News & Events

"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.

Please consider submitting abstracts for a guaranteed stream of panels on Early American Environments to be held at next year’s Society of Early Americanists conference (March 18-20, 2027, Chicago). We are interested in scholarship that considers questions of environment and ecology in the early Americas, broadly defined to include the transatlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific worlds.

An important new book on the history of the city of Glasgow and its connections to North America has just been published by Peter Lang. Portable City: Modern Glasgow's Transatlantic Connections is edited by Stephen Bowman and Kieran Taylor and includes contributions from new and established scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, including Kevin James, Tanja Bueltmann, Craig Lamont, and James J. Smyth.