Saturday 13 November, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford                          

Keynote Speakers: Professor Donald E. Pease (Dartmouth College); Dr Nick Selby (UEA)          

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The British Association for American Studies (BAAS) welcomes papers for its annual postgraduate conference, to be held on 13 November 2010 at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.

We have selected the theme “American Geographies” to encourage an interdisciplinary range of perspectives concerning the turns and methodological re-mappings of Americanist fields that have come about through challenges to the geographical scope of “America” and “American” cultures, histories, and literatures. After these globalist, transnational, and comparative shifts, how have the landscapes of America and American studies changed, and with what effects? As phenomena like globalization, translation, and diaspora are increasingly recognized as complicating factors for the setting of “geographical” boundaries between fields of inquiry, what roles might geographical considerations take on for Americanists in the 21st century?

We envision dialogues on both the impact of this dynamism within Americanist fields on our objects of study, and the ways in which our objects of study invite dynamic approaches.

We encourage submissions from those working within such broader fields as literature and language, history, politics, and geography. Potential areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Aesthetics
• Geopolitics
• Border studies
• Historiography
• Canonicity
• Literary influence
• Cultural geography
• Poetry/poetics
• Cultural studies
• Theory of the novel
• Diaspora studies
• Translation
• Ethnic studies
• Transnational/transoceanic studies
• Exceptionalism/states of exception
• Travel writing
• Film studies
• Visual arts

Our keynote speakers will be Donald Pease, Professor of English and Avalon Chair of Humanities at Dartmouth College, and Dr Nick Selby, Senior Lecturer and head of the School of American Studies at University of East Anglia.

Please e-mail your 300-word abstracts (for 20-minute papers) or any questions about the conference to  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by 15 August 2010. Abstracts should include your name, institution, e-mail, and phone number.

Contacts: Stephen Ross and Aaron Hanlon

For more information about the BAAS, visit http://www.baas.ac.uk/

For more information about the RAI at Oxford, visit http://www.rai.ox.ac.uk/