BAAS Annual Conference 2009
University of Nottingham, April 16-19 2009
The 54th Annual Conference
Thursday 16 th April
2:00-4:00pm Conference Registration and Coffee and Tea
2:45- 4:00pm – Library Session
“Copyright in the Age of Open Content: what every American Studies Academic Needs to Know”
Tim Padfield (Information Policy Consultant at The National Archives)
‘Archives and Copyright'
Matthew Shaw (British Library)
‘From Pirates to Google Books: copyright in the Old and New worlds'.
Ben White (British Library)
Copyright – the Here and Now
4:15-5:15pm Plenary Lecture
Allison Graham (University of Memphis) Introduction by Professor Sharon Monteith (University of Nottingham)
Dreams From the Road To Nowhere: Reinventing the Southern Narrative in the "Smack-Dab Center" of the Country.
5:15pm Reception and American Scene Prints Exhibition (Hosted by the University of East Anglia)
Introduction: Douglas Tallack (University of Leicester)
Lakeside Arts Centre, University Park
8:00pm Dinner
6:00pm-1:00am Bar
Friday 17 th April
9:00-10:30am Session 1
Frank Sinatra
Chair: Sharon Monteith (University of Nottingham)
Karen Mc Nally (London Metropolitan University)
Narrative vs Star Image: Frank Sinatra and the World War II Veteran in Suddenly
Kathryn Castle (London Metropolitan University)
Citizen Frank: Frank Sinatra and the FBI
Roberta Pearson (University of Nottingham)
Frank Sinatra in Fifties Television
Political Culture in Revolutionary and Antebellum America
Chair: Matthew Pethers (Univeristy of Nottingham)
Tom Rodgers (University of Warwick)
Tyranny, Popular Sovereignty, and American Revolutionary Coercion.
Allison M. Stagg (University of London)
“The Times – A Political Portrait”: Political Caricature after the American Revolution, 1789-1801
Gwyneth Mellinger (Baker University)
The Silent Bargain: The Straight Norm within the American Society of Newspaper Editors
New Perspectives on Mark Twain
Chair: Will Kaufman (University of Central Lancashire)
Thomas Ruys Smith (University of East Anglia)
“The Mississippi was a virgin field”: Mark Twain and Postbellum River Writings, 1865-1876
Peter Messent (University of Nottingham)
Friendship's Limits: Clemens, Howells and the Deaths of Susy and Winny
Alexis Haynes (Keuka Collage , New York)
Mark Twain and the Global Imagination: The Aesthetics of Circumnavigation in Following the Equator
Reimagining the African American Diaspora: Trauma, Representation and the Great American Forced Migration
Chair: Richard Follett (University of Sussex)
Calvin Schermerhorn (Arizona State University)
The Great American Forced Migration in Literature and Culture
Ben Schiller (University of East Anglia)
Negotiating Trauma: The Limits of Resistance in the Shadow of Diaspora
Lisa Merrill (Hofstra University)
‘Human flesh and blood, like yourselves': Henry Ward Beecher 's Staging of Mock Slave Auctions.
The NAACP at 100: New Links, New Directions and New Contexts
Chair: Simon Topping (University of Plymouth)
Jenny Woodley (University of Nottingham)
“ The Crisis : The Arts in the NAACP's fight against racial prejudice, 1910-1934.”
George Lewis (University of Leicester)
With No Deliberate Speed: the NAACP's Battle with the Putnam Letters.
American Realism, Political Intellects and the Renegotiation of Jewish American Identity in the 1940s and 1950s
Chair: Anthony Hutchison (University of Nottingham)
Richard O'Brien (Leeds Metropolitan University)
Saul Bellow , Trotsky and ‘The Mexican General'
David Gooblar (University College London)
‘You're what Grammy Hall would call a real Jew': Jewish-American Identity in Portnoy's Complaint and Annie Hall
Gordon Hutner (University of Illinois)
The Prizing of Contemporary American Realism
Immigration and the Imagination in American Writing
Chair: Aishih Wehbe-Herrera (University of Edinburgh)
Stella Bolaki (University of Edinburgh)
“On the Other Side of the Mirror”: Illness, Performance, and Political Imagination in Guillermo Gómez-Pena's Brownout 2.
Aishih Wehbe-Herrera (University of Edinburgh)
Anglos vs Californios?: (Un)doing Masculinity in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton 's The Squatter and the Don .
