The British Association for American Studies is pleased to maintain a list of news and events from across the American Studies community.
The items below include news from BAAS itself and submissions from other institutions and organisations. You will find posts organised by category below. Each week, the news and events submitted to BAAS, are included on the Weekly Digest mailing. You can sign up to receive the weekly mailing by completing this form.
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ALT-AC is a dynamic, responsive platform within the Journal of American Studies dedicated to engaging with the evolving landscape of American culture, politics, and society in real time. Moving beyond the traditional boundaries of academic publishing, ALT-AC offers a space where scholars, writers, and practitioners can reflect on urgent issues as they unfold, bridging the gap between scholarly analysis and contemporary public discourse.
On 19 May 2026, at University College London, Frederick M. Lawrence, Secretary and CEO of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and former President of Brandeis University, will be in conversation with Professor Larry Kramer, President and Vice-Chancellor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. They will explore the profound political, legal, and cultural pressures reshaping US universities.
"Gary Scharnhorst engages in a bold new experiment: he has assembled a vast archive of personal reminiscences about the author by people who knew him during each of the key phases of his extraordinary life. The result is a collage of impressions that serves to contextualise and, in some cases, to complicate the mythological persona that Mark Twain himself promoted and that his official biographers have often perpetuated." - Henry B. Wonham, author of Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale
"Cherny excels at showing how San Francisco's diverse inhabitants shaped the city's history. Readers will appreciate the dry humor that appears from time to time like morning fog at Ocean Beach on a chilly day in July. The book is a very readable survey based on the author's forty-plus years of scholarship." —William Issel, author of Church and State in the City: Catholics and Politics in Twentieth-Century San Francisco
"An indispensable contribution to the study of Black speculative production." - Reynaldo Anderson, co-editor of Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness "Meticulous and exciting, Audiofuturism fills in a major gap in the history science fiction, radio dramas, the Jim Crow era, and speculative Black studies." - Shanté Paradigm Smalls, author of Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City
Join us for the next Faulkner Studies in the UK colloquium, celebrating 90 years of Absalom, Absalom!, on May 2nd–3rd, 2026, online via Zoom.
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