‘simplest’ shortcut of all to circumvent the whole labyrinthine immigration process, ‘marry an American!’

Putting that shortcut aside, this book is written with two particular groups of individuals in mind. Not surprisingly, considering Mills’ background, the adventurous undergraduate or graduate looking at the possibilities of studying in the USA or working there in a gap year and the professional academic are very well served.

For the student, Mills provides good bibliographical references and Internet links to aid a more intensive look at studentships and working in America in the short-term. But the professional academic will gain most from this book in that it will open their eyes to every discernible aspect of living and working in America; from the deliberations on whether or not to go, to the practicalities of housing, banking, schools, and even the air conditioning in your car.

There is no pretence that a move from Britain to America would be easy and inexpensive. Quite the contrary. Yet the important message which underpins the whole of Steve Mills’ book is that a great amount of thought and deliberation is needed before the decision to live and work in America-or any other country for that matter-is taken. This message is supported on all fronts by detailed and practical advice along with the motivating factor behind the book, his own varied experience over a quarter of a century, experience which in Mills’ own words puts ‘a little more emphasis on the fun and a little less on the hassle.’

Johnny Finnigan, University of Glasgow

Kudos

Congratulations to all of the following:

Janet Beer (one of the BAAS nominees) has been invited to serve on the AHRB English panel.

Malcolm Bradbury has received a knighthood. Congrats, Sir Malcolm!

Paul Giles has been invited to join the International Committee of the ASA.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (University of Edinburgh) is in 2000 the holder of an Arts and Humanities Research Board research leave award given for the writing of a book on Hyperbole, Public Relations and the History of US Secret Intelligence.

Karen Kilcup (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) has been promoted to full Professor of American Literature and was named the 2000 Edna and Jordan Davidson Eminent Scholar Chair in the Humanities at Florida International University, Miami, Florida.

Susan Manning (University of Edinburgh) is the first holder of the Grierson Chair of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, having moved from Cambridge University in time for the 1999-2000 academic year. Among her recent publications are a World’s Classics edition of Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1997) and an essay on Emily Dickinson and William James in Karen Kilcup, ed., Soft Canons: American Women Writers and the Masculine Tradition (University of Iowa Press, 1999). She is currently completing a major Scottish-American comparative study, Fragments of Union.

Peter McCaffery has been appointed Vice Principal of Bolton Institute for Higher Education.

David Murray (Nottingham) has been awarded a Fellowship at the Shelby Cullom Davies Center for Historical Research at Princeton University for 2000-2001.

Simon Newman has received a Research Leave Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Board; a Residential Fellowship at the International Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello, Virginia, August-September 2000; a Research grant from the American Philosophical Society; and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

David Seed has been given a Personal Chair at Liverpool.

In Print: Members’ Publications

Bernard Aspinwall’s publications in the last year include an essay on ‘William Robertson and America’ in T.M. Devine and John Yound eds., Eighteenth Century Scotland: New Perspectives (Tuckwell Edinburgh 1999) pp.152-175. Another essay includes details on Lithuanian imigrants who subsequently either adopted Scottish names, returned home or went on to settle in the USA-‘The ties that bind and loose: the Catholic Community in Galloway, 1800-1998’ in Records and Proceedings of the Scottish Church History 1999.

Philip John Davies, US Elections Today, (Manchester & New York, Manchester University Press, 1999); ‘Motivating the US ‘motor voter”, Politics Review, v. 9, no. 3 (Feb 2000); ‘Crowded Out: American Political Conventions’, published in two parts, Contemporary Review, v. 276, nos. 1908/9 (Jan/Feb 2000).

Karen Kilcup (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) has edited Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition (Univ. of Iowa Press, 1999), 345 pp, ISBN 0-87745-689-5, £16.95. This collection of original essays by BAAS and EAAS members explores the relationship of male and female authors in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. She also co-edited Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon (Univ. Press of Florida, 1999), 294 pp., ISBN 0-8130-1703-3, £39.95, and a special issue.

Joe Moran, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America (London: Pluto Press, 2000).

Forthcoming Publications: Call for Papers

Studies in American Humor Special Issue on Popular Culture

The 2001 issue of Studies in American Humor will be a special issue on humor in popular culture guest edited by Judith Yaross Lee. Topics can include (but are not limited to): cartoons (animated, narrative, or gag), graffiti, newspaper and magazine columns, film, television, performance humor, radio or sound recordings, folklore, and Internet humor. Submissions should be approximately 5000-8000 words. Address all inquiries and submissions by 15 January 2001 to: Judith Yaross Lee, School of Interpersonal Communication, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 45701; jlee@ohiou.edu.

Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry

Karen Kilcup welcomes suggestions and proposals for essays in a new volume, Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, to be published in 2002 by the Modern Language Association. Seeking to represent various perspectives on teaching in a range of academic institutions, the volume will cover a wide spectrum of topics and individual writers. The editors seek essay proposals that consider the following: period (e.g., antebellum, Civil War, premodern); style and genre (sentimental, humorous, visionary, religious, nature, oral, popular); audience (literary establishment, children, rural readers, ethnic communities); publication context (periodicals, books); issues of class, gender, and race; writing coteries; regional differences; and material conditions of publication (sales, distribution, history of the book). Please contact Karen Kilcup (klkilcup@uncg.edu; fax and voicemail, 530-686-8076) or Paula Bennett (pbernat@aol.com) by 1 February 2001.

Short-term Travel Reports

Ruth Percy, University College London

Research trip to the Schlesinger Library of the History of American Women at Radcliffe College, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Firstly I would like to thank you once again for the generous support you have given me. Despite the fact that I had to cut it back to one week instead of two, my research trip to the Schlesinger Library was very successful. The library holds the papers of the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) as well as those of various individuals who were involved. I was able to get through the Margaret Dreier Robins papers (WTUL President 1903-1922) which consisted mostly of letters and speeches, the WTUL papers which were similar although in addition contained pamphlets and newsletters, and listen to an audiotape of an interview of Mary Anderson (Women’s Bureau Chair 1920-1944). As I said in my application for funding this material is essential to my thesis. Having done comparable work in London I have now begun to start writing.

In addition to this by sheer chance I became aware that another Harvard University library had a selection of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) archives. This is one of the trade unions upon which I am focusing in my study of British and American women garment workers from 1917-1927, so this find was a nice surprise as I was under the impression that the ACWA papers were all in New York. These archives turned out to be very productive. They included the papers of the President Sidney Hillman and also a collection of scrapbooks that had been compiled by union members containing press cuttings, pamphlets, etc. I was able to finish up with these and as such am beginning to construct some arguments as to why and how labour feminism developed among garment workers. This work will be further developed with the use of the archives held in the Trades Union Congress collection at the University of North London.

Rosie Wild, University of Sheffield

Report on Rosie Wild BAAS sponsored research to visit the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. in November 1999.

I have always wanted to visit Washington, so it was with great pleasure that I discovered that I would need to pay the Library of Congress a visit in order to research my dissertation on the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People’s role in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956. Although Cambridge University holds series I and II of the NAACP Papers on microfilm, the collection ends at 1955, precisely the date from which I wished to start my research. The rest of the official NAACP archive-as well as the original documents from series I and II-is catalogued in innumerable boxes in the Library of Congress. The Library also holds the personal papers of NAACP leader Roy Wilkins and leading black unionist and civil rights campaigner A. Philip Randolph as well as a wide selection of useful southern newspapers like the Montgomery Advertiser and Birmingham News.

Although the Montgomery bus boycott is a well documented episode, historians have almost exclusively studied it in relation to the ensuing civil rights movement of the 1960s and thus possibly overlooked elements that were perceived to be extremely significant in the mid-1950s. The major oversight of this approach has been an examination of the NAACP’s role in the boycott: it was after all the NAACP sponsored Browder v. Gayle (1956) court case that desegregated Montgomery’s buses and all the major actors in the boycott were or had been NAACP members. The NAACP also suffered tremendous harassment in Alabama during the boycott, culminating in it being legally enjoined from operating in the state in June 1956. By exploring the internal relationships between the national headquarters and the Alabama state and local branches of the NAACP and the external relationships between the Association and white and black northerners and I southerners I hoped to uncover the significance of evidence previously deemed irrelevant. Furthermore I wanted to explore the themes of legal and extra-legal harassment against the Association and the contribution of cold war and class concerns in shaping the NAACP’s approach to the Montgomery bus boycott.

The Library of Congress is a fantastic place. It is the Ritz of the library world. From my first telephone enquiries to my last day’s research the friendly helpfulness of the staff never wavered and the superb facilities and the scholarly atmosphere made the place a delight to work in. I would like to have stayed much longer than my ten days-and possibly even moved in if they would have let me!

I was quite surprised at the number of people using the NAACP Papers in the Madison Building’s Manuscript Reading Room; obviously the Association is beginning to attract more attention from scholars. I did not, however, have any difficulty in finding material to look at as the NAACP’s archive is simply enormous. It was a daunting task trying to extract specific information from such a huge and varied collection but after a few hours of sifting through petty cash ledgers, fundraising schedules and form letters, I managed to identify a number of interesting documents. Some of the most exciting things I found were not directly related to my research topic: for example I was particularly overawed when I stumbled across a very elegantly hand written speech, scribed in blue fountain pen on a yellow legal pad by Martin Luther King. I remember looking up guiltily expecting an irate member of staff to come rushing over shouting Dont touch that youre not worthy! The fact that anyone can walk into the Library of Congress completely free of charge and access such things is a commendable by-product of Americas democratic ethos.

Many of the most interesting documents concerning the NAACPs work in the Montgomery bus boycott dealt with the Associations relationship with the forces of anti-Communism. It became clear that the Association spent a great deal of its time and effort both defending itself against red-baiting and trying to eliminate Communist sympathisers from its membership. The fear of being tarred a Communist front or fellow traveller organisation was a recurring theme throughout the Associations papers and has perhaps been under-emphasised as a causal factor in the NAACPs decline after 1960. Other fascinating findings included two folders of the most vile and threatening letters sent to the NAACP headquarters from Proud Southerners-albeit not proud enough to sign their real names and some despairing letters from Roy Wilkins, bemoaning the inability of the black race to unquestioningly follow the orders the NAACP. The picture of Roy Wilkins the NAACP Papers painted was that of a dedicated and selfless man too focussed on his own vision of emancipation to appreciate the contributions of other campaigners and grass roots participation.

I did not find exactly what I was hoping for at the Library of Congress but I did gain a real insight into the nature of the NAACP and the immense obstacles it had to overcome to achieve as much as it did. I still think that historians have not fully acknowledged the groundbreaking nature of the Associations work before 1960 and uncovering the flawed nature of the NAACPs leadership and strategies during the Montgomery bus boycott only highlighted the impressiveness of its victories. I would sincerely like to thank the BAAS for its financial assistance in my research trip to Washington. Visiting the Library of Congress was an immensely enjoyable and satisfying experience, both intellectually and personally, and I am extremely grateful for the Associations help in affording me the opportunity to go.

Celeste-Marie Bernier, University of Nottingham

BAAS Report of Research Visit to Washington D.C. (April-May 2000).

I was awarded a travel grant from BAAS to go on a research visit to Washington D.C. in support of my Ph.d. As the focus of my research is the Creole slave ship revolt of 1841 and the competing literary and historical versions of it, I needed to look at a combination of extremely rare texts: including government documents, author manuscripts and obscure periodicals. Thus, I made extensive use of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (part of Howard University) and the Library of Congress. Both were excellent. In particular, the Moorland Spingarn Research Center (complete with extremely knowledgeable and friendly librarians) had extensive collections of rare eighteenth and nineteenth century African American materials: all of which constituted an astonishingly rich resource throughout my visit. Similarly, the Library of Congress had very useful manuscript collections: including (of primary interest for my research) the Frederick Douglass and Lydia Maria Child Papers.

At the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, I made a transcript of the New Era Magazine (February-March 1916). This is an extremely rare “race” periodical published and edited by Pauline E. Hopkins. As this library only allowed photocopying of ten percent of any document, it was wonderful to be there to take exhaustive notes. These were needed due to the fact that many unsigned contributions were written by Hopkins in her capacity as editor: thereby extending the (by-no-means definitive) existing canon of known Hopkins authored material. I also looked at a great deal of rare material by William Wells Brown and Lydia Maria Child: including original copies signed by them as gifts to other abolitionists. These works ranged from antislavery tracts to Brown’s rather intriguing pamphlet, entitled William Wells Brown’s Original Panoramic Views (1852). A fascinating text, it was the published guide to a travelling exhibition he organised in London during the early 1850’s. Whether or not this exhibition took the form of waxwork models or painted illustrations forms a topic of current critical controversy. Either way, Brown references an image dramatising the Creole revolt and also the “Escape of Leander the Heroic Slave”. The latter piece borrows heavily from Brown’s descriptions of Madison Washington in his versions of the Creole mutiny, as well as pointing to important (and often unregarded) intertextual links between these texts and Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave.

In general terms, while at the Moorland Spingarn Center I managed to look at many useful newspapers and periodicals, including: The Weekly Anglo-African (serialising Brown’s later version of Clotel retitled Miralda and other interesting pieces on insurrection); National Anti-Slavery Standard (useful for reports on the Creole revolt and surrounding issues); The Liberator (including Brown’s letters from England) and Frederick Douglass’ Paper (notable for its serialisation of The Heroic Slave). I also saw Lydia Maria Child’s antislavery giftbook The Oasis which was extremely interesting: particularly for one of Child’s own contributions, ‘Malem Boo: the Brazilian Slave’. The extensive volumes of The Liberty Bell yielded much: including Child’s melodrama of the Crafts’ escape “The Stars and Stripes” and Brown’s “The American Slave Trade”. I also looked at Channing’s abolitionist tract (The Duty of the Free States) which revealed the uses made by abolitionists of the Creole mutiny. At the Library of Congress, I gained access to Douglass’s New National Era and also the Frederick Douglass Papers. These contained his different manuscripts versions of “Touissant L’Ouverture”: relevant primarily in terms of their similarities to his depiction of Madison Washington as revolutionary exemplar in The Heroic Slave.

I would like to offer my most sincere thanks to BAAS and the AHRB for their generous support in funding this indispensable research visit.

Funding Opportunities

The University of Nottingham School of American & Canadian Studies and Institute of Film Studies

M.A., MRes and PhD Funding Opportunities

A number of Scholarships (either Home/EU fees plus maintenance at AHRB rates or fee-waivers) and Teaching Bursaries are available to applicants in the following areas:

University Research Scholarship for a PhD (full-time) in Nineteenth-century American History and Culture (e.g. the Civil War, Slavery, including Slave Narratives, Race and Class) UniversityResearch Scholarship for a PhD (full-time) in Twentieth-century Women’s Writing in the US and/or Canada Schoolof American & Canadian Studies Research Scholarship for a PhD (full-time). All areas of American or Canadian Studies or Film Studies. Schoolof American & Canadian Studies Studentships (full- or part-time fee-waivers only) for either an MRes (any area) or an M.A. in one of these degree-courses: M.A. in American Studies; M.A. in American Studies (Literature); M.A. in American Studies (History); M.A. in American Studies (Visual Culture); M.A. in American Studies with Study in Europe. This degree offers students the opportunity to spend one semester at the University of Amsterdam, Basel, Berlin [Kennedy Institute], Copenhagen, Munich [Amerika Institute], Orleans, Turin, Venice, or Vercelli as part of a European M.A. in American Studies (taught in English). An Erasmus/Socrates grant would be available for such students.; M.A. in British and American History (joint degree with Department of History) Teaching Bursaries in the Institute of Film Studies (for full- or part-time PhD students) Canadian Studies Studentship (fee-waiver only) for a PhD (part-time). All areas of Canadian literary study considered.

Please contact the School Office for an application form and further information: E-mail: american-enquiries@nottingham.ac.uk Tel: (0115) 951 4261. From overseas: +44 155 951 4261. Fax: (0115) 951 4270. From overseas: +44 155 951 4270. School Secretary, School of American & Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK.

Applicants should indicate in a covering letter which award(s) they are applying for and, for full-time study, should confirm that they are also applying for other sources of funding (e.g. AHRB for Home/EU students; ORS or other sources for overseas, non-EU students). It is a condition of any of the above full-time awards that students must make such applications. Applicants for PhD degrees should include with their application form a 2-3 page outline of their proposed area of research. Pre-application enquiries about possible areas of research are welcomed, using the above contact. See, also: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/american The deadline for the above awards (and for AHRB applications) is 1st May BUT applicants should be in possession of an offer of a place on a PhD, MRes or M.A. programme by the end of March, allowing for 10-14 days for a completed application to be processed.

Professor Douglas Tallack Head of School School of American & Canadian Studies University of Nottingham Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK Direct line tel: 0115 951 4262. Secretary tel: 0115 9514261 School Fax: 0115 951 4270 School Homepage: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/american/

Director, Arts and Humanities Research Board Project: Three American Cities Homepage: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/3cities/

New Members

Carolyn Attwood, currently a recruitment consultant, is interested in American foreign policy, Red scares, and 17th-century settlers in America.

Peter Bell is Head of American Studies at the College of Ripon and York. He specialises in international history of the 1930s and 1940s.

Trevor Graeme Bernard is affiliated with the Department of History at Brunel.

Melanie Bleck is a postgraduate at Edinburgh University.

Kelly Boyd lectures in History and American Studies at Middlesex University.

Rober Cherny is Professor of History at San Francisco State University.

Christopher Clark, who is Professor of American History at Warwick, has published extensively on the roots of rural capitalism and on communitarian movements. His current research is on US society from 1770 to 1870.

Madeleine (Mandy) Cooper is Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christchurch University College, with a special interest in Native American literature.

Susan Currell is preparing her D. Phil at the University of Sussex.

David Evans is a postgraduate in the Department of American Studies at Hull, focusing on Literature and Cultural Studies.

Bridget Falconer-Salkeld is an MPhil student at the Institute of United States Studies, University of London, researching the role of the MacDowell Colony in the development of American music.

Eva Fernandez de Pinedo is a Ph. D. student at the University of Warwick.

Jeffrey Geiger lectures in the Department of Literature of the University of Essex.

Lincoln Geraghty is a postgraduate student at Nottingham, researching links between American history and culture and science fiction.

Marybeth Hamilton is Lecturer in US History at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Peter Hammond is linked to the School of American and Canadian Studies at Nottingham University.

Timothy Hanson is a postgraduate at the University of Maryland.

Anthony Hutchinson is a postgraduate at Nottingham University.

David Ketterer is Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.

Sarah Knott is a research fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.

Nicholas Maffei is a part-time Ph. D. student and lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London.

Sarah Martin is starting her M.Phil/Ph.D on Law and Space in Contemporary Native American Writing at Goldsmith’s College in London.

Trevor McCrisken is Tutor in American Studies at the University of Sussex.

Tony McCulloch is Head of American Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University College. His current research interests include FDR and the New Deal, the Truman presidency, and Anglo-American relations since 1920.

Megan McGilchrist has been linked with Goldsmith College. Her research interests are in the Western American landscape in 20th-century fiction.

Ian McGuire lectures in the Department of English and American Studies at Manchester University.

Mary McKinney is affiliated with the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Texas Christian University.

John Moore lectures in the Department of Literatary Studies, University of Luton.

Rachel Morgan is a postgraduate student in history at the University of Wales, Swansea.

Marina Moskowitz, with a Ph. D. dissertation in the area of Material Culture (mail-order homes), is Lecturer in American History at the University of Glasgow.

Alessandro Pirolini is researching in the area of Film History at University College, London.

Jay Prosser is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Leeds.

Paul Quigley is a postgraduate at the University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill.

James Reibman is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Lisa Mary Rull is a postgraduate in American Studies at Nottingham.

Liana Sakelliou is Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Athens.

David Ryan is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Historical and International Studies at De Montfort.

Thomas Saville is Coordinator of Study Abroad programs at Southern Illinois University.

William Schultz also is affiliated with the Department of English Studies at Athens, where he is Associate Professor.

Kirstin Shands is Associate Professor at the University College of Southern Stockholm (Sweden).

John Soutter is preparing his Ph. D. on William Gaddis at Liverpool University.

Joe Street is preparing his Ph. D. at Sheffield on Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael), and lists as his research interests African-American culture in the 1960s-70s, the Black Panther party, American slavery, and 1960s radical politics.

Jill Tabuteau is Manager of the Incoming Program with BUNAC Travel Services.

Rudi Theommes is a publisher specializing in providing primary sources in the History of Ideas.

Andrew Warnes is a postgraduate student in the School of English at Leeds.

Anne Sharp Wells is a Fellow at the Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library.

Marjorie Wheeler is Professor of History at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Tracy Wismayer is currently preparing her Ph. D. at Sheffield University on Robert Kennedy and the Civil Rights Movement.

Tim Woods is Lecturer and alternately Head of American Studies at Aberystwyth.

Editorial

Given the new transnational turn in American Studies, it seems singularly appropriate to be writing this editorial somewhere over the Atlantic as I return from the American Studies Association conference in Montreal. Indeed, the Forum column of this issue of American Studies in Britain explores many of the themes debated there. In an age of increasing political and economic globalization, is it valid to continue to focus on the US as a discrete entity, a culture hermetically sealed off not only from the rest of the Western hemisphere but indeed from the rest of the world? At the same time, however, might the internationalization of American Studies not be an attempt to reinforce post-Cold War US cultural hegemony on a global scale by re-defining the world as America? There are no easy answers to these questions. Nonetheless, the Millennial musings of members of the BAAS Board provide an interesting panorama of the state of the discipline in Britain today.

As the Millenium draws to an end, so does my stewardship of American Studies in Britain, with my three-year term as Editor ending with the last issue of 2000. Applications are thus invited for the post of Editor of American Studies in Britain (for details, please see page 4 of this issue). Although I have derived considerable enjoyment from editing ASB, I feel that now the goals I set myself as Editor (revamping the contents and graphic design of the Newsletter, increasing income from ads and inserts, and reinforcing our new status with ISSN registration) have been achieved, it is time to give others the opportunity to show what they can do.

As always, thanks are due to my Editorial Assistants, Marie Tate and Sean Groundwater, for their graphic flair, unfailing good humour, and hard work. Thanks are due as well to Simon Newman, Marina Moskowitz and the Glasgow American Studies postgrads for their help in our marathon envelope-stuffing sessions.

To each of you and to your families, warm best wishes for the holiday season, and for the next thousand years.

Susan Castillo, Editor

Department of English Literature
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ
Tel: 0141-330 6393
Fax: 0141-330 4601
Email: S.Castillo@entlit.art.gla.ac.uk

Forum: American Studies At The Millennium—Some Thoughts

The advent of a New Year has traditionally been a time of soul-searching, of looking critically at the past and tracing goals for the coming year. Recent newspaper reports indicate that this tendency to have a hard look at the meaning of one’s life and work is even more accentuated on significant dates such as the approaching Millennium. For us as scholars, it is a time not only to take stock of what has been accomplished in American Studies in the past but also to speculate about where our discipline may be heading in the future. Members of the BAAS Board were asked for their views, and the resulting Forum column is a the result of a cyber-exchange of diverse opinions.

Philip Davies, BAAS President, DeMontfort remarks:

I find it very difficult to connect ‘American Studies’ and ‘Millennium’ at all – they seem to have nothing to do with each other. ‘American Studies’ and ‘half century’, however, is a different matter.

At the turn of the year American Studies will have been taught in the UK for just over half a century, if we can (as Dennis Welland has written) date its recognisable origins from Professor Kandell’s first courses at Manchester University, in 1947. American topics had been taught in theUK before this. For example BAAS members at this year’s Glasgow conference learned of the early and intellectually significant Scottish connections with the study of America in Britain. But it was the energy of our colleagues in the mid twentieth century that led to the founding of the British Association for American Studies. Ever since its founding BAAS has been the main scholarly support for Americanists of all disciplinary interests, throughout the UK. The changing nature of education has prompted changes in the Association, so that the subject, its teachers, researchers and students are represented, promoted and defended at every level and in every available forum. While the millennium may pass with a whimper and a mild hangover, I look forward to the time shortly after, when we will be celebrating the first half century of BAAS, and looking forward to more success and progress as we reach the halfway point in the first American Studies century.

Mick Gidley (Leeds), touches upon issues such as the internationalisation of American Studies and the impact of multiculturalism:

I have been delighted that, over the last few years, academic interests of my own-such as American photographic history-that used to seem peripheral (sometimes even to me, let alone to others) have become more central, and in fact the urge to create hierarchies of all sorts, from the literary canon outwards, has been deeply problematised. We all, I think, work nearer to an anthropological model of American culture or cultures, where an understanding of any feature may be related to, and revelatory of, others.

Analyses of American culture based on gender, race, class and, to a lesser extent, region as overarching categories of difference have been enormously productive-and, in many respects, still are. At the same time, I sometimes worry that these categories are invoked too mechanically, and in the U.S. itself they are all too forcibly linked to the marked divisions of American society, as if the American Studies community no longer wishes to heal the wounds of the past.

In Britain-where we often fail to see the destructive operation of these or parallel categories at the institutional level (the glass ceiling for women may be cracked, but it is still there, and we have few Black academics or students in American Studies)-such ferment remains, I think, exciting, productive, and necessary.

A healthy development has been the increasing internationalisation of our field (some folk have discussed the possibility of founding a World Association for American Studies), not only because it encourages comparative scholarly work-which has long been an American Studies tradition on the mainland of Europe-but also because it makes us all reflect on global concerns and on the divisions and potentialities of our own local societies.

After the long retrenchment of the 1980s and the market-led expansion of the 1990s, I feel that interdisciplinary American Studies is institutionally quite buoyant. At the same time, in Britain we in American Studies are still small in relative terms-for example, public funding bodies think there are only 118 researchers in the field, just a fraction of those they believe research such single disciplines as English, History or, even, Politics. This means that we have to be more proactive in every way than our peers in traditional disciplines. One means of moving ahead is implied in my comments about the internationalisation of our scholarly concerns: we must seek more institutional overseas links.

Nick Selby (Swansea) looks at the future of American Studies from the perspective of methodology:

Henry Nash Smith’s call, in 1957, for a ‘principled opportunism’ that would allow the newly emerging academic discipline of American Studies to develop a method has proven prophetic. Mostly opportunistic (and sometimes principled) American Studies has developed across the latter half of this century through its searching for a methodology of inclusiveness that is both general in effect and specific in its analytic detail. This attempt by American Studies to ‘study American culture as a whole’ has seen its practitioners embrace many different approaches in their examination of American ideology. Mythological, psychoanalytical and structuralist methods; revisionist, new historicist, and postructuralist reading practices; Marxist, feminist, post-Marxist, post-feminist and postmodernist approaches have all-amongst many others-had, or still have, intellectual currency within American Studies. Indeed, the vibrancy of American Studies seems to me to be reflected through its methodological diversity, the necessity of its opportunistic borrowings from other, more rigidly defined, academic disciplines. Despite the apparent diversity of its methods, though, I do think that American Studies has always been a discipline based in cultural materialism. That is, it reads America through its cultural materials-whether they be works of art, literature, history or politics-and it extrapolates from its reading of those materials, the more general conditions of the culture which produced them.

Questions, then, which currently occupy debates about the future of American Studies, especially in America, questions of whether American Studies is inter- or multi-disciplinary, or whether its predominant focus on the United States is rather old-fashioned given the trans-nationalism of late-twentieth century (capitalist) culture, seem less a threat to the continuance of American Studies as a discipline than a reconfirmation of the opportunities that it has always taken to redefine the principles within which it operates. Such debates see America itself as a discursive intellectual terrain across which sites of cultural power are mapped. My hope is that as American Studies moves into the new millennium, it remains intellectually opportunistic in its response to new ways of reading of America, whilst it retains its established principle of disentangling and examining America’s powerful hold over all our lives and imaginations.

Hugh Brogan (East Anglia) offers the following pragmatic assessment of the state of American Studies within the context of academic institutions, British funding bodies and the realpolitik of international power relations:

American Studies: The Outlook

American Studies will not be able to escape the general crisis of the academy which I see fast approaching. Universities and related institutions (the British Academy, for example) are now, with few exceptions financed and controlled by the Government and Business. He Who Pays The Piper Calls The Tune. From an intellectual, and even political point of view, this is an extremely unsatisfactory situation, but there is no sign of any movement to change it. So we must make the best of it, which means, are we satisfying the larger purposes of our paymasters (ultimately, the Great British Public) as well as our own? At the moment I am far from sure that the answer is Yes.

All academic disciplines are to some extent, quite properly, esoteric. But the race into specialisation has got quite out of hand. I need say nothing about the extent to which undergraduates are neglected while research is pursued and research grants are hunted. I expect that scandal to be corrected before long, and anyway I am not convinced that it is, in actuality, a great problem, whatever may be the case in the US. But the extent to which specialists are losing the will, even the ability, to talk to anyone except other specialists in the same line is appalling. It is no wonder that so much ‘research’ gets published which almost no-one reads today and none will read tomorrow. It is to me inconceivable that the state will allow this state-of-affairs to persist indefinitely; the hard sciences will get their money, because it is so obviously necessary and beneficial; the social sciences will survive at the price of making themselves mere handmaids of Whitehall; the cuts will come in the humanities. And when the last research student has been strangled in the guts of the last research supervisor it will be discovered that higher education in the humanities had many other purposes more humane, and more necessary – indeed essential – to the state than the production of trivial PhD theses.

American Studies can avoid this crisis if it takes the right steps NOW. The annual BAAS conference, for instance, should downplay its function as a showcase for research students and become a consciously directed opportunity to collaborate between disciplines and within disciplines, always looking for the HCF of our studies and teaching. For example, the biggest decision facing the British people at the moment is that of the euro. Are we to enter, probably irreversibly, a permanent European Union, and try to make it more perfect, or are we to trust ourselves to the cockleshell of national independence and some (as yet unimagined) relationship with the United States? Surely we, as Americanists, must have something to say on this subject? There seems to be a real doubt as to whether the British are culturally closer to the country of Faulkner or the continent of Dante. Can’t we help resolve the debate? We historians and political scientists – by the way, we MUST NOT let our links with political science break completely – spend such time as we can spare from race, gender and class to analysing and discussing federalism. We should be HEARD in the national debate. The cant phrase of the moment is multiculturalism, which is a topic of major debate in the United States, where it is far more pressing than it is as yet among us. We should be heard on that topic too. And so on…it may be said that the agenda I propose is too patently political or utilitarian; but so what? If American Studies is to attract the young, and educate the young, and deserve support by the state, then it must face these questions; the frivolous concentration of post-modernism, etc., can be left to a better day. This is no moment for scholasticism of any kind. As a practical suggestion, I propose that the words ‘Derrida’, ‘discourse’, ‘intertextuality’ be blue-pencilled from all future issues of the Journal.

Paul Giles (University of Cambridge) analyzes the new transnational turn in American Studies:

One issue that needs to be addressed as soon as possible in the new millennium is the lazy tendency to speak of American Studies as synonymous with study of the United States. Such a distinction has become even more important since the U.S., in the post-NAFTA era, has begun thinking of itself for trade purposes as part of the continent of America. Indeed, just as in the next century Britain will probably find itself involved in stronger social and economic links with Europe, so the United States will position itself as the central player in a geopolitical area bounded by Canada and Latin America. This shift, alongside changing demographic patterns within the United States itself, will generate a compelling need for the next generation of Americanists, particularly literature specialists, to be more conversant with Hispanic and other non-Anglophone languages than my generation has been.

Richard Hinchcliffe (Central Lancashire), postgraduate representative, makes an appeal for more openness to ethnic minorities in American Studies programmes:

American Studies as a discipline has pioneered much of the interest in race, gender and sexuality within the culture, politics and history of America. As an academic discipline it helps to maintain the focus of higher education upon the need for the continual emancipation of all the diverse ethnic and cultural groups that make up the population of North America. However, the academic community itself whilst far from being dominated by male power is nevertheless conspicuously white. While this might reflect on the humanities in general in some parts of the U.K. higher education establishment, we cannot afford to let an academic community that frequently pronounces on the historical, cultural and political matters of race be an all-white intellectual enclave.

American studies conferences are very much all-white affairs and if we want to engage scholars from different ethnic backgrounds and enrich our discipline with fresh ideas and challenges then we need to do something positive about it. The recruitment of ethnic minorities for American studies courses must start in schools, sixth form colleges and access courses, but in order that these feeder systems should get the message BAAS should use its establishment weight and begin a high-profile campaign across all the humanities in higher education to increase the intake of students from ethnic minorities. While it is patronising to assume that all students from ethnic minorities should be interested in American Studies, it is surely increasingly untenable for the American Studies community to pronounce on the politics of race without being in the least bit representative of those at the receiving end of white colonial power. As western society becomes increasingly multi-cultural those sectors of education that appear out of step with this trend may begin to appear out-of-date and irrelevant. It will not matter how much they can lay claim to be, in some way, responsible in the past for the establishment of that multi-cultural society, unless multi-culturalism is reflected through its membership it will begin to speak for less of the community as a whole and its influence may be weakened as a result.