Katrin Korkalainen (UNIVERSITY OF OULU , FINLAND
Domestic Battlefields and Public Hunting Grounds: Sound, Time, and the Immigrant's Struggle for Survival in Anzia Yezierska's Ghetto Narratives
Arabs, Cubans and Transnational America
Chair: Sarah MacLachlan (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Jenna Pitchford (Nottingham Trent University)
The Iraqi Image: Representations of Iraqi Identity in US Iraq War Literature
Wendy McMahon (University of Essex)
‘Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose': Loss, Language and Place in Reinaldo Arenas' ‘American' novel, The Doorman
Ikram A. Elsherif (Gulf University for Science and Technology)
“I got slapped for not knowing I was Arab”: Marginality in Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage
Second and Third-Wave Feminist Activists in the United States
Chair: Sue Currell (University of Sussex)
Sinead McEneaney (University of Essex)
Women, welfare and the stirrings of liberation in Cleveland, Ohio, 1964-69
Sylvia Ellis (University of Northumbria)
‘Enhancing the Quality of the Educational Experience': University & College Women's Centres in the United States from the 1940s-the Present
Helen Mitchell (Northumbria University)
Establishing ‘ A Place of One's Own': The Women's Centre at the University of Connecticut
10:30-11:00am
Coffee and Tea
11:00am-12:30pm Session 2
Contemporary Fiction, Cultural Memory and Episodes in American Radicalism
Chair: Anthony Hutchison (University of Nottingham)
Peter Kuryla (Belmont University , Nashville)
Bombers and Starfish: Political Radicalism and Gender Trouble in American Pastoral and The Book of Daniel : A Novel
Richard H. King (University of Nottingham)
Marilynne Robinson 's Gilead as Historical Novel and a Novel of Ideas
Sarah E. Churchwell (University of East Anglia)
On Moral Grounds: Marilynne Robinson's Gilead , Home, and American Cultural Memory
Arab-American Studies
Chair: Douglas Tallack (University of Leicester)
Patrick McGreevy (American University of Beirut , Lebanon)
Arab-American Encounters and the Globalisation of the Higher Education Industry
Paul Jahshan (Notre Dame University , Zouk , Lebanon)
Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra and Early-Nineteenth-Century American Constructions of the Oriental
Youssef Yacoubi (Bard College , New York)
Diasporic Criticism: From Orientalised Transcendentalism to Post-orientalism.
Backing Dr. King: The Support Networks of the SCLC
Chair: Kate Sampsell-Willmann (Georgetown University)
Clare Russell (University of Nottingham)
Upheaval in the ‘Old South': A Study of Grassroots Organizing in Protest Events – Savannah (1963) and Charleston (1969)
Johannah Duffy (University of Nottingham)
Passing the Plate: Personal Appearances of Dr. King and the Donations Flows to SCLC
Peter Ling (University of Nottingham)
What did the South give to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference?
Dissent and Identity in Early America – Moving Away From a History of ‘Puritan New England '
Chair: Matthew Pethers (University of Nottingham)
John Donoghue (Loyola University)
Samuel Gorton and the Common Law: Secular Dissent, the ‘custom of the country', and Abolitionism in Early America.
Charlotte Carrington (University of Cambridge)
“Mine-Host of Ma-re Mount' and his ‘ Land of Milk and Honey': A Reappraisal of Thomas Morton and his World.
Alison Stanley (King's College London)
Why Buy A Bible You can't Read?: Religious Identity and Scriptural Translation in Seventeenth Century Puritan New England
Adapting America : Issues of Form, Culture and Property
Chair: Mark Gallagher (University of Nottingham)
Charles J. Shindo (Louisiana State University)
Displacing Magnolia: The Adaptation of Edna Ferber's Showboat from Novel to Musical Theater
Rayna Denison (University of East Anglia)
American Heroes in Japanese Hands: Anime depictions of Batman in Batman Gotham Knight (2008)
Ian Gordon (National University of Singapore)
Smallville : Superheroes, Adaptation, Derivative Works and Intellectual Property Regimes
American Poetry
Chair: Ian Bell (University of Keele)
Tim Kendall (University of Exeter)
Robert Frost and the Great War
Amy Morris (University of Cambridge)
“You should have disappeared years ago”: The poetic return of Mina Loy
Masuga, Katy (University of Washington)
Modern Poetry and the ‘Black Hole' of the Image/Text Relation
African American Icons in Britain
Chair: Mark Whalan (University of Exeter)
Dr. Kasia Boddy (University College London)
Jack Johnson and the ‘race of sportsmen'
Graeme Abernethy (University College London)
Malcolm X in Britain
Paul Auster
Chair: Alan Gibbs (University College , Cork)
Stefanie Albers (University of Duisburg-Essen)
A Matter of Fragmentation?: The Public and the Private in Selected Works by Paul Auster
Alan Bilton (University of Swansea)
In the Kingdom of Shadows : Paul Auster and Silent Film
Alys Moody (University of Sydney)
America Inside: Paul Auster's Man in the Dark and the American writer after Bush
American Politics Group US Elections Roundtable
Chair: David Waller
A roundtable of four participants Professor George Edwards, Professor Philip Davies, Dr. Ross English and Dr. James Boys discuss the outcomes of the U.S. elections of November 2008.
