News & Events

Douglas Field was introduced to Baldwin's essays and novels by his father, who witnessed the writer's debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge University in 1965. In Walking in the Dark, he embarks on a journey to unravel his life-long fascination and to understand why Baldwin continues to enthrall us decades after his death. Tracing Baldwin's footsteps in France, the US, and Switzerland, and digging into archives, Walking in the Dark interweaves Baldwin's writings on family, illness, memory, and place with a meditation on his father’s illness.

The association of British Americanist Nineteenth Century Historians still welcomes registrations for their upcoming conference at Madingley Hall, University of Cambridge - October 10-12, 2024.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery encourages applications for its 2025-2026 research fellowships, awarded through the Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program (SIFP). Residencies are available at the graduate, doctoral, postdoctoral, and senior levels. The deadline to apply is October 15.

BAAS member Sarah Layzell's debut children's novel Cottonopolis has now been published by Northodox Press. Cottonopolis is an LGBTQ+ middle grade story set in 1840s Manchester, mixing social history with a magical story of friendship and first love. Among other topics, the book addresses the historical relationship between Manchester, the Industrial Revolution, the cotton trade and enslavement in the United States.

The Mississippi River, often regarded as America’s central artery, has been instrumental in shaping the nation’s geography, culture, and history. This edited volume, The Mississippi: Soundings on America’s arterial River, aims to explore the river’s vast influence, tracing its course from the headwaters at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to its expansive delta at the Gulf of Mexico. Through a multidisciplinary approach—encompassing geography, ecology, history, culture, and literature—we invite contributors to examine the river’s profound impact.

Taking into consideration recent developments toward a Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies, this special issue of The European Journal of American Studies aims to rethink and recontextualize the American project not through the homogenizing impulses of the global sublime but through the decentered relationality of planetarity—the act of “making our home unheimlich or uncanny” (Spivak 74). Potential contributors should send a 500 word abstract and a short biographical note to dominik.steinhilber@uni-konstanz.de and florian.wagner@uni-jena.de by December 31, 2024.