George McKay (Central Lancashire) offers an assessment of the ways in which his own institution has engaged with shifting paradigms in American Studies:

At University of Central Lancashire we have spent the past few yearsworking through our curriculum. In some ways we have found ourselvestaking issue with the dominant paradigm of American Studies asconsisting in the main of the study of literature and history. This has meant two things, both of which we’re hoping to continue. First, we have embraced developments in Cultural Studies more widely, both by extendingthe range of texts and practices we look at to include popular music, sport, subculture, and so on-as well as literature, history, politicsoptions- and by having a core through the degree of exploring cultural theory. Second, we have shifted from looking at American Studies as adiscrete national discipline to placing it in a transatlantic, sometimes global, framework, where we are concerned with exploring the workings of American cultural power overseas. We are interested in the study of theUnited States, its regions and identities, of course, but we areinterested in the impact of American culture on, in particular, Europe,too. And we look at the ‘bad’ as well as the ‘good’ sides of that!

Jenel Virden (Hull) focuses on the importance of strengthening transatlantic links:

In the recent past American Studies in Britain made it through the quality assessment of teaching with flying colours, with an overall performance at a very high level. We are now pushing on in the research assessment exercise which will, no doubt, also go well. Our performance in both of these areas has been helped by our close association with universities and scholars in the United States and I believe the future of American Studies in Britain lies in forging even more and stronger links with America. Through more student exchanges, faculty exchanges, scholarly collaborations and the encouragement of overseas links on editorial boards and at conferences, American Studies in Britain can look forward to the next millenium with enthusiasm and optimism.

Douglas Tallack (Nottingham) makes the following strategic points:

American Studies will need to be less preoccupied with curriculum wars, interesting though we academics find them, and more strategic in exploiting its inter-disciplinary experience and history to link itself in with new developments. Schools of American Studies should become natural homes for developments which are not necessarily wholly American in content e.g. visual culture, comparative area studies.

American Studies also needs to make the most of its constituent disciplines (e.g. History, Literature, Politics, Geography) because these are still likely to be the main routes into the subject. At the same time, it needs to define itself as Area Studies (offering expertise within the ‘special relationship’ because whatever we might think of this concept politically it is significant). This suggests that while AS remains inter-disciplinary in many of its most exciting manifestations it is strategically important also to be multi-disciplinary.

Finally, Richard Ellis (Nottingham Trent) concludes on a suitably apocalyptic note as agent provocateur:

The next decades’ ‘swarming activity’ for Not-BAAS: an apocalyptic provocation

A range of transnational turns, pivoting around globalisation and the exploration of all Atlanticisms (- all Black Atlantics, of course, but over and above these other Atlantics [Jewish Atlantics, Muslim Atlantics, Fundamentalist Christian Atlantics, and a gamut of cultural Atlantics: Romantic Atlantics, Post-modern Atlantics …], etc.), and by extension ‘Pacificisms’ and ‘Americanisms’ (as these might be tentatively termed) will rapidly become the sine qua non of what is at present inadequately labeled ‘American Studies’. What is apparently a defined field (defined by its nationalistic and erroneous label [the United States, America]) will increasingly be seen not in terms of homogenization (processes of cultural hegemony) but in terms of dialectical exchanges, or (I should better say) dialogic exchanges (with no dialectical synthesis arrived at) between on the one hand dominant economic and cultural formations and practices (multinational corporations, conglomerates, but also international ‘Hollywood’, international TV corporations and other international media ventures, including the net) and on the other hand arenas of diversified and diversifying, hybrid socio-cultural alternativization (let’s say, acounter-cultural Atlantic, a [post-]Marxist Atlantic, a Youth Atlantic). Faith in any mapping of this post – ‘American Studies’ field (necessarily rechristened and offering only – in de Certeau’s words a ‘fiction of knowledge’) will be overtaken by a exploration of what de Certeau calls ‘swarming activity’. So BAAS perhaps needs to reconsider what it calls itself. Should it extend its range to embrace only the whole continent, or re-christen itself the Association of US Studies (AUSS), or (rather) discover another more radical and globally-oriented re-designation (the Association of America-in-the-World Studies [AAWS])? Plainly, I am also suggesting that our association’s title has to abandon the label ‘British’, too, as Europe confederates and Britain separates out into individual EEC memberships (Wales, Scotland, Wessex, etc). But I also want to suggest that what is required is immediate attention to the available vocabulary (to get rid of the ugly neologisms I am drawing upon or coining). Behind all this echoes David Nye’s plaintive internet inquiry: how are the institutions supporting the members of AUSS or AAWS or AUSWS (formerly BAAS) to afford the hybrid proliferation I am envisaging (in terms of library support, staffing expertise, etc.)? Agglomerations of some sort are called for (regional and/or local AUSWS confederations, for example). All change (for sure?), and maybe the sooner we rechristen ourselves the bigger, and better, choice of titles our association will have.

BAAS Glasgow 1999

BAAS AGM Glasgow 1999: Chair’s Report

I returned home from last year’s BAAS conference feeling good. In the closing session that I had chaired, Malcolm Bradbury had in equal proportion taught, entertained and charmed us with his erudition. I brought the news that my colleagues had honoured me with the Chair of the British Association for American Studies, and the BAAS AGM had signalled interesting challenges that must be tackled. In the mail waiting for me was a letter from my university announcing my Professorship of American Studies, plus a good review of a recently published book, and the proofs of another piece on its way to publication. It was a sunny day. I was feeling pretty pleased with myself.

So, while neither DIY nor gardening have ever been my strong suit, I was not too dismayed to find 141 rolls of turf stacked in front of the house. My wife Ros, having engineered a complete remodelling of the gardens, had decided that turfing the lawn was certainly something we could manage ourselves. We would save the cost of hiring turf layers, and invest our own labour into the project, thereby gaining both financial and moral virtue. Energised by all my good news, and a celebratory cup of tea, rather than return to the book typescript that awaited completion, I launched myself at the turf.

One square metre of turf is heavier than it looks. Rolled, with the earth side out, it is slippery, difficult to handle, and enormously messy. Every roll had to be manhandled from the road, through a narrow passage, down a flight of steps, to the lawn site.

It began to rain. The sun disappeared. The pile of (expensive) turf became ever more slippery, and threatened to dissolve as the heavy drops of water hit and dislodged the soil. I raced the rain, staggering around clutching rolls of earth heavier than anything I have ever lifted, in intimate, though decreasingly loving, embrace, having to hug the cylinders tight to prevent them turning into uncontrollable snakes of mud. I was so encrusted with mud that a number of garden creatures, mistaking me for a small planetoid, were considering setting up home. I was tired, soaked, very cold, and still had 40 or 50 rolls of turf to move. It was at this point that a neighbour, full of cheer and bonhomie, commented ‘that must feel different, doing some real work for a change.’

I was reminded of my late grandmother who, when my much younger cousin gained entry to Oxford University, pointed out that she was not convinced he should go, since ‘our Philip’s been at university for years and years, and he still doesn’t have a proper job.’ Eliza Davies loved all her grandchildren unconditionally, whatever they did, but she did consider it her responsibility to warn them that they should be able to work for their living.

There remains a dislocation in society, between the broad perception and our own, of the value of academic work. The past year has produced plenty of evidence that misperceptions of the breadth, value and nature of American Studies also exist within communities that have huge impact on our professional lives. The executive of BAAS has adopted a prominent role in putting the case for American Studies in many ways.

At the 1998 Annual General Meeting of BAAS a great deal of concern was voiced regarding the proposals of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) on ‘subject benchmarking’. The newly elected BAAS committee took as its first priority the defence of American Studies against the proposal that our subject be considered by QAA as an offshoot of English Literature. The strong representations made by BAAS and its members were successful. Within hours of the consultation deadline the Chief Executive of the QAA indicated that the original plan could not stand. Discussions between BAAS and the QAA resulted in the creation of a subject benchmarking category of Area Studies not primarily based on foreign languages – a group to serve American Studies, but also acting as a service to others, such as those with whom we already share a Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) panel. A measure of BAAS success may be that this was the only subject group change made by QAA in the light of the national consultation. As a result of our prominent lobbying effort, BAAS was also asked to nominate a member for the QAA Working Group on Multidisciplinarity and Modularity, and Professor Douglas Tallack continues to take an active part in this Group’s work.

In pursuing its work for the profession over the last year, the Association has been in consultation with many other national bodies. The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) and the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) received a firm indication of the American Studies community’s position when they proposed to abolish the American Studies subject coding. In this, as in the lobby of QAA, BAAS was supported actively by a former colleague, Barry Sheerman, now MP for Huddersfield. The Higher education funding councils have maintained the American Studies RAE panel, to be chaired by Professor Judie Newman, former Chair of BAAS, and BAAS conducted a wide consultation exercise before making nominations to this and other relevant RAE panels. The Association has been in touch with the new Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) to press the position of American Studies in the emerging AHRB system. Among BAAS members, Professors Helen Taylor, Mick Gidley and Michael Heale are now serving on AHRB panels.

After some considerable effort on our part, BAAS was the only subject association consulted by the Department for Education on arrangements for the financial support of students. Contacts were also made with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the British North America Committee, to spread the word of the threat to future Americanist knowledge in the UK by policies that could damage student exchange programmes. The latest information suggests that BAAS’ representations have had good effect, with some specific changes from the last consultation document reflecting the BAAS position, for example the retention of a grant for medical insurance and visa costs. Many colleagues have helped in this campaign, but it is fair to mention in particular those BAAS members at the Universities of Lancaster, Sussex and Swansea, who have been generous with information, suggestions and comments that helped the BAAS executive respond quickly and positively in defence of our subject area and its students.

As members of the Co-ordinating Council of Area Studies Associations (CCASA) our members were invited to be included in the Area Studies Directory of Expertise in the UK. The launch was covered by Huw Richards in the THES, and led directly to another article by Huw Richards on American Studies, published in The Guardian. Perhaps American Studies colleagues are not great form-fillers, but it seems that plenty of colleagues did not put themselves in the Directory. It is being maintained and updated on an internet homepage, and I would encourage members to add themselves to this virtual database.

BAAS’ long relationship with the American Politics Group (APG) was maintained with a further APG/BAAS colloquium in London. The Chair of BAAS was also convenor of APG’s 25th anniversary conference, held in January at Selwyn College, Cambridge. BAAS sent formal congratulations at the time, and is happy to record those good wishes in this annual report. BAAS is now a member of the Association of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences (ALSISS), which is shortly to launch the Academy of Social Sciences. It is important to be sure that Americanist interests are represented at the beginning of such a significant development in UK education.

As Cultural Attaché at the American Embassy, Robin Berrington was a good friend of the Association. This London posting was the finale of a dynamic career. I have no doubt that BAAS members will join me in wishing Robin a happy and creative retirement. I look forward to the continuation of a productive relationship with the Embassy, and welcome the new Attaché, T.J. Dowling, to the British American Studies community.

In 1998 the Association continued to promote American Studies through the award of BAAS Short Term Awards to seven young scholars, and the presentation of the BAAS essay prize. As well as mounting the annual conference, BAAS co-sponsored a programme of several specialist conferences, including events to serve postgraduate students, thematic scholarly events, and meetings for teachers and for schools students. In addition the BAAS Library and Resources Subcommittee mounted a very successful conference at the British Library. I am pleased to acknowledge the valuable co-operation of our various partners in these ventures, without whose help BAAS would not be able to lend the range of support that it does to American Studies teaching, learning and scholarship in the UK.

The Treasurer continued the redesign of the subscriptions system, aiming to simplify the payments system, reduce costs, and thereby maintain the efficiency of the Association’s operation. BAAS’ publishing co-operation with Cambridge University Press maintained the quality and international reputation of the Journal of American Studies. Co-operation with Edinburgh University Press has resulted in the ‘BAAS Paperbacks’ series developing a substantial, and trans-Atlantic, reputation. Our own Newsletter has been renamed American Studies in Britain: the Newsletter of BAAS, and has acquired its own ISSN. Building on the work of previous editors, Dr Susan Castillo has transformed the Newsletter into an exciting and especially attractive vehicle for American Studies and for the Association. The BAAS homepage has moved to Nottingham Trent University, where, under the watchful eye of Dr Dick Ellis, it too has developed into a new and increasingly valuable part of the Association’s work. The plan to mount out of print ‘BAAS Pamphlets’ on the site is going ahead.

Projects are always in progress. We are conducting an investigation into the continuing difficulty faced by American Studies graduates who wish to enter PGCE programmes, and will report on this in the future. Several American Studies programmes volunteered to provide information on the employment of American Studies graduates, and the results of this data collection will be made available to BAAS members. We are discussing with UCAS ways in which the data on recruitment to American Studies undergraduate programmes held in their Cheltenham headquarters might be used to aid the American Studies community.

The whole American Studies community owes a great deal to those colleagues who launched the Association in the 1950s. This year we have lost two particular friends, and former Chairs of BAAS, from those early years: Harry Allen, who had lived in recent years in the USA, and Herbert Nicholas, an apparently permanent fixture in Oxford. As is often the case, many of us were surprised by the eventual mortality of these dear friends and great mentors, and it serves to remind us of the debts we owe.

The individual American Studies scholars in the past year whose contribution has been recognised include Susan Castillo, awarded a Readership at Glasgow, Philip Davies, Professor at De Montfort, Jay Kleinberg, Professor at Brunel, George McKay, Reader at Central Lancashire, Peter Messent, Professor at Nottingham, Helen Taylor, Professor at Exeter.

I would like to thanks all the members of the BAAS executive committee, the various sub-committees of BAAS, the officers of BAAS branches, the editorial board of the Journal, and others who donate their time and energy to support the Association. The Association depends completely on the hard work, commitment and reliability of volunteers to progress its aims and objectives. For the management of an excellent 1999 conference, thanks are due to Simon Newman, supported by Susan Castillo and their team of local helpers. Particular thanks are due to those members of the BAAS Executive whose current terms of office come to an end at this AGM: Jay Kleinberg, Vivien Miller, Allan Lloyd Smith, Jenel Virden, and Andy Watts. I have no doubt that these members of BAAS will continue to work for the Association in many ways.

The dominant contemporary motif for Americanists through the past year has inevitably been progress of President Clinton from allegation to impeachment trial. I seemed to become adopted by the BBC local radio network as a designated spokesperson on the President’s alleged fumblings. Impeachment having failed, I am pleased not to be up at 5 am to give radio interviews, but regret that I may not soon repeat the experience of being on ‘Three Counties Radio’ (Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire), when an interviewer, using that stream of consciousness style that is familiar on local radio, said something like, ‘… This is Three Counties Radio, with Professor Philip Davies speaking with us about President Bill Clinton, serving Beds, Bucks and Herts.’ I stumbled on, trying to get to grips with the real work – getting the word out about American Studies. I trust the next year will bring different, but equally interesting, times for our profession.

Philip John Davies, Chair: British Association for American Studies, Professor of American Studies, De Montfort University Leicester

BAAS AGM Glasgow 1999: Minutes

The 1999 AGM of BAAS was held on Sunday, 28 March at the University of Glasgow.

Elections:
Secretary Jenel Virden (to 2002)
Committee Dick Ellis (to 2002), Paul Giles (to 2002), Simon Newman (to 2002)

The Treasurer circulated accounts which were approved and reported that BAAS is working to disaggregate the journal subscription from the membership fees so that it can be paid directly to CUP, this is being done at the suggestion of the auditor. It helps allow for overseas subscriptions to be paid by Visa. The Treasurer also recommended that the postgraduate subscription rate be increased beginning in 2000 to £10 per year. This was put to the vote of the AGM and passed.

The Chair’s Report included mention of:

1. The QAA subject benchmarking and the movement by BAAS which successfully headed off the consolidation of American Studies with English Literature.
2. The successful BAAS campaign this year which reversed the UCAS proposal to abolish the American Studies subject code.
3. The appointment of Judie Newman to Chair the American Studies RAE panel.
4. The fact that three members of BAAS are currently serving on the AHRB.
5. The successful BAAS campaign to get the DfEE to reverse its decision on the financial support of overseas students in relation to the United States. He thanked the Universities of Lancaster, Sussex and Swansea for providing him with much needed information on this subject.
6. The suggestion that BAAS members should be sure to add themselves to the CCASA area studies directory.
7. A special thanks to retiring Cultural AttachÉ Robin Berrington for his support and encouragement of BAAS and the expression of hope that the new Attaché, TJ Dowling, who was at the conference, would continue to work positively with BAAS.

Conferences: Simon Newman and Susan Castillo and the team of helpers they assembled were thanked for their fine efforts at organising the Glasgow conference. Next year’s conference will be held at Swansea from 6-9 April. Michael McDonnell is organising the conference and would welcome suggestions for panels. Future conferences are tentatively planned for Keele, Aberystwyth and Oxford.

Publications: Jay Kleinberg reviewed the situation of all publications and fielded questions about the Journal. She also expressed her thanks to the membership for her six years on the executive.

Development: Douglas Tallack reviewed the past year with special reference to the QAA plans, PGCE, ant Teacher Conferences.

Library and Resources: Phil Davies reported a successful conference at the British Library.

EAAS: The Chair reported that the next conference would be in Graz, Austria in 2000.

AOB: The Secretary thanked the Chair for his hard work throughout the year.

BAAS Glasgow 1999: Panel Report Update

Conference Report

Session Title ‘Strategies of Protest, Strategies of Resistance: New Perspectives on Civil Rights in the South’

Chair: Peter Ling (Nottingham)

Participants:

Nahfiza Ahmed, (Southampton) The Neighborhood Organization Workers [NOW] of Mobile, Alabama: Black Power Politics and Local Civil Rights Activism in the Deep South, 1968-1971.

John Howard (York) ‘Trumped-Up Charges:’ Framing Leaders of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.

John Kirk (Wales-Lampeter) The Other Freedom Summers: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Arkansas Delta, 1962-1967.

George Lewis (Newcastle) Red-Baiting, Gender, and White Resistance: Dr. Louise O. Wensel and the Virginia Senatorial Election of 1958.

Comments:

This session illustrated the extraordinarily high quality of research being done by British Americanists on the Civil Rights Movement. It was a privilege to be chair.

The speakers presented sharply angled portraits of the racial struggle at the local level in four different states. In Alabama’s second industrial centre – Mobile – an older style of racial negotiation had persisted until 1969 when a new black organization (NOW) demanded a more combative approach. Despite the polarization that followed, this new assertiveness was essential to black empowerment in the city. In Mississippi’s dirty war against the movement, black NAACP leader Aaron Henry and white movement attorney Bill Higgs faced charges of sexual indecency. Evidence suggests that both men were gay but Henry’s ability to continue as a long-term community leader compared to Higgs’s forced flight from the state tentatively suggests how pressing necessity and some toleration secured greater support for black than for white leaders. As black Mississippi stirred for action in the early 1960s, across the state line in the Arkansas Delta, SNCC workers struggled to find a way to galvanize local people. They faced both the challenge of older, more moderate leaders a la Mobile and Mississippi-style white repression. Ironically, repression ultimately undercut the position of accommodationist black leaders. One of the best features of recent scholarship has been a greater probing of the character of white resistance. In Virginia, Senator Harry Byrd marshalled the opposition to desegregation. His Democratic machine was so dominant that local Republicans decided not to run a candidate in 1958, leaving Dr. Louise Wensel as his sole challenger. A physician and white working mother with five children, Wensel regarded Byrd’s threat to close the public schools rather than desegregate as totalitarian, thus neatly turning against Byrd the Cold War rhetoric that he, like most southern politicians of the time, deployed against racial reformers. However, with seemingly little direct encouragement from Byrd, the local press weakened Wensel’s challenge by a sexist emphasis on her ‘femininity.’ Ultimately, she attracted just over 27% of votes cast. Like sexual orientation, gender constrained political opportunities in the white communities of the South.

How should these diverse facets of the movement inform its presentation in general histories of the period? asked one listener. By making it more difficult, seemed to be the consensus in reply, but also more fascinating and compelling.

BAAS AGM, Swansea 2000

The Annual General Meeting of the British Association for American Studies will be held on Saturday 8th April 2000 at the University of Wales Swansea.

Agenda

1. Elections: Treasurer, three committee members, postgraduate representative, any other offices that fall vacant before the AGM
2. Treasurer’s Report
3. Chair’s Report
4. Amendments to the Constitution
5. Annual Conferences 2001-2003
6. Report of the Publications Subcommittee
7. Report of the Development Subcommittee
8. Report of the Libraries and Resources Subcommittee
9. Report of the Representative to EAAS
10. Any Other Business

Members are reminded that the Treasurer may come to the AGM to propose a change in subscription rates for calendar year 2001.

At the 2000 AGM elections will be held for the postgraduate representative on the BAAS Committee (two year term), three positions on the Committee (three year term), for the Treasurer of the Association (three year term), and for any other 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 nomination is as follows. Nominations should reach the Secretary, Jenel Virden, by 12.00 noon on Saturday 8th 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. Candidates for postgraduate representative must be registered postgraduate students not in permanent teaching employment. As with last year, 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 and available for the membership to read before the AGM.

The Conference Scene

From Sahara to Sunbelt?: Narratives of the South and Southernness in the Twentieth Century

School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, Saturday 4 December 1999, 10am-5pm

We are inviting proposals for papers to be given at this one-day conference. Proposals of no more than 500 words for papers dealing with fictional and/or nonfictional narratives – novels, short stories, poetry, drama, film, history, biography, autobiography, music, etc. – of the South and Southernness in the twentieth century are welcome. Please send proposals by 1 October 1999 to Professor Richard H. King at: (mail) School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD; (fax) (0115) 851 4270; (email) Richard.King@nottingham.ac.uk. All general enquiries should be directed to Professor King.

The conference fee will be approximately £10 (£6.50 postgraduates/unwaged), including buffet lunch and interval refreshments. Further details, including speakers, will be announced soon.

Martyn Bone

Commonwealth Fund Conference – The State of American History, 17-19 February 2000.

The Commonwealth Fund Conference in American History for the year 2000 will be organised on the theme of ‘The State of American History.’ It will be held at University College London from 17th to 19th February. Speakers who have so far agreed to take part include John Ashworth, Alan Brinkley, Christopher Clark, Adam Fairclough, Daniel Feller, Neil Foley, Robert Gross, Howell Harris, Michael Heale, Jay Kleinberg, James Kloppenberg, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Simon Newman, Michael O’Brien, Peter Parish, Joy Porter, Michael Tadman, Douglas Tallack, David Turley and Peter Way.

For further information, contact the conference chair: Melvyn Stokes, History Dept., University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT or e-mail: commonwealth.fund@ucl.ac.uk

The Image of the 20th Century, Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, Ninth Annual Conference.

Call for Papers: The Image of the 20th Century (and the End of the Millenium) in Literature, Media, and Society, March 9-11, 2000, Colorado Springs, Colorado. An interdisciplinary conference exploring the importance and significance of the Twentieth Century (and the Millenium) in culture, literature, history, politics, economics, film, television, art, music, social theory, business. The view of the past and the future as we begin the next century and the next millenium. Different perspectives on different issues, such as change, technology, religion, race, sex, war, environment, and the market. Possible topics would include:

• The 20th Century in literature and popular culture-novels, poetry, drama, movies, TV;
• Modernity and Postmodernity in the 20th Century;
• Capitalism and socialism in the 20th Century;
• The First and Third Worlds, colonialism and imperialism in the 20th Century;
• Wars, conflicts, and cultures in the 20th Century;
• Men, women, families, children in the 20th Century; Race, ethnicity, diversity in the 20th Century;
• Markets, government, politics, production, class in the 20th Century;
• Visions, stories, images of events, values, and lives in the last century;
• Visions, stories, images of the future, as optimistic and pessimistic science fiction;
• The 20th Century as the end of the Millenium, the history, ideas, changes;
• The view of the present (and the future) from 1000 years, the view from milleniums;
• Nature, the environment, population-in the Century and the Millenium;
• Science, communication, information, genetics – in the 20th and the 21st Centuries;
• Other imaginative variations.

An annual conference addressing the role and structure of imagery in social life, with a different thematic focus each year. A Proceedings will be published from selected papers presented at the conference. Previous themes have included The Image of Violence, The Image of Technology, The Image of Nature, The Image of America. Eclectic and innovative approaches are encouraged. For previous programs, etc., see webpage: http://meteor.uscolo.edu/sissi

Please submit a one-page abstract, or a panel proposal with abstracts, by December 1, 1999. Proposals for organized panels are encouraged and graduate students are welcome. Email: century@iscp;p.edu; fax: (719) 549-2705; mail:SISSI (Century), University of Southern Colorado, Pueblo, CO 81001-4901.

For further information contact Will Wright, Department of Sociology, University of Southern Colorado [719-549-2538; wright@uscolo.edu] or Steven Kaplan, Dean of Arts and Sciences-Professor of English, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN [317-940-9874; skaplan@butler.edu]

Television and the Fantastic, Interdisciplinary Conference, 7-9th April 2001, University of Reading

An Interdisciplinary Conference Hosted by the Science Fiction Foundation and the Association for Research in Popular fictions.

Proposals welcome on: specific programmes, writers or performers; cultureal aesthetic, social or historical issues; fan culture; specific genres; transcultural reception of televisual narratives; methodologies.

250 word abstracts by 1st September to: Dr Farah Mendlesohn, Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR; email: Farah3@mdx.ac.uk.

Nelson Algren: An International Symposium, 9 June 2000 at the School of English University of Leeds.

Call for papers.

Proposals (max.250 words) are invited on any aspect of the work of Nelson Algren. Submissions might include issues relating to gender relations, urban space, addiction, and transience. The conference fee is £15 (£8 concessions) and will include registration, programme, buffet lunch and refreshments.

The keynote speaker will be Bettina Drew (author of Nelson Algren: A Life On The Wild Side).

Proposals for individual papers of twenty minutes should be sent by 1 November 1999 to: Robert Ward, School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom, LS2 9JT; Email: engrpw@english.novell.leeds.ac.uk; Fax: Abroad [+44] UK (0)113-233-4774

Robert Ward, School of English, University of Leeds

Incense and Insensibility: Science Fiction, Psychedelia & the 1960s and 1970s, Liverpool University

On June 12 there was a one-day conference organized by the English Department at Liverpool University on ‘Incense and Insensibility: Science Fiction, Psychedelia & the 1960s and 1970s’. The papers included a considerable number of American topics such as Burroughs, ‘Barbarella’, Kesey and Philip K. Dick. The focus concentrated on the origins of the drugs culture and its impact on popular culture of the period. Anyone seeking further details on the papers should contact Elliot Atkins, English Department, Liverpool University, Liverpool L69 3BX.

SASA – First Conference

Following a meeting at the Glasgow BAAS conference, Dr Colin Nicolson of Stirling University drew up a constitution for the Scottish Association for the Study of America (SASA. Website: http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/CAS/sasa/), one provision of which makes it an affiliate of the BAAS. Principal C. Duncan Rice of Aberdeen University, SASA’s honorary president, drafted a letter encouraging people to join the new organization. Dr Susan-Mary Grant of Newcastle University edited and issued SASA’s first Newsletter. On Tuesday May 11, 1999, Principal Andrew Miller of Stirling University hosted a lunch at which the launch of SASA was formally announced, and at which the guest of honour, U.S. Ambassador Philip Lader, gave the new venture his blessing.

The first annual conference of SASA took place at the National Library of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh on October 27, 1999. The conference organizer, Professor Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones of the University of Edinburgh, had expected a core of about ten to twelve people to attend, but the numbers were larger than this, with every room packed to capacity. Represented were six Scottish universities engaged in the study of America: Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Strathclyde. It is hoped that the conference will in retrospect prove to have been a fillip to the study of America in Scotland, where BAAS membership has hitherto been relatively thin on the ground.

The conference opened in the Librarian’s Room at the National Library of Scotland, where 32 postgraduates and a sprinkling of other researchers heard a 90-minute induction talk by Dr Kevin Halliwell, secretary of the North American Studies Group of the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries.

The centrepiece of the conference, made possible by a grant from the BAAS, was a Master Class for postgraduates. 38 people heard Simon Cuthbert-Kerr (Strathclyde) talk on the Black Church as a source of civil rights activism, Sam Maddra (Glasgow) on the significance of Glasgow’s repatriation of the Ghost Dance Shirt to the Wounded Knee Survivors’ Association, Kathryn Nichol (Edinburgh) on community and movement in Toni Morrison’s novel, Paradise and Kathryn Napier(Glasgow) on poetic voice and cultural explanation in Louise Edrich’s poetry. Professor Robin Winks (Yale University and this year’s Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford) commented on each paper. Susan Manning, Edinburgh’s new literature professor, added her own critiques, and there was time for some brief open discussion.

54 people now heard Robin Winks deliver a talk of his own, ‘American Conservation: The U.S. national parks movement from 1864 and its influence outside the U.S.’

The next item on the agenda was a triple book launch. 150 people attended this event at the Empire Rooms in the Festival Theatre. All three authors were members of the Department of History at the University of Edinburgh: Frank Cogliano, Revolutionary America, 1763-1815: A Political History (Routledge), Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War (Yale UP) and David Stafford, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (Little, Brown).

Those who could linger at the end of the day, 28 in all, attended a conference dinner at the small restaurant booked for the occasion.

The next SASA conference will be at Glasgow University in the early autumn of 2000. Enquiries to the conference organizer, Dr Simon Newman: S.Newman@modhist.arts.gla.ac.uk.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, University of Edinburgh

American History in Schools

Problems and Progress: the challenge of teaching A level American history

A generation of students who have grown up with American culture in the shops, on TV and on the sports field find American history an increasingly popular option. Teaching it can be fun and rewarding, but there is often a lack of expertise and resources. However, a growing range of publications, access to the Internet, and a sense of community among teachers of American History are among the encouraging signs the author notes.

Any comment on teaching in England today is usually wrist-slashingly depressing – and in some ways teaching American history is no different. All the usual problems are there. Yet, there are bright spots, otherwise it would not be the fastest growing history option at a time when history A level generally is declining.

Education at all levels is under pressure. The hoped-for changes did not materialise after May 1997 as we might have wished; classes are too large and schools are under-funded. This is especially true of VI form and FE, which have seen cuts of 27% in the last few years, and where A level classes of 30 are becoming the norm. (No French students here riding to the rescue.) But what are the particular problems of teaching American history?

We may not wish to admit this as teachers, but one issue is lack of expertise. We might be competent historians and good teachers, but few of us are trained in American history. We know where to get information, how to present that information and how to prepare students for exams, but probably the majority of us especially the older (how I hate that word) teachers got our degrees in British and European history. It means we might not have the nuances of the periods we teach as we would on, for example, Gladstone’s foreign policy. Most teachers’ updates naturally concentrate on the more popular options so we have little opportunity to increase our own knowledge. Time for reading is at a premium; so more support for staff would be welcome.

Resources

The more immediate difficulty is resources. Getting books on US history at the right level is not easy. As American history has only recently become popular there simply are not the books available, and ones that are available are expensive. Several publishers have some good GCSE titles, some of which can be very useful for weaker students, but good A level texts are rare. BAAS pamphlets can be very useful, though their quality is variable, and the excellent Access to History series from Hodder and Stoughton is producing more American titles, though again the standard is variable. More books and pamphlets are needed both as course texts and as reference texts for personal studies. The publishers need to talk to the teachers to find out what they need. Recently, for example, one of my students found a small paperback on twentieth century US history published by Manchester University Press which would be ideal for the NEAB A level, but it is out of print. National Curriculum has taken the focus to the secondary level, but publishers should not forget the growing post-16 sector.

Linked to this is the lack of other resources. Student-friendly magazines such as History Review have few articles on modern America, and student conferences such as those run by Sovereign Education are never on the USA. But before we all abandon teaching US history and return to Peel and the Corn Laws, we should note the positive aspects.

Positive aspects

American history is popular. Many students cover the Crash, Vietnam or Civil Rights at GCSE and want to go on to look at more American topics. To a generation that watches Friends, Seinfeld and Larry Sanders, (the latter two watched by the more discerning student), wears baseball caps, eats Haagen Das and cheers the Manchester Giants, America is simply more attractive than Britain. In my college the introduction of American history has seen the number of students taking history A level double. The United States is the fastest growing history option at NEAB. All of this in spite of history often being seen as difficult and boring.

While resources need to be better, there have been several improvements in the last couple of years. The BAAS pamphlets and Access to History titles have already been noted. The BAAS pamphlets can be good introductions to topics, and there are several excellent ones, particularly those on Civil Rights, Vietnam and the New Deal. Access to History already has titles on the New Deal, the Cold War and Vietnam, among others, and it is hoped there are more in the pipeline. And although the magazines do not put in enough articles on US history, they are starting to appear.

The Internet

One increasing source of information is the Internet. Internet access varies tremendously from institution to institution, but the government has recently made a pledge to get every school on-line so we should expect to use it more and find more of our students being familiar with it. Many of us are already using the Internet and finding our students getting information from it, particularly for personal studies: references to CIA documents in work on Cuba, for example, are no longer so unusual. And as the web becomes more sophisticated the volume and variety of documents we will be able to get access to is very exciting (when it isn’t terrifying). It is also getting simpler to get at material as higher education institutions provide pointers to other sites. The American Studies Centre at John Moores University has many hot links on its site, and is even prepared to give Internet help to schools who want to book visits there.

And, without wishing to appear sycophantic, the recent BAAS conference at Nottingham and the annual conferences Ian Ralston organises at Liverpool Maritime Museum have both been valuable, and dare I say fun, for staff and students.

Enthusiasm

The enthusiasm shown by the BAAS and by teachers of US history when they get together gives one much hope. There seems to me to be a growing sense of identity and comradeship (if that word is still permitted under New Labour) among teachers of A level American history. A small group has already got together to talk about where to go from here and further conferences are planned. If we can harness and build on this the future does not look too bad.