12:30pm-1:30pm Lunch
12:30pm-1:30pm Postgraduate Lunch
1:30pm-3:00pm Session 3
Race, Racism and Performance
Chair: Ben Schiller (University of East Anglia)
Hannah Durkin (University of Nottingham)
“Tap Dancing on the Racial Boundary”: Bill “Bojangles” Robinson
Niveen Kassem (University of Newcastle)
The Known World : Edward Jones and the changing faces of Moses
Alexa Weik (Université de Fribourg)
Mysteries of the Mountain: Environmental Racism and Cosmopolitan Commitment in Percival Everett's Watershed
Grassroots Movements in the Twentieth-Century United States : A Reappraisal
Chair: George Lewis (University of Leicester)
Daniel Scroop (University of Sheffield)
Antimonopoly and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth-Century United States
Axel Schäfer (Keele University)
The Sixties and the Evangelicals: Perspectives on the Countercultural Origins of Grassroots Conservatism
Kendrick Oliver (University of Southampton)
When does a Grassroots Movement matter, and when does it not?
Feminist Writing, Trauma and Visual Culture
Chair: Susan Castillo (King's College London)
Barbara Tomlinson (University of California)
Feminism at the Scene of Argument: The Deployment of Affect in Feminist and Anti-Feminist Writing.
Wendy Ward (Clinton Institute, University College Dublin)
Homeward Bound by China : Susan Sontag's American Project
Alison Gibbons (University of Nottingham)
Temporal Revision and Traumatic Resolution.
American Scene Prints
Chair: Douglas Tallack (University of Leicester)
Jody Patterson (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
From the Reactionary to the Radical: Rethinking American Realism During the ‘Red Decade'.
Warren Carter (University College London)
The Artist as Worker: Radical Responses to the New Deal Federal Art Projects.
John Fagg (University of Nottingham)
Genre Scenes in 1930s Prints.
The Short Story, Trauma and Affect in Recent US Fiction
Chair: David Brauner (University of Reading)
Alan Gibbs (University College , Cork)
Don DeLillo's The Body Artist : A New Phenomenology of Trauma
Adam Kelly (University College Dublin)
Twenty-First Century American Fiction: Sincerity, Manipulation, Affect
Su Mee Lee (Saekyung International College)
Reading Don Lee's Yellow as a Short Story Cycle
American Celebrities and Showbusiness Culture
Chair: Roberta Pearson (University of Nottingham)
Laura Pollard (University of East Anglia)
“Oh God, I need this show”: 1970s America dreams of show-business
Kathryn Cramer Brownell (Boston University)
“A New Deal in Entertainment”: Franklin Roosevelt and the Politicization of American Celebrities
Jenel Virden (University of Hull)
The Chaplains and the Showgirls: US Army Chaplains and the USO
African American and Native American Masculinity and Identity Politics
Chair: Paul Jahshan (Notre Dame University , Zouk , Lebanon)
Malcolm McLaughlin (University of East Anglia)
Ole Mongoose and the Glass Mountain : Archie Moore's ABC Youth Delinquency-Deterrent Program and Conservative Community Activism in the 1960s
Rebecca Cobby (University of Nottingham)
Harlem 's ‘boy mayor' and the ‘good-acting champ': male heroism and national identity in Gordon Parks' photographs of Red Jackson and Muhammad Ali
Kim Warren (University of Kansas)
Modernity on the Gridiron: Indians v. Whites in the Battle for Masculine Citizenship
Politics and Representation in Film
Chair: Paul Grainge (University of Nottingham)
Andrew Dix (Loughborough University)
Johnny Depp in Exile
Jindriska Blahova (University of East Anglia)
There is no place for Peace-mongers: Charles Chaplin and Czechoslovak Communist Propaganda.
Claire Jenkins (University of Warwick)
Suburban Heroes: The superhero family in The Incredibles and Sky High
Hollywood and Indiewood
Chair: Mark Gallagher (University of Nottingham)
Carl Wilson (Brunel University)
Kaufman, Jonze, Gondry, and the ‘Indiemercial': From the mainstream of the margin to the margin of the mainstream
Cornelia Klecker (University of Innsbruck)
Skip and Rewind: When time gets out of line in mainstream film
David Hayes (Sheffield Hallam University)
Spartacus and the ending of the Hollywood blacklist: 1960 a juncture for change?
3:00-3:15pm
Coffee and Tea
3:15-4:30pm
BAAS Annual General Meeting
4:30-5:30pm
Eccles Centre Lecture
Janet Beer (Oxford Brookes University) and Jon Snow (Channel Four) (Introduction by Phil Davies , Eccles Centre)
The Special Relationship: what does America teach us about ourselves?
