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.
To submit content to appear on this page and to be included in our Weekly Digest mailing, please submit your content to us by completing the submission form.
“Berebitksy provides essential historical context, revealing how female sexual subordination was baked into office culture from the 1860s, and her keen analysis of gendered power dynamics illuminates a path forward.” —Kimberly Hamlin, author of Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener
"Rum was global integration in liquid form, a distillation of the greed, ingenuity, violence, and resilience that organized the early modern Atlantic world. In The Invention of Rum, Jordan B. Smith displays the best of the historian’s craft as he ranges across multiple scholarly fields, revises familiar interpretations, recognizes the complexities of the past, and reckons with the continuities that shape our world today."—Seth Rockman, author of Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery
“An unconventional biography that reads like fiction, Sherry Smith’s Bohemians West traces a twentieth-century sojourn with alternative romance. Although the portrait of America’s decades-long transformation through modernity may draw interest on its own—with the complex interplay of new radicals, old conservatives, industrialism, war, and impending recession—it is the even more complex magnetism between Sara Bard Field and Charles Erskine Scott Wood that makes each page turn itself.”—Pacific Historical Review
“[A] tribute to the Girl Scouts that probes the organization’s controversies as well as its successes. . . . [Farrell’s] research tackles uncomfortable truths . . . [and] contains copious historical tidbits that will intrigue Girl Scouts aficionados.”—Publishers Weekly
The genocidal war in Gaza alongside the acceleration of ethnic cleansing of the West Bank could not occur without full US and UK support. And yet American Studies in the UK has been largely silent. This symposium aims to put Palestine back at the centre of our theorisations of the history, culture, literature, and political economy of American Empire, theorise its current absence in UK American Studies, and catalyse practical (and utopian) change, from creating collective syllabi to building Palestine solidarity networks, and transforming our professional organisations and universities.
The Margaret Fuller Society is pleased to sponsor a panel on "Trouble and Recovery: Health in Margaret Fuller’s Life and Society" for the upcoming Thoreau Society Annual Gathering in Concord, MA, July 8-12, 2026. The words of our title, “Trouble and Recovery,” encompass both obstacles to health and its restoration, in Fuller’s personal life or the family and society within which she lived, in body or “head and heart,” whether descriptive or metaphoric in significance.
We encourage you to submit content for the BAAS Weekly Digest, which will also appear on this page. Each week the digest is emailed out to our full list of subscribers and includes information on upcomming events, conferences, job opportunities, call for papers and more. You can submit your item to the digest, by clicking the button below.