But we do need to be aware that the Dearing Review is still talking of ‘a substantial amount’ of British history. If we want American history to survive we must continue to lobby as teachers, in partnership with the universities, with BAAS and with the American embassy for A level American history to survive. There are difficulties and in many ways teaching Gladstone and Disraeli is easier, but I started teaching American history because I thought it would be fun. I haven’t changed my mind, and my students seem to like it too. Long may it continue.

How well is American Studies doing in Britain today?

Courses with an American content are quite healthy at present, although a minority interest in many schools. Including an American angle does not seem to make much difference to either the stability or the autonomy of courses. These are some of the conclusions we drew from analysing a questionnaire sent out to our subscribers in Autumn 1998.            

How well is American Studies doing in schools in Britain today? This is what we aimed to find out when we sent out our questionnaire with last year’s American Studies Today. Of nearly 500 questionnaires sent out, 47 were returned. This is a response rate of 9.4%, certainly an improvement on our last survey, on the use of IT in American Studies, when only 17 were returned.

We asked a range of questions, including how many of you actually taught on courses which were either specifically American orientated or which included an American content. Most of you (81%) had an American content, but less than half (38%) were teaching on specifically American Studies courses. Even for those with an American content, it is a minority interest in many schools, as of the 38 respondents who did have an American content, just over half were entering more than 26 students for exams.

In terms of level, the vast majority of you were teaching on A level courses, with about 1/4 teaching GCSE. Six respondents from Scotland were teaching Highers. The most popular subject areas were History with 29 responses and Politics with 23. Surprisingly, in view of the popularity of American texts with English literature teachers, only 5 respondents were teaching Literature, one less than those who were teaching film or media studies.

How secure are the courses you teach on, and does having an American content make any difference? Overall, 72% of you felt that your courses were stable. Of those who taught an American content, this figure was 74%. Do you have any say in the content of your course? Three quarters of all respondents said they did, and this figure was exactly the same for those teaching on courses with an American content. So, including an American slant does not seem to make much difference to either the stability or the autonomy of your course.

Overall, although only a minority of respondents were teaching specifically American oriented courses, the future for courses with an American content seems to be reasonably healthy.

Kathryn Cooper of Loreto VI Form College, Manchester

News from American Studies Centres

American Studies Resources Centre

Annual Report 1998-99

This academic year has again seen a number of significant developments in the work of the ASRC; particularly in the continued expansion of its web site, conference programme, as well as services to schools, colleges and increasingly universities both in the UK and abroad.

ASRC Conferences/Lectures

The year began with the ASRC’s annual schools/FE student conference at the Maritime Museum in Liverpool. This years topic of An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of American Government attracted a capacity audience of 200 students from across the country. The success of these annual events was highlighted by the fact that a ‘waiting list’ of a further 100 existed. It is clearly the case that the direct contact the ASRC has with A Level and Access teachers does allow us to focus on their specific needs and cover topic areas that are of direct relevance to the needs of their students. While a larger lecture theatre (than the present 200 maximum) would allow us to meet the increased demand for conference places, it is felt that the location of the Museum and their American exhibits, adds an extra dimension to conferences. Our thanks go to this years speakers (Niall Palmer, Esther Jubb and Ian Scott) as well as Dilys Horwich and her staff in the Education Section of the Museum for all their hard work and support, and to BAAS for the continued financial support which makes these ventures possible. Next years conference will be on October 20th. and will consider, Hoover, Roosevelt and the New Deal.

In March the ASRC, in conjunction with the University of Westminster and the Smithsonian Institute, organised a major conference at the US Embassy on Muhammad Ali. Papers were presented by Chris Brookeman (University of Westminster) and John C.Walter (University of Washington (see later section on Visitors) on Ali’s impact on American Culture and Society and the social/political role of boxing. This was followed by a live television link up with Prof. Jeffrey Sammons (New York University) and Al Brown, a boxing promoter in Atlanta. A panel in London, consisting of Chris Brookeman, John C.Walter, Johnella Butler (University of Washington) and Kasia Boddy (University of London) addressed questions that had arisen during the lectures, as well as considering other aspects of the career, representation and impact of Ali. A full report of the conference was carried in the last issue of American Studies in Britain as well as in the present issue of American Studies Today. Media coverage of the event was also extensive, with reports in the Independent, The Times, Daily Telegraph, and Daily Mail as well as ten regional newspapers. BBC Radio Five and GLR also reported the event. The success of the day has had two consequences. Firstly, the ASRC will be launching an Ali section on its web site, with articles, reviews and links. Secondly, the ASRC and the University of Westminster will again be collaborating to produce a further series of lectures on other aspects of American culture and history. Details, once finalised, will be announced on the ASRC web site. Our thanks go to Sue Wedlake at the US Embassy for her support and hard work, as well as all the speakers and participants.

In May the ASRC, in conjunction with the National Museum and Galleries on Merseyside, ran a one day programme on Navajo culture and art. The well known Navajo artist and educator, Dennis Lee Rogers gave a demonstration of sand painting and dance, as well as discussing the issues and problems faced by Native Americans. This event attracted over 80 participants and (again) received extensive media coverage. It is hoped that a similar event will take place next year. (Details of this are also carried on the ASRC web site.)

As part of an extension of its work within JMU, the ASRC also organised the first Thanksgiving lecture and celebration for American Studies students. Stephen C.Kenny presented a highly entertaining and informative lecture entitled ‘The Image of the Pig in Southern Culture.’ The lecture focused on the work of the artist Tarlton Blackwell, as well as considering the ‘role’ the pig has played in everything from Southern cooking and the food industry to popular culture. This was followed by a traditional Thanksgiving meal. Steve’s lecture is also available in the ‘On Line’ section of the ASRC web site. Our thanks go to Steve Kenny, and to John Freeman (JMU) for his encouragement and support.

ASRC Web site

David Forster has continued to develop the ASRC site and its range of materials and services. This year saw the inclusion of the Guide to American Studies in British Universities, (produced by the Eccles Centre) in an on line version. As well as details of American Studies programmes at both under and post graduate level, David added direct links to all the Universities listed. In addition, David has updated and added to the various links and has included many more book reviews and original articles. The increased number of hits to the site is testament to the success of David’s work. From February of last year till early July 1999, the site received over 155,000 hits. The monthly figure has also increased dramatically. In the period May till June (1999) the site was averaging close to 17,000 hits per month. The development of the Ali section (as previously noted) is on going and hopefully will be on line in the near future. Our thanks go to David, Bob Burchell and Jean Kemble at the Eccles Centre, as well as all the contributors of articles and book reviews. (www.americansc.org.uk)

US Visitors and guest lecturers

As noted in the section of this report on conferences, the ASRC played host to John C.Walter and Johnella Butler of the University of Washington. As well as his lecture at the Ali conference, John presented a paper to JMU and LCC students on the success of African American Athletes and changing patterns of Supreme Court cases dealing with issues of race and equal rights. John and Johnella also visited the Slavery Gallery at Liverpool Maritime Museum, where they were given a guided tour by ASRC Advisory Panel member and lecturer at Liverpool University, Mike Boyle. Of particular interest were the comments of Professor Butler, who noted that there was not a comparable exhibit in the US that looked at slavery and the Transatlantic trade from a thematic basis.

Later in the year the ASRC was also visited by Pam Wonsek of City University New York. As well as looking at the developments within the ASRC and the Learning Methods Unit of JMU, Pam visited both the Slavery Gallery (again guided by Mike Boyle), and the North American collection at Liverpool Museum, where she was met by Lynn Summter, curator of the gallery. Talks also took place regarding extending the existing links between JMU and CUNY.

Student Essay competition

This year saw the launch of an annual original essay award for JMU American Studies students. The winner for 1999 was David Clensy. David submitted an essay looking at America’s Atomic Monopoly and its implications in the post World War Two period for relations between the US and Soviet Union. An abbreviated version of this was also published in American Studies Today and in the ‘On Line’ section of the web site. David also received a book token and was presented with this and a certificate of merit when he graduated this year. It is planned that a similar award will be offered to American Studies students at Liverpool Community College next year.

Requests and student visits to the ASRC

Requests for information, the loan of AV materials and visits to the ASRC increased yet again this year. Although figures related to JMU and LCC students are not included in the final figures, and were not formally recorded, it is clear that there has been a vast increase in the use of the ASRC’s facilities by these students. Details of other requests/visits are indicated below and clearly suggest that despite the problems faced by HE/FE/schools the services of the ASRC are highly regarded and welcomed by students and teachers alike.

The increased demands on ASRC staff were partly eased by the help of volunteer Emma Kilkelly, an American Studies student at JMU and by post graduate researcher Steve Kenny. Plans to introduce a work based module for students in the ASRC were delayed, but will come into operation in the academic year 1999-2000. This will not only provide invaluable support for the ASRC but will also allow JMU students to gain an insight into the operations of information services and support the development of their academic, transferable and interpersonal skills.

In conclusion, the ASRC would like to thank again all those mentioned earlier in this report who have made this another successful and productive year. In addition our thanks also go to Steve Jackson and Harry Pepp (JMU) and Steve Daw (LCC) for their support and encouragement, as well as the British Association of American Studies.

Conferences/visits: 1980 hours (not including JMU/LCC students/staff.)

Information/AV requests: 805 (not including JMU/LCC students/staff.)

Web site hits (Sept. 98 – June 99): 124,982

Ian Ralston, Director, American Studies Centre

Accessing Archival material: The Lomaxes’ Folk Music Collection at the Library of Congress

For members who like their country music essentially traditional and rural, with its folk roots showing, the Web can now prove its worth through providing access to The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip Collection. Online access is now available through the Library of Congress American Memory Web site at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/lohtml/lohome.html. If you have used Bill C Malone’s under-rated but no less classic monograph turned paperback _Country Music USA_ (University of Texas Press, Austin 1985 published in the UK by Equation, Wellingborough) and have wondered however anyone overseas could ever gain access to even a small part of the material discussed, or are merely tired of carrying Smithsonian CDs back from visits to DC, then this is a source well worth exploring. Some of this has appeared on Folkways UNIT and The ethnographic field collection includes 686 sound recordings, as well as photographic prints, fieldnotes, dust jackets, and other manuscripts documenting folksingers and folksongs discovered on the Lomaxes’ 6,502-mile trip through the states of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia. And remember this was 1939!

Starting in Texas on 31st March 1939, returning to DC on 14th June 1939, John Avery Lomax, Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center), and his wife, Ruby Terrill Lomax, recorded approximately 25 hours of music from more than 300 performers. These recordings represent a broad spectrum of musical styles, including ballads, blues, children’s songs, cowboy songs, fiddle tunes, field hollers, lullabies, play-party songs, religious dramas, spirituals, and work songs. Over a 100 songs are sung in Spanish, a suitable reminder that Hispanic influences in American culture are not limited to but the distant colonial and recent modern periods.

A special presentation on the collection provides a state-by-state snapshot of the Lomaxes’ expedition, highlighting the diverse musical styles of each region, the variety of documentation archived by the collectors, and many of their experiences on this field expedition through the rural South in the 1930s.

Visitors to the site can search for items in many ways, including by city, state, and county where the recording took place, performer name, song title, musical genre, and recording venue. Alsoincluded in the collection is an extensive bibliography and discography for those interested in doing further research on the folk music documented in this collection. In conjunction with the New Deal state by state guides there is wonderful scope for a wide range of approaches to the Depression South.

Other folklife-related online collections, selected publications of the American Folklife Center, and information about products and services are available from the Center’s homepage: http://lcweb.loc.gov/folklife

American Memory is a project of the National Digital Library Program of the Library of Congress, which, in collaboration with other institutions, is bringing important American historical materials to citizens everywhere.

Through American Memory, fifty-nine multimedia collections of digitised documents, photographs, recorded sound, motion pictures and text are now available online, freely available to the public for educational purposes. This collection is the fifth American Folklife Center contribution to the American Memory Web site. All American Memory collections can be accessed through http://www.memory.loc.gov

Any questions? Check the Web pages and if in doubt email ndlpcoll@loc.gov.

Steve Mills, David Bruce Centre for American Studies, Keele University

American Studies at the University of Luton

A Minor in American Studies has been validated as part of the BA Honours programme at the University of Luton. The Minor arose out of a convergence of interests among members of the Departments of History and Literary Studies. The programme, externally reviewed by Professor Colin Bonwick of the University of Keele and Dr George McKay of the University of Central Lancashire, draws largely upon existing modules to provide an examination of American literature, history and film from both interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary perspectives.

The programme begins with a new module, Introduction to American Studies, which introduces students to the discipline by exploring some of the fundamental themes and preoccupations of American culture, as well as familiarising them with the concepts and procedures of interdisciplinary study. In subsequent semesters, students are obliged to study core modules in American Literature 1900-1945 and American History 1607-1877 as a means of providing them with a firm grounding in the disciplines of literary and historical study.

After successfully completing these mandatory modules, students can follow various routes through the Minor, focusing for example on a particular discipline or a specific period, or taking a more general overview of the field.

The teaching team anticipate that the distinctiveness of American Studies as a field at Luton will emerge from the ongoing development of a research centre on Americanisation which is being pioneered by the Department of History. One aim of the centre is the generation of a focus of collaborative research and publication in the American Studies discipline area, including projects which can feed into and shape the teaching of the subject on the undergraduate programme.

The manager of the Minor is Dr John Moore, Senior Lecturer in American Literary Studies at the University of Luton.

Ethnic America in Wales

In order to build upon its growing research interests in ethnic American literatures and cultures, Drs Helena Grice, Martin Padget and Tim Woods from the Department of English, who all contribute towards the Honours degree scheme in American Studies, held a conference at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, on the 2-4 July entitled Reconfiguring Ethnic America. This was an interdisciplinary conference, drawing on the subjects of literature, sociology, visual art, politics, popular culture, history, philosophy, and cultural theory.

This was attended by delegates from Germany, the United States, Canada, Scotland, Wales and England, representing a variety of disciplinary interests in literature, history, film, music, and sociology. The conference of approximately fifty delegates sought to foster a dialogue between academics on both sides of the Atlantic about current research concerning such issues as cultural hybridity, racial identities and differences, whiteness, cultural pluralism and civil rights, and the cultures of the different ethnic communities in the United States, such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Chicano Americans, and Euro-Americans. Other seminar sessions included literatures of the Caribbean, race and region, and Euro-American immigration. The plenary speakers were Professor Arnold Krupat (Sarah Lawrence University, New York), an expert on Native American cultures who opened the conference with an address on nationalism, indigenism and cosmopolitanism in relation to Native American literature; and Dr Maria Lauret (University of Sussex), who spoke on the politics of studying African American culture as a white feminist. It was a matter of great regret to all participants that Professor Amy Ling (University of Wisconsin, Madison) was unable to attend due to severe illness, although her plenary address on the Asian American writer Yan Phou Lee was delivered in her absence.

Further information can be received from Dr Helena Grice, Dept. of English, Hugh Owen Building, Penglais, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales, SY23 3DY, email: hhg@aber.ac.uk.

In Memoriam

Mark Leaf, 1925-1999

Older members of BAAS will be saddened to learn of the sudden and unexpected death of Mark Leaf, in his sleep at the age of 73, at his summer home in France. For a full decade Mark was the linch-pin of the association, but many will remember him rather as one of the most lively and imaginative minds in the field, renowned for his provocative comments and questions in committee, seminar, and conference session.

Mark entered the profession late in his career. After war service and a brief spell at Oxford, he took over the family wholesale grocery business and ran it for twelve years. Then, in his mid-thirties, he went to his local university in Nottingham, gained a First, and started postgraduate work in American literature. In 1964 he was appointed to a lectureship at Durham, where he spent the remainder of his career as an energetic, widely-read, and stimulating teacher of English literature and American Studies until his early retirement in 1984.

In 1972 he ran a hugely successful BAAS conference at Durham, and for his pains was elected to the BAAS committee. In short order he became co-editor of the Newsletter, 1974-75, Treasurer, 1975-78, Secretary, 1978-84, and EAAS representative, 1980-86. Indeed, at one point he acted as both treasurer and secretary, at the same time as helping to start the BAAS Pamphlet operation. The chairmen of those years-Allen, Parish, Welland, Erickson-all recognised how his commitment, energy and initiative helped to keep the organisation afloat and growing through some difficult years.

His friends and acquaintances will recall most strongly the pleasure of his company, the liveliness of his conversation, the unpredictable eccentricity of his mind. He had an ability to see familiar problems from a fresh, novel point of view, to invert the perspective, and to perceive implications and extensions of ideas and arguments concealed to other people. Many a visiting lecturer in Durham was stumped for a reply to a question or comment by Mark, sometimes because the idea was too far-fetched, but commonly because it opened up entirely new avenues of thought. Typically, he claimed that he could always think of a good question because he slept through most of the paper, hearing so little that his mind was unencumbered by an excess of information or the speaker’s subtle qualifications!

Sadly, Mark put little of his outpouring of ideas on to paper. Perhaps there were too many ideas; perhaps he lacked the singlemindedness to restrict himself to developing them systematically. Somehow he always felt that his late entry to the profession and his business experience undermined his academic credentials. But, more than that, he was always interested in practical achievement: in organising, in decision-making, in creating structures, in starting new useful ventures, in improving the world around. As a result, he energetically involved himself in university politics, in the AUT (as long-serving branch secretary), in the local Labour Party; and when he retired in 1984, he cut himself off from academe and worked for Amnesty International, becoming its national treasurer.

The driving force was always his concern for causes he thought worthwhile-an academic subject that expressed humane values and cultivated critical intelligence, a colleague who had been unfairly treated, a student who deserved extra assistance, a movement that aimed to improve the lot of mankind. In their defence he could be a tough and tireless negotiator. This essential humanity and concern for civilised values, coupled with his diffident charm, made him a kind friend to many, a committed teacher, a thoughtful colleague, and now a cherished memory.

Donald Ratcliffe, University of Durham

Announcements

New Program in Early American Economy and Society, The Library Company of Philadelphia

New Program in Early American Economy and Society, The Library Company of Philadelphia announces the establishment of a new Program in Early American Economy and Society that will foster scholarship in and public understanding of the origins and growth of America’s economic system and the nation’s business history through the Civil War. The Library Company, founded in 1731, is an independent research library that has one of the premier collections in the nation of printed materials relating to the study of early American economy, business, and technology. The new Program will offer short-term and long-term research fellowships to doctoral candidates and senior scholars; bimonthly seminars throughout the academic year to be held at the Library Company and at co-sponsoring institutions; conferences that will appeal to both scholarly and lay audiences; teacher training institutes; publications such as conference proceedings and monographs; and a variety of public programs such as lectures, exhibitions, and a web site.

The Program will also enable the Library Company to augment, catalog, and conserve its collections in this field, and Program staff will carry out a survey of research resources at the Library Company and at many other regional repositories, documenting the wealth of information available at Philadelphia-area institutions bearing on this subject. The Program will be the first in the nation dedicated to collecting and explicating American economic history in its formative years, and will fill a void in our understanding of this important aspect of the formation and growth of American society. The Director of the Program is Cathy D. Matson, Associate Professor of History at the University of Delaware and a noted scholar in the field. For further information, contact Professor Matson at cmatson@librarycompany.org.

NCC Washington Update, Vol 5, #16, May 17, 1999

NCC Washington Update, Vol 5, #16, May 17, 1999 by Page Putnam Miller, Director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History pagem@capaccess.org

1. Subcommittee Recommends Approximately Level Funding in FY’2000 for NHPRC and National Archives
2. Judge Orders Historic Grand Jury Records To Be Made Public
3. FOIA Suit Filed for CIA’s Official Histories

1. Subcommittee Recommends Approximately Level Funding in FY’2000 for NHPRC and National Archives-On May 14 the House Appropriations Subcommittee On Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government, which has responsibility for the budgets of the National Archives and the grants program of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission met to ‘mark-up’ its FY 2000 appropriations bill. Although details from this subcommittee meeting are still not available, indications are that the Subcommittee recommended level funding for the competitive grants program for NHPRC, which would mean $6 million in 2000.

It is anticipated that the operating budget of the National Archives will have a few adjustments but will be very close to the 1999 level. Although the 13 subcommittees have not yet received the numbers establishing their allotted amount of the total federal budget, some of the subcommittees, including the Treasury Subcommittee, have started work on their bills. The full House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to consider the Treasury Appropriations bill on Thursday, May 20. The other bills that appear to be on a fast track are the Agriculture and Transportation appropriations bills and the Legislative Branch appropriations bill.

2. Judge Orders Historic Grand Jury Records To Be Made Public-On May 13 Judge Peter K. Leisure of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the release of thousands of pages of 1940s grand jury testimony in the investigation of Alger Hiss. This case, No. M-11-189, focused on the grand jury proceedings that led to Hiss’s indictment and later conviction of two counts of perjury arising out of his denials under oath before the Grand Jury of having passed State Department documents to a Communist agent.

Current law requires that grand jury information remain secret except in certain ‘special circumstances’ where a ‘particularized need’ for the material is demonstrated. In the past, release for historical research has not been regarded as meeting this standard. Thus, Judge Leisure’s decision is a ground breaking one for he concluded that the petitioners fulfilled their burden to justify disclosure. The opinion states: ‘The Court is confident that disclosure will fill in important gaps in the existing historical record, foster further academic and other critical discussion of the far-ranging issues raised by the Hiss case, and lead to additional noteworthy historical works on those subjects, all to the immense benefit of the public. The materials should languish on archival shelves, behind locked doors, no longer.’

In December, 1998 Public Citizen, a non-profit litigation group, filed a petition requesting the release of these papers on behalf of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society of American Archivists, and the American Society for Legal History. The petition built on a 1997 decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City in the case of Bruce Craig v. United States of America (No. 96-6264). In that decision the Court denied historian Bruce Craig access to the specific historical records that he sought; however, the Court made clear that historical interests are appropriate grounds for the release of grand jury material and provided some specific guidance for determining the ‘special circumstances’ when sensitive grand jury records should be unsealed for historical reasons.

The oral arguments in this case were made on May 12, at which time, Judge Leisure praised the petitioners for the most ‘complete and thorough papers that he had even had’ submitted to him. The plaintiffs’ petition included declarations by 11 historians, as well as journalists and film makers, and friends and family of both Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. All attested to the importance of this material in shedding light on specific historical questions related to the Hiss-Chambers episode and on broader questions about domestic policy and legal practices in the early Cold War era.

Judge Leisure concluded that most of the transcripts should be opened for many reasons, including the historical significance of the records, the lack of need to keep the materials secret, and the long passage of time since the special grand juries were convened. The opinion stated: ‘Alleged Soviet espionage against the United States was a controversial, highly-visible and significant issue in domestic politics during the 1940s and 50s.’ The Judge stressed that ‘of all the events pertaining to that issue, the Hiss case is among the most historically important.’ The Court opinion highlights 4 historical issues on which the grand jury materials are likely to contain information: the extent to which the House Un-American Activities Committee was involved in the Grand Jury proceedings; allegations concerning Hiss; Soviet espionage activity in the United States; and alleged improprieties in the Doe II Grand Jury proceedings.

In summarizing the Government’s case for keeping these records closed, Judge Leisure asserts that aside from its generic objections to disclosure, the Government does not content there is any particular reason to keep secret the fifty-year old grand jury materials at issue. He notes that the Government made no objections based on national security interest or offered arguments that disclosure would undermine any of the rationales for maintaining grand jury secrecy and that the few privacy concerns the Government raised were addressed. Finally, on this point, the opinion states: ‘In view of the Government’s failure to identify any material need to keep the grand jury materials secret, the court wonders why the Government opposes disclosure at all.’ While this is a ground breaking decision, the case makes clear that grand jury records should be opened only in very exceptional cases where there is broad public and researcher interest in the issues, where the records are very old, and where there are no outstanding privacy issues.

3. FOIA Suit Filed for CIA’s Official Histories-On May 13 the National Security Archive, a non-profit public interest research institute that collects, catalogues, and publishes declassified and unclassified government documentation on national security and foreign affairs policy, practices, and activities, filed a suit under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain official CIA historical materials. The suit focuses on two official CIA histories -one pertaining to the CIA’s involvement in the 1948 Italian elections and the other to a 1953 coup in Iran-and on CIA-prepared biographies of nine former Cold War Communist leaders of Eastern European, seven of whom are dead and the remaining two have been out of power for more than a decade. Tom Blanton, Executive Director of the National Security Archive, noted that CIA Director James Woolsey testified in 1993 that documents on these two covert actions are vitally important for historical research, government accountability, and informed current policy making. The National Security Archive decided to file the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia when they learned that their appeal to the CIA on the denied FOIA request was in a queue at the CIA of approximately 350 pending appeals. NCC invites you to redistribute the NCC Washington Updates. A complete backfile of these reports is maintained by H-Net at http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~ncc To subscribe to the ‘NCC Washington Update,’ send an e-mail message to listserv@h-net.msu.edu acc ording to the following model: SUBSCRIBE H-NCC firstname lastname, institution.

This announcement has been posted by H-ANNOUNCE, a service of H-Net, Michigan State University. List archive and information about how to post: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/events/announce.html

Book Reviews

Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture by Lewis A. Erenberg

Lewis A. Erenberg, Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998) xxi + 293p. ISBN 0-226-21516-4, (cloth) $28.00.

Eric Hobsbaum in his valuable review essay ‘Some Like it Hot’ called for a study of the Swing Era which would look at ‘the music business…, the transformation of the record industry… the college and noncollege dancing public and the rise of the specialist jazz/pop press’1 as well as the ways in which the political anc cultural milieu of the Roosevelt era shaped the artistic growth of jazz. Hobsbaum’s request has been answered by the appearance in this decade of two volumes, the first being David Stowe’s Swing Changes in 1994.

When like Stowe before him Erenberg presents the phenomenon as a self-consciously American music, articulating in a spirit of hope the valuse of freedom and democracy, it is easy to understand how it would function ideologically in the fight against Fascism. Support for the idea of its influence beyond the shores of the USA is found in the popularity of swing during World War II in Occupied Europe where, in the context of Nazi hostility, an enjoyment of this form of jazz took on the force of a political statement. Erenberg writes at the end of his book: ‘Swing bands… defined a mass youth style around music, dance and fashion, and conveyed hopeful fisions of the future.’2 The provocative display of youth style was replicated in Europe where the rebellious groups were known as ‘Les Petits Swings’ (Paris) or ‘Swing Jugend’ (Germany) – with the difference that in Europe such activity was of necessity clandesting, the punishment for discovery was prison or in many cases confinement in a concentration camp.3

In his magisterial survey of American music Charles Hamm observed that ‘even at the peak of the swing era, Ellington continued to search for more distinctive voicings… to play various small groups of instruments off against each other and the entire band.’4 But it could also be said that, even as he sought to become an innovative ‘distinctive artist’, he strove, after the arrival of Strayhorn in 1939 and the subsequent recruitment of Ben Webster and Jimmy Blanton, to emulate the driving style of his contemporaries. Strayhorn’s ‘Take the A Train’, the orchestra’s most popular swing arrangement, became their theme tune while Ellington’s own ‘Harlem Air Shaft’ was very much in the energetic Kansas City style with its riffs for brass and reeds. In the guise of swing, Erenberg writes, jazz ‘defined and dominated’ American popular music. Its greatest practitioners, Basie, Goodman and Ellington, were necessarily and willingly representative. They were also musical and cultural giants.

1. E.J. Hobsbaum, ‘Some Like It Hot’, New York Review of Books, April 13, 1989, p.33. Back
2. Erenberg, Swingin’ the Dream, p.251. Back
3. See my ‘Swing and the Dissolute Life: Youth, Style and Popular Music in Wartime Europe’, Popular Music, Vol.8,2(May 1989), pp.157-63. Back
4. Charles Hamm, Music in the New World, (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1983), p.524. Back

Ralph Willett

From Goosecreek to Gandercleugh: Studies in Scottish-American Literary and Cultural History by Andrew Hook

Andrew Hook, From Goosecreek to Gandercleugh: Studies in Scottish-American Literary and Cultural History (Phantassie, East Lothian : Tuckwell Press, 1999). vii and 248pp. £14.99. ISBN 1 898410 58 5.

Judie Newman, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne

American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film by David Seed

David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Pp. 216. ISBN 1-85331-227-4.

Nick Selby, University of Wales, Swansea

Kudos

Susan Manning (University of Edinburgh) is the first holder of the Grierson Chair of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, having moved from Cambridge University in time for the 1999-2000 academic year. Among her recent publications are a World’s Classics edition of Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1997) and an essay on Emily Dickinson and William James in Karen Kilcup, ed., Soft Canons: American Women Writers and the Masculine Tradition (University of Iowa Press, 1999). She is currently completing a major Scottish-American comparative study, Fragments of Union.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (University of Edinburgh) is in 2000 the holder of an Arts and Humanities Research Board research leave award given for the writing of a book on Hyperbole, Public Relations and the History of U.S. Secret Intelligence.

In Print: Members’ Publications

Professor Philip Davies: Political Parties and the Collapse of Old Orders, (co-author and co-editor with Professor J.K. White), (New York, State University of New York Press, 1998); Historical Atlas of North America, (co-author with D. Ryan, D. Brown, R. Mendel) (New York, Macmillan, 1998); ‘The Media and US Politics’, in Developments in American Politics 3, (London: Macmillan Press, 1998; and Chatham, New Jersey: Chatham House, 1998), edited by Gillian Peele, Christopher J. Bailey, Bruce Cain and B. Guy Peters, pp. 337-353.; ‘Ethnicity, Race and 1990s US Politics: A nation of immigrants’, Politics Review, v. 7, no. 4 (April 1998), pp. 29-33.; ‘Demographic Movements within the USA’, in The USA and Canada: 1998, (London: Europa, 1998), pp. 152-55.

Susan Castillo, ‘Gems in the Quarry’: George Cable’s Strange True Stories of Louisiana in Southern Literary Journal, Spring 1999.

Research Award Reports

Gail Danvers, University of Sussex

I was originally awarded a travel grant to conduct research at the William L. Clements Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This archive, part of the University of Michigan, houses a vast array of documents, maps and prints pertaining to the colonial period. Shortly after I had made travel arrangements, I discovered that I had been invited to present a paper at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture conference at the University of Texas. Thus, fortunately I was able to use my grant to cover travel costs to both Austin and Ann Arbor.

In addition to hand written manuscripts, I also spent time looking at the library’s substantial collection of eighteenth-century pamphlets, maps and prints. The staff greatly assisted me in finding some appropriate engravings of Iroquois Indians, as well as maps of Iroquoia, so that I can provide some visual aids in my dissertation. This archive was one of the friendliest I have had the pleasure of working at, making my research trip highly productive and thoroughly enjoyable. Neither this research trip nor the conference at Texas would have been possible without the travel grant. Therefore I would very much like to take this opportunity to express my sincerest appreciation to BAAS for their financial assistance.

Joanna Gill, Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education

Report of a visit to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Austin at Texas, Joanna Gill (June 1999)

I should like to express my gratitude to the British Association for American Studies for offering me the short-term travel award which made this visit possible. I should also like to thank the Daphne Doughton Fund of Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education for indispensable additional support.

Cathy Hoult, University of Leicester

Report on Cathy Hoult’s BAAS sponsored research to visit the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

Overall the trip was very productive and enabled to gather some extremely useful material for my thesis. It also highlighted many future avenues for further investigation. I want to thank BAAS for granting me a short-term travel award and enabling me to make this research trip.

Peter Ingram, Keele University

Background and Overview

In spite of some frustrations regarding interviews, my trip was therefore extremely productive, and I now have all of the necessary material in place to complete my thesis.

Emma Lambert, University of Birmingham

Research Trip to the United States : June-August 1999.

I was able to complete my research in New York City, where I consulted the excellent collections of Time Inc. publications for the period in the New York Public Library, and where I was forced to purchase large quantities of additional luggage in which to transport safely home my enormous, and still expanding, collection of photocopies! (I am currently awaiting delivery of several filing cabinets in which to house them!) I would like to thank BAAS for their generous support for this project, without which this research trip would not have been possible.

Anne Trudgill, Manchester

Report of the BAAS sponsored research trip to the United States 8th May 22nd May 1999 by Anne Trudgill

Stoddard’s work, only recently rediscovered, is perhaps more likely to be appreciated by today’s literary scholars and readers than those of her own time. The Allison-Shelley collection includes exciting material relating to a number of nineteenth century Americans: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Edwin Booth, as well as both Richard Henry Stoddard and Elizabeth Stoddard. Yet it is access to the particularly fine collection of Elizabeth Stoddard’s letters, literary works, journalistic pieces and unpublished materials, which may yet prove the most important, allowing this highly original and individual American writer to receive the recognition due to her. The woman who was to enquire of Lowell, ‘Tell me whether in writing, one should aim at entering a circle already established or making one?’ may be noticed at last.

Research Support

2001 David Thelen Prize

The Organization of American Historians sponsors an annual prize (formerly the Foreign-Language Article Prize) for the best article on American history published in a foreign language. The winning article will be translated into English and published in the Journal of American History. Entries must have been published in the preceding calendar year.