5:30pm
Reception Hosted by the University of Nottingham
Coaches to Nottingham Castle
8:00pm Dinner
6:00pm-1:00am Bar
Saturday 18th April
9:00am-11:00am Session 4
Progressivism and the New Deal in Intellectual and Cultural History
Chair: Mark Whalan (University of Exeter)
Kate Sampsell-Willmann (Georgetown University)
Lewis Hine and the Birth of Social Documentary Photography: the Pittsburgh Survey
Sue Currell (University of Sussex)
Let Us Now Praise Knives and Forks: the Un Fortunate Deconstruction of Consumerist Politics
Collin Meissner (University of Notre Dame)
Capital Crimes: Money and the American Scene
Guy Barefoot (University of Leicester)
Memory Gaps: Researching the Serial Audience in 1930s USA
Stepping Out: Women, Visibility and the Public Sphere in the late Nineteenth Century
Chair: Karen Karbiener (New York University)
Janet Floyd (King's College, London)
Space, Performance and Visibility: the Singer on Stage in the late Nineteenth Century
Rowena Edlin-White (University of Nottingham)
Penelope's Progress: Kate Douglass Wiggin and her Contemporaries in Britain , Ireland and Europe 1880-1910
Lindsey Traub (Cambridge)
'Negotiating visibility: Louisa May Alcott's narrative experiments'
R. J. Ellis (University of Birmingham)
'Str[iking] an attitude': Surveillance of Fashionable Space in Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins
Rethinking the American Presidency
Chair: Ian Scott (University of Manchester)
Sam Edwards (University of Lancaster)
“From Here Lincoln Came”: The ‘Special Relationship' in Anglo-American Commemoration of WWII
Roger Johnson (University of Sussex)
The Library on the Hill: Myth and History at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum
Keith Nottle (University of Nottingham)
James A. Baker III: Serial Campaigner
Carl Pedersen (Copenhagen Business School)
Stranger in a Strange Land: Barack Obama and American National Identity in the 21st Century
African American Culture
Chair: Jenny Terry (University of Durham)
Tessa Roynon (University of Oxford)
A Mercy : An Analysis of Toni Morrison's New Novel
John Howard (King's College London)
Oprah's Mississippi Roots
Emma Jeffrey (University of Sussex)
The Complexities of Establishing an Anti-Establishment Publishing House: Clarence Major and the Fiction Collective.
Barry Shanahan (Clinton Institute, University College , Dublin)
“Clocking The Wire”: Hip-Hop and Representation in the Work of Richard Price
Writing into the Twenty-First Century: Examining Contemporary North American Fiction
Chair: Sarah MacLachlan (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Anne-Marie Evans (University of Sheffield)
Marriage and Materialism in Manhattan : Re-Imagining Female Consumerism in the Contemporary Novel.
Anthony Warde (University of Sheffield)
No Road to Run: Mapping Motifs in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
Colin Howley (University of Sheffield)
‘Invisible Views': Blackness, Urban Bodies and Community in John Edgar Wideman's Two Cities: A Love Story.
Race and Representation
Chair: Will Kaufman (University of Central Lancashire)
Ian Brookes (University of Nottingham)
From Ball of Fire to A Song Is Born : Jazz Changes and Racial Representations in 1940s' Hollywood .
Corin Willis (Independent Scholar)
Cracking the Minstrel Mask. African American Jazz and Blues Expressivity in Stormy Weather (1943).
Kate Dossett (University of Leeds)
Taking Haiti Back: Black Masculinity and African American Memory in 1930s. American theatre
Emma Kilkelly (University of Exeter)
Mental Automatism, Double-Consciousness and Social Schizophrenia: Minstrelsy's Legacy of Mental Illness
1960s Politics and Patterns of Activism
Chair: Robert Mason (University of Edinburgh)
Sandra Scanlon (University of Sheffield)
'Tell it to Hanoi !' Student support for the Vietnam War
Alexander Dunst (University of Nottingham)
Richard Hofstadter, paranoid politics, and the last defence of modernity
Patrick Hagopian (University of Lancaster)
The Reagan Administration and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Julian Killingley and Anne Richardson Oakes (Birmingham City University)
They Had a Dream - Litigation for Social Change and the Limits of Rights Discourse
African American Rights at Home and Abroad
Chair: Sinead Moynihan (University of Nottingham)
Cara Rodway (King's College London)
'Vacation and Recreation Without Humiliation': The Rhetoric of Roadside. Segregation in African-American Travel Guides
Derek Charles Catsam (University of Texas)
From America 's Black Promised Land to South Africa 's Dark City : Bus Boycotts in Harlem and Alexandra in the 1940s
Droessler, Holger (Ludwig-Maximilians University)
Searching for Order in the 'White Atlantic': racism, nationalism, and interracial relationships
Government, Politics and Individualism
Chair: Barbara Ryan (National University of Singapore)
Daniel Clinkman (University of Edinburgh)
Bailyn's Pamphlets and the Habermasian Public Sphere”
Stuart Price (De Montfort University)
The Audacity of Rhetoric: Barack Obama and Moral Authority
11:00-11:30am
Coffee and Tea
11:30-1:00pm Session 5
Representing the Blues in Photography, Film and Literature
Chair: David Murray (University of Nottingham)
Nick Heffernan (University of Northampton)
"I'm the bluesman; he's from Long Island !”: The Politics of Crossover in the Hollywood Blues Movie.
