News & Events

How should Miller be read in an age shaped by feminist, queer, and intersectional approaches to literature? How might his work be situated within longer histories of sexual representation, counter-cultural dissent, and challenges to moral and aesthetic convention? What place, if any, should Miller occupy within contemporary literary canons, classrooms, and public culture? By bringing these questions into dialogue with archival research, transatlantic studies, and the study of artistic networks, this conference seeks to reconsider Miller whilst reflecting on the changing critical landscape.

The 2026 BAAS Postgraduate Symposium invites proposals from postgraduate researchers at all levels and across all disciplines on the topic of Transatlantic Connections and the ‘Special Relationship[s]’. By using the term ‘Special Relationship[s]’, we intend to explore the relationship between not only the US and the UK, but also between the US and other countries. We invite panels and individual papers on this theme and encourage you to interpret it as broadly as you wish, including any aspect of the US’s transnational cultural, political and literary connections, influences or contrasts. We w

"The National Comedy Center and Smithsonian approach comedy's history with the same rigor and reverence we bring to it as artists." - Lily Tomlin "A one-of-a-kind trip through the archives of the National Comedy Center and Smithsonian Institution that shines a new light on America's funniest moments." - Carol Burnett

"The Fenian Empire strikes at the homogeneity of Fenian associationalism and rhetoric and elaborates on its many contradictions and complexities in the United States and across the western hemisphere. Teeming with individual Fenians, splits, spies, and swagger, it is a captivating read contending with ideas which are at once both historical and contemporary." - Úna Ní Bhroiméil, author of Building Irish Identity in America 1870-1915

"By centering the ways of knowing and being of Black gay men and elaborating on the practices they use to refashion their identities, Winder intervenes in the social science and public health tendency to obscure or dismiss Black gay men's agency in their own self-recognition, affirmation, and care; this is a crucial contribution that Shameless makes." – Marlon M Bailey, author of Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit

“Bezio offers an insightful and compelling way to argue for the relevance of early American texts in providing nuanced, epidemiologically attuned readings of outbreak stories in the present.” - Louise Penner, author of Victorian Medicine and Social Reform: Florence Nightingale among the Novelists