All Entries Must Be Clearly Labeled ‘2001 David Thelen Prize’

Centre for Maritime Research

Centre for Maritime Research-Research Fellowships at the National Maritime Museum

Fellowships are advertised each September. Interviews take place in December/January. Successful applicants take up their award in the October of the following academic year. For application forms, telephone 020 8312 6716 or E-mail: research@nmm.ac.uk

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation

Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, International Center for Jefferson Studies, Short-Term Fellowships and Travel Grants, 2000

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which owns and operates Thomas Jefferson’s historic home at Monticello, is pleased to announce a program of short-term residential fellowships and travel grants at its International Center for Jefferson Studies open to all scholars working on Jefferson projects. Foreign nationals are particularly encouraged to apply.

Short-Term Fellowships are awarded for periods of one to three months to doctoral candidates and postdoctoral scholars from any country. Awards carry a stipend of $1,500 for United States and Canadian fellows plus pre-approved round-trip airfare, and $2,000 for overseas fellows plus airfare. Residential accommodation may be available on a limited basis. Fellows are expected to be in residence at the Center during the course of the fellowship, and no awards are made for work carried on elsewhere.

Fellows have access to Monticello’s expert staff and research holdings as well as to the extensive resources of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. Occasional visits may be made to the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Historical Society in nearby Richmond, and to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Applicants should submit four copies of (1) a succinct description of the research project (500-words), and (2) a curriculum vitae. In addition, please arrange for three references to be sent directly to the Center at the address below.

Travel Grants are available on a limited basis for scholars and teachers wishing to make short-term visits to Monticello to pursue research or educational projects. Application procedures and deadlines are the same as for fellowships.

Deadlines for Applications: 1 November 1999 and 1 April 2000

Candidates who submit applications by 1 November will normally be considered for awards between February and July, and candidates who apply by 1 April for July to January.

Applications and references should be addressed to the Fellowship Committee, International Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello, Post Office Box 316, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902, USA. Announcement of awards will be made no later than 1 January and 1 June 2000.

The fellowship and grants program is underwritten by endowments established for this purpose by the Batten Foundation and First Union National Bank of Virginia, and by a grant from the Coca-Cola Company.

Princeton University: Anschutz Distinguished Fellowship in American Studies 2001

The Princeton Program in American Studies, founded in 1943, sponsors teaching, research, and public discussion about the history, literature, art, and culture of the United States, in ways that span the traditional disciplines.

The Anschutz Distinguished Fellowship, created through an endowment by the Anschutz family, will be awarded in the spring term of 2001 to a writer, critic, journalist, musician, artist, or other contributor to the arts, letters, or commerce – not necessarily an academic scholar – who is interested in spending a semester in residence at Princeton. The Anschutz Fellow is expected to teach one undergraduate seminar for the American Studies Program and deliver one public lecture to the University. The Fellow will enjoy full access to Firestone Library and to a wide range of activities throughout the University.

The Anschutz Fellow will receive a stipend of $25,000 (plus benefits) in addition to travel to and housing in Princeton.

To apply: Applicants should submit a curriculum vitae and a statement (of approximately 1,000 words) describing their proposed seminar and public lecture by mail, postmarked by January 15, 2000.

Send the above to: Sean Wilentz, Director, Program in American Studies, 42 McCosh Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544

If you have questions, you may contact: Judith Ferszt, Program Manager, Program in American Studies, 42 McCosh Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544. Telephone: (609) 258-4710. E-mail: jferszt@princeton.edu

Notes and Queries

Professor Waldemar Zacharasiewicz of Vienna University would like to know of publications on Southern writers/subjects by BAAS members in 1998 (and 1997). Professor Zacharasiewicz’s address is Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik,Universitat Wien, Universitatscampus Hof 8, Spitalgasse 2A-1090 Vienna, Austria, Tel.: +43(1)4277-42410FAX: +43(1)4277-42497.

To Err Is Human

Peter Ling’s conference report ‘Strategies of Protest, Strategies of Resistance: New Perspectives on Civil Rights in the South’ was not included in the previous edition of American Studies in Britain. Our sincere apologies for this omission. Please find this report in the present edition on pp.10-11.

The full title of Karen Wilkinson’s paper in the previous edition of American S tudies in Britain should have read: ‘Enduring the Storm of the Tempest: Self Reliance in the Novels of Susan Warner.

BAAS Membership

New Members

Susana Isabel Araujo, originally from Lisbon, is currently preparing her D. Phil at the University of Sussex.

Elliot J. Atkins is writing his Ph. D. dissertation on the work of Thomas M. Disch at the University of Liverpool. Among his areas of interest are the post-war American novel and US science fiction.

Sarah Churchwell lectures in the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia.

Roger Andrew Clark is Senior Lecturer at Ripon & York, with interests in Cultural Studies and literature.

Daniel Cordle lectures in English and American Literature at Nottingham Trent University.

Brian Dunn is a postgraduate in American literature in the Department of English at University College London.

Lawrence Goldman is a Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at St. Peter’s College, Oxford. Among his research interests, he lists the history of slavery and emancipation, Anglo-American reform to 1914, and US social thought.

Stephanie Jones is preparing her Ph. D. at Birkbeck College on New Deal cultural production in California and the Southwest.

Mark Ledwidge is a postgraduate student living in Manchester.

Lorna Jowett lectures in American Studies at University College Northampton.

Laurence Marriott is a Ph. D. student researching English and American literary naturalism at University College Northampton.

Kathryn E. McLean Nicol is a postgraduate student in the Department of English at Edinburgh University.

Madeline Minson has recently completed a Ph. D. thesis on the work of Henry David Thoreau. Other research interests include ecocriticism and the American tradition of nature writing.

Stephanie Munro is a postgraduate student at the University of Sheffield, writing a thesis on ‘Trauma and Narrative Rupture in the Work of Four African-American Women Writers’

Paolo Palladino is Wellcome Trust University Award lecturer at Lancaster University, and is researching topics in the history of biomedical and agricultural sciences in North America and Great Britain.

Mark Scott Rawlinson is preparing his Ph. D. at the University of Nottingham.

Annette Louise Rubery has a long-standing interest in the relationship between literature and art, particularly during the early years of the 20th century; her Ph. D. (from Warwick) was on ‘Portrait, Landscape and Identity in the work of Gertrude Stein and Georgia O’Keefe’.

Louise Jayne Stimpson is a graduate student in the Department of Cultural Studies, King Alfred’s College, Winchester.

Appointment: Editor of American Studies in Britain

Applications are invited for the post of Editor of American Studies in Britain. Applications, in the form of a letter and accompanying c.v., should be sent to each of the following people:

Dr Jenel Virden
Secretary of BAAS
American Studies Department
University of Hull
Hull HU6 7RX
Tel: 01482 465638/303; Fax: 01482 465303; Email: J.Virden@amstuds.hull.ac.uk

Professor Hugh Brogan
Chair of BAAS Publications Committee
Department of History
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester
CO4 3SQ
Tel: 01206 872307

Deadline for receipt of applications is: 15 January 2000.

Editorial

This issue of American Studies in Britain, which includes descriptions of papers presented at the Glasgow BAAS Conference, is a lengthy one, given the number of panels and the variety of papers presented. I would like to thank Session Chairs for presenting their reports in timely fashion, and indeed to express the gratitude of American Studies at Glasgow to all the friends and colleagues who helped make the 1999 conference such a success. As well, thanks are due to my wonderful Editorial Assistants, Marie Tate and Sean Groundwater (responsible for graphics, layout, and the image of the immortal Joltin’ Joe on the cover), and our printer Jim O’Donnell.

Very special thanks go as well to Gerard Sweeney, wo arranged for e-mail to be forwarded to my home while I was on research leave, and to Mike Black of Humanities Computing here at Glasgow University, who heroically zapped yet another virus which had invaded my machine. As some of you are aware, my computer was replicating e-mails in lunatic fashion, to the tune of 113 copies of each message in some cases. To those who received dozens of messages from me, may I hasten to reassure you that this is not a Fatal Attraction scenario, lovely though you all are! Apologies to those concerned and to those whose text may have vanished into cyberspace.

One exciting bit of news is that American Studies in Britain now has an ISSN number. One hopes that this will prove to be of particular interest to contributors and reviewers as RAE approaches!

In conclusion, I would like to express gratitude to Professor Mark Ward, Dean of the Arts Faculty of Glasgow Unversity, whos stint as Dean will be coming to an end in July. It is only fair to say that it would have been totally impossible to produce this review in its present expanded form without his constant support and encouragement. American Studies in Britain (the publication) and American Studies in Britain (the community of scholars) are in his debt.

Susan Castillo

Editor

BAAS Annual Conference – Glasgow 1999

Conference Banquet

After a reception hosted by the Lord Provost of Glasgow and the American Studies programme of the University of Wales, Swansea (BAAS conference location, 2000), there followed pipes and pomp before everyone settled to an excellent meal served in the impressive surroundings of Bute Hall. The BAAS Chair welcomed participants to the conference, announced the award of this year’s BAAS Essay Prize to Graham Thompson (Nottingham Trent University), introduced Allan Lloyd Smith of UEA who announced the award of this year’s Arthur Miller Prize to Paul Giles (Nottingham), and then introduced this year’s conference opening speaker:

Andrew Hook: Glasgow and American Studies

Andrew proposed to make the case that ‘Glasgow deserves to be recognized as the first city of American Studies’ …. a claim made with ‘a polite, peripheral, postcolonial perspecuity.’

The good sea-road between the west of Scotland and the eastern seaboard of America was a ‘material reality underpinning all those links in trade and commerce, emigration, and the export of everything from letters and books to philosophical, religious and political ideas…’ This trans-Atlantic link in the 18th century was pre-eminently focused on Glasgow and the Clyde, and while there are clear influences made by individuals, Hook drew attention to the more general influences. Graduates of Glasgow University were the bedrock of the foundation of the influential Presbyterian church in America. Glasgow educated pedagogues and philanthropists led education initiatives in America, and Glasgow University continued to receive American students who were educated and trained in Scotland before returning home, continuing to cross-fertilise American and Scottish values and influence well into the 19th century.

When John Nichol took the newly-created Chair of English Literature at Glasgow in 1862 there was an established tradition of Glasgow-America links. Nichol took an active part in promoting the Northern cause on public platforms during the American Civil War, and afterwards made an extended visit to the USA. His ambition to relocate in America was never realised, but his book American Literature, An Historical Sketch, 1620-1880 was groundbreaking. ‘For a senior British academic such as Nichol to choose to specialize in American writing at this time is simply extraordinary …. not even within America itself had a comprehensive history of American literature appeared.’ He presented American literature within the context of American history and society – and while his book did not have the impact he might have hoped for, his idea, that American literature is part of American culture, and not a mere offshoot of English literature, lies at the core of an understanding of American Studies. Along with his friend James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth, Nichol deserves recognition as a Scottish pioneer of American Studies.

Philip John Davies, De Montfort University

Andrew Hook: Glasgow and American Studies

Andrew Hook: Glasgow and American Studies

Andrew proposed to make the case that ‘Glasgow deserves to be recognized as the first city of American Studies’ …. a claim made with ‘a polite, peripheral, postcolonial perspecuity.’

The good sea-road between the west of Scotland and the eastern seaboard of America was a ‘material reality underpinning all those links in trade and commerce, emigration, and the export of everything from letters and books to philosophical, religious and political ideas…’ This trans-Atlantic link in the 18th century was pre-eminently focused on Glasgow and the Clyde, and while there are clear influences made by individuals, Hook drew attention to the more general influences. Graduates of Glasgow University were the bedrock of the foundation of the influential Presbyterian church in America. Glasgow educated pedagogues and philanthropists led education initiatives in America, and Glasgow University continued to receive American students who were educated and trained in Scotland before returning home, continuing to cross-fertilise American and Scottish values and influence well into the 19th century.

When John Nichol took the newly-created Chair of English Literature at Glasgow in 1862 there was an established tradition of Glasgow-America links. Nichol took an active part in promoting the Northern cause on public platforms during the American Civil War, and afterwards made an extended visit to the USA. His ambition to relocate in America was never realised, but his book American Literature, An Historical Sketch, 1620-1880 was groundbreaking. ‘For a senior British academic such as Nichol to choose to specialize in American writing at this time is simply extraordinary …. not even within America itself had a comprehensive history of American literature appeared.’ He presented American literature within the context of American history and society – and while his book did not have the impact he might have hoped for, his idea, that American literature is part of American culture, and not a mere offshoot of English literature, lies at the core of an understanding of American Studies. Along with his friend James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth, Nichol deserves recognition as a Scottish pioneer of American Studies.

Philip John Davies, De Montfort University

Glasgow Conference 1999 – Panel Reports:

Plenary Lecture I

Chair: Richard Gray (Essex)
Robert Gross (College of William and Mary; and Fulbright Scholar at Odense University), ‘Transnational Turn: Rediscovering American Studies in a Wider World’

In the inaugural Journal of American Studies lecture, Robert Gross considered transnationalism as the latest move to alter an interdisciplinary field that has been radically remade over the last two decades, thanks to the challenge of multiculturalism. He offered insights into American cultural politics and identity politics since the time of Thoreau; and he examined the connections between ‘the transnational turn’ and the processes of globalization in economics, communications, and culture. Examining recent developments, he linked attempts to deconstruct classic questions about national character with the projects of pluralising American culture and internationalising problems of race, ethnicityh, and gender. This sweeping and sophisticated lecture was both a persuasive summaryof the present state of the American Studies debate and a provocative contribution to its future development.

Socio-literary intersections at the turn of the century

Chair: Helen Dennis (Warwick University)
Kevin McCarron (Roehampton),'”I do hate a drunkard”: WD Howells, Temperance Narratives, and the American fin de siecle’
Lisa Ganobcsik-Wiliams (Warwick), ‘Intersections of Race and Science in the turn of the century reform literature of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Pauline Hopkins’
Bridget Bennett (Warwick), ‘Christian Science at the turn of the century: Willa Cather, Mary Baker Eddy and Mark Twain’
Janet Beer (Manchester Metropolitan) and Katherine Joslin (Western Michigan), ‘Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Civic Housekeeping: Establishing the Safe House’

Kevin McCarron argued for the importance of WD Howells in the formation of the ‘recovery narrative’, since he did not believe that alcoholism was caused by an impoverished environment, but rather that it was a failure of will, and thus a condition over which the person of good character could gain control through the exercise of moral choice. Howells’ influence on the development of the recovery narrative thus extends to the methodology of Alcoholics Anonymous. A further similarity between Howells’ fiction and AA is the use of the illusory equivalence, which in the case of AA is exemplified by the meretricious equivalence drawn between a Jamesian ‘Higher Power’ and the social amiability of recovering alcoholics.

The theme of social and moral reform was continued by Lisa Ganobcsik-Wiliams’ paper on ‘Intersections of Race and Science in the turn of the century reform literature of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Pauline Hopkins’. Gilman’s gendered concept of social evolution conceived of a progress towards racial unity, through assimilation to the ‘white world’. While Gilman believed that society had evolved to a stage where white women could take their full part in civic life, she considered that African-Americans were at a different evolutionary stage. Thus while the ‘safe house’ paradigm was appropriate for the education of women for full democratic participation, it was unsuitable for African-Americans who needed to be educated through indoctrination to assist them to ‘grow up’. By way of contrast Pauline Hopkins believed that the African-American could develop and participate fully in contemporary society and advocated their following a similar model to Gilman’s for white women only. Hopkin’s appraisal of African-American potentiality was far more optimistic than Gilman’s, but employed a similar appeal to science. She subscribed to the theory that the origins of Western civilization were located in a highly-evolved, ancient black African, Egyptian civilization, which scientists of modern times had not yet managed to emulate. Lisa concluded by suggesting that the reason why Gilman chose not to use the strategy adopted by Hopkins was not based on rational scientific argument so much as on her political judgement.

Bridget Bennett’s paper, ‘Christian Science at the turn of the century: Willa Cather, Mary Baker Eddy and Mark Twain’ argued that 19th century Spiritualism was a formative influence on Christian Science, despite identifiable diferences in the two movements, and furthermore that both occupy a significant place in the American literary imagination. Mary Baker Eddy followed a pattern common to numerous young women who engaged in spiritualism and used their powers as a means of socio-political advancement. Later she denied her roots in spiritualism, although Cather’s Life details the connection. Bridget alluded to the ways in which spiritualist ‘conversion narratives’ lent themselves to the cause of radical reform movements associated with women’s rights and abolition, despite the inherent conservatism of their content. Spiritualism helped prepare the way for Christian Science by providing challenges to Clvinism which were both doctrinal and practical; most significantly it enabled women to speak publicly and have their voices sanctioned.

The final paper was a joint presentation by Janet Beer and Katherine Joslin, entitled ‘Jane Addmas and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Civic Housekeeping: Establishing the Safe House’. This paper discussed Jane Addams’ work to create a safe house for herself – the single professional woman in inner-city Chicago – as well as for the poor and working class immigrant women who were seeking shelter from the ‘relentless and elemental forces’ of urban life. Addams’ version of civic housekeeping did as much to secure her own sense of safety as it did to shelter her neighbours and many of her ideas developed at Hull House – particularly about appropriate living space for working women – were taken up by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in both her sociological and fictional writings. Gilman promotes such spaces as both safe and health promoting; she links communitarian living with freedom from domestic drudgery and incorporates within her exposition her controversial views on courtship, eugenics, women’s education and childcare.

A number of cross connections were evident both to the panellists and the audience, but unfortunately there was insufficient time to explore them fully.

The American South

Chair: Helen Taylor (Exeter University)
Sharon Monteith (Hertfordshire), ‘”Black and White Together” in Popular Cinema: White Women and Black Men in the Civil Rights South’
Allison Graham (Memphis), ‘Elvis, Shakespeare, and Stanislavsky: Reeducating the Southerner in Postwar Popular Culture’

These two papers from collaborating scholars complemented each other well, raising important issues about the ways popular culture mediated post-Civil Rights anxieties about national, regional, social and moral education, southern whiteness, class, gender, racial ambiguity and interracial relationships.

Sharon Monteith focussed on post-Civil Rights film, especially in terms of its reperesentations of white womanhood and black masculinity. Using Richard Rorty’s argument that film, TV and fiction have ‘replaced the sermon and treatise as the principle vehicle of moral change and progress’, she examined Driving Miss Daisy (Beresford, 1989) and Love Field (Kaplan, 1991) as consolatory or compensatory liberal representations. Interracial alliances between marginalised white women and black men may offer utopian perspectives on race relations, though Monteith’s paper and the subsequent discussion debated their status as reactionary texts functioning within pre-Civil Rights discourse or as interrogative spaces for radical political possibilities. The commercial success of the more lyrical and conservative Driving Miss Daisy was contrasted with the box-office flop, and video-only UK distribution, of the more innovative Love Field, which gestured towards successful inter-racial sexual relationships.

Alison Graham identified the 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling as marking the beginning problematisation of the southern white man, who has been seen increasingly as ill-educated, uncontrolled, vulgar and criminal (uncomfortably close to definitions of southern blacks). Countering the widespread southern resistance to public education itself, mainstream Hollywood cinema produced broadsides on behalf of the nation, urging the re-education of southern white men to redeem the very notion of whiteness. The ‘hillbilly’ and ‘redneck’ were reclaimed and domesticated in TV and film characters played by Andy Griffith (celebrated and mocked as ‘white trash’, despite being a relatively sophisticated and educated actor), Paul Newman and Marlon Brando. Graham argued that Elvis Presley, who most embodied the vulgarity and criminality of working-class southern whiteness, remained unreconstructed, seen in his later years as the hick, racially-ambigous ‘White Negro’ who stumbled into the big-time and who moved uneasily between southern urban and rural, black and white. The discussion focussed on the extent to which the different periods of Elvis’ career may be collapsed into this single problematic, especially given his relationship with black music and thus black identity.

Economic Realities and the Politics of Identity

Chair: Marina Moscowitz (Glasgow)
Ruth Kamena (Independent Scholar), ‘Counting Politics or The Politics of Counting’ Dennis Nickson (Strathclyde) and Chris Warhurst (Glasgow), ‘”Little Americas”: Hotels, Americanisation and the International Economy’

This session brought the perspectives of the social sciences to bear on issues of American identity. In her timely paper on the United States Census, Ruth Kamena addressed critical issues of the decennial process of ‘counting,’ and how that counting results directly in allocations of power and money. First, Kamena examined the controversies over statistical methodology in enumerating state population figures, which in turn determine the allotment of representatives to the lower house of the United States Congress. Kamena showed examples from the fascinating advertising campaigns placed by the Census Bureau through the Ad Council, in order to encourage high response rates to census questionnaires. Second, Kamena explored the ‘race question,’ in which the racial mix of state populations, as represented by the Census, can affect the apportionment of federal funding flowing to individual states. Kamena raised the issue of, in essence, forcing persons of mixed racial heritage to identify solely with one group, for the sake of the ‘economic realities’ of government funding.

In a joint presentation, Dennis Nickson and Chris Warhurst shifted the focus from personal and racial identity to corporate identity, in their critique that ‘the epistemology of globalisation is erroneously applied to the ontology of an international economy.’ Nickson and Warhurst asserted the continuing dominance of the United States in the international economy. To support this claim, Nickson and Warhurst first examined the concept of the ‘transnational corporation’ (TNC) and showed that nine of the ten top firms in the world are in fact American companies, with the top three being Microsoft, General Electric and Exxon. Then, Nickson and Warhurst developed a case study of the hotel industry, in which they examined not only the dominance of American firms, but also the increasing adoption of standardized services and decor by leading European hotel chains, in order to compete with the perceived American model. The question and comment session raised such issues as the uses of marketing in both the census-taking and ‘Americanising’ processes and the forms of resistance to these political and economic events.

Translantic Cultural Exchanges

Chair: Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (University of Edinburgh)
Jack Pole (Oxford), ‘The American Revolution and the Construction of Sovereignty’
Julie Flavell (Dundee), ‘Reconstructing the Typical American Colonist in London in the Late Colonial Period’
Tom Humphrey (Cleveland State), ‘”The Mask of Grins and Lies”: Deference and the American Revolution in New York’s Hudson Valley’

Former Princeton Graduate Cricket Club captain Jack Pole (Oxford) opened the session by addressing the theme, ‘The American revolution and the Construction of Sovereignty.’ Drawing on his forthcoming edition of ‘The Federalist’, Pole explored some of the sources upon which the authors of the Papers drew, ranging from the Aegean League to Bodin. Showing himself to be a master of the limited overs game, he finished in an elegantly constructed fifteen minutes.

Former Scottish Universities swimming representative Julie Flavell (Dundee) contributed next, with a discourse entitled ‘Reconstructing the Typical American Colonist in London in the Late Colonial Period’. The American colonists in London were ‘well-born’ and mingled without trace of distinctive identity with the English upper crust – in contrast, for example, to the Scots, who gathered in their own coffee houses. Nevertheless, the English stereotyped the Americans in the abstract as exploitative planters. Will Kaufman (Central Lancashire) now spoke on ‘The American Sectional Crisis in the British Reviews and Magazines’. The controversy over the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska bill was a turning point for British reporting on the sectional crisis. From then on, the periodicals took an intensive and diversified interest and adopted stances that changed little once the Civil War had broken out.

The concluding speaker was Tom Humphrey (Cleveland State). Humphrey’s study of Livingston Manor in the Hudson Valley indicated that, between 1700 and 1766, tenants’ deference led them to vote for the manor lord or his agent in elections for the colonial assembly. But this changed in 1767. Patterns of deference nevertheless remained, because the landlord-tenant relationship remained unequal, if symbiotic. The papers stimulated a lively debate that would have continued long beyond the twenty minutes allowed.

Creating, Interpreting and Defending Identities: Law, Gender and Settlement

Chair: Simon Newman (Glasgow University)
Bruce Dorsey (Swarthmore), ‘The Gendered Meanings of African Colonization for Black and White Americans During the Antebellum Years’
Martha Hodes (New York), ‘Beyond Mission and Empire: Outsiders in the British West Indies’
John Weiss (London), ‘The Florida Negroes and the Admirals: Forbes v Cochrane & Cockburn 1824 revisited’
Laura Edwards (UCLA), ‘Bodies, Violence and Citizenship in the Antebellum US South’

In this session four scholars explored various aspects of race in ninteenth-century America in a coherent and illumination panel. Bruce Dorsey spoke about his research into the ways that gender affected Northern reformers’ responses to slavery, concluding that white rhetoric described colonization in terms of sexual conquest.

In the second paper, Martha Hodes examined the enslaved population of Grand Caymen Island, a non-plantation Caribbean British colonym using the discrete narratives of British officials, Scottish missionaries and a white New England woman, illustrating how their very different perspectives demonstrate a breadth of perspective that says much about the diversity of the Atlantic World as played out in one tiny island.

John McNish Weiss presented his research into the case of Forbes v Cochrane & Cockburn (1824), which dealt with the slaves of a British citizen in East Florida who had secured their liberty by running away to British forces during the War of 1812. His paper demonstrated how the issues of slavery and liberty were played out through military, maritime and common law.

Laura Edwards analysed how violent acts during Reconstruction illustrated how particular changes in law and governance in the nineteenth-century South gave rights physical form and made the body itself a political site. Thus control over the body was linked to definitions of citizenship and the structure of the polity, thereby demonstrating how individual acts were connected to larger structures of governance. This was a panel of the very highest quality, which spurred critical discussion throughout the following days of the conference.

Plenary Session II

Chair: Philip John Davies (De Montfort University)
Professor Charles O Jones (University of Wisconsin at Madison; Olin Visiting Professor, Nuffield College, Oxford), ‘Clinton and Congress: Risk, Restoration and Re-election’

Chuck Jones, former President of the American Political Science Association, and leading analyst of the modern presidency, turned his attention to the administration led by Bill Clinton. Jones identifies Clinton as the president of the permanent campaign – an energetic and enthusiastic participant who campaigns vigorously not just for office, but also as a strategy for governing. In a political system separated not only by constitutional structure, but also by the electorate’s consistent habit in the last generation of voting for executive and legislature from different political parties, the permanent campaign focused on policy serves to close the gaps in the attempt to progress policy proposals to final legislation.

In 1992 Clinton had no coattails, only 43 per cent of the vote, and no national crisis on which to build a mandate for change, yet this was the first US national government unified by political party since the late 1970s, so expectations were high. Clinton’s room for manoeuvre was defined by the lasting context of previous administrations – accumulated debts from Johnson to Reagan. A mixed record in his first congressional term culminated in the Republican victories of 1994, and in the years thereafter the permanent campaign became increasingly relevant. The Republicans claimed an ideological mandate from their 1994 victory – the rhetoric was strident – and President Clinton moved to the centre on budgetary and policy matters, concentrating on small initiatives that have substantial public resonance.

Clinton, claims Jones, using great skill, constant discussion and negotiation, and considerable work, developed the ability to Voice policy based a the caring attitude on day-to-day issues. The 1996 acceptance speech in Chicago was a prime example of the overlap between this approach to campaigning in elections as well as government. After re-election Clinton built carefully towards his 1998 State of the Union address, only to be derailed by the Lewinsky revelations. His campaign contributed to his job approval remaining high, a fact not powerful enough to sway Congress, but simultaneously leaving Congress without the strength to progress an alternative agenda.

Regardless of the embarrassments of Clinton’s late period in office, he has shown how a president can use the permanent campaign in a policy process that is increasingly public and participatory. This strategy has involved a significant increase in the use of polls, a greater role for consultants, an increasing use of campaign-style tactics, sophisticated use of communications to reach beyond the White House press corps, advertising campaigns on major policy matters, and greater public communications by Members of Congress on policy issues. Clinton’s ability to absorb, identify and articulate public policy in this changing environment make him a model of this new president, showing even more effectiveness when the Republicans held Congress than when his own party allies were in power. The election of 2000 could initiate a period of complex combinations of party power in Washington, in which the skills of the permanent campaign will be especially significant.

American Women’s Cultures

Chair: R. J. Ellis (Nottingham Trent)
Judie Newman (Newcastle), ‘Stowe’s Sunny Memories of Highland Slavery’
Danielle Ramsay (Newcastle), ‘Semantic Passing’
Celeste-Marie Bernier (Newcastle), ‘Diverse Black Narrative Form in Pauline E. Hopkins’ Topsy Templeton (1916)’
Lindsay Traub (Lucy Cavendish college, Cambridge) ‘The Atlantic Monthly – Cradle of Talent’
Lisa Merrill (Hofstra University), ‘Charlotte Cushman’s Performance of Nationality, Sexuality and Gender on the Nineteenth-Century Stage’

Judie Newman kicked off this packed, absorbing session in lively fashion with a trick question: which passage comes from Stowe: (A) ‘counting the natives and their slaves and prey, [they] disposed without scruple of them and all that they had, reckless of the wrongs and misery they inflicted’; or (B) ‘An almost sublime instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggles of advancing civilization’. The gradualist proposition contained in the second quote is Stowe’s, taken from her Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, whereas the first is taken from M’Leod’s angry riposte, Gloomy Memories in the Highlands of Scotland – an account of the forced clearance of the Naver valley in the Scottish Highlands. M’Leod rebuts Stowe point by point, but Stowe would later repeat her ‘couleur de rose’ version, even when confronted with counter-evidences. Newman’s question was, why? – since Stowe’s inaccuracies provided easy ammunition to her critics, allowing them to impugn generally her authenticity. Newman’s claim was that Stowe’s whitewash was done expressly. The considerable parallels between slavery and the clearances (forced transportation, lack of legal protection, enforced immorality, and docility under oppression) meant that ‘equalizing comparisons’ could beckon, and so play straight into the hands of Abolition’s opponents. Indeed, M’Leod suggestion that were slaves to be offered the lot of Highlanders they would opt to remain slaves opens the door wide for Southern apologists. So Stowe preferred stonewalling to equalising comparisons.

Danielle Ramsay used the two surviving versions of Sojourner Truth’s speech to the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio to establish a critique of Henry Louis Gates’ theory of ‘signifyin[g]’. The version best remembered is the one written out by Frances D. Gage, twelve years later, centering on the chorus, ‘And ain’t I a woman?’. The lesser-known one appeared at the time of the speech, in the Anti-Slavery Bugle. Ramsay’s point was that the Gage version enjoys currency because, in the words of one black feminist, it ‘speaks the truth’. Ramsay wanted to unpack the inherent ironies in this (truth/Truth), and use these to explore how Gates, in explaining how ‘signifyin[g]’ works, has it both ways, seeing ‘signifyin[g]’ as the artful form of African American writers but also as ‘specific uses of literary language’ – the latter contradictorily allowing for a form of ‘semantic passing’, where white writers (like Gage) could ‘signify’ in a way going far beyond racist parody: ceasing to reading Truth’s ‘speech’ simply as ‘her’ words plays havoc with singular, univocal notions of truth.

Celeste-Marie Bernier argued that Pauline E. Hopkins re/invented a black feminist identity and a flexible narrative form in which to articulate it. Topsy Templeton opens up an experimental critical dialogue with her earlier writing (particularly Of One Blood), upsetting socially endorsed hierarchies of gender, race and caste, undermining the generic constructions of black and black female identity found in domestic fiction and abolitionist rhetoric, and exploring how the conflation of white assumptions about black male and female physicality in the metonymic equation of rape and lynching exposes their ideological underpinnings. Bernier argued that the way Hopkins is repeatedly concerned to write Topsy’s experience into semantic and syntactic gaps in white discourse illuminates Hopkins’ meta-textual agenda. So, when Sophronia determines to rear Topsy ‘as an example of what may be done by environment and moral uplift’ these sentiments are surgically undercut by her reflection that this ‘adventure … will undoubtedly increase sales of my book’. This sort of self-reflexive procedure establishes why, in Topsy’s words, ‘A colored person has just got to fight her way along in this world’ – and Ramsay urged us to observe how this fighting black has been silently identified as female.

Lindsey Traub began by noting how, in Henry James’ words, ‘everybody’ read The Atlantic. It therefore seems essential to consider not only who ‘everybody’ was (the young Boston brahmins and their friends and relations) but also what it was they read. What was read was often by women, and often far from conformist. In particular, the fiction of Harriet Prescott, Elizabeth Stoddard, Louisa Alcott and Gail Hamilton shows for a period (January 1860 to April 1861), when James Russell Lowell was succeeded by J.T. Fields, a fluidity of genre and an innovatoriness that cumulatively unsettled conventional assumptions. When in April 1861 Rebecca Harding Davis’ ‘Life in the Iron Mills’ was brought out, the stage was already well set for the way this story goes well beyond ‘realism’ to become, also, a refection upon women and their position: ‘look at that [sculptured] woman’s face! It asks questions of God and says, ‘I have a right to know”. Under Fields’ editing, these writers manipulated genre to find new ways of relating to their readers’ expectations, before William Dean Howells arrived to end the Atlantic’s ‘good season’.

Finally, Lisa Merrill charted the enthusiastic reception of the American actor, Charlotte Cushman, in Britain in the eighteen-forties, and how her performances called into question beliefs about gender, sexuality, nationality and power. Skillfully incorporating slides into her discussion, to show how representations of Cushman’s acting treated with her transgressiveness (most famously, by taking on the role of Romeo opposite her sister, Susan Cushman), Merrill explored how the masculinity of Cushman’s appearance, performances and roles helped cement in place an idea that to be masculine as a woman could surpass denigatory connotations to embrace ideas of seriousness, intellect, force, achievement and status. Genius was one particular label that Cushman recurrently secured in critical receptions of her vehement emotional expressiveness. What could and could not pass for female acting was being redefined by such enthusiasm for her stage-performances. This reception contrasted with that of Edwin Forrest, whose ‘manliness’ was seen as uncouthly American beside her self-contained passionateness, which remained commensurate with British ideas of dignified stalwartness, whilst also being seen as American in its forcefulness.