Richard Ings (Independent Scholar)
The improvisational image: the Kamoinge Workshop and the jazz of photography.
Paul Oliver (Oxford Brookes University)
Richard Wright and the Blues.
Transnationalism
Chair: Amy Morris (University of Cambridge)
Maeve Pearson (University of Exeter)
Shuttles and Pilgrims: The Transatlantic “Children” of Henry James and Frances Hodgson Burnett
Tara Deshpande (University of Leeds)
George Lippard's Transnational Nightmare
Chen Xu (Hangzhou Dianzi University)
Zane Grey as a Successful Popular Western Author
The 1952 Presidential Election and US Foreign Policy
Chair: Robert Mason (University of Edinburgh)
Robert Barnes (London School of Economics)
"The Impact of the 1952 Election on the Korean War and US Policy toward the UN".
Mara Oliva (Institute for the Study of the Americas)
China Policy and Presidential Politics.
Bevan Sewell (University of Nottingham)
Putting Brazil in its Place: The Impact of the 1952 Election on US-Brazillian Relations.
Immigration and White Ethnicity
Chair: Kate Sampsell-Willmann (Georgetown University)
Joe Merton (University of Oxford)
“Ethnics All”: the 1976 Presidential Election and the Importance of Being 'Ethnic'
Ann Schofield (University of Kansas)
Transnational Folk Culture: The Returned Yank Revisited
Sinéad Moynihan (University of Nottingham)
Who are the New Irish?: Race and Immigration in Contemporary Irish-American Culture
American Theatre
Chair: Heidi Macpherson (De Montfort University)
Garry Maciver (University of Cambridge)
Tennessee Williams and the American Scene 1939-1942: The Early One Act Plays as Theatrical Snapshots
Jina Al-Hassan (University of Edinburgh)
Female Violence on the Modern American Stage: The example of Maurine Dallas Watkins's Chicago (1926).
Theresa Saxon (University of Central Lancashire)
'A Pair of Handsome Legs': Display and Desire on the American Stage
Iconographies of Race and Nationality
Chair: TBC
Paul Williams (University of Exeter)
The Great American (Graphic) Novel? War, Racism, History and Ennui in Chris Ware 's Jimmy Corrigan
Robert Jacobs (Hiroshima Peace Institute)
Target Earth: Cartoon Images of Globalism in the Ashes of Hiroshima .
M. Kjellman-Chapin (Emporia State University)
The Figure and Formal Rupture: Whistler and the Constitutive Blank.
Cold War Culture
Chair: Martin Halliwell (University of Leicester)
Christine Bianco (Oxford Brookes University)
Modern Art for Middle America : Mass Magazines, Abstract Painting, and Cold War Culture in the 1950s.
Mary Robb (University of Edinburgh)
Music, politics and society: Miriam Gideon and the composers circle in New York City during 1945-1955
Rebecca Arnold (Royal College of Art)
Wife Dressing : Designing Femininity in 1950s America
Postwar Race, Gender, Nationalism and Sexuality
Chair: Sarah Barnsley (Goldsmith's, University of London)
J. E. Smyth (University of Warwick)
Jim Crow, Jett Rink, and James Dean: Reconstructing Ferber's Giant (1952-1956)
Anna Creadick (Hobart & William Smith Colleges)
From Queer to Eternity: Sexual Dis-locations in a Postwar Blockbuster.
Linda Toocaram (King's College London)
Queer Aztlán: translating Cherríe Moraga's nationalism
Douglas Field (Staffordshire University)
James Baldwin and Africa
1:00- 2:00pm Lunch
2:00-3:30pm Session 6
American Thought and Culture
Chair: Theresa Saxon (University of Central Lancashire)
Michael Collins (University of Nottingham)
The Child of Nature, The Wonder of the Age: Master Betty's Performance in Herman Melville's “The Fiddler” (1854).
David Greenham (University of the West of England)
Emerson and Shakespeare
Orphanhood and Agency in Contemporary American Novels
Chair: Maeve Pearson (University of Exeter)
Liz Kella (Södertörn University)
Making a Difference: Indian Orphans in Works by Linda Hogan and Barbara Kingsolver.
Maria Holmgren Troy (Karlstad University)
Genre as Cultural Memory in Octavia Butler 's Orphan Narratives.
Helena Wahlström (University of Gavle)
Re-inventing the American Adam in Michael Cunningham 's Specimen Days.
Modernist Poetry
Chair: Mark Whalan (University of Exeter)
Danielle Barrios (University of Ulster)
Hart Crane's Bridge in the Twenty-First Century: Poetry, Technology, and the Evolution of American Identity
Niall Munro (Oxford Brookes University)
“Some combination of eye and sympathy and hand”: Hart Crane's visual culture
Sarah Barnsley (Goldsmith's, University of London)
"Let us be unforgivably simple-minded": William Carlos Williams and Mary Barnard's poem of America
Bigotry and the White House
Chair: Phil Davies (Eccles Centre)
Raymond Arsenault (University of South Florida).