Documenting Identity in the American Film

Chair: Douglas Tallack (Nottingham)
Kris Jozajtis (Stirling), ‘”The Birth of a Nation”: Event in American Religious History’
Margaret Roberts (Exeter), ‘Masculinity and Sexuality in the films of Sidney Poitier’
Catherine Griggs (Eckerd), ‘American Identity and the Primitive in Early Documentary Film: Grass‘

The three papers in this session did not fit together particularly well but, in their own terms, addressed different aspects of American identity. Kris Jozajtis (Stirling) used Robert Bellah’s notion of ‘civil religion’ and, more recently, Stewart Hoover’s work on religion, media and culture to argue that D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation is ‘an important turning point within the history of American civil religion.’ Mostly, Jozajtis offered a contextual interpretation and this subsequently provoked questions on reception which were also addressed to Margaret Roberts’ paper. Jozajtis did include a short analysis of the framing mechanism in Birth of a Nation, though its subtlety would have been enhanced had a clip been shown.

Margaret Roberts (Exeter) had clips for her paper on masculinity and sexuality in Sidney Poitier’s films but did not have time to show them. In her case it was the theoretical vocabulary, arising from Laura Mulvey’s essay on the gaze which needed visually illustrating. Certainly it is a neat idea to put Poitier’s image alongside Mulvey and also alongside theorists of performance but the strengths of Roberts’s paper and the way out of the trap of circling round the critical debate trying to touch every base lay in the interesting treatment of Duel at Diablo and Paris Blues.

Unfortunately Catherine Griggs (Eckerd College) could not attend. Her paper, ‘American Identity and the Primitive in early Documentary,’ was read by Margaret Devine (Glasgow), who also showed an extract from Grass, a product of the collaboration between Marguerite Harrison, Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack. The use of the film as a counterpoint to the frontier thesis and other strenuous American texts came across well but, quite understandably, the question session could not encompass this paper. For various reasons and through no one’s individual fault this was not an entirely satisfactory session even though the research being presented has plenty of potential.

Labyrinths of Identity

Chair: Candida Hepworth (University of Wales, Swansea)
Andrea Dlaska (Warwick), ‘Imperial Fantasies and American Identities in Bharati Mukherjee’s Leave It To Me
Barbara Shaw-Perry (Birmingham), ‘Ethnic and Gender Performance in Borderland Literature: A Case Study of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Line of the Sun
Helen Oakley (Nottingham), ‘Reading the Labyrinth: the intertextuality of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo
Angela Groth (University of Kent at Canterbury), ‘The Precession of Hawthorne’

At first sight rather out of place on this panel, Angela Groth’s discussion of ‘The Precession of Hawthorne’ actually provided the framework for this session’s contemplation of the dynamics of identity formation, arguing for a consideration of the manner in which one is manufactured into a personage. Taking the career of Nathaniel Hawthorne as her example, Groth argued that this author’s production was specifically engineered in order to fill a gap in the literary marketplace. In collusion with the publisher James T. Fields, Hawthorne conspired to sell both his work and himself as a very particular commodity. Taking Baudrillard’s suggestion in Simulations that, in time, reality comes to be replaced by appearance, Hathorne – now Hawthorne – connoted not so much the substance as the image.

Barbara Shaw-Perry again insisted upon the necessity of understanding identity as performance in arguing the case that Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Line of The Sun shows ethnicity and gender both to be ongoing processes of invention. In a world which prefers to deal with stable signifiers. However, according to which we are seen as one thing or another, this stable identity – in itself performative – is shown always to to force the Puerto Rican immigrant into the position of ‘other’. He or she, the novel claimed, was granted a degree of acceptance only if they ‘performed’ in a manner compliant with American norms. For Marisol, then, the novel’s narrator, the challenge becomes one of negotiating between the two cultures, a process of identity formation which is, even at the novel’s end, without closure.

The challenge of reinterpreting oneself in the face of the United States’ representation of the ethnic ‘other’ similarly concerned

Nation, Sentiment and Spirituality

Chair: Kasia Boddy (University College London)
Glenn Hendler (Notre Dame), ‘Martin Delaney’s Sentimental Black Nationalism’
Peter Coviello (Bowdoin), ‘The Bonds of Sane Affection: Intimacy and Nationality in the American Renaissance’
Sophia Taylor (Nottingham, ‘Covenants and Judgements: Ellen Glasgow’s Calvinist Fiction’
Claire Keyes (Salem State), ‘Of Religion and Science: The Poetry of Pattiann Rogers’

Four papers complimented each other in a busy session which still allowed time for some fruitful discussion. Glenn Hendler began by considering the notion of sentiment in Martin Delaney’s thought – looking particularly at his engagement with the Negro Convention movement and conflict with Frederick Douglass (which led to his forming a breakaway emigrationist faction), his attendance at the 1860 Statistical Congress and his novel, Black. Delaney argued that since blacks would always be a statistical minority in the US, full civil and political rights would never be granted. Delaney frequently draws on a familial sentimental discourse, essentially to maintain that ‘if the United States has been a bad mother . . . her children’s love can be displaced onto one who loves them better’.

Next to speak was Peter Coviello who noted the prevalence of what he called ‘anti-state nationalism’ in a range of antebellum writers; in particular, Whitman. The problem which these writers had to address, Coviello argued, is ‘if the state fails so utterly to account for . . . true ‘American-ness’, of what, exactly, is nationality made?’ For Whitman, the problem of nationality is how it explains the intimate relation of people unknown to each other. The notion of an American (white) ‘race’ was Whitman’s first way of accounting for the connection; in later work, desire becomes the dominant model of anonymous attachment. Coviello concluded that ‘a shift in emphasis from the problem of the subject to the problem of relation – from affiliation to identity’, would benefit American Studies more generally.

Sophia Taylor then brought us into the twentieth century with a paper on Ellen Glasgow. Although Glasgow rejected Calvinism at an early age, three of her novels, The Deliverance (1904), Barren Ground (1925) and Vein of Iron (1953) explore her heritage. In particular the Calvinist aesthetic of binary opposites enabled Glasgow to explore questions of selfhood and community, heredity and environment, in the changing modern world.

Finally Claire Keynes came right up to date with a paper on the poetry of Pattiann Rogers, a poetry which engages fully with modern science to find within it possibilities for a new spirituality. Using vocabulary drawn from cosmology, geology, physics and biology, Rogers envisages a notion of divinity emerging from a continuously changing interaction with the natural world.

Identification of the Self in 19th and early 20th Century Writing

Chair: Lindsey Traub (Cambridge)
Anne-Marie Trudgill (Manchester Metropolitan), ‘Reflections of the Female Self in the writing of Elizabeth Stoddard’
Shirley Foster (University of Sheffield), ‘Nation and Identity: the travel writings of Catherine Maria Sedgewick and Harriet Beecher Stowe’
Karen Wilkinson (Manchester Metropolitan), ‘Self-Reliance in the novels of Susan Warner’
Bert Bender (Arizona State University), ‘Willa Cather’s contribution to the Eclipse of Darwinism’

Four diverse and interesting papers were given drawing on a range of genres but all, coincidentally, by women writers.

Anne-Marie Trudgill (Manchester Metropolitan) discussed Elizabeth Stoddard’s deployment and subversion of a range of tropes and both literary and social conventions in constructing female identities rich in erotic self-awareness and self-determination. Although widely read on publication, The Morgesons (1862) and her other novels did not achieve lasting popularity – now republished by Penguin, perhaps Stoddard’s time has come at last.

Shirley Foster (Sheffield University) drew attention to subtle twists in the process of self-definition in the writing of Catherine Maria Sedgewick and Harriet Beecher Stowe in response to their travels in England. Both, already established critics of their society, acknowledged cultural difference and similarity by moving between direct, reflective comment and delighted self-irony: exploring while subsuming the ambivalence of the American abroad.

Karen Wilkinson (Manchester Metropolitan) took up the problematic notion of self-reliance for mid-nineteenth century women through the aptly named Miss Fortune Emerson, in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World. While advice books frequently counselled acquiring a ‘means of self-sustenance and self-protection’, Warner expresses clear ambivalence about spiritual independence, for which Emerson himself warned ‘a man must be a non-conformist’. Only in the late 1860s did Warner propose a heroine, in her ‘Daisy’ trilogy, whose character is shaped by resistence and self-determination.

Finally, Bert Bender from Arizona State University, brought the discussion towards and into the twentieth century by exploring the development of Willa Cather’s relation to Darwinism and more particularly to Henri Bergson’s ideas of creative evolution and the ‘elan vital’.

A lively and focussed discussion followed with special interest in the processes and imagery of ‘reflection’ in a wide variety of 19th century texts in the construction and identification of identity and the self.

How the West Got Wild: American Media and Frontier Violence

Chair: Jo Ann Manfra (Worcester)
Robert R. Dykstra (State University of New York at Albany), ‘Configuring Dodge City: Homicide, Moral Discourse, and Cultural Identity’
Michael A. Bellesiles (Emory University), ‘History is not a Film: The Influence of Westerns on Historical Scholarship’

Robert Dykstra pointed out that frontier Dodge City, Kansas, is currently a metaphor, both in the United States and elsewhere, for homicide, civic anarchy, and moral depravity. Yet, the historic village, a famous cattle town from 1876 through 1885, actually suffered only fifteen adult homicides during that period. What, Dykstra asked, led to the development of the received cultural image? His answer: Dodge City is and always has been a media creation in which gun violence was enormously exaggerated. By the late 1870s the town was already experiencing national attention, some of it self-generated. In the twentieth century popular interest revived. During the Depression, Dodge began advertising itself as a tourist attraction; in 1939 Hollywood began to exploit the locale; and from the 1950s to mid-1970s three television serials definitively inserted an imaginary Dodge City into the public consciousness. The specific metaphor emerged during the Vietnam War, and was employed to designate any dangerous place.

Michael Bellesiles began by noting that the United States has the highest rate of interpersonal homicide in the world. He argued that, despite published research to the contrary, historians and other scholars continue to assert that the reason is America’s violent frontier heritage. But in making this culturally broad casual linkage they often generalize not from historical materials, but from Hollywood films that they accept as accurate representations of past reality. Such assertions were magnified as Hollywood Westerns themselves became more violent in the 1960s, culminating in Sam Peckinpah’s Vietnam-inspired The Wild Bunch (1969). Professor Bellesiles showed videotaped excerpts from this and George Steven’s Shane (1953) to illustrate his point.

A lively discussion prompted by questions from the audience of about thirty persons followed the presentations.

(Post)Modern Textual Economies

Chair: Richard Hinchcliffe (Central Lancashire)
Brian Jarvis (Loughborough), ‘The Book of Daniel: Doctorow’s Discipline and Punish?’
Julian Crockford (Sheffield), ‘Walter Benn Michaels and the (postmodern) Logic of the The Gold Standard’
Martyn Bone (Nottingham), ‘The Post-Southern “Sense of Place” in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter‘

This involving session had speakers all deeply engaged in examining three systems of postmodern expression, namely punishment, money, and space. Brian Jarvis’s paper expertly delineated the relationship between punishment and capital as seen through E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Brian argued that Doctorow’s novel sees the visibility of state discipline and the importance of punishment as spectacle as crucial to capitalist hegemony during the cold war. The execution of the Rosenbergs, the novel’s metaphorical use of electricity and Foucault’s observation that plague allows the state to impose draconian measures of control all contributed to a richly informative paper. Its keynote was that Doctorow got it right and Foucault got it wrong in that the latter failed to acknowledge the visibility of punishment provided by the mass media in modern times.

Julian Crockford looked at the conceptualization and representation of money in Walter Benn Michaels’ The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Asking if the impossibility of referential stability that post-structuralism describes can be linked to structures found in money, Julian noted how Michaels describes the capacity of capital to determine reality through economic definition. Materiality itself becomes questioned by the emptiness of abstract money shorn of its connection to the weight of stored gold bullion. A disturbing but very interesting examination of the power of money.

Real estate space and post-Southern geographic sensibility was Martyn Bone’s focus, examining Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter. The paper skilfully exploited the sense of place found in the characters of both novels and showed how such awarenesses contribute to the idea of the post-South. In particular, Martyn’s paper highlighted the notion of Southern characters being fascinated or disturbed by an ‘absence of place’ found in the industrial north.

Popular Consciousness and Political Thought

Chair: Philip John Davies (De Montfort University)
Brendan McConville (State University of New York, Binghamton), ‘Oliver’s Last Campaign’
Tim Milford (Harvard University), ‘John Gardiner, liberalism, and the versatile elite’
Zoltan Vajda (Jozsef Atilla University, Hungary), ‘The Idea of Progress in John C. Calhoun’s Political Thought’
Ian Margeson (Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education), ‘William Smith and his Miranian Vision’

Brendan McConville (State University of New York, Binghamton) presented a paper examining the changing symbolic significance of Oliver Cromwell in late 18th century America. The written and oral memory of Cromwell in the 1700s was significant, and there is much reference to him in American print culture. Early eighteenth century references were generally critical and disparaging. Cromwell was seen as too militant and disorderly, but events in American changed the context and both memories and analysis underwent a revision from which Cromwell emerged a republican hero, and symbolic protector on American ideas of rights, liberty and property. The revision affected all levels of American thought, from serious theoretical support from the President of Yale to many calls for the establishment of a public holiday on the Lord Protector’s birthday. The calls faded, and the 19th century growth of Irish-American impact on politics undermined any lasting fashion for lauding Cromwell.

Tim Milford (American Studies programme, Harvard University), followed the pragmatic and shifting career of a late 18th century lawyer in his paper ‘John Gardiner, liberalism and the versatile elite’. Gardiner was a trans-Atlantic character, as were many of the elite of this period. Born in Massachusetts he travelled to Glasgow to train, and emerged a qualified lawyer. An acquaintance of John Wilkes, Gardiner gained experience as a circuit lawyer in Wales, providing a foundation of case knowledge that would serve him well in later work in St Kitts, and then back in Massachusetts. Gardiner served with equal felicity the English, French and American polities, exercising the authority of the king at one point, but having the versatility to promote himself on his successful return to Massachusetts as a long-standing promoter of American freedom.

In ‘The Idea of Progress in John C. Calhoun’s Political Thought’, Zoltan Vajda (Institute of English and American Studies, Jozsef Atilla University, Szeged, Hungary) discussed Calhoun’s understanding of the interrelationship between progress, inequality and government. Bringing together an analysis of Calhoun’s ideas of progress expressed in A Disquisition on Government, and applying this to his positions on slavery and Mexicans, Vajda concluded that the Calhoun’s idea of progress can act as a foundation for racist assertions, tying entitlement to liberty to innate intellectual and moral capacities, which were then defined as racially and ethnically differentiated.

Concluding this international panel, Ian Margeson (Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education) examined the visions of a less well-known 18th century thinker and activist, William Smith. Aberdeen-born Smith moved to America in the 1740s, rising to prominence as a educationalist in Philadelphia. As a moderate Loyalist he wrote a series of letters published over the pseudonym ‘Cato’ during March and April 1776, but he had founded the intellectual pursuit of his ideas in the utopian treatise A General Idea of the College of Mirania. The same ideas underpinned his teaching and encouragement of intellectual, social and artistic development in Philadelphia. He fostered majored talents in his circle, but also progressed the ideas ‘ordered progress’ in America.

The four papers and the following discussion provided stimulating insights into the thinkers and the competing political ideas of the early American nation.

Culture and Character in American Studies

Chair: Susan Castillo (Glasgow University)
Ron Bush (Oxford), ‘Philip Roth, Cultural Property, Political Correctness, and Censorship’
Donald E Pease Jr (Dartmouth), ‘American Studies into Cultural Studies: Paradigms and Paradoxes’
Paul Giles (Nottingham), ‘British American Studies and American American Studies’
Michael Barton (Pennsylvania), ‘The Measure of Americans: New Approaches to the Studey of National Character’

In a well-attended session, participants came to grips with the complex question of American national identity. Ron Bush, in a lucid paper titled ‘Philip Roth, Cultural Property, Political Correctness, and Censorship’, dealt with the thorny issue of cultural property and the rights of ethnic groups to censor the cultural productions of individuals belonging to such groups, illustrating his points with the example of Philip Roth.

Donald Pease, in ‘American Studies into Cultural Studies: Paradigms and Paradoxes’, drawing on Gene Wise’s concept of paradigm dramas, provided a stimulating discussion of the ways American Studies paradigms change and evolve, as well as the existence of epistemological categories that attempt to suppress the emergence of new paradigms. A particular case in point is the recent move toward concepts of hybridity and borderlands, in contrast to the reductive either-or character of multicuralism.

Paul Giles, in an articulate and thought-provoking paper titled ‘British American Studies and American American Studies’, went on to analyze the implications of the push toward globalization for the re-mapping or re-situating of American Studies, focusing on the consequences of this for American Studies in the United Kingdom.

Finally, shifting to the perspective of the social sciences Michael Barton, in ‘The Measure of Americans: New Approaches to the Study of National Character’, provided a highly illuminating (and amusing!) overview of more quantitative studies of American character, and of how Americans see themselves. A lively (though all too brief) discussion followed.

Conservation and Catastrophe

Chair: David Seed (Liverpool)
Karen Wills (Bristol), ‘The Changing Nature of Yellowstone Park’
John Wills (Bristol), ‘Diablo Canyon, California: A Nuclear Wilderness Park?’
David Ingram (Brunel), ‘Free Willy and the Hollywood Conservationist Movie’

Karen Wills first outlined the history of the Yellowstone National Park, the first in the USA, and identified a tension between preservation and contrivance. The park managers constantly shaped and ‘improved on’ Nature. In the 1930s a policy change occurred shifting the emphasis from entertainment to education. This redefinition was symbolized by the decision to reintroduce wolves, extinct since 1926.

John Wills next discussed the controversy surrounding the decision by Pacific Gas to construct nuclear installations in Diablo Canyon. Where the nuclear establishment promoted reassuring garden images, the opposition drew on fears of nuclear catastrophe, developing a trail culture around the area. The controversy demonstrated a complex interrelation between military-industrial facilities and the natural landscape.

Lastly, David Ingram examined the anthropomophizing strategies in the film Free Willy, which he read as a redemptive narrative both for the boy protagonist and the humanized whale. The film was set in the context of representations of wild animals and all three papers connected through the importance of culturally mediating imagery.

The Racial Dilemma: War, Religion, Film and Athletics

Chair: Rebecca Starr (Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education)
Joel Helfrich (Glasgow), ‘Tom Molineaux: The Life and Career of an African-American Boxer’
Mark Newman (Derby), ‘Race, Religions and Jim Crow: White Southern Baptists and the Defence of Segregation during the Civil Rights Movement’

George Mikes (How to be an Alien) has the following logic to offer. ‘The French say life is a game. The English say that cricket is a game.’ His incomplete theorem , that the game and life are the same, is left for human reason to grasp. Being a historian is something like being an alien. We stand on the outside — looking at the familiar as though never before seen — asking new questions, finding new patterns. Sport is one such familiar arena, but as we learned from Joel Helfrich’s paper (‘Tom Molineaux: The Life and Career of an African-American Boxer’) , sport seen through the lens of social history can open exciting new perspectives on racial and national identities. Born into slavery in South Carolina in 1784, Tom Molineaux exchanged a talent for bare knuckled fighting , first for his freedom, and then for a career in professional boxing in New York and finally in Great Britain. Molineaux’s challenge to England’s [white] heavyweight champion of the day, aroused heated feelings of national and racial pride in Britain’s sporting public, whose rhetorical flourishes Helfrich is tracing in newspapers, publicity posters and a variety of off beat sources. Equally important, Molineax’s pre-bout challenge speeches, a hype formula still familiar in the boxing world, may reveal something about the African- American’s own view of his dilemma, a contender for the prize in a microcosmic world, where rules imitate laws and penalties and rewards imitate judgements Ñ in short , reflections (or refractions) of justice.

Expanding on the theme of race and nation, Mark Newman’s paper (‘Race, Religions and Jim Crow: White Southern Baptists and the Defence of Segregation during the Civil Rights Movement’) on Southern Baptist’s dilemma in the segregation debates of the 1950s and 1960s, offered a thoughtful analysis of religious leader’s use of scripture as a guide to interpreting government’s policy on racial integration. (Even preachers were not immune to mixing scripture and sports metaphors in Dixie, the heartland of American football, where one described Washington’s pro-integration policy as ‘fumbling the ball in God’s plan’). The autonomous nature of each Baptist congregation permits the historian to penetrate local views on ideas about race and national allegiance. Both these papers suggested original methods and sources for the study of ideas about identity, provoking a lively and developed discussion from those attending.

The Transmission of Cultures

Chair: Marina Moskowitz (Glasgow)
Paul Grainge (Nottingham), ‘Time’s Past in the Present: nostalgia and the black and white image’
Jeffrey S. Miller (Augustana), ‘English Channels: British Television, American Culture and the Myth of Cultural Imperialism, 1969-1976’
Anna Notaro (Nottingham), ‘Visions of the Future in the American Modernist Metropolis’

This session brought together three excellent papers focusing on representations of American culture in a variety of media. Paul Grainge, in his presentation which last year won the BAAS Essay Prize, set out to discuss the concept of nostalgia, not, as he said, ‘as a mood, but as a mode.’ He explored the use of black and white imagery on the covers of Time magazine, explaining that when the magazine as a whole went to full color in 1989, the use of black and white acquired a status it had not earlier had. Grainge presented readings of cover images of Princess Diana, President Clinton, race relations around the time of the Los Angeles riots, and the business dealings of Apple and Microsoft to prove his thesis that while ‘color reports, black and white chronicles’ and adds the authority of history to whatever is depicted.

Jeffrey Miller followed with a discussion of American borrowings from British television in the 1970s. Miller discussed the large influence, ranging from the wholesale importation of British shows, such as New York’s WOR presenting a week of wildly popular programs from Thames Television to celebrate the Bicentennial in 1976 to the more subtle appropriation of British series remade into American situation comedies. Miller discussed the politics of transforming British shows such as Till Death Do Us Part and Steptoe and Son into the now classic American shows created by Norman Lear, All in the Family and Sanford and Son. While these programs originally borrowed not only the concept but actual scripts from their British models, Miller also discussed the transmission of concepts such as the comedy sketch show and the mini-series. With these examples, Miller successfully challenged the often assumed dominance and ‘imperialism’ of American television.

Anna Notaro then discussed the imagery of modernist architecture in both drawing and film. Notaro explored the ways in which film could serve as both an exaggeration of modernist architecture and as a way to educate the public about its common features, such as extreme verticality. By showing the futurist urban vision in films such as Metropolis (1926) and Just Imagine (1930), filmmakers and set designers created a desire for modernist architecture. Cinema was a place where the most visionary ideas of architects could be carried out in a more dynamic form than drawings; film added the experience of moving through space and time inherent to the modern metropolis. A lively discussion period followed, in which comparisons between the various media, and their contemporary implications, were discussed.

BAAS Postgraduate Meeting

Chairs: Richard Hinchcliffe & Karen Wilkinson (Postgraduate Representatives)

Douglas Tallack attended the meeting and suggested a number of ways in which postgraduates could obtain funding to continue research. He also offered advice with regard to preparing for the job market and suggested ways in which postgraduates could increase their profile through presenting conference papers at both postgraduate conferences and at full conferences such as the BAAS annual conference. In addition, he suggested that it was important for postgraduates to gain some teaching and administrative experience, and gave examples of ways in which his own department at Nottingham provided forums for postgraduates to gain this experience as well as discussing their work within research groups.

Richard Hinchcliffe and Karen Wilkinson reported on their first year as members of the BAAS Executive Committee and highlighted the fact that almost every issue brought to the Committee had some input from each of the postgraduates in their roles on the Development and Conferences sub-committees. Richard emphasised the importance of postgraduates taking part in the OVERhere postgraduate mini conference and reported on the success of the last conference held at Sussex in December. In addition, postgraduates were made aware of the BAAS website and in particular the postgraduate pages. Philip Davies, reported that it was hoped that within the near future the website would have its own domain.

Amongst other issues raised at the meeting, was the proposal going before the AGM, that postgraduate subscriptions to BAAS would be increased to £10 a year, and an announcement was made concerning the possible formation of a Scottish Association.

Race, class and politics in African-American Narratives

Chair: Karen Wilkinson (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Fiona Le Brun (Keele), ‘Honouring the Difficult: Alice Walker’s Activism in Fiction and Film’
Ann Bomberger (Bilkent), ‘Tidying Class and Racial Boundaries: Representations of Domestic Service’
Ikram Elsherif (Royal Holloway), ‘Paradise: Toni Morrison’s Development of an Anti-Racist Attitude’
Maria Balshaw (Birmingham), ‘”There is only one Frye Street” All the world is there’, Geographies of Racial Disaffection in the Writings of Marita Bonner

In this session, panellists provided an interesting and thought provoking view of representations of race and class in African American narratives.

Fiona Le Brun considered the novel Possessing the Secret of Joy in light of Walker’s experiences in film media. In particular she examined the novel in relation to Walker’s documentary film journal Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women in which she depicts her journey to Africa as an advocate for the end to the practice of female genital mutilation. Le Brun argued that in both novel and journal, Walker can be seen to present a ‘strategic lie’ in her construction of an alternative history of black maternal genealogical inheritance, deployed as an instrumental means of healing an historical wound. Le Brun found that Walker’s reliance upon images which transcend the limits of embodied subjectivity (in particular her obsession with reincarnation, mysticism and pantheistic experiences) produce complex methodological conflicts in her writing. Le Brun traced the origin of such conflict in the dichotomous representations of the body in the novel and journal, and concluded that out of her deeply flawed account of womanist genealogy, Walker writes some of her most interesting and controversial accounts of female sexuality.

Ann Bomberger’s paper suggested ways in which domestic service provides a space in which feminist discourse can attempt to negotiate class and racial discord, and that ideologies of womanhood focusing on maternal roles, housework and exertions of authority come to the fore in these negotiations of power which occur in the home. In order to further her argument, Bomberger considered some of the negotiations of power between domestic workers and employers in Puerto Rican American Esmeralda Santiago’s novel America’s Dream (1996) and African American Barbara Neely’s Detective novels, Blanche on the Lam (1992) and Blanche Cleans Up (1998). Bomberger argued that , Santiago’s America’s Dream emphasises the protagonist’s initial victim status (of both domestic violence and domestic service) and describes her movement towards self-empowerment. Within the novel, Santiago analyses intentional and unintentional methods of victimisation and suggests strategies for empowerment. By comparison, Barbara Neely’s novels centre around a protagonst who is a strong-minded, independent domestic worker who deflects employer’s attempts to demean her and in the proces uses her intellect and intuition to solve murders which occur in the houses in which she works. In concluding her report, Bomberger suggested that whilst there were difficulties in professionalising domestic service due to the fact that employers will use the discourse of the private sphere to perpetuate class and racial inequalities, the Blanche novels do celebrate the autonomy found in a job that once provided very little autonomy.

Ikram Elsherif’s paper examined the way in which Toni Morrison’s latest novel Paradise (1998) expresses a humanitarian stance previously unseen in her earlier work. Arguing that in both Tar Baby and Beloved, characters are split by class and race divisions which are always sustained by white racist ideology, Elsherif suggested that such racial marking is notable absent from Paradise. That in this latest nove., Morrison was able to move away from this dichotomy between black and white and concentrate more fully on the relationships within the black community.

In the final paper of the session, Maria Balshaw argued that with the exception of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Jo Baker, women writers of the Harlem Renaissance can be seen as retrograde, and that Marrietta Bonner’s writing in particular, casts a new light on the Harlam Renaissance and its participants. Bonner’s work affirms both gender politics (through focussing on psychosexual realities) and considers the implications of urban life in Chicago and the interracial relationship. Balshaw suggested that there were fundamental problems of seeing ethnicity and race as self authored, and that overtones of race lines can be seen in Bonner’s work through her inclusion of children playing. However, whilst the earlier works can be seen as offering a more positive view of these issues, the later stories become more pessimistic, and show migrant aspirations being crushed, thus linking Bonner’s work to other highly politicised work of the period.

The papers were followed by an interesting discussion of some of the issues raised.

Recent American Poetry

Chair: Nick Selby (University of Wales, Swansea)
Maria Anita Stefanelli (University of Rome 3) ‘Kenneth Patchem between Poetry and Performance’
Liana Sakelliou (University of Athens), ‘Gary Snyder’s Poetic Call for the Discovery of America’
Nerys Williams (University of Sussex), ‘The Poetry of C.K. Williams: Extending lyric boundaries on a line?’
Frances Barry (University of Sussex), ‘”words are not acts / out of my text I am not what I play”: Performing Language Writing’

In this session, the only one in the conference devoted specifically to poetry, a small audience was privileged to hear four excellent papers. Both entertaining and intellectually stimulating these papers – and the lively discussion that followed – were evidence of the quality of research in American poetry that is currently being done by Americanists in Britain and Europe. Though highly diverse in their approaches and specific foci, a concern with the ways in which poetry can be seen to perform American culture emerged as a common theme in all four papers. As a whole, the session served to empahsise the vitally important role that attention to America’s poetry can play in the formulation of a critique of American culture and ideology.

Maria Stefanelli’s paper examined the relationship between poetry and performance in the post-war work of avant-garde poet Kenneth Patchen. Stefanelli argued that Patchen’s work represents a deliberate breaking away from the sorts of academic poetry tht dominated American literature in the 40s. She argued, therefore, for seeing Patchen as a precursor (by quite some time) of the experimental poetry of the Beats in the 50s. Patchen’s interest in a poetics of ‘play’, led him to explore expressive media other than the narrowly poetic. And his political and aesthetic force derives from his stuggle to dissolve what he saw as artificial barriers between poetry, painting, jazz, vocal improvisation and performance. By transgressing the boundaries traditionally erected between disciplines, he discovered unexpected inter-cultural relationships and ultimately succeeded in bridging the gap between high and low art as well as contributing to re-defining the changing panorama of mid-century American art. The paper focused on Patchen’s 1942 colaboration with John Cage on the radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat. A tantalisingly brief section of the (seldom heard) recording of this play demonstrated the power of Patchen’s poetics of performance. It was in the physical impact of his poetry on the listener’s mind and body that, the paper concluded, Patchen’s poetry explored and mapped the whole terrain of the human psyche by opening up questions about the performance of identity within American ideology.

Liana Sakelliou’s paper, which discussed the poetry of Gary Snyder, likewise examined the means by which America is discovered by poetry. It argued that Snyder’s poetry seeks to present us with an America that we have never known, and indoing so traced the changes in his poetry and social attitudes from 1974 to the present. Sakelliou described how Snyder’s 1974 collection Turtle Island calls for a recolution in one stroke by changing the myths on which people base their political, social, environmental and life choices. It asserted, though, that after Turtle Island, Snyder’s views on society become more cooperative, practical and specific as a result of his idea of the need for a sense of place. He calls for smaller changes in technology to make them more ‘bioregionally appropriate’. The paper concluded by asserting that now Snyder views nature no longer solely as something being destroyed by civilisation; nature is also the civilisation that destroys. In No Nature (1992) Snyder therefore improves his former poetic sense of social ills by eliminating in himself the sense of nature as something outside the self, and other than society. This allows Snyder in his poetry to see beyond the limited perspective of many of his contemporaries.

Nerys Williams’ paper addressed the issue of C.K. Williams’ verse line, and was itself written verse. Unconventional as this may have been in terms of academic conferences, this bold move provided a new angle on questions of poetry, performance and the breaking down of barriers that were emerging in the session. Williams’ was a finely nuanced reading of C.K. Williams’ poetry and deftly argued for a rethinking of traditional ideas of the constitution of the speaking voice in lyric. The paper suggested that there are forms in which the lyric can move beyond the boundaries of intimate personal experience to address a complexity of subject matter, where language is not taken for granted. It argued that Williams’ ‘long line’, rather than valorising an abstract myth of transparancy in language, actually renders words themselves with a degree of opacity, suggestive of how we inhabit the sentences that we speak. C.K. Williams’ poetry becomes therefore, the paper concluded, an inclusive structure that plots the dynamic of a shifting sensibility in a line that travels both spatially and temporally.

The final paper of the session, performed by Frances Barry, was another examination of the relationship between poetry, performance, and academic paper-giving. True to the chance-driven and experimental nature of much ‘Language Poetry’, the topics that Barry tackled were determined by the audience. The paper, therefore, was both brave and challenging by making explicit the questions: how do you perform this poetry? And how does this poetry perform? The paper argued for a rethinking of the process by which poetry defamiliarizes our relationship to language itself. But it also pointed to the implicit political power of a poetry that deliberately questions convention. To raise such questions, the paper argued, is to question an idea of measuring performance that has become insidiously commonplace in comtemporary America. It is to open up late capitalism to investigation. It is to assert: ‘What’s your performance indicator… answering the telephone within three rings? We’ve all been there’.

Defining Americanness

Chair: Tom Humphrey (Cleveland State University)
J. Russell Snapp (Davidson), ‘Reflections on American character’
Fergal Cubukcu (Turkey), ‘Reflections on American Character’
Karl E. Campbell (Appalachian State), ‘Defending Jim Crow: Senator Sam Ervin and the South’s Legal Strategy against Civil Rights’

Christopher Gadsden and his perceptions of what constituted an American in the eighteenth century, by J. Russell Snapp; Reflections on American character as portrayed somewhat sarcastically by Hollywood and how those views conflicted with how Americans viewed themselves and how others viewed Americans, by Fergal Cubukcu; and Senator Sam Ervin’s Constitutionally based strategy against Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s by Karl E. Campbell. Together, these papers presented historical and contemporary perceptions of Americanness that focused on race, ethnicity, status and myth making, prompting us to examine how the inhabitants of different centuries defined themselves, Americanness, and others. The papers were followed by a rousing discussion on what Americanness means and meant.

Women, Warriors and Warfare: The Social and Cultural Dimensions of Imperial Conflict in 18th Century North America

Chair: Sam Maddra (University of Glasgow)
Gail D. Danvers (University of Sussex), ‘Gendered Encounters: The Impact of Warfare on Iroquois Gender Roles’
Matthew C. Ward (University of Dundee), ‘”Where all is at stake, and mutual destruction the object”: The Transformation of Algonquian Warfare in the Eighteenth Century’
Stephanie Pratt (University of Plymouth at Exeter), ‘From Canassatego to Outalissi: making sense of the Native American in Eighteenth Century culture’

I was drafted in at short notice to chair this session and it proved to be a thoroughly stimulating experience, with all three papers provoking a variety of questions from the floor.

Gail Danvers explored the process of cultural synthesis and its relevancy to the alliance between the Iroquois and Superintendent of Indian Affairs, William Johnson, between 1740-1765. Arguing that rather than the creation of a bi-racial culture, there was in fact an ascendancy of Anglo-American culture over that of the Iroquois, Danvers demonstrated how Johnson used his knowledge of Iroquois practices, in particular, he manipulated one facet of their culture – gender – to promote the interests of the Crown and colonies, and the consequences of this policy on the power and cultural autonomy of the Iroquois.

Matthew Ward examined how Algonquian warfare developed a broader sense of strategy during the latter half of the eighteenth century, arguing that their participation in the global wars was marked by an understanding of the role of psychological warfare against both civilian and military targets, and an appreciation of the importance of prisoners in diplomacy with European and American powers. Despite the success of such strategies, their reliance upon them led to disastrous consequences, fuelling a growing cycle of vengeance.

Stephanie Pratt probed the relationship between texts and images as bearers of meaning, with regards to representations of Native American eighteenth century culture. Through the examples of travel writing, the novel, and poetry, Pratt demonstrated that notwithstanding claims advanced in the written texts about eye-witness accuracy or the utilisation of authoritative accounts, the presumed desire for empirical truth was often undercut by the accompanying illustrations, which show the extent to which pre-existent tropes, especially classicising references, checked any turn towards what might be considered an authentic representation.

US-East Asian Relations in the First Half of the 20th Century

Chair: Yone Sugita (Osaka University of Foreign Studies, Osaka)
Mark Caprio (Rikkyo University, Tokyo, Japan), ‘Japanese and American Images of Korea: A Tale of Two Occupations’
Tracy Steele (Sam Houston State University, Texas), ‘Friendly Persuasion: American Manipulation of the Question of Chinese Membership in the United Nations during the Johnson era and the British Connection’
Yone Sugita (Osaka University of Foreign Studies, Osaka), ‘The Dulles-Yoshida Negotiations and U.S. Ambivalence with Japan’

Mark Caprio examined American and Japanese images of the Korean people under two separate occupational periods. While there are stark differences in duration and stated purpose of the two periods, he found similarity within the images the two peoples drew to justify their presence on the Korean peninsula. One area highlighted in his paper was the idea that the Korean people were a victim of ‘bad government’: they could not be entrusted with their country’s administration. In the end, many Americans found more in common with the Japanese enemy than with the Koreans they had come to liberate.

Tracy Steele argued that although American tactics and justifications shifted over the course of the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, the goal of American policy remained the same: retention of the Republic of China in the seat reserved for China in the UN and its subsidiary organs. By manipulating the rules of the United Nations and issuing threats, subtle and otherwise, the United States flexed its power and authority over key member states that in turn cast their votes as virtually proxies of their host nation. Her paper explores the means and methods used from the ‘moratorium’ procedure to the ‘Important Question.’ The American lobbying effort continued unabated; friendly persuasion kept the allies in line but at a cost to the United Nations and the US.

Reexamining the significance of the Yoshida-Dulles negotiations between January and February 1951, Yone Sugita’s paper demonstrated the limits and irony of American hegemony in occupied Japan. Japan, an undependable former enemy, eventually became America’s only regional ally in the unstable Asia-Pacific region. The United States believed that it would have to make a continuous commitment to manage Japan and to stabilize the region as a whole. The United States exercised its power to shape the future course of Japanese development, but every success seemed to cause the country to take on that much more of a burden in order to consolidate success.

After the presentation, we had a lively discussion on US images of Asian nations, on British political manuevering in Chinese affairs, and on the impact of US bases on Japanese-US relations.

Bellow and Blackness

Chair: Alan Rice (University of Central Lancashire)
Jim Hall (Falmouth), ‘The Revolving Brush’
Carol Smith (King Alfred’s College), ‘The Jewish Atlantic – The Deployment of Blackness in Saul Bellow’
Aliki Varvogli (UEA), ‘”The Corrupting Disease of Being White”: Notions of Selfhood in Bellow’s Mr Sammler’s Planet‘
Alex Benchimol (Glasgow), ‘The Cultural Dialectic in the Twentieth-Century American Public Sphere: From Lionel Trilling to Cornel West’

In a vibrant Sunday afternoon session the speakers looked at the relationship between African American and Jewish writers and the depiction of blackness in the work of Saul Bellow. Jim Hall’s paper, ‘The Revolving Brush’ discussed the elided figure of the black in The Bellarossa Connection and Humboldt’s Gift with passing reference to the fiction of Tom Wolfe. He delineated the way in which the African American contribution to Chicago is downplayed by Bellow in his critical writings whilst his role in the fiction is as mere functionary.

Carol Smith concentrated on Henderson the Rain King in her paper ‘The Jewish Atlantic – The Deployment of Blackness in Saul Bellow’. After critiquing Bellow’s essentialised portraits of Africans, Carol moved to an excellent close reading of the key episode where Henderson blows up the frogs in an attempt to ‘save’ the village water supply. Herein she identified a racialised language which belies Bellows’ claim that the novel should be read as mere mythology.

Aliki Varvogli’s paper on ‘Notions of Selfhood in Bellow’s Mr Sammler’s Planet’ was an excellent revisiting of the black pickpocket incident which sought to defend Bellow against over-reductive readers and critics.

Alex Benchimol in his paper on Lionel Trilling and Cornel West sought to create a critical genealogy between the two thinkers which cuts across racial difference. The paper provided a crucial overview of philosophical relations between black and Jew which provided a handy backdrop to the other more textual papers. A brief discussion afterwards concentrated on the autobiographical nature of Bellow’s fiction, whether he could be indicted for racism and the context of black/Jewish relations in New York and Chicago.

Veils and Sharp Edges: Concealment and Disclosure in American Literature

Chair: Janet Beer (Manchester Metropolitan)
Maureen McDermott (Glasgow), ‘On editing the unpublished diaries of Edith Wharton’
Birgit Behrend (Marburg, Germany), ‘The Veil of the Soul: Aesthetic Perception in the Works of Washington Irving’
Nick Selby (Swansea), ‘Moby-Dick, the American Renaissance and the Ethics of Consumption’

The panel featured papers on Washington Irving, Herman Melville and Edith Wharton. Maureen McDermott began her paper with a consideration of the dual imperatives of concealment and disclosure in the writing of diaries and followed this with examples from Edith Wharton’s various diaries to illustrate her argument. Particular attention was paid to the differences between Wharton’s recording of observations about private and public matters, material noted for gardening and other domestic purposes and that which was later used in published work, especially the travel books.

Birgit Behrend discussed The Sketch Book (1819/20) in terms of the discrepancy between Irving’s literary descriptions and 19th century European reality, using Edgar Allan Poe’s definition of the ‘veil of the soul’ to refer to an aesthetic perspective similar to the Claude glass, by which the visual perception of the artist is transformed and he is able to conceive an idealized scene. She argued that Irving fuses the romantic notions of the picturesque, the ideal and the power of the imagination into the unity of an aesthetic mode of perception that enabled him to conceive his version of a romantic Europe.

In his paper Nick Selby argued that Moby Dick is sustained by an ethics of consumption, analysing the variety of metaphors of consumption which Melville proposes so as to assess how far the text goes toward deconstructing its own ‘cannibalistic encycopedism’ (Bersani). Selby further suggested that the playing out of an ethics of consumption is grounded in a notion of abjection and that, following Julia Kristeva, the text can be read as a study in abjection, both consuming and being consumed by the literary, mythic and real whales it depicts.

Postcolonialism and American Multiethnic Literature

Chair: Deborah L. Madsen (South Bank University, London)
Candida Hepworth (University of Wales, Swansea), ‘The Postcolonial Dialectics of Gloria Anzaldœa’s “We Call Them Greasers”‘
Joanna Price (Liverpool John Moores University), ‘Figuring Race and the Commodification of Identity in Toni Morrison’s Jazz’
Susan Forsyth (University of Essex), ‘The Wounded Knee Massacre and the Problem of Indigenous Evidence’

If there was a common theme to this panel it was the exploration of the implications of the idea of ethnic authenticity and the problematic issue of ethnic voice. Candida Hepworth’s paper ‘The Postcolonial Dialectics of Gloria Anzaldœa’s ‘We Call Them Greasers”; Joanna Price on ‘Figuring Race and the Commodification of Identity in Toni Morrison’s Jazz’ and Susan Forsyth’s talk, ‘The Wounded Knee Massacre and the Problem of Indigenous Evidence’ all dealt in some way with the practical difficulties and theoretical complexities of the idea of ethnic authenticity.

Candida Hepworth gave an insightful and penetrating close analysis of a single poem by the Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldœa, ‘We Call Them Greasers’. This poem is notable within the context of the book in which it appears, Borderlands / La Frontera (1987), as being the only poem in which Anzaldœa adopts the voice of the oppressor. There is an intercultural dynamic at work, for the poem’s author is Gloria Anzaldœa not the white male who is narrating the events of this conquest, which is both territorial and sexual; the author is a colonized female, a Chicana, who chooses in this poem to place herself in an inverted relationship of colonizer and colonized. The ‘we’ of the poem refers to the Anglo imperialists who violated the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo by clearing from the land ceded by Mexico in 1848 those ex-Mexican now US citizens who had elected to stay on their lands and relied on the protection of the Treaty. Anzaldœa addresses the violence, the raping and lynching, that was this imperial acquisition of territory. Candida Hepworth analyzed the ways in which Anzaldœa’s crafting of the poem reduces the colonized ‘other’ to the position of subaltern and then deprives them of voice – as a monologue the poem does allow them to speak directly as the Anglo speaker assumes the power to narrate this historical moment which is seen through his colonialist perceptions. Chicano/a literature is commonly conceived as one of the United States’ many ‘resistance literatures’ – resisting the hegemonic ideology of ‘America’, the ‘we’ versus ‘them’. The complex postcolonial inheritance of the Chicano/a, however, is represented as a hybrid cultural consciousness, a colonial dialectic between colonized indigene and Spanish, first, then US, colonizers. The colonial encounter of which this poem speaks clearly illustrates the elements of contest and consort that characterize this dialectic. Candida Hepworth concluded her account of postcolonial dialectic of ‘We Call Them Greasers’ with the observation that the poem articulates multiple acts of conquest – of the woman, of the land, of the ‘other’ – that comprise the Chicano/a postcolonial inheritance.

Joanna Price’s paper situated Toni Morrison’s writing as postcolonial in that it creates a discourse which anticipates a position, for African Americans, beyond that which has been delineated by colonial discourse. Joanna Price argued that the figures which Morrison creates for this position are problematic, specifically, in that they may require a repetition of the essentialism of colonial discourse. The paper examined the way in which Morrison, in Jazz, departs from her usual critique of the effects of white consumer culture on African Americans, by returning to the 1920s as a moment in which the gaze of the consumer appeared to offer the possibility of deconstructing the signifiers of race. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing were discussed as offering significant intertexts of Morrison’s exploration of this in Jazz. The paper concluded by asking whether Morrison’s use of two figures to deconstruct racial essentialism remains locked in the very visual economy which they are asked to critique: namely, the figure of the ‘wild woman’ which, despite the text’s deconstruction of it, seems to connote an originary blackness associated with femaleness, Nature and the South; and also Morrison’s use of the figure of the visible ‘hybrid’, Golden Gray, to challenge an essentialism which depends upon the fetishization of skin colour.

The fetishization of colour within colonial discourse, the signifiers of race that allow ‘passing’ for white as a strategy of survival in a deeply racist culture, the erasure of ethnic voice within the imperialist discourses of Anglo America – these issues raised by Candida Hepworth and Joanna Price were focussed in Susan Forsyth’s discussion of historical accounts of the Wounded Knee Massacre. The question of evidence and the reliability or authenticity of the accounts given by witnesses to the massacre was heavily prejudiced by racial and ethnic issues. Susan Forsyth showed the ways in which the events leading to the killing were differently construed by Native as opposed to Anglo witnesses and the evidence given by these witnesses was differently evaluated according to their ethnicity. The testimony of Native witnesses like the reservation physician Charles Eastman was regarded as impressionistic and untrustworthy while the testimony of white witnesses was regarded as factual and reliable. Susan Forsyth set out a compelling account of the complicated nature of the historical record which resulted from this biased use of witnesses’ testimony and she concluded by pointing to the ambiguity which still shrouds even the factual representation of the Wounded Knee Massacre. The authenticity of ethnic voice, the voice of the colonized, in the historiography of Wounded Knee is evaluated by the colonizers and according to the rationale of white supremacy, just as Gloria Anzaldœa shows poetically is the case in the representation of the history of the Southwest. The voice of American subalterns – Native, Chicana, and Black – is silenced by the postcolonial conditions under which they seeks to make themselves heard.

Meeting of Scottish Americanists (SASA)

The Founding Meeting of the Scottish Association for the Study of America was held on March 28, 1999 at the University of Glasgow. The association aims to provide a forum in Scotland and beyond for academics, postgraduates, writers, school teachers, and others who have a professional or personal interest in the study of America. The meeting discussed attracting members from several disciplines including history, literature, politics, social science, and cultural studies. Expressions of support had also been received from colleagues active in the fields of economic history and international relations, and from academics in the US and the rest of the UK.

After agreeing the title of the association, its broad aims and objectives, the meeting proceeded to business: setting membership rates at £10 and £5 for the unwaged and postgraduates, with special concessionary rates for life-time subscribers; office-bearers were elected and mandated to draft a constitution.

Prospective members will be contacted with details of the membership scheme and the association’s aims and plans as soon as is possible. There will also be a web site.

The first major event will be a one-day conference for postgraduates to be held at a convenient time and place sometime in 2000. One of the key aims of the association is to provide a foundation to expand graduate studies in Scotland and the North of England. Two postgraduates were elected to the executive committee: Sam Maddra and Kathryn Napier (Glasgow).

For further information please contact:

Colin Nicolson
Secretary SASA
Department of History
University of Stirling
Stirling FK9 4LA

Tel: (01786) 467963
Fax: (01786) 467581
Fax International: +44 1786 467581
E-mail: colin.nicolson@stir.ac.uk

Closing Plenary Session

Chair: Simon Newman (Glasgow)
Peter Parish (London), ‘Conflict by Consent: Democratic Will, Popular Commitment and the War for the Union, 1861-1865’

The final session of a long and full conference is not always well attended, especially when delegates face long journeys home, and it was thus a testament to Peter Parish that well over 80 people attended his lecture. Professor Parish pointed out that while Civil War historians have thought and written a good deal about popular support for the war within the Union. While the Confederacy was able to unite to defend hearth and home, the Union could only prevail if the civilian population actively supported a war far away from home that would cost a great deal of many and many lives, and Professor Parish demonstrated the significance of popular commitment to the cause of union. In a wide-ranging lecture that referred to such variables as race, gender, political ideology and identity, and regionalism, Professor Parish shared some of his findings, thereby demonstrating that his work on the subject will tell us much that we did not know about the Civil War.

The Conference Scene

BAAS Annual Conference – Swansea 2000: call for papers

Call for papers for the Annual Conference of the British Association for American Studies hosted by the Department of American Studies University of Wales Swansea, 6th-9th April 2000.

The BAAS Annual Conference for the year 2000 will be hosted by the Department of American Studies at the University of Wales, Swansea from April 6-9. Though there will be no specific or overarching theme for the conference, we hope that the timing of the Conference might help celebrate the millenial year and highlight the historical and ongoing cultural and social ties between Wales and America, as well as showcase the tremendous diversity and strengths of American Studies by featuring interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary papers from as wide a range of disciplines as possible. Papers are therefore welcomed on any American Studies topic, broadly defined.

Swansea, Wales is a culturally diverse and thriving city located at a crossroads between industrial South Wales and areas of outstanding natural beauty that include the mountains of the Brecon Beacons National Park and the long coast lines and remote beaches of the Gower peninsula – all within easy reach of Cardiff and London and generally accessible to the rest of Britain. Plans are being made to include cultural events and countryside excursions that will capitalise on the strengths of the American Studies community in Swansea and throughout Wales and the rich cultural heritage and natural beauty of the area.

Paper Proposals should not exceed one page and must include a provisional title. If submitted individually these will be organised into appropriate panels; alternatively, panel proposals by two or three paper-givers sharing a common theme may be submitted. Proposals are due by October 1st 1999 and should be addressed, together with any queries or suggestions, to Michael McDonnell, Conference Secretary.

Michael A. McDonnell
Department of American Studies
University of Wales Swansea, SA2 8PP

Tel:+ 44 (0)1792-295 305
Fax:+ 44 (0)1792-295 719
E-mail: m.mcdonnell@swansea.ac.uk

EAAS – Graz 2000

The next biennial conference of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS) will take place in Graz, Austria, April 14-17, 2000. The theme will be: ‘Nature’s Nation’ Reconsidered: American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis. Obviously, the theme will be interpreted very broadly (see the call for papers in the BAAS Newsletter, No 79), so the conference should mark the millennial year in a lively manner. By the time you read this, plenary and stream lectures will already have been selected from those submitted in January 1999, but there is still an opportunity for you to offer a paper to a workshop. The workshop titles, with names of convenors, will be announced in the next issue of American Studies in Europe, the EAAS Newsletter. You should submit your proposals directly to the convenor of the workshop that seems most appropriate for your offering.

EAAS web site and other matters

The Graz workshop will be announced on the EAAS web site: http://www.let.uu.nl/eaas where you will find other information on the Association and its activities. EAAS also maintains a very helpful email list, which is looked after by Jaap Verheul of the University of Utrecht (jaap.verheul@let.uu.nl). I should have appeared at the BAAS AGM to report on EAAS, but unfortunately it clashes with the Board meeting of EAAS, being held this year in the Czech Republic. If you have any questions or comments on EAAS, do not hesitate to pass them on to me.

Mick Gidley
School of English
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT

E-mail: g.m.gidley@leeds.ac.uk

Report – The American Politics Group, Cambridge

The American Politics Group held its 25th annual conference on January 6th-8th at Selwyn College Cambridge. The conference attracted a wide international audience, consisting of 85 participants from nine countries with a large American contingent of 28 participants. The keynote speaker was Professor Graham Wilson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His topic for the John Lees Memorial Lecture was the future of American politics, both foreign and domestic, at the beginning of the 21st century. The topic took particular note of the Clinton impeachment and what it portended for America’s future. The impeachment reached a critical stage during the conference, which kept members scurrying to find televisions in between sessions. The ever vigilant and security conscious porters made the task more sporting by rigorously enforcing limited vacation hours for the common rooms.

The programme, which contained too many participants and papers to mention here, included many panels on both domestic and foreign policy. Panels on domestic affairs included American Historical Foundations and the Supreme Court, The Right in America, Presidential Management of the Message, The Policy and Politics of AmeriCorps: Building a Clinton Legacy, States and Regions, Interest Conflicts, Congress , Parties and Elections, Economic and Social Policy, and Elections and Campaigns. International topics included Foreign Affairs and International Affairs and Domestic Perceptions. Many prominent American scholars came to present papers at the conference. Some notable examples included Professor David Walker’s paper ‘Devolution in America: 1969-1998,’ Professor Joseph Zimmerman’s ‘Citizen Law-Making: The Initiative,’ and Professor John Maltese’s ‘The Communications Strategies of the Clinton Whitehouse.’

The American Politics Group’s November Colloquium will focus on ‘Assessing the Clinton Presidency.’ The colloquium will be held on November 5th at the American Embassy in London. The convenor is Dr. Christopher Bailey of the Department of American Studies at Keele University.

The 26th Annual Conference of the American Politics Group will be held on January 7th-9th, 2000 at Keele University for those wishing a more reasonable and less crowded way to celebrate the new year. The convenor is Dr. John Dumbrell of the Department of American Studies at Keele University, who will accept any proposals for presentations but insists that they NOT contain the word ‘millennium’ in the title.

Jonathan Parker, Department of American Studies, Keele University

Seminar – Clinton Impeachment Trials

Robert Tait, Scotsman correspondent in Washington, D.C., for part of the Clinton impeachment trials, gave a seminar to American Studies and American History students and staff at the Compton Room (American History Library), William Robertson Building, University of Edinburgh, on 9 March 1999. All those present enjoyed a vivid eyewitness account which brought out several central issues relating to the Clinton Presidency, political scandal, and recent American constitutional history.

Report – Muhammad Ali Conference

More than sixty people attended a conference on Muhammad Ali on 29th March at the American Embassy in London. The conference was organised by Ian Ralston of John Moores University Liverpool and Christopher Brookeman, Univeristy of Westminster

In the morning there were two papers:

Christopher Brookeman, University ofWestminster, ‘Float Like a Butterfly, sting like a bee: Muhammad Ali, Norman Mailer and the mythology of boxing’

John C.Walter, Dept of American Ethnic Studies, University of Washington (Seattle), ‘Muhammad Ali: The quintessential American; or how did he do it?

While considering Ali’s importance more generally, Christopher Brookeman gave a fascinating account of Ali’s adoption and manipulation of many traditional stereotypes from the minstrel and melodrama traditions – Ali’s ‘performances’ variously drew on, amongst others, the figure of the crazy coon, the angry buck and the accomodating Uncle Tom. Brookeman then went on to consider Norman Mailer’s famous account of the Ali-Foreman fight (the rumble in the jungle), ‘The Fight’.

John C. Walter then went on to argue that while we tend to celebrate Ali as a thorn in the side of the American establishment (after all, he became a Muslim and refused to fight in Viet Nam), it is more accurate to pinpoint his enduring appeal in his exemplary Americanness. Supremely self-confident and honest, in particular to his own beliefs, he represents all that the ‘true American’ should be. And after all, what Americans like best is success.

In the afternoon, a video link was set up between a British and American panel to further discuss Ali and his legacy. The UK panel of Christopher Brookeman, John C. Walter, Prof Johnella Butler (University of Washington), Ian Ralston and Kasia Boddy (University College London), addressed questions to Al Brown, the legendary boxing promoter, (live from Atlanta) and Jeffrey Sammons, Professor of History, New York University. The discussion covered many different aspects of Ali’s career and legacy – from his impact on today’s boxing culture to the symbolism of his appearance as icon at the Atlanta Olympics. The message of the Oscar-winning ‘While We Were Kings’ (another version of the rumble in the jungle) was keenly debated. While Brookeman praised the film for its postmodern lack of resolution and clear ‘meaning’, Sammons expressed concerns at how little Ali spoke in the film, and how much time was given to the Mailer-Plimpton version of events. In the particular the film’s suggestion that Ali’s victory was due to a fŽticheur’s ‘hex’ provoked an interesting discussion.

The UK panel then took further questions from the audience and the session finished about 4 o’clock, with everyone agreeing that the day had been highly enjoyable and a great success.

The event was widely and enthusiastically reported in the Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Independent on Sunday and the Liverpool Daily Post. The Independent – 6 April 1999, p.4 – published an extract from Christopher Brookeman’s paper. Radio 5 and GLR Radio (London) also carried reports.

Report – Abroad in the World: Internationalising the Study of American History

In early July, 1998, some two dozen historians from eight countries participated in a conference in Florence on Internationalising the Study of American History. The second in a series of three annual meetings co-sponsored by New York University and the Organisation of American Historians, the conference took place in the elegance of a Tuscan villa, redolent of the errant internationalism of the age of the Grand Tour. Participants, some invited, others selected via a competition, debated what internationalising the study of American History might entail. The aim was to ‘imagine American historical narrative(s) that situate the United States more fully into its larger transnational and intercultural global context, with the intention of revealing more clearly the multiple narratives, time scales, and geographies that constitute the American past.’ Unlike conferences that contribute to established domains of study, this one set out to inaugurate a field. The participants were therefore groping towards, rather than pursuing, a set of organising principles and a thesis, a task that was potentially energising but also a bit perplexing.

This broad charge brought forth a wide variety of proposals and examples of diverse projects. Some general themes did emerge: the keynote address by the University of Chicago’s Prasenjit Duara argued that nations and the concept of nationhood were social constructs and should be treated as historical entities, not natural facts. National histories must be situated in broader geographical, historical and intellectual frameworks. Other participants described approaches that cut across the nation-state as an object of study and as an intellectual precept. These alternatives included regional histories, transnational processes such as colonialism, and biography. The conferees implicitly recognised that analytical categories and markers of identity such as race, ethnicity, class and gender not only shape nations but also transcend their boundaries. They also wrestled with the consequences that the proposed de-centring of the nation might have on historical periodisation. Shifting the centre of gravity away from the history of the USA and of the industrialised nations collectively identified as ‘the West’ would also require the historian to recognise the absence of a universal temporality encompassing the world. If it is acknowledged that concepts such as modernity are local, not universal, in scope, historians might have to adopt more variable, heterogeneous, overlapping and shifting frameworks and time scales.

‘American Exceptionalism’ was the most venerable of our implied intellectual antagonists, so out of fashion that the conference merely registered rather than argued for its passing. Participants also agreed with their predecessors from the previous year’s conference that comparative history carried all the baggage of national histories, if it took the nation-state as a given. Some discussion centred on a perceived decline of scholarly interest in Area Studies following the end of the Cold War, with the suggestion that placing American history in an international frame might help bridge the gap between Area Studies and American Studies.

The kind of project contemplated by the conference appears unexceptionable in many respects and yet vaguely unsettling for a member of the British Association of American Studies. Students of the United States based in Britain may not be challenged to adopt a perspective on the USA unrestricted by its geographical boundaries; gaining an insider’s perspective might, indeed, require greater effort and knowledge on our part. Addressing the implications of internationalisation for American Studies, Robert Gross raised a different challenge in his plenary lecture at the most recent BAAS conference: if the practitioners of an interdisciplinary subject such as ours find the political and geographical foundation of their scholarship eroding and dissolving into the surrounding world, we may wonder what then holds our subject together. As practitioners of many methodologies, we shall have to re-think the common ground we share if we join in reconceiving our object of study.

The Florence conferees offered some comfort to those disquieted by the prospect of a drastic reconceptualisation of intellectual domains. They recognised that doing away with the concept of the nation and the study of nations is an implausible and perhaps even an undesirable goal: construct or not, the nation is a stubborn historical fact, and many scholars’ work will continue to live happily within its bounds. Nor should one unreservedly celebrate liberation from the ideological hegemony of the nation-state, even if such an unlikely prospect were achieved. The concept of the nation has, after all, been deployed as a rallying point for democratic movements and for anti-imperialist struggle; nationhood can therefore be articulated as the common ground for an emancipatory politics.

Nations are not only symbols but also political actors with their own, inescapably material, instruments, such as military arsenals. In light of this, the most surprising absence from the conference was any substantial contribution from specialists in diplomatic and military history, fields that perforce combine a transnational perspective with attention to the nation-state. Indeed, there was scant contribution from practitioners of political history. Such specialists might have provided an important counterpoint to the sub-disciplines, such as social and cultural history, represented at the conference. Although the movement of capital and information may follow increasingly global currents, nations still exert an enormous gravitational pull in shaping their flow and accumulation. Most legal jurisdictions and sovereignties remain determinedly national in their scope and most armed forces primarily national in their allegiance.

The staying power of nation-states betrayed itself in a conference on international law taking place simultaneously in Rome. In a telling irony, while the Florence conference was broadening Americanists’ historical perspectives to embrace the world, the U.S. delegates in Rome were refusing to subscribe their nation to the newly forming International Court of Justice. They stated that they wished to shield their citizens from the jurisdiction of an international court on the grounds that this would expose Americans to frivolous prosecutions or to retribution by ‘rogue nations.’ The more serious and unspoken danger, however, is that the United States or its citizens might face bona fide prosecutions for international crimes, something that American power will not countenance. The threat of prosecution for war crimes is now increasingly being used by the remaining great power(s) as an instrument of policy. At this historical moment, we are told that dictators must tremble before the long and enduring reach of international justice. But this internationalisation of justice is frankly non-reciprocal and asymmetrical, because the U.S. government will not allow its uniformed citizens or officials to submit to the nascent international tribunal.

Another kind of imbalance afflicts the project on internationalising the study of American history. If it is still ‘American history,’ how international is it? This tension was embodied in the composition as well as the title of the conference. Not only were a large majority of the participants Americanists; most were Americans and most worked in U.S. institutions. There were no Arab or African participants and only one from Latin America (the attendance of the Cuban delegate was prevented by logistical problems). The conference funding came from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. The organising institutions were American. Thus, although the conference took place in Italy, most of the talk came from Americans as they set the agenda for the internationalisation of the study of their nation. For the traffic in ideas to be more effectively internationalised, the challenge may be achieving international sponsorship and a better balanced membership. Perhaps organisations such as BAAS and the European Association for American Studies might assume a role in shaping the ongoing project.

The conference chair, New York University’s Thomas Bender, intends the third conference in summer 1999 to focus on exemplary work taking up the discussion to this point. A further outcome will be the publication of a selection of the papers presented at the three conferences. A report will be presented to the Organisation of American Historians, and thence to the world, putting the case for ‘widening the lens of American history’ and making appropriate practical recommendations. Early in the Florence conference, one participant speculated that this project might define a new paradigm for the study of American history. Comparing the conference papers to Frederick Jackson Turner’s presentation in Chicago in 1893, a speaker on the final day gently deflated this notion by pointing out that new paradigms tend to be rather less tentative and diffuse in their formulation than were the speculative discussions in Florence. In the end, the conference participants adopted a more modest goal, reformist rather than revolutionary, recognising that the nation-state will persist as a focus for historical study even within an augmented international frame.

Patrick Hagopian, Lancaster University

Borderlands’, University of Wales Swansea

The Department of American Studies at the University of Wales Swansea hosted a special conference on American ‘Borderlands,’ co-funded by the US Embassy, held at the University of Wales Conference Centre at Gregynog, in Newtown, Wales, 26-28th April 1999. Speakers scheduled included Rolando Hinojosa, Gary Arroyo, Candida Hepworth, David Taylor, and Jack Laurence. The Conference was of interest to students and scholars alike. For details, please contact Phil Melling, David Taylor or Candida Hepworth at:

Department of American Studies
University of Wales
Swansea, SA2 8PP, UK.

Fax: 01792-295719
Tel: 01792-295305
E -mail: d.r.taylor@swan.ac.uk.

EABI Conference Announcement

Early Americanists in Britain and Ireland Colloquium, 28-29th June 1999, Brunel University, London.

Attention all Early Americanists:

After further arrangements and confirmation of details, we are pleased to be able to announce that there will be a Colloquium for Early Americanists in Britain and Ireland at the end of June. The gathering will be held at the Uxbridge Campus of Brunel University (hosted and arranged by Kenneth Morgan), on 28-29th June 1999.

The Colloquium, generously funded by Professor Tony Badger and the Mellon Fund at Cambridge University, will run for two days with consecutive panel sessions and several keynote addresses or special roundtables. We invite all early Americanists in Europe or the US to participate in the Colloquium, details of which can be found at the Brunel University website. The final details of the programme will be announced in early April, but will include both graduate students and scholars in the early stages of their careers more advanced scholars around the UK and visiting scholars from the US and abroad.

Please feel free to get in touch with one of the organisers listed below for further details or questions or if you would like to find out about accommodation possibilities. In the meantime, we hope that you will be able to join us in June and help to make the Colloquium a success. We look forward to hearing from you.

Professor Kenneth Morgan
Brunel University
300 St. Margarets Road
Twickenham, TW1 1PT

UK Fax: +44 (0)181-891-8270
Phone: +44 (0)181-891-0121, ext. 2260
E-mail: Kenneth.Morgan@brunel.ac.uk

Mary Geiter
9 Woodcrest Dr. Conestoga,
Pennsylvania 17516, USA

Tel: +1-717-871-0723
E-mail: Mgeiter1@aol.com

Michael McDonnell
Department of American Studies
University of Wales
Swansea SA2 8PP

UK Fax: +44 (0)1792-295719
Tel: +44 (0)1792-295305
E-mail: m.mcdonnell@swan.ac.uk

Note: Of especial interest to some is the fact that the Colloquium will be held immediately before the Anglo-American Conference of Historians, whose theme this year is ‘Race and Ethnicity’ and whose key speaker is Professor David Brion Davis. That conference will be held from 30 June through to the 2 July 1999 at the Institute of Historical Research in London, and full details can be requested from Dr. Debra Birch, IHR, Senate House, Malet St. London, WCIE 7HU. Fax: 0171-436-2183. E-mail: ihrdir@sas.ac.uk.