The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Roosevelts, and the 1939 Lincoln Memorial Concert.
Jeffrey S. Demsky (Miami Dade College)
Bigot in Chief: Examining the Parlor Talk of Richard Nixon.
Stephen J. Whitfield (Brandeis University)
The Antisemitism of Richard Nixon .
Ecocritical Interventions and the Urban Poor
Chair: Ruth Maxey (University of Nottingham)
Helen Bralesford (University of Nottingham)
A Moving Picture? Image and illustration as environmental strategy in Terry Tempest Williams' Leap
Daniel Cordle (Nottingham Trent University)
'Legacy Waste': Reading the Nuclear and Cold War Contexts of American Literature Since 1945
Drew Lyness (University of Wyoming)
Pathologising Poverty: The Cultural Camouflage of America's Urban Poor
Aesthetics in American Culture
Chair: M. Kjellman-Chapin (Emporia State University)
Gordon J. Marshall (Haliç University)
From “Typing” to Literature: Kerouac's “Original Scroll” and Post-1945 Print Culture
Nasser Hussain (University of York)
Crossing America : going nowhere all at once with Allen Ginsberg
Anne Bettina Pedersen (University of Southern Denmark)
Aesthetics of Americana/Auteurs of Americana
American Fiction
Chair: Joanna Gill (University of Exeter)
Darren Richard Carlaw (University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne)
New York Gentrification and the Twentieth Century Walking Narrative
Kate Charlton-Jones (University of Essex)
Richard Yates 's Revolutionary Road
Ecaterina Patrascu (Spiru Haret University)
(Re)/(Dis)Embodiment of Reality: the Dilemma of History in British and American Postmodern Fiction
Crime Fiction
Chair: Peter Messent (University of Nottingham)
Helen Oakley (University of Nottingham)
Cross-cultural Encounters: the crime fiction of José Latour.
Steven Powell (University of Liverpool)
Los Angeles in the Fiction of James Ellroy
Maria Ramon-Torrijos (University of Castilla-La Mancha)
The Dynamics of Lesbian Crime Fiction
Community, Culture, and Violence in the Antebellum Slave South
Chair: James Campbell (University of Leicester)
Greg Smithers (University of Aberdeen)
Studs: Slave Breeding and African-American Masculinity in the Antebellum South.
Lydia Plath (University of Warwick)
‘When he was brought back to the bluff the people met and hung him': Lynching, vigilantism and mob violence in the antebellum South.
Tom Strange (University of Sheffield)
“Old Lady put the pig's foot further on the bed”: The problems of hidden messages within the slave spiritual.
3:30-4:00pm
Coffee and Tea
4:00-5:00pm Session 7
Richard Rorty and American Literature
Chair: Richard King (University of Nottingham)
Áine Kelly (University of Nottingham)
Stanley Cavell , Richard Rorty and the Inheritance of American Philosophy
Filomena Vasconcelos (University of Porto)
Subverting Representation. Rorty's antirepresentationalism and a possible reading of E. A. Poe 's poetics
Representing Nature in American Culture
Chair: David Murray (University of Nottingham)
Lu Li-Ru (Huafan University)
Expanding the Boundary of Nature Writing: Alexander Wilson
Christina Matteotti (King's College London)
The Colonial Compulsion to Collect: Capturing an 'Authentic' Indigeneity
Religion and Contemporary Politics
Chair: TBC
Christopher Boerl (Royal Holloway College)
A House Divided: An examination into the impacts of a fragmented Evangelical vote
Marie Gayte (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle)
The United States and the Vatican : A Quest for Morality?
American Belief, Romance and Ben-Hur
Chair: Lisa Rull (University of Nottingham)
Barbara Ryan (National University of Singapore)
Ben-Hur : Man, Boy and Buchan
James Russell (De Montfort University)
Entertainment and Enlightenment: Ben-Hur (1880) and American Belief at the End of the Nineteenth Century
Philip Roth
Chair: Catherine Morley (University of Leicester)
Rachael McLennan (University of East Anglia)
Enabling Fictions: Philip Roth's Prosthetic Anne Franks
Alex Hobbs (Anglia Ruskin University)
Masculinity and the Family in Phillip Roth 's The Plot Against America
Issues in Asian North American Studies
Chair: Sämi Ludwig (UHA Mulhouse)
Subarno Chattarji (Swansea University)
'The New Americans': creating a typology of Vietnamese American identity
Su-ching Wang (University of Washington)
Black-Asian Interracial Formation in the United States : A Comparative Reading of Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go and John Okada 's No-No Boy
Nature and Social Science in American Thought
Chair: Martin Halliwell (University of Leicester)
Hing Tsang (University of Lincoln)
Classical American notions of subjectivity and agency: America 's native dialogic tradition
Robin Vandome (University of Nottingham)
Revisiting the ‘Organization of Knowledge': Disciplinary Formations in the Natural Sciences around 1900.