Call for Papers – Athens 2000

Hellenic Association for American Studies May 25-28, 2000 University of Athens, Athens, Greece

The theme of the conference will be: Culture Agonistes: Text Against Text

Papers are invited to address current debates going on in the United States and Europe in a variety of disciplines in community and the academy – in literature, linguistics, literary theory and cultural studies.

Suggested topics are: American feminism and postmodernism, postcolonialism and postmodernism, Marxism and postmodernism: contentions and contests; the debatable texts of multiculturalism; center and periphery; the changing relations of philosophy and politics in an era of deconstructionism; gendered gazes; competing texts in American film theory; ways of reading literary texts: new horizons and battles.

Closing date for proposals is October 1st, 1999. Please send a one-page proposal and a brief biographical statement to:

Professor Robert Crist
University of Athens
School of Philosophy
Department of English Studies
University Campus
Zografou 157 84

Fax:00301 7248 979
E-mail: desnos@otenet.gr

or

Associate Prof. Theodora Tsimpouki
University of Athens
School of Philosophy
Department of English Studies
University Campus
Zografou 157 84

Fax:00301 7248 979
E-mail: tsimpouki@otenet.gr

Colloquium: The David BruceCentre for American Studies, Keele University

The Centre is planning to hold its seventh international colloquium in September 2000 on the subject of Writing Southern Poverty Between the Wars. There will be a limited number of places available for those wishing to attend. Inquiries should be addressed either to Professor Richard Godden or Dr Martin Crawford, David Bruce Centre for American Studies, Keele University, Keele, Staffs. ST5 5BG, UK.

Selected papers from the previous two colloquia are due to be published shortly. They are Robert Garson and Stuart S Kidd, eds., The Roosevelt Years: New Essays on the United States, 1933-45 (Edinburgh University Press) and Alan J Rice and Martin Crawford, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (University of Georgia Press).

News from American Studies Centres

The David Bruce Centre for American Studies, Keele University

A new Occasional Papers series is being published under the imprint of the Centre. The series will consist of working papers or extended essays that may form part of a larger work at a later stage. The first essay, rather appropriately, will be ‘”I Begin to Think of Myself as a Marco Polo”: David Bruce in China, 1973-1974’ by Pricilla Roberts.

The David Bruce Centre for American Studies has continued to build up its collections in African American History. Recent Acquisitions include further runs of the Chicago Defender, which now runs from 1982-present.

The Centre is able to provide substantial contributions towards research travel for registered research students. Twelve awards have been made since March 1998. Inquiries about research opportunities are welcome.

Steve Mills, The David Bruce Centre, Keele University

US National Archives

Readers interested in updated information on the US National Archives following last year’s article might like to know that the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History pagem@capaccess.org at http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~ncc> keeps an eye on developments. A recent ‘NCC Washington Update’ includes an item on how the ‘National Archives Affirms the Importance of A Strong Regional Archives System’. To subscribe to the ‘NCC Washington Update’ send an e-mail message to listserv@h-net.msu.edu according to the following model: SUBSCRIBE H-NCC firstname lastname, institution. Foreign researchers who do not intent to visit suburban Washington DC (now home of Archives II) would also be well advised to contact the National Archives’ own website http://www.nara.gov> or email inquire@arch2.nara.gov about what is available both electronically and at regional sites throughout the USA.

Steve Mills, The David Bruce Centre, Keele University

Robinson Library, University of Newcastle

Robinson Library, University of Newcastle, has received a bequest of £8 million and a collection of books, many of which seem to be Americana. In future there will be three research studentships (Robinson Bequest Studentships) to support research in the special collections and other areas of the Robinson Library. For further information contact: Professor Judie Newman (Judith.Newman@newcastle.ac.uk).

Cold War Archive, Liverpool University

Cold War Archive: We are building up a collection at Liverpool of Cold War cultural material which will include popular fiction of the period, memoirs, journals, etc. If any BAAS members are clearing their shelves or attics and want to get rid of any books, pamphlets, etc. please contact: David Seed at the English Department, Liverpool University on 0151-794-2723; or via e-mail dseed@liverpool.ac.uk

History of Women’ Microfilm Collection at The British Library

The British Library has recently acquired Research Publications International’s ‘History of Women’ microfilm set. This collection contains more than 8,500 books, 2,000 pamphlets, 100 periodical titles, 80,000 manuscript pages, and photographs taken from American collections of Women’s Studies materials. The collection includes books and pamphlets from most of the Western hemisphere, but has a strong American slant. There is material on women in the American reform movements from the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe; on the settlement house movement, and turn of the century American reform from the Sophia Smith collection at Smith College, and on women in the Western movement from the Ida Rust McPherson collection at Scripps College. The collection also reproduces material from the New York Public Library, Boston Public Library, the Widener Library and several others. Both the guide to the microfilm collection (Ram 305.4) and the microfilms themselves (Mic.b.955/ ) may be consulted in the Rare Books Reading Room at the British Library.

In Memoriam

Harry Allan, 1917-1998

The founders of BAAS were distinguished in many ways, and not least for their longevity. In a society established in 1955, it is a remarkable fact that, with the single sad exception of Marcus Cunliffe, all its former chairmen were still living at the beginning of 1998. We had begun to think that they were ageless, but now, in the space of a few months, we have lost two of them, Harry Allen and Herbert Nicholas. The founders had much in common. Few if any of them were trained as Americanists; they were ‘converts’ to the study of the United States. Almost all of them were profoundly influenced by the experience of the Second World War. All of them battled bravely to convince the academic establishment of the day of the need to develop the serious study of the United States in British schools, colleges and universities. Their work was infused with a strong sense of being missionaries for American studies.

Harry Allen shared all of these characteristics. His wartime experiences (which included the award of the Military Cross for outstanding courage in action) instilled in him a full appreciation of the crucial role of the United States in world affairs. As Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Lincoln College Oxford from 1946 to 1955, he did his utmost to introduce American history into his teaching. In 1955, he was appointed to the Commonwealth Fund Chair of American History at University College London, at that time the only established chair in the subject in any British university. When interviewed for the chair, he was required to produce page proofs of his book on the British-American relationship in order to convince the appointing committee that the book was not merely ‘forthcoming’ but ‘imminent’. It was entirely appropriate that his first major publication was his Great Britain and the United States, a massive history of the British American relationship which reflected its author’s deep conviction of the necessity of cordial British-American relations. A revised version of the more analytical sections of the book appeared later under the title of The Anglo-American Relationship since 1783. His other publications from this period included Bush and Backwoods (1959), a comparative study of Australia and the United States frontier societies, and The United States of America (1964), a brisk and lively introductory survey of American history.

During this same period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Harry Allen was also in the forefront of the campaign to advance the cause of American history and American studies. He was an active member of the group which founded BAAS in 1955, and, having been instrumental in the establishment of the Institute of United States Studies at the Unversity of London in 1965-66, he became its first Director. In 1971, he accepted the invitation to move to a chair of American Studies at the University of East Anglis, and there he remained until his retirement in 1980. At UEA, he saw himself as a stabilising and moderating influence in the early, heady days of a new University, and his affability and adaptability, as well as his zest for academic politics, were great assets in this very different academic environment.

It was in the 1970s, too, that he made his greatest impact on the national and international academic secne. As an active and energetic chairman of BAAS from 1974 to 1977, he presided over its continuing development with much skill, and sought to build bridges between older and younger generations of its membership. Young members, perhaps attending their first conference, were sometimes surprosed to be accosted by the chairman, eager to seek their views and put them at their ease – always full of good intentions, if sometimes in a manner akin to that of the orderly officer asking the other ranks if they had any complaints. (Harry’s military experience stayed with him, and some of his early memos to colleagues at the Institute read rather like orders of the day!) In the 1970s, too, he took up a new cause, and, with the backing of colleagues at East Anglia, he injected new life into the European Association for American Studies, where he served as president from 1976 to 1980. This was a surprising turn of events for a confirmed ‘Americanist’ like Harry Allen, but he plunged into this new task with great enthusiasm, and he eventually coased his successors in BAAS into committing themselves to EAAS.

Harry Allen held a number of key positions at critical times, and in all these roles, he made a genuine contribution and made a real difference. But the measure of the man lay not only in the offices whch he held, but also in his engaging personality and in his qualities of character and leadership. He was a courteous, generous, good-natured man, with a sunny disposition, but also with deep convictions and a strong sense of what was right and proper and fair. He relished academic gossip and intrigue, enjoyed the conference circuit, and was one of the pioneer academic frequent flyers across the Atlantic. His inaugural lecture at UCL in 1955 may serve as his lasting testament as a British Americanist. ‘It is no more than a rudimentary common-sense’, he said, ‘to do our utmost to understand – if only to help us influence – this powerful nation… We must study the history of the United States: we dare do no other’. In his conclusion, he invoked the words of the Declaration of Independence, as he pleaded for better understanding of the United States as a nation which would inevitable have an overwhelming effect upon ‘our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honour’. some of his words and sentiments may have a slightly old-fashioned ring, but the essential message remians clear and relevant, and will endure along with the cherished memory of the man himself.

Peter J Parish, London

Harry Cranbrook Allen MC: born 23 March 1917; Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Lincoln College, Oxford, 1946-55; Commonwealth Fund Professor of American History, University College London, 1955-71; Director, Institute of United States Studies, 1966-71; Professor of American Studies, University of East Anglia, 1971-80; married to Mary Kathleen Allen (died 1992), (one son, two daughters); died 21 June 1998.

Geoffrey Herbert Moore (1920-1999), An Apprecation

Members of BAAS will have been saddened to learn of the death (on 5 February 1999) of Geoffrey Moore, GF Grant Professor (Emeritus) of American Literature at the University of Hull, and one of the founding fathers of American Studies in Britain. Born in South London and educated at Mitcham Grammar School, he spent the war years at the Air Ministry and in the RAF. He then read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, including a brief period at the Sorbonne (where he met Samuel Beckett) and received a First in the English Tripos in 1946. After graduating from Cambridge, Geoffrey Moore taught at several American universities, including the University of Wisconsin (Madison), Tulane, the University of Kansas, the University of New Mexico, and Harvard. He also produced a radio programme in New Orleans, through which he formed a life-long friendship with Gore Vidal.

On his return to Britain in the 1950s, Moore became an editor and producer for BBC Television, was a regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, and was an Extra Mural Lecturer for London and Cambridge Universities. In 1955, Marcus Cunliffe brought him to the newly-established Department of American Studies at the University of Manchester, where together they devised an innovative and imaginative syllabus.

In 1962 Moore was appointed as GF Grand Professor of American Literature and Head of the Department of American Studies at the University of Hull, where he remained for 20 years. Already firmly convinced that ‘American Studies’ offered a legitamate and fertile field of academic enquiry, Geoffrey Moore proceeded to build up the American literature holdings of the Brynmor Jones Library, increased the staff of the Department of American Studies, and attracted a succession of visiting Fulbright Scholars to Hull. He was also the moving force behind the establishment of a student exchange scheme – part of the Single Honours programme which required the department’s undergraduates to study at an American university during their third year.

Geoffrey Moore’s own contributions to the field of American literature lay in his singular talents as an anthologist. He edited The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse (1954), which was acclaimed by Roy Fuller as ‘one of the very few creative and wholly satisfying anthologies of verse published since the thirties’. The revised edition (1983) was praised by Richard Ellman for its catholicity and the accompanying ‘intellegent comentary [on] a representative group of American poets’. American Literature: A Representative Anthology of American Writing from Colonial Times to the Present (1964), was Geoffrey Moore’s magnum opus, and admirably fulfilled his intention ‘to provide for non-American readers a sort of ‘Beowulf to Virginia Woolf’ of American Literature’ – at a time when American texts were either not readily available or inordinately expensive.

Following his retirement from Hull in 1982, Geoffrey Moore continued to preach his fundamentalist gospel of the essential ‘American-ness’ of American Literature to the converted and the unconverted. He edited the Penguin edition of the works of Henry James, and reviewed frequently for the Financial Times.

Never an ‘academic’ in the conventional sense of the word, Geoffrey Moore was a great populariser and promulgator of American Studies. He assiduously cultivated the friendships of successive Cultural Attaches at the American Embassy, soliciting funds for visiting lecturers and books for the library. He also (successfully) proposed James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy and Robert Lowell as recipients of honorary degrees from the University of Hull.

Frequently absent from Hull on lecture tours – he never established a permanent residence in the city – Geoffrey Moore unashamedly relished the ‘good life’: high-powered cars, the company of authors, playwrights and poets, the bright lights of London and other capital cities, the comforts of American faculty clubs, and the Spartan regimes of the ‘health farms’ to which he periodically retired after his return (suspiciously tanned) from international engagements. Geoffrey Moore’s character and behaviour displayed – in Michael Woolf’s apt phrase – a ‘nonconformism and a persistent Bohemianism’ which delighted his admirers and annoyed his detractors. His passing has deprived the community of British Americanists of one of its more idosyncratic and colourful figures.

John White, University of Hull

Announcements

Memorial Service: Professor Geoffrey Moore

A memorial service for Professor Geoffrey Moore will be held in London in June. If you would like to receive an invitation, please contact Mike Woolf at: mike-woolf@lineone.net or on fax: 0181 441 0108.

Michael Woolf Director Syracuse University London Centre 24 Kensington Park Gardens London W11 2QU. Tel: 0171 229 0005 Fax: 0171 792 0791

Folksinger, David Rovics, Tours Europe

David Rovics, a Boston, Massachusetts-based folksinger and songwriter, is planning a tour of performances around Europe soon. For history clubs (or other interested clubs and academic departments), he offers a presentation on the role of music and song in the social movements of twentieth-century American history. This presentation can focus specifically on a time period or movement with which a particular program might be involved, or it can cover broad historical ground, from the Wobblies and the rest of the labor movement of the early twentieth century, to the student, anti-war, and civil rights movements of the 1960’s and beyond.

On and off campus, he also plays frequently for activist groups and music clubs, singing original songs and songs of other contemporary songwriters about contemporary social realities. The songs are those of and about modern-day struggles, from saving the last of the redwoods to living in a downsized economy to lifting sanctions against Iraq.

As a performer, groups with which Rovics has been involved include the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC), School of the Americas Watch, Earth First!, Concerned Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Green Party, the Labor Party, the New Party, many different labor union locals, and many others. Campuses on which he has performed include Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Penn State, University of Georgia, University of Oregon, Washington State University, Earlham College, Loras College, Calvin College, Oberlin College, and many others.

For more information, please contact:

e-mail: Drovics@aol.com

http://www.davidrovics.com

Tel: (617) 747-4460

P.O. Box 995 Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 USA

Forum: ‘Difficult as I Can Make it’: The Fiction of William Gaddis (1922-1998)

William Gaddis, who died of prostate cancer in December of 1998 aged 75, was one of the most admired but least read of innovative post-war American novelists. Because of the demanding nature of his fiction, Gaddis never had a large readership. When a character in J R (1975) is told his work in progress ‘sounds a little difficult’, he responds, ‘Difficult as I can make it’. Because of the sheer bulk of his best work, he remains largely absent from university curricula. In view of this, I would like to offer an outline of his fiction and suggest some of its qualities.

A writer of sometimes forbidding difficulty, his monumental first novel of 1955, The Recognitions is an ambitious and deeply allusive work of nearly one thousand pages which takes the theme of art forgery, counterfeiting and fraud as a grim metaphor for contemporary social and political relations. By turns comic and demonic, this fathomlessly bizarre novel abounds in strange incidents, not least the sacrifice of an ape, self-castration and post-crematorial cannibalism. It met with mostly bewildered reviews and sank without trace. Over the years however, it gained a following and a number of critics came to see it as possibly the greatest American novel of the century, a Janus-faced text that looks back in its complexity to the great modernists such as Joyce and Faulkner and forward to the postmodern American writers on whom Gaddis was a shaping influence, Thomas Pynchon and Don De Lillo.

Gaddis was born in Manhattan, New York City in 1922. In the early 1940s, he attended Harvard but left without a degree. After working as a fact-checker at The New Yorker in the mid-1940s, he travelled to Europe, North Africa and South America and wrote his first novel. Published when he was thirty-three, The Recognitions is at the very heart of his enviable literary reputation. In a carefully wrought and densely-woven series of plots involving upwards of fifty characters across three continents, we follow the adventures of Wyatt Gwyon, son of a clergyman who rejects the ministry in favour of the call of the artist. His quest is to find significance and some form of order in the world. His initial ‘failure’ as an artist leads him not to copy but to paint in the style of the past masters, who had found the kind of order and beauty for which Wyatt searches. His talent for forgery is exploited by a group of unscrupulous critics and businessmen who hope to profit by passing his works off as original old masters. As the novel develops, these art forgeries become a profound metaphor for all kinds of other frauds, counterfeits and fakery: the aesthetic, scientific, religious, sexual and personal. Towards the end, Wyatt seems to wrench something authentic from the simulacra he has produced. The nature of his revelation, however is highly ambiguous and is hedged about by images of madness and hallucination, which disturb simple distinctions between real and authentic, between faith and fakes.

Recently married and with a young family, Gaddis needed to find work and began a twenty-year career in business, writing speeches for corporate executives and scripts for government films. By 1975, and with two failed marriages, Gaddis’s glacial rate of production yielded his second and most demanding novel, the bitterly comic J R. The intervening years had seen The Recognitions gaining influential admirers and the publication of his second novel marked the beginning of a reassessment of his work. J R consists of a huge Babel of unattributed dialogue. It is a satire on corporate America and tells the story of the eleven-year-old schoolboy JR Vansant who builds an enormous economic empire from his school’s public phone booth, an empire that touches everyone in the novel, just as money – the getting of it, worry about the the lack of it, the desire for it – shapes a great deal of the characters’ waking and dreaming lives The novel lays before us in immense detail, in the very grain of the human voice, the alienation that is part and parcel of a world in which our innermost feelings have been commodified.

J R met with critical acclaim and won the National Book Award in 1976. From this point on Gaddis found it increasingly easy to win major grants, endowments and awards that allowed him to write virtually full-time. The 1980s saw the first full-length study of Gaddis to appear and a flurry of articles addressing the complexities of the recent J R. Gaddis’s third novel in thirty years, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985) was greeted with even warmer praise and at a manageable two-hundred odd pages, marked Gaddis’s entry into the book-buying public’s consciousness. Concerned with the media and religious fundamentalism, it is a profoundly bleak novel, deeply pessimistic about the possibilities of human happiness or creative fulfilment, but is energised by its withering satire and Gaddis’s fine ear for speech. While Carpenter’s Gothic picks up and develops themes from Gaddis’s earlier fiction, this much shorter and relatively accessible novel proved the most commercially and critically successful work of the three he had thus far published. It is, however, his least characteristic and his least artistically successful, and it is a shame that because of its relative brevity, it is the first of his novels to which curious readers turn.

The 1990s saw the publication of a number of specialist studies of Gaddis’s work. His fiction was read in the light of influential Continental and postmodern literary theory and it became obligatory to deal with his novels in any survey of innovative post-war American fiction. So, while 1994 brought only his fourth novel in four decades, A Frolic of His Own, his oeuvre stood at a substantial two and a half thousand pages. Gaddis’s last novel is about the culture of litigation in America. It won the 1995 National Book Award, was widely and generously reviewed and Gaddis, who until then had protected his privacy as staunchly as a Salinger or a Pynchon, agreed to be interviewed by the press both in America and abroad. A Frolic of His Own follows a series of litigations through the courts and it is the discrepancy between the ideal of justice and the reality of the law that is Gaddis’s subject. For Gaddis, the theory of justice is a beautiful, ordered system we have constructed to ward off or minimise the chaos and contingency of existence. The practice of law however, is for him ‘a carnival of disorder’, a self-sustaining system of legalese and a conspiracy against the people run for the benefit of a self-serving legal profession.

The novel tells the farcical but horribly believable story of Oscar Crease, a college instructor who is suing both a film company and himself. Firstly, he is convinced that a Hollywood mogul has plagiarised an unpublished play of his about the American Civil War and turned it into a blood-and-guts blockbuster. Secondly, he has managed to get himself run over by his own car while hotwiring it and through the insurance company, he is claiming damages against himself. In a virtuoso piece of structural parallelism, Oscar’s Civil War play revolves around the idea that a soldier who sends out substitutes during the war to fight on his behalf for both sides becomes convinced that the substitutes met and killed one another in battle; a ghostly form of suicide. Finally,the law is about the validity of certain forms of interpretation and about who possesses the power to enforce them. This is at the core of this remarkable novel.

Gaddis’s novels are basically satires; they are about money and are relentless in their criticism of the way contemporary capitalism corrupts and distorts human creativity and personal relationships. Gaddis’s novels amount to something much more than this though, for his bitter satires are woven into immensely elaborate and carefully wrought texts that work at a variety of levels. Gaddis has been called ‘the presiding genius of post-war fiction’. His concern with the detrimental effects of the desire for money links him to Twain, Henry James, Dreiser and Fitzgerald, while many of the most important American novelists writing today, Don De Lillo for example, have acknowledged the influence of Gaddis’s fiction on their own work. In Carpenter’s Gothic, a character speaks of ‘books that erode absolute values by asking questions to which they offer no answers’. This is very close to what Gaddis’s fiction attempts, and close too to the work of two of the greatest American novelists, Hawthorne and Melville. In rejecting the easy affirmations by which most of us live, Gaddis knew he would be writing (as one of his characters says) ‘for a very small audience’.

Peter Dempsey, University of Sunderland

Gaddis’s novels are published by Penguin in Britain. Carpenter’s Gothic is out of print here but is available from Penguin in the US.

Peter Dempsey is at present working on a study of William Gaddis.

Robin Berrington: A Farewell

The following farewell speech was given by Robin Berrington, retiring Cultural Attache at the US Embassy.

’32 years. What a career — from that first assignment in a remote provincial capital in northeast Thailand to London — with stops in Tokyo, Dublin and Washington in between. And what memories. In Thailand in the late-sixties I worked with a counter-insurgency radio station in an effort to prevent another Vietnam from breaking out; I visited remote villages that had never seen foreigners before, usually by jeep, but sometimes by boat and on footÑespecially in the rainy season when the roads simply disappeared. Once we had to sneak out of a village under the cover of darkness when we learned anti-government terrorists were on their way to ambush us. It was dangerous, exciting, and looking back, I wonder how I found the nerve to do it. In Ireland in the late 70’s, as press attaché, I traveled more back roads and by-ways, but the only hostile natives I observed there was when the pubs closed. I drank more Guinness than I can remember, met American politicians with questionable Irish ancestry, enjoyed the fabled Irish hospitality, and wrote a controversial Christmas letter that led to my leaving the country in 48 hours with the tabloid media in hot pursuit. Probably the Thai terrorists would have been gentler.

But, most of my time overseas was spent in Japan — 16 years in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s — a country I had first come to know as a student in Tokyo in the early 60’s. After a few years, it became almost a second home. Doing a variety of press and cultural jobs, I did not hesitate to take advantage of all the opportunities that came my way. When visiting opera or ballet companies needed Western faces to fill costumes on stage, I ‘made my debut’ with the Vienna State Opera, Royal Ballet, Metropolitan Opera and La Scala, among others. I can even reveal that a special part was especially created for me by the all-male Ballet Trockadero de Monte Carlo in their new production of ‘The Pharaoh’s Daughter!’ After a reception I hosted for them, they invited me to go on stage. I said I could never get away with wearing a tutu. They replied it would be no problem. But, when I learned I was to be a eunuch with a costume consisting only of a skull cap, a small towel with a velcro fastener, and lots of body make up, I should have gone for the tutu. I also came in 2nd place in a nationwide sake tasting competition, hosted the visits of Big Bird and Mickey Mouse to the embassy, played a clandestine role in the defection of a Soviet opera singer to the U.S., (eat your heart out, Les Patterson), dressed up as Daffy Duck at an embassy July 4th party, took part in a sword fight in a charity performance of Kabuki drama, ran a contemporary music festival featuring over the years the Kronos Quartet, Michael Torke, Lou Harrison, and other well known Japanese and American musicians, attended the investiture ceremony of a sumo grand champion wrestler, was best man at a Japanese wedding, and endured numerous earthquakes, typhoons, and hangovers — thanks again to all that sake.

Obviously I have not suffered from boredom over the past three years here in the UK either. With all the cultural and educational comings and goings it would be impossible to list all the highlights. But how could I forget the Encaenia ceremonies at Oxford where the dons in academic robes looked like tropical birds in full plumage, or the flight back from the Duxford American Air Museum when on approach to London we could see the spectacle of the scarlet and gold of the setting sun reflected off the Thames and Houses of Parliament…or the thrill of the opening night of Sadler’s Wells, the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and the magnificent new British Library, and the premiere of the new Elgar 3rd symphony. I danced in white tie and tails at the queen’s diplomatic dinner at Buckingham Palace (Fred Astaire look out), and took many glorious weekend walks in the Chilterns or along the Thames. I was honored to read out presidential greetings at a wonderful dinner for Arthur Miller’s 80th birthday at the University of East Anglia. There were memorable evenings like the Trinity College concert in the chapel at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, the many exciting eveings at the BBC Proms or those delightful ‘lost American musicals’ at the Barbican every summer. Or emotional gatherings like the reconciliation service at Coventry Cathedral. Of course, there was the odd event to remind me life in London is like other placesÑI was mugged in Deptford, my house in Little Venice was burglarized, and I was witness to a stabbing on the Bakerloo line. But they serve to give what I like to call a certain texture to life. More important were the happy memories — like the delightful John Cage MusicCircus at the Barbican, the idyllic atmosphere of the Dartington music festival, meeting my heroes, Wallace and Gromit, in Bristol, welcoming the new batch of Fulbright scholars to Britain or the embassy’s July 4th party when we all dressed up in cowboy outfits. Indeed, there is probably a wonderful story associated with each one of you. That is why you are here. I just wish I had the time to repeat them all.

In summing up, the foreign service has enabled me to meet presidents and prime ministers, radical students and Communist terrorists, orchestra conductors and movie stars, emperors and queens (some of the latter in places other than palaces). I have participated in ancient rituals and festivals, judged beauty pageants, travelled to remote areas, eaten exotic foods (like spotted dick or bubble and squeak), battled fellow and foreign bureaucrats, and crossed the oceans of the world more times than I can remember. Dull it never was. But soon it will be over and I must turn in my black diplomatic passport. With feelings that are a mix of relief and regret — not unlike seeing your new car go over a cliff with your mother-in-law inside — I will sleep in, be free of the diplomatic implications of what I say or do, decide my own schedule, read some books, visit some friends, and undertake activities I have long put aside due to other, more pressing, official duties. In a life where change has been the one constant, this will be the biggest change of all.

I thank all of you for helping to make my stay in London as enjoyable as it has been. Whatever the politics or economics of a place, it is the people that make the experience, and you have succeeded marvelously in giving me quite an experience. Several years back when I saw Hillary Clinton here in London only a few months after I had escorted her about Tokyo, she exclaimed, ‘Robin, you must feel like you died and went to heaven.’ She was right. This heavenly place is now a part of my life, and I hope I am the better for it.

But now it is time to go. In closing, let me quote George du Maurier:

‘A little work, a little play, to keep us going — and so good day A little warmth, a little light, of love’s bestowing — and so good night A little fun to match the sorrow of each day’s growing — and so good morrow A little trust that when we die we reap our sowing, and so goodbye.'”

Book Reviews

Gender, Ethnicity and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film by Jude Davies and Carol R. Smith

Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1987, pp156,£12.95, ISBN 1 85331 174 X Pb.

In this book Jude Davies and Carol Smith contend that the period since the late 1980s ‘has seen considerable penetration of non-white, non-straight,and non-male filmmakers into the Hollywood mainstream.'(pp1-2) The authors argue that both contemporary Hollywood and independent films have explicitly engaged with ‘the discourses of identity politics’ operating elsewhere in American society (p3), and, more precisely, that ‘(t)he interest in fragmentary and unstable identity that developed outside mainstream representations in the late 1980s and early 1990s is now discernible in Hollywood productions.’ (p9) Each of the three chapters deals with the intersection of discourses on gender, ethnicity and sexuality in a small group of films, demonstrating both the fragmentation and instability of ‘the centre’ (inhabited by the white heterosexual middle class male) and the process by which ‘othering’, that is the foregrounding and neutralization or rejection of alternative constructions of identity, works to re-establish asense of the centre, albeit a tenuous and illusory one. Chapter 1 examines several Michael Douglas films and the reassertion of a crisis-ridden white masculinity in terms of family and paternity. Chapter 2 discusses a number of films which deal with the construction of African American identities and histories, ranging from the black independent production Daughters of the Dust to the ‘new racism’ of Grand Canyon. Chapter 3 deals with homosexuality in films ranging from independent documentaries to Hollywood hits such as Philadelphia.

While the authors make an effort to contextualize many of the chosen films in terms of the intentions of filmmakers and of developments in American society at large, the chapters mostly consist of outlines of various critical and theoretical positions and of film interpretations, which are both intriguing and revealing. Without any sustained consideration of production and reception contexts, however, the authors’ revelations about the hidden meanings of the chosen films appear to be somewhat arbitrary, as is the selection of films to be interpreted. One can’t help thinking that yet another intricate interpretive move might well reveal an even deeper subtext, and a different selection of films could easily represent a very different ideological trend in contemporary American film.

While Davies and Smith’s work represents a particular school of thought within Film Studies, it is perhaps unfortunate that this book is offered to undergraduate students in American Studies as an introduction to the study of Hollywood films. According to the cover blurb, the ‘BAAS Paperbacks’, of which this books is one, are meant to be ‘clearly written introductions designed to offer students definitive short surveys of key topics in thefield.’ Yet, already the book’s first two sentences would appear to lack the required clarity: ‘This book is not about the representation of various groups of Americans, defined in terms of gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Instead, we are concerned with the uses of cinematic images of identity.'(p1) What is the difference between ‘representation’ and ‘use’? What exactly is a ‘cinematic image of identity’? How can it be used? And by whom? Underwhat circumstances and to what end? The authors seem to assume that the readers already know the answers to these questions.

In conclusion, the book’s narrow focus on cultural theory and textual interpretation and on what may only be a minor trend in contemporary American cinema as well as the author’s tendency to jump right into the middle of complex critical and theoretical debates as well as their dense, jargon-ridden prose, make this a difficult read for students, which may well frustrate their efforts to work on Hollywood cinema and/or give them a narrow view of what the study of Hollywood cinema might entail.

Peter Kramer, University of East Anglia

The United States and European Reconstruction: 1945-1960 by John Killick

Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997, ISBN 1 85331 178 2.

In the 1990s, the extent of the physical and economic devastation experienced by the continent due to the Second World War is often forgotten. Recovery required the restoration of severely damaged but essentially skilled economies. The American hand in this post-war reconstruction was clearly important, but its exact impact remains contested. The spectrum of the debate ranges from a belief that ‘American dollars saved the world’ to one which holds that Europe’s recovery was well underway and American aid was marginal. Killick’s very readable book surveys this debate over the impact of the US Marshall Plan in Western Europe’s astonishingly robust recovery after 1945. He gives equal attention to both sides of the debate and comes to the conclusion that although ‘American policy was very important in European reform and development’ the ‘potential for rapid growth was already present, but it had to be activated and directed into viable channels’ (pp180-181). Killick is also careful in tying in American interest in the aid program. Pax Americana in Europe was not established out of American altruism but enlightened self-interest. The Marshall Plan established ‘a liberal policy aimed at restoring European viability, American trade and international peace’ (p185).

Killick supports his arguments well by analyzing the origins of the aid, its implementation and its impact on the various countries. Furthermore, he devotes two chapters to the influence of the US in the process of European integration – from the creation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), the establishment of the European Payments Union (EPU) and the inception of the European Coal and Steel Community (ESCE).

It is in these two chapters that Killick falters. Albeit ‘American interest and influence can be found at all stages’ of European integration, one must be wary of overemphasis. The creation of the ESCE was not merely achieved by US prodding but also by the founding states’ pursuit of their own interests. These interests did not stem purely from economic concerns but were equally motivated by geostrategic and political interests. The Federal Republic of Germany saw it as a means to slowly free itself from Allied occupation and semi-sovereignty. France saw it as a means to bind Germany closer to it in order to pursue la politique du grandeur. Additionally, as recognized by Paul-Henry Spaak, a forgotten father of the ESCE was Stalin. At the end of the war, there was a strong perception of a common threat of communism, both ideologically and militarily. This concern made a considerable contribution towards Franco-German reconciliation.

On the whole, Killick’s treatment of the subject is admirable. He presents statistical information in manner understandable to the most numerically challenged. The analysis is careful and the answers accessible. This work will no doubt be a ubiquitous feature in the reading lists for courses on economics as well as European history.

Norman Vasu, London School of Economics

Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing by Josh Cohen

London: Pluto Press, 1998. $40.00/£12.99. pp. 174 ISBN 0 7453 12071 / 0 7453 12128.