5:15-6:15pm Plenary Lecture
Journal of American Studies Lecture
George Lipsitz (University of California) (Introduction by Susan Castillo, King's College London)
The Bitter But Beautiful Struggle: Why American Studies Matters Now
6:30-7:30 Reception West Concourse, Portland Building
8:00 Banquet followed by Dr. Jazz
Sunday 19th April
9:00-11:00am Session 8
Folklore, Folk Music and the South
Chair: Peter Kuryla (Belmont University , Nashville)
Will Kaufman (University of Central Lancashire)
Woody Guthrie and Stetson Kennedy
Phil Langran (University of Lincoln)
Recycling the South: Music and the Work of William Gay
Rachel Clare Donaldson (Vanderbilt University)
“Of, By and For the American People”: Alan Lomax, Moses Asch and Musical Education
Chris Dixon (University of Queensland)
No More Songs: Phil Ochs and the Cultural Critique of Post-war America
Transatlantic Relations
Chair: Bevan Sewall (University of Nottingham)
Ian Scott (University of Manchester)
Twilight of the Gods: The United States , the Cold War and the Decline of English Football in the 1950s
John Killick (University of Leeds)
American Shipping in the Civil War; the Cope Line Experience
Finn Pollard (University of Lincoln)
“Old feuds, old grudges, old hatreds”?: A Matter of Life and Death , Anglo-American Relations and the American Revolution
Francois Lalonde (Boston University)
Reestablishing the transatlantic diplomatic dialogue: The Eisenhower administration and the Atlantic Community, 1957-1960
Youth Identity and Counterculture
Chair: Rachael McLennan (University of East Anglia)
Richard Nowell (University of East Anglia)
Dressed to Kill: Tailoring the Canadian Teen Slasher Film for Hollywood
Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes University)
Technologies of Death: phonograph, computer, cyberspace
1920s and 1930s
Chair: Ian Bell (University of Keele)
James Harding (University of Sussex)
The Truth About Visual Training: Efficient Eyes in John Dos Passos' U.S.A.
Catherine Gander (King's College London)
The Road Through the Depression: Muriel Rukeyser 's The Book of the Dead and the 1930s Documentary Road Narrative
Catherine Rottenberg (Ben-Gurion University)
Spaces of Ambivalence: Blacks and Jews in New York City
Eric J. Sandeen (University of Wyoming)
Robert Adams beyond the Suburbs: Picturing Endurance and Transformation in the Contemporary American West
William Faulkner
Chair: Taylor Hagood (Florida Atlantic University)
Nehama Baker (Tel-Aviv University)
Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun as a Work of Mourning – An Alternative to Postmodern Melancholy
Euan Gallivan (University of Nottingham)
The Touch that Abrogates: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the Value of Pity in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!
Sämi Ludwig (UHA Mulhouse)
William Faulkner's Geometrics of Redemption: From Circles and Rectangles to Triangles
Maya Heller (Goldsmith's College)
Critical reception of William Faulkner in France in the 1930s
New Perspectives on the NAACP
Chair: Derek Catsam (University of Texas)
Mark Newman (University of Edinburgh)
Desegregation in the Diocese of Galveston-Houston, 1945-1988.
Simon Topping (University of Plymouth)
“Of Mr Walter White and Others….” Walter White, Partisan Non-partisanship and the NAACP, 1938-1952
Lee Sartain (University of Portsmouth)
“A little more dead than last year”: The Baltimore NAACP, 1914 to 1935, and why the establishment of a branch took so long
Women and Corporeality
Chair: Heidi Macpherson (De Montfort University)
Ellen Matlok-Ziemann (Uppsala University)
Old Career Women and Young Spinsters Representations of “Old” Women in American Fiction
Carol Smith (University of Winchester)
Hillary, Sarah, Carrie & Michelle: Sex and the City and the failure of American Feminism
Ann Hurford (University of Nottingham)
Witchy Women and Bad Boys: Transformation and Difference in Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic and the Probable Future.
Mary Lo Ying Wa (University of Hong Kong)
The Representation of the Female Body in a Female Bildungsroman: Schizophrenic Female Selfhood and the Motif of Inbetweenness in The Bell Jar
Fantastic Females: The Representation of Women in American Popular Culture
Chair: Paul Williams (University of Exeter)
Jennifer Woodward (Edge Hill University)
Deluge (Felix E. Feist, 1933) and the Transformed Manifestation of the Female Fantasy Figure.
Peter Wright (Edge Hill University)
“That's like kissing a sword-blade”: Jirel of Joiry, C. L. Moore and the Origins of Feminist Sword and Sorcery.