This book is a significant and fascinating intervention into current debates about postmodernity in its relationship to contemporary American culture. Focusing on the work of six recent American writers – Norman Mailer, Jerzy Kosinski, Robert Coover, Stephen Dixon, Joan Didion and James Ellroy – the book examines the politics of seeing that animates the mass spectable of postmodern culture. By stressing that acts of seeing are crucially and critically engaged in these writers’ works, the book argues for a rethinking of the operation of political and cultural agency within contemporary society. Rather than reinforcing arguments about the operation of domination through a (male) gaze, the book seeks, instead, to establish ways of reading that discover a ‘porosity’ in subject-object relations wherin the seer and the seen are felt to be in productive dialogue. This innovative and far-reaching approach to reading postmodern American fiction is welcome not least because of the weight it gives to two of the most agile and interesting early theorists of the postmodern condition, Walter Benjamin and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The book convincingly demonstrates the importance of these two thinkers to a critique of postmodern America’s culture of late-capitalism. It is, therefore, refreshingly different from so many recent studies in which Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson seem to be the only intellectual capital available to theories of postmodern America. Indeed, some of the most interesting and important sections of the book are the ‘theoretical interludes’ (as Cohen terms them) with which the main chapters are introduced.

The book is at times, however, rather undermined by its own neatness of argument and structure. There is a sense that its theoretical perspectives have been applied to, as opposed to worked through, its readings of American fiction. So carefully argued and delicately wrought are the book’s ‘Introduction’ and its theoretical justifications that there is little space for a developing thesis throughout the book, It is, as it were, all visible from the outset, and the examples that are given, its textual analyses, often serve merely to reiterate rather than further a point made previously. This is most apparent in the way in which the book returns repeatedly to Benjamin’s definition of (postmodern) allegory as that in which ‘any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything’. The textual indeterminacy and visual opacity that this statement seems to endorse is thus only ever reiterated and never really tested by the book. It should be: Benjamin’s definition of allegory is, to say the least, questionable. There is a world of difference – a crucially important political and ethical difference – between the operations of allegory and indeterminate free-play in a text.

Such an unloosening of the notion of allegory within postmodern theory points to, I think, a wider difficulty in this book: namely its own unloosening from a literary and historical tradition in American writing that has privileged the spectacular nature of its culture. Whilst this by no means invalidates the book’s central thesis, it does isolate it somewhat from its cultural history by failing to locate – or even point to – a similar engagement with a problematised politics of seeing in texts from before the twentieth century. It is a little surprising in a book about America’s relationship to the intense visuality of its culture not to find any examination of (and only one fleeting reference to) the sort of romanticisation of the act of seeing that is endemic in writers such as Emerson, Fuller, Whitman and Thoreau, and which is deeply rooted in earlier Calvinist modes of reading the world for visible signs of redemption. This is, though, understandable in a book whose focus is postmodern culture.

Another surprise, however, is that very little attention is given to visual media themselves. Though Chapter Three examines ‘cinematographic fiction’, and has an excellent discussion of film theory, it does not actually discuss film in itself. This strikes me as an opportunity missed. This is equally true of the book’s failure to mention (let alone discuss) postmodern painting. Film theory and art theory would both equally benefit from this book’s acute and sensitive readings in the politics of perception. These are points of contention, though, and not serious criticism of a book which genuinely opens up new ways of reading postmodernity, ones that are expecially apparent in its brilliant close reading of James Ellroy’s LA Quartet. All in all this is a lively and engaging book that really does offer a stimulating new approach to the ways in which we see America, and its fiction, in the light of postmodern culture.

Nick Selby, University of Wales, Swansea

New Readings of the American Novel: Narrative Theory and its Application by Peter Messent

Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998, £14.95 pp. 328 ISBN 1-85331-234-7.

New Readings of the American Novel, first published in 1990, arises from the two decades or so of thick theory that reached its peak towards the middle of the 1980’s. Its applications of Genette, Barthes, Rimmon-Kenan, Iser and Bakhtin are characteristically English in that they are tried in the court of empirism and weighed in the scales of social responsibility. To cavil a little, it has to be said that despite the banner ‘New Edition’, this is no more than a reprint. The ‘Preface’ to this version restricts itself to repeating elements of the agenda charted in the ‘Introduction’ and to suggesting that were there, in effect, to be a new edition, New Historicism would be a candidate for inclusion and ‘black’ would be replaced by ‘African American’. ‘New Historicism’, never a monolithic or coherent enterprise, has itself been superseded by critical approaches which have assimilated many of the positions surveyed by Messent and, in the process, have also largely recuperated the author, history, culture, society (in a fiercely problematic way, of course), and the whole question of value. For readers of a certain age, there is nostalgia in a book where the work ‘postmodern’ fails to appear once.

Whereas this book might have been required reading as part of a core module on classic American fiction in 1990, it would sit more awkwardly in such, more thinly scattered places now. The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury, and The Sun Also Rises are analysed in terms of focalization and narration, time and narrative, and character, respectively. Messent is keen to identify what he regards as the ultimately sterile framework of structuralism – with its commitment to autotelic, heterocosmic texts – within which the first three chapters operate. His analysis certainly reveals, however unwittingly, the extent to which so much of this is a scientific refitting of New Criticism. Messent, incidentally, seems to deprive America of theory; there was scope for a survey of American-European continental intersections on that front. In particular, what about the work of Dorrit Cohn? More broadly, work subsequent ot Genette, which cannot be taken into account here, has tended to concentrate on the incipient, insidious, naturalisations of ‘voice’ and ‘focalization’ and the need for a decentred approach (as in Andrew Gibson).

The fourth chapter, on A Lost Lady, is identified as pivotal in that here, the reader is presented as breaking down the wall of the text as Iser, modified by Uspensky and Mailloux (Fish) enters the scene. Steven Mailloux’s appropriation of Fish’s ‘interpretive communities’ is used to stress the degree to which reader-response theories had hitherto neglected the reading environment and its political determinants. Messent rejects Iser, in part, because his reading practice ignores the ‘historical community’ and, furthermore, assumes that texts are stable entities. Fish’s ‘interpretive communities’ represent, though, the substitution of one form of pernicious stability for another. Beyond that, there is a uncanny sense of a paradise regained as the social relevance of classic American fiction, the locating of which has never depended on all this ‘theory’ anyway, is reasserted. On offer, then, is Peter Messent the reluctant (now belated) structuralist and the Damascus of theoretical pluralism underpinned by a liberal critique of injustice.

Messent’s mechanical approach of Barthes’s codes to The Portrait of a Lady and The House of Mirth serves as a reminder of how tiresome, even costive, all this is when not performed by Barthes himself. The distinction between classic-realist and writerly texts has never seemed so vacuous. If the reader writes the text, after chapter four, she can certainly refuse to be pushed around by these dinosaur categories. For Messent, after Barthes, the title of The Portriat of a Lady is a classic example of classic realism: it flaunts the novel’s lack of ambiguity and apparent investment in framing and containment. It is simply baffling to see James in this light. The Portrait of a Lady revels in a title whose over-determination is everywhere explicit in the text: there is endless equivocation over whether Osmond is Isabel’s portrait or she, his. In Osmond, for example, Isabel sees ‘the most striking of portraits’ (1881 edition).

The best chapter in the book is on Bakhtin and Huckleberry Finn. It is one of the most convincing applications of ‘dialogization’ and the ‘socio-ideological’ imperatives of novelistic polyphony around. I still think, nevertheless, that to attack Genette with Bakhtin is to miss Genette’s point. Genette was more interested in taxonomy than in interpretation (although there’s plenty of interpretation in Narrative Discourse) but he did not see it as his task to prevent such a process. On the contrary. The final chapter, with Their Eyes Were Watching God, is a token attempt, given the space available, to tackle the issue of ‘widening’ the canon. Canons will be, well, always canons; and the bigger they are, the more dangerous they become. Since this book’s first appearance, in any event, they have become big indeed on the American front. Messent’s new Preface regrets the exclusion of Derrida, Jameson, and Foucault. Yes, a book that discusses power without Foucault, not to mention Macherey and Althusser, is something of a curiosity.

Peter Rawlings, Kyushu University, Japan

Designs of Blackness by A. Robert Lee

Pluto Press, 1998, ISBN 0 7453 0643 8; pp. 259.

A. Robert Lee’s latest work, Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America, is an ambitious oveview of the field of African American literature, often with intertextual referencing of the cultural and political background pertinent to each era under discussion. His citation of works is impressive, so much so that the guiding theses of the first chapters get lost in the shuffle – a bad case of ‘you can’t see the forest for the trees’. At first I found myself wondering just what the usefulness of such a listing could be. If the objective was bibliographical, why didn’t the author simply give a ‘Works Cited’ bibliography at the end of the book rather than weighing down the text with so many footnotes?

This attempt to include so many works sometimes leads Lee into difficulties. The very valid illustration of African American autobiography (Chapter 2) as the ‘inscription of the self’ is undercut by the inclusion of both James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and, even more incredibly, Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman, with no acknowledgement of the peculiar relationship of the African American ‘autobiography’ to the novel (not to mention the importance of white mediation in the slave narrative, nor how this specifically African American genre differs from the Western concept of autobiography). Harriet E Wilson’s Our Nig, on the other hand, is mentioned first as a novel (p15) and then examined in a little more detail in the chapter entitled ‘Womanisms’, in which the author finally posits this dilemma: ‘Is Our Nig, accordingly, novel or autobiography, even a Northern ‘slave narrative’?’ (p78).

This brings me to yet another reservation, that of grouping together the majority of women writers into one chapter under one rather vacuous heading – as if ‘womanism’ summed up and unified the vast variety of works by these authors. If we are to understand the term as defined by Alice Walker, included in the epigraph at the beginning of Chapter 4, Morrison’s Sethe of Beloved, for example, simply does not qualify, and this outstanding contribution to literatue is reduced to its lowest possible denominator, a disservice to this author and her work. And inevitable an attempt at inclusiveness means that there will be some ‘favorites’ left out. For this reader anyway, the one sentence devoted to Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day dramatically shortchanges a woman who is probably the best writer of the generation after Morrison. Not that the women are totally left out of other chapters, but the focus thereafter is definitely male-oriented. In Chapter 3 which takes Harlem as its focus, Morrison’s Jazz is treated with a curt gloss of the ‘plot’ while the force of ‘The City’ as main protagonist in this novel goes unremarked; all the more amazing since it is a prime example of Lee’s contention that Harlem is the black city par excellence.

Lee is best when he abandons the pretense of linking every work there is to be linked by simply mentioning or at best glossing the novels, and settles down to more in-depth analyses of a certain number or representative texts. Chapters 5 through 9 are well-written and provocative, and they bring much to bear on the critical era of black life, literature and culture from the 1940s to the 1960s (obviously Lee’s specialty, as the strength of his expertise shines through brilliantly), as does his excellent study of Leon Forrest’s oeuvre. I was particularly delighted with Chapter 8, ‘Acting Out: The Black Drama of the 1960s, the 1960s of Black Drama’, in which his extension of ‘drama’ to the culture and politics of the age capture the excitement and sheer energy of an era crucial to black life. With the exception of his occasional return to peppering the essays with uncritical name-dropping, these central chapters make Designs of Blackness a welcome addition to the critical work on this literature. (Certain minor errors cause a bit of confusion: Richard, Elizabeth’s lover and father to her son John in Go Tell It On the Mountain, was not murdered, but committed suicide; it is Bobo, not Big Boy, who is burned to death in Richard Wright’s ‘Big Boy Leaves Home’; and at one point Hansberry is written ‘Lansberry’ (p169).

Chapter 10 should have been two chapters: the discussion of ‘hybridity’ and the ‘multicultural’ push at the end of this century is a timely and appropriate comment on ‘where we are’ on questions of ‘race’ and ‘canon’, and it reviews the debates exhaustively and intelligently superficially resolved in a concluding paragraph recognizing that ‘race’ as category says very little about the self. But we knew that.

The fact that there is no concluding chapter perhaps points to the central weakness in constructing some otherwise excellent essays into a book. The pitfalls of trying to include too much unfortunately detract from some excellent scholarship and a notable command of a growing field. For the scope of Designs of Blackness is indeed impressive. Perhaps the difficulty inherent in trying to categorize and label such a vast display of intellectual power and literary achievement is tribute enough to the diversity and vitality of African American literature. Nevertheless, Lee’s new book is a valiant attempt and well worth a close reading.

Justine Tally, University of La Laguna, Tenerife

Careers – American Studies Graduates

Career Paths for American Studies Graduates

An American Studies degree allows graduates to pursue a career in widely diverse fields. The following analysis draws on reports from 365 graduates from nine departments over a number of years. The career paths have been grouped into nine broad categories, and the proportion of graduates following each one is listed below. Within each of these categories, however, many different careers are possible. A sample of these indicates how various the options are for American Studies graduates.

Arts, Media and Media Related (8.2%) This includes working for regional and national radio and television, film production, gallery work, acting and theatre management.

Publishing and Journalism (6.3%) This includes freelance writers and researchers as well as journalist for regional and national newspapers and magazines. Many graduates also go into publishing, in fields ranging from production to editorial to management.

Public Relations and Advertising (2.2%) Graduates have secured PR and personnel jobs in many different firms, and have found work in both the creative and management aspects of advertising.

Business, Law and Accountancy (41.9%) Graduates pursue the full range of careers in these fields: in banking, in large accountancy firms, in estate agency and in other financial services, in management, marketing and retail for small and large firms. Others take the CPE and go on to work as lawyers.

Administration and Civil Service (10.9%) This includes charity organisers, immigration and other Civil Service officers, as well as local authority and health service administrators.

Postgraduate Study (13.2%) While some graduates take MAs and PhDs in American (or Latin American) Studies, others go on to postgraduate courses in such varied areas as Cultural Studies, Social Work, Creative Writing, Development Studies, or even take an MBA. American Studies graduates are more likely than their peers to undertake further study abroad – often, but not exclusively, in the United States.

Teaching (All Levels – UK) (9.9%) This category includes teaching at all levels from primary school to universities and colleges.

Teaching and Other Work Abroad (3.3%) Careers abroad range from TEFL teaching in, amongst other places, Poland, Spain, Japan and China, to working for the EU in Brussels, to internship programmes in the US Congress, to administrative posts in various multinational companies.

Other (4.4%) There are of course many other career paths not covered by the preceding categories. These include nursing, the Armed Services, speech therapy, the police and leading expeditions as well as more temporary bar or hotel work.

Kasia Boddy, University College London

Career Advantages of an American Studies Degree

An American Studies degree gives its graduates an edge in the job market for two main reasons:

• First, unlike most undergraduate courses in England (although not in Scotland), it is often a four- rather than a three-year degree, and includes a period ranging from a semester to a year spent studying abroad. Graduates are therefore seen by employers as more mature and independent-minded, as well as more flexible in new situations, than their peers.
• The multidisciplinary nature of the American Studies degree also increasingly appeals to employers. American Studies graduates are regarded as more versatile and more able than single discipline graduates to adapt quickly to new information and new approaches.

BAAS would welcome any further information about the future careers of American Studies graduates. Please send to Dr. Jenel Virden, BAAS Secretary.

Kudos

Anthony Badger, Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge, has been awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at the University of Hull.

Mark Jancovich (University of Nottingham) has been awarded a £61,000 grant by the AHRB for year one of a three-year project on Consumption and the Cinema.

Peter Messent (University of Nottingham) has been promoted to a personal Chair in Modern American Literature.

John White (Department of American Studies, University of Hull) was appointed as the 1998-1999 Emmy Parrish Lecturer in American Studies at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. In November 1998 he delivered The Emmy Parrish Lectures on the theme: ‘American Studies and All That Interracial Jazz’: ‘The Other Great Migration: Louis Armstrong and Chicago Style in the 1920s,’ and ‘The Other New Deal: Kansas City, Boss Pendergast and Count Basie.’

Susan Castillo has been appointed Reader in English and American Literatrure at Glasgow University.

In Print: Members’ Publications

Brian Docherty has published Armchair Theatre, Hearing Eye Press, ISBN 1 870 841 59 X £6.00. Armchair Theatre is Brian Docherty’s first full-length collection, featuring poems which draw on the legacy of Auden, William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, and the political culture in which he grew up. Childhood memories, contemporary Irish politics, personal relations and the Thatcher era all feature here. Brian Docherty was born in Glasgow in 1953 and now lives in north London.

Derek Edgell, who lectures in US history at the University of Southampton New College, has just published The Movement for Community Control of New York City’s Schools, 1966-1970 (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 532 pp., ISBN 0 7734-8262-8.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones (Edinburgh), Peace Now! American Society and the Ending of the Vietnam War. Yale, 1999. ISBN 0-300-07811-0, $32.50.

Nick Selby (ed) The Icon Critical Guide to T. S. Eliot: ‘The Waste Land’ (Icon, 1999), £6.99, ISBN 1-84046-039-3.

John White (Department of American Studies, University of Hull), has published Artie Shaw: Non-Stop Flight (University of Hull Press: EastNote Studies in Jazz,1998, paperback, £9.99, ISBN 0-85958-666-9), and has co-edited (with Brian Holden Reid) Americana: Essays in Memory of Marcus Cunliffe, Foreword by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (University of Hull Press, 1998, paperback, £14.99, ISBN 0-85958-670-7)- a revised edition of American Studies: Essays in Honour of Marcus Cunliffe (Macmillan,1991). His article ‘Civil Rights in Conflct: The ‘Birmingham Plan’ and the Freedom Train, 1947,’ will appear in The Alabama Review, Vol.52, No. 2 (April, 1999), pp121-41.

Short-term Travel Report

Report: Sam Maddra, University of Glasgow

I travelled to the US for a month this summer to carry out research at various archives across America, for my Research M. Phil. Cultures in Collision: The 1891/92 Tour of Britain by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, and its Continuing Legacy. The dissertation will explore the history of the show’s sojourn in Britain; the significance and meaning of William Cody’s use of 23 Indian prisoners, who were members of his entourage; the importance of the interpreter George Crager’s role, as a cultural mediator between Indian and white society; and the consequence of his sale and donation to Glasgow Museums of 28 Native American artefacts in 1892. Four of the artefacts have Wounded Knee provenance, the most significant being a Ghost Dance shirt reportedly removed from a body after the massacre. In November 1998 the shirt was the subject of a historic agreement, when Glasgow City Council decided to repatriate the garment to the Wounded Knee Survivors Association.

My trip started in Washington DC with some very profitable research atthe National Archives, sandwiched between work at the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. At the National Archives I was particularly interested to look at the correspondence of the Bureau of IndianAffairs concerning the use of Indian performers in Wild West shows, and opposition to such employment. I was also here to view the correspondence of the Adjutant General’s Office, which dealt withWilliam Cody’s employment of twenty-three Indian prisoners. These men and women were originally incarcerated at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, in the aftermath of the military suppression of the 1890 Ghost Dance religion.

My next stop was the Federal Archives Regional Center in Kansas City, MO. Despite notifying the archive of my visit, forwarding lists of items I wanted to see, and receiving confirmation of my trip, it was not until my arrival that I was informed that the majority of the material I wanted to view had been sent to Washington to be digitised and put onto the Net. This was fortunately found not to be the case. I went to see specific letters in the Agency Correspondence files, but was pleasantly surprised to find a wealth of information there.

The next stage of my research involved a number of archives dotted about South Dakota and Wyoming. I visited Wounded Knee, the site of the infamous massacre, and was fortunate enough to spend an evening at the Oglala Lakota Nation Pow-wow at Pine Ridge, before going on to the South Dakota State Historical Society in Pierre. This archive holds the family papers of Mary Collins, a missionary of the Congregational Church. Collins was at the forefront of the opposition to Cody’s use of the Ghost Dance prisoners in his Wild West show. The archive is housed at the Cultural Heritage Center, which is where Glasgow’s Ghost Dance shirt will be held initially. I therefore talked to a member of the museum staff about their agreement with the Survivors Association,and their Wounded Knee display. Heading west towards Cody in Wyoming,I stopped to view other Wounded Knee objects, including a Ghost Dance shirt, at the Journey Museum in Rapid City, SD.

At Cody, I worked in the McCracken Library, at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, going through their William. F. Cody archives. They have a number of items pertinent to my research including correspondence, clipping books, and photographs, but it was an unexpected discovery in their Plains Indian Museum that was perhaps my most significant find here: a Ghost Dance shirt which bore a striking resemblance to the Glasgow shirt. The similarity between the shirts was interesting, given the individuality of designs on Ghost Dance shirts. Their similitude suggests a connection in manufacture, which could have significant consequences for the given provenance of the Glasgow shirt.

I ended my trip in Denver, in the Western History section of the Denver Public Library. I was here to view the Nate Salsbury photographic collection, which includes 175 photographs taken in 1892 by A.R. Dresser. These images were photographed over a three month period and illustrate all aspects of the Wild West show during itsstay in Earls Court, London.

Overall the trip was extremely productive and the material I was able to gather is invaluable to my research. At the 1999 BAAS Conference I will be presenting a paper based on sources collated in the American archives I visited. I would like to take this opportunity to thank BAAS for awarding me the short-term travel award that helped to make this trip possible.

Research Support

BAAS Short Term Travel Awards

Winners of the BAAS Short-Term Travel Awards are:

Peter Ingram (Keele) John Lees Award for work on Congress and Eastern Europe.

Anne-Marie Trudgill (Manchester Metropolitan) Marcus Cunliffe Award for research into the work of Elizabeth Stoddard.

Gail Danvers (Sussex) for work on Iroquois-British relations in colonial New York.

Joanna Gill (Cheltenham and Gloucester College) for research on the work of Anne Sexton

Emma Lambert (Birmingham) for work on the Luce media and the Cold War

Richard Ings (Nottingham) for work on the photographic images of Harlem, 1917-1955

Cathy Hoult (Leicester) for work on the influence of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Congratulations!

New deadline for short term awards

Please note: the deadline for submission of applications for short term travel awards has been extended to 1 December 1999.

J.Virden, Hull

BAAS Mini-Conference Support: guidelines

The BAAS executive committee receives a number of requests every year to provide financial assistance for mini-conferences in American Studies. BAAS support for American Studies conferences is a vote of confidence in the conference itself and a recommendation of quality to scholars, teachers and delegates in all disciplines. The following guidelines are intended to help future applicants.

BAAS wishes to support access to American Studies throughout the UK, and at all levels of education, but the money available for this purpose from the Association’s general funds is limited. When support can be provided, it will usually be around £100, and will not normally exceed £200.

The BAAS Education fund exists in part to help conferences aimed at supporting the teaching of American Studies in schools. The Association welcomes applications falling into this category.

Among the factors that may be considered are the regional impact of the conference, and the target audience of scholars, and/or postgraduates.

Applications are welcome from any body or institution wishing to host an American Studies event. Applications from BAAS branches will be given preference.

Applications should be made to the Secretary of BAAS, normally in time for the June meeting of the Executive Committee. It is suggested that conferences be planned at least a year in advance, allowing time for a first call for papers six months before the conference.

Applications should state the purpose of the money sought from BAAS, and should provide an outline of the conference programme including the dates, the target audience, and full costings.

It is expected that usually the host will also be providing costed support. Conferences will not receive grants if their dates clash with the BAAS Annual Conference.

Financial support will be confirmed by letter from the Chair of the Development Subcommittee.

Grant recipients will undertake to acknowledge BAAS support and to distribute BAAS recruitment leaflets in their conference mailings and at the conference. These materials should be obtained by the conference convenor from the Secretary of BAAS.

Address labels for the BAAS membership may be obtained from the Treasurer of BAAS.

BAAS strongly suggests that conferences aimed at teachers and/or Access and School students should include provision for a Resources session and/or Resources room to be included in the meeting, and that American Studies programmes be circulated and invited to provide admissions publicity for display.

The conference convenor should nominate a deputy who will assume responsibility if necessary. Where appropriate BAAS encourages the use of postgraduates to assist with conference organisation.

Within two months of the conference, a report, with accounts, should be submitted to the Chair of the Development Subcommittee. Any unused part of the grant must be returned to BAAS, to be used for other American Studies projects.

Jefferson Fellowships

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which owns and operates Thomas Jefferson’s historic home at Monticello, is pleased to announce a program of short-term residential fellowships and travel grants at its International Center for Jefferson Studies open to all scholars working on Jefferson projects. Foreign nationals are particularly encouraged to apply.

Short-Term Fellowships are awarded for periods of one to three months to doctoral candidates and postdoctoral scholars from any country. Awards carry a stipend of $1,500 for U.S. and Canadian fellows plus pre-approved round-trip airfare, and $2,000 for overseas fellows plus airfare. Accommodation is available on a limited basis. Fellows are expected to be in residence at the Center during the course of the fellowship, and no awards are made for work carried on elsewhere. Fellows have access to Monticello’s expert staff and research holdings as well as to the extensive resources of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. Occasional visits may be made to the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Historical Society in nearby Richmond, and to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Applicants should submit four copies of (i) a succinct description of the research project (500-words), and (ii) a curriculum vitae, including names and addresses of three referees. Deadline for application: 1 April 1999

Travel Grants are available on a limited basis for scholars and teachers wishing to make short-term visits to Monticello to pursue research or educational projects. The application procedure and deadline are the same as for fellowships.

Applications should be addressed to the Fellowship Committee, International Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello, P.O. Box 316, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902, USA. Announcement of awards will be made by 1 June 1999.

The fellowship and grants program is underwritten by endowments established for this purpose by the Batten Foundation and First Union National Band of Virginia, and by a grant from the Coca-Cola Foundation.

James Horn, Saunders Director, International Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello.

New Members

The British Association for American Studies is pleased to welcome the following new members:

Barry Atkins lectures in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research interests include US writing of the Great War, immigration and Nativism in literature, and American science fiction.

Frances Barry is preparing her D. Phil at the University of Sussex. Her research interests include the relationship between performance and performative utterance, particularly in the work of Susan Howe, Bob Perelman, and Carla Harriman, among others.

Birgit Behrendt is a Ph. D. student at Philipps-Universitate in Marburg, Germany, researching the treatment of Romantic motifs, themes and topoi in nineteenth-century writers of Spain and America, focusing on Washington Irving and Gustavo Adolfo Becquer.

Rachel Elisabeth Bell’s MA dissertation was on African traditions in the arts and craft of African- American slaves. She is currently preparing an MA.

Gary Blohm is preparing his Ph. D. at Exeter on individualism in recent American fiction.

Martyn Bone is a Ph. D. student at Nottingham, working on the postmodern ‘sense of place’ in contemporary Southern literature, with emphasis on Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Barry Hannah and Tom Wolfe.

Siobhan Davis is currently in her second year of doctoral research at Keele, examining the changing representation of white, urban, middle class women in the United States 1930-1945.

Andrew Dlaska, who holds an M. A and Ph. D. from the University of Innsbruck, lectures in German at Warwick. Her book on Bharati Mukherjee, Ways of Belonging: Appropriating Spaces, Fashioning Identities, is now in press.

Robert Dykstra is Professor of History and Public Policity at the State University of New York at Albany. His areas of expertise include Western history and the Gilded Age.

Ikram Elsherif, with a B. A from Kuwait University and an M. A. in English Literature from South Valley University in Egypt, has carried out research on Iris Murdoch’s novels.

Susan J Forsyth will soon defend her PhD dissertation at Christ Church College, Canterbury, on representations of the Wounded Knee Massacre. she is currently researching the US reservation system.

Dave Foster is an M. Phil student at Newcastle, working on the work of radical Southern white journalist Stetson Kennedy.

Ruth Frendo has just begun a Ph. D. at Essex, researching issues of representation, identity, and female sexuality in the works of selected Southern women writers in the period 1920-1960.

Zoe Greer is a PhD student in History at Newcastle, researching the African-Smerican prison experience between 1945 and 1970.

Helena Grice is Research Fellow in American Literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She is co-editor, with Tim Woods, of ‘I’m Telling You Stories: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading’ (1997); co-author, with Maria Lauret, Candida Hepworth and Martin Padget, of ‘Beginning New American Fictions’ (MUP, 1999), and editor of ‘Asian American Feminist Thought’ (Cornell UP, 2000). She wrote her PhD on the work of Asian American women writers.

Bornali Halder is preparing a D. Phil in social anthopology at the University of Oxford. She recently returned from the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, where she was researching the political and social geographies of the Lakota Sioux.

Simon Hall is currently preparing a Ph. D. at Cambridge on the Civil Rights movement and the New Left.

Ann Heilman lectures in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her subject interests include 19th and 20th-century women’s writing and contemporary feminist fiction.

Bill Issel is Professor of History at San Francisco State University, and lists geography and media studies among his interests.

Rossitza Ivanova is based at Warwick. Her research interests include women writers from diaspora, and she hopes to register in a PhD program in the UK, the US, or in her native Bulgaria.

Donna Jackson has recently begun her Ph. D. dissertation on the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter at Wolfson College, Cambridge.

Elizabeth Jacobs is a postgraduate student at Aberystwyth, researching Chicana/o literature and culture.

Cynthia Jesner is studying for an MPhil in American Studies at Glasgow. Originally from the American Northwest, her BA is from the University of Washington in Seattle.

Kris Jozajtis is engaged in research for his Ph.D at Stirling. The provisional title of his dissertation is ‘Hollywood and American Civil Religion’.

Desmond King is Professor of Politics at Oxford University. His publications include Separate and Unequal (1995) and In the Name of Liberalism (1998).

William Lazenblatt lectures in American Studies at the University of Ulster, Jordantown.

Frederic Lee is Reader in Economics at DeMontfort University. His primary focus is on American economic history.

J. Loftus is Head of Department at St. Francis Xavier, London.

Sam Maddra is a postgraduate at Glasgow, working on her dissertation ‘Cultures in Collision: The 1891/92 Tour of Britain by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and its Continuing Legacy.’ She has written several articles on this subject.

Jo Ann Manfra is Professor of US History at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Robert Mason lectures in History at the University of Edinburgh.

Maureen McDermott is preparing an annotated edition of a selection of the unpublished diaries of Edith Wharton. She has taught in Adult Education since 1992.

Alison McDowall is a graduate student at Liverpool John Moores University. She is currently working on the influence of jazz music on African-American writers of the 1950s.

Christopher MacGowan is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. His publications include William Carlos Williams’ Early Poetry: The Visual Arts Background (1984), as well as editions of the poems and letters of Williams.

Philip McGowan lectures in the Department of English at Goldsmith’s College, with interests in the areas of Cultural Studies, History, and Literature.

Suzanne McGruther (Glasgow) is researching contemporary Native American art. She is currently writing her first book, which she describes as ‘creative fiction concerning American and Scottish social distinctions.’

Tiffany McKirdy is currently a Ph. D. student at Glasgow University, where she is preparing her dissertation on the work of Cormac McCarthy.

Josephine Metcalf is a student living in Kent.

Nathaniel Millett is beginning his doctoral studies at St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge. His special interests include slavery and Native American culture.

Gillian Mitchell is an M. Phil student in American Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include popular music in North America in the period 1960-1980 and folk music of the Depression era.

Jonathan Mitchell is a Ph. D. student in Swansea, researching the literature and culture of the American 1960s.

Ann Mumford holds a Ph. D. from the University of Cardiff in Law. She has published articles on tax law, tax evasion, and the American Bill of Rights, among other topics.

Carol Nahra is Campus Relations Coordinator of the Council on International Educational Exchange. She has an MA in Anglo-American Studies from Sussex.

Robert Orr is a postgraduate student at Newcastle, researching foreign influences on the Black Panther party.

Andrew Preston is currently a Ph. D. candidate at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. His dissertation is on the role of National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy in decision-making on Vietnam, 1963-1965.

Dominic Sandbrook is a Ph. D. student at Cambridge, working on the life and political career of Senator Eugene McCarthy.

Margaret Mary Smith is a postgraduate student at Manchester Metropolitan University, with interests in cultural studies, history and literature.

Rebecca Starr is Senior Lecturer in History at the Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education. She specialises in Colonial and Revolutionary American History. She has published a monograph titled A School for Politics: Commercial Lobbying and Political Culture in Early South Carolina (Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), as well as articles on related topics.

Carrie Swan has recently begun her MA in American Literature and Culture at Keele. Her current research interests include African-American women’s writing and film.

Sophia Taylor is a Ph. D. candidate at Nottingham, working on the religious aspects of Ellen Glasgow’s writing. Her article ‘Ellen Glasgow and the Culture of Suffering’ was recently published in the Ellen Glasgow Newsletter in its Spring 1998 issue.

Zoltan Vajda lectures in American Studies and Cultural Studies at Jozsef Attila University in Szeged, Hungary. Among his interests are antebellum Southern history, media and cultural studies.

William Van Vugt is Professor of History at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His book Britain to America: The Mid-Nineteenth Century Immigrants to the USA will be published this year. He is also interested in folk music and performs locally as a guitarist.

Maria Varsamopoulou is preparing a Ph. D. in American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her special interests include the writings of Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison.

Mark Whalan has recently enrolled on a PhD course at Exeter University on the development of the short-story cycle in American Modernism, with a selected focus on Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner. He has already published an article on detective fiction in postmodernity in Paradoxa.

John White (Department of American Studies, University of Hull) was appointed as the 1998-1999 Emmy Parrish Lecturer in American Studies at Baylor University, Waco, Texas.

Elizabeth Williamson was appointed Director of the UK Office of the Council on International Educational Exchange in May 1998.

Jayne Wood is preparing an MA at Leeds in American Literature and Culture with European Study at the John F. Kennedy Institute of Berlin’s Free University.

Sarah Wood, who holds a BA and MPhil in American Literature from Cambridge, is currently preparing a PhD at University College London on Washington Irving.

Anne Woodward lectures in American Studies at the University of Derby.