Andrea Wright (Edge Hill University)
A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing: The Representation of Women in 1980s Sword and Sorcery Cinema.
Jenny Barret (Edge Hill University)
Fear and Loathing (and Admiration): The Ambiguities of the Dominatrix in Comics.
Travel, Hospitality and the Gay Imagination
Chair: Sarah Barnsley (Goldsmith's, University of London)
Michael Bibler (University of Manchester)
Queer Ethics and the Southern Gothic in Truman Capote 's 'The Thanksgiving Visitor'.
Alfonso Ceballos Munoz (Cadiz University)
“Still Crazy after All these years”. The evolution of gay AIDS plays on the American stage.
11:00-11:30am
Coffee and Tea
11:30-1:00pm Session 9
US Hegemony: Rethinking Empire in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
Chair: Maria Ryan (University of Nottingham)
Adam Burns (University of Edinburgh)
To End an Empire? William Howard Taft and Philippine Retention, 1912-1921.
Ariane Knuesel (University of Zurich)
“A war between east and west, between the yellow peoples and the whites”: The Yellow Peril and US national identity in the 1930s
Jonathan Arnold (University of London)
What didn't Theodore Roosevelt read?
Race and Transatlanticism in Twentieth Century American Literature and Film
Chair: TBC
Ruth Maxey (University of Nottingham)
Brave New Worlds?: Miscegenation in transatlantic South Asian writing and film
Jing Yang (University of Hong Kong)
Interracial Romance in the Postcolonial Orient
New Perspectives on Nineteenth Century Culture
Chair: Maeve Pearson (University of Exeter)
Magnus Ullen (Karlstad University)
Uncanonical Hawthorne
K. A. Harris (University of Sheffield)
‘Well, you've come to be disillusioned have you?': Transatlantic Pilgrimages to Walt Whitman .
Karen Karbiener (New York University)
At Home at Pfaff's: Walt Whitman's Place in New York 's First Literary Lair
Narratives of Risk in American Culture
Chair: Adam Kelly (University College Dublin)
John O'Brien (University of Leeds)
Gambling in American Literature: A Short History
Mizsei-Ward, Rachel (University of East Anglia)
Underworld versus the World of Darkness:
Giannini, Erin (University of East Anglia)
The 'Death Whinny' of Television? Doctor Horrible as Model for Television-Quality Internet Content
Contemporary American Fiction, the Marketplace and the Suburbs
Chair: Catherine Morley (University of Leicester)
Brian Jarvis (Loughborough University)
The Fall of the House of Finance: Uncanny Economics and American Gothic fiction
Martin Dines (Kingston University)
Suburban Gothic and the Ethnic Uncanny in Jeffrey Eugenides 's The Virgin Suicides
Madeleine Lyes (Clinton Institute, University of Dublin)
“It Should Frighten Your Shoes”: Critical Urban Messiness in the New York fiction of Donald Barthelme
New Perspectives on African American History
Chair: Jenel Virden (University of Hull)
Dawn-Marie Gibson (University of Ulster)
Louis Farrakhan ' s Nation of Islam at a crossroads
Oliver Gruner (University of East Anglia)
The Many Faces of Malcolm X (1992): Film, Politics and the (Re)construction of History
Alan Rice (University of Central Lancashire)
“Choc'late Soldiers From the USA ” (1942 -2008): The Cultural Implications of Black GI's in Europe
Poor Whites, New Orleans , and Strategies of the Global South
Chair: Taylor Hagood (Florida Atlantic University)
Sarah Robertson (University of the West of England)
Invoking the Agrarians: Poor Whites and the Global Southern Community in Rick Bragg 's Memoir Trilogy
Owen Robinson (University of Essex)
Gateways and Telegraphs: Nineteenth-century Travellers and Global, Southern New Orleans
Taylor Hagood (Florida Atlantic University)
'The Prince With That Hearth-broom': Faulkner 's ‘Knight's Gambit' and the Movement of Southerners Across the Global Grid
Race, Slavery and Reconstruction
Chair: Peter Ling (University of Nottingham)
Andrew Heath (University of Sheffield)
Capitalism and Race in the Making of a Transatlantic Radical: The Career of John Campbell, 1840-1861
Carole Emberton (State University of New York)
Natural Born Killers: Debating Violence and the “Militant South” after the Civil War
James Campbell (University of Leicester)
Attempted Lynchings and Police Brutality in New York and Pennsylvania , 1890-1919
Surrealism and Modernist Writing
Chair: Filomena Vasconcelos (University of Porto)
Ruth Hawthorn (University of Glasgow)
“Come back to that calm country”: The Limits of Nostalgia in Randall Jarrell's Lost World
Emma Kimberley (University of Leicester)
Cultural politics and the preservation of memory in contemporary American poetry
Joanna Pawlik (University of Manchester)
“The Surrealist transformation of America ”: the Chicago Surrealists' Revolt
1:00-2:00pm Lunch
Conference Close