School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham: September 14, 2010

Universitatea “Ovidius” Constanta, Romania: October 7-9, 2010

The topic of this conference aims at reflecting the contemporary atmosphere of dissent in the United States

University of Windsor, Canada: October 14-17, 2010

During 2009 fears of “death panels” clashed with calls for universal coverage, as President Barack Obama encountered an increasingly heated debate about health-care reform.

Innsbruck: November 12 -14, 2010

The Visual Culture of Modernism

With the advent of modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the cultural paradigm of seeing underwent a self-reflexive turn and generated new ways of perceiving, experiencing, and thinking.

University of Glasgow, Scotland: June 23-26, 2011

We invite proposals for panels and individual 20 minute papers that engage a variety of transatlantic and/or transnational topics in the literatures and cultural histories of the Atlantic world.

Fifth World Congress of the International American Studies Association, Rio de Janiero, July 25-30, 2011.                       

Keynote Speakers: Dr David Platten (University of Leeds) and Dr Stephen Morton (University of Southampton). Reading by Courttia Newland

In his essay, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, George Orwell claims that the ‘old domestic poisoning dramas’ of pre-war England were ‘products of a stable society’, made to be consumed within middle-class sitting rooms on a Sunday afternoon. This conference seeks to examine how discourses of crime and criminality are produced in a global context that extends well beyond the cloisters of Orwell’s English middle class. Such discourses are generated across the disciplinary spectrum – legal studies, the visual arts, the humanities, the social sciences, geography, environmental studies and even the hard sciences – suggesting that, in an age of terrorism, cyber scams, corporate corruption, drug wars, cross-cultural conflict and engineered ecological and biological threats, crime is itself becoming increasingly fractured and difficult to define.

May 18-22, 2011, Columbia College, Chicago, IL

"For the poet Carl Sandburg it was the 'City of the Big Shoulders.' Architect Daniel Burnham called it 'the Paris of the Prairies.' That mix of raw energy and refined aestheticism makes Chicago one of the world's great cities-and the current theatre capital of America." Michael Billington, The Guardian, 2004                                                            

November 6, 2010 10.00 – 17.00                                              

Keynote: Dr. David Holloway (University of Derby)                                                        

Almost a decade later, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 remain a key influence on global political discourse.  Whether or not we think of 9/11 as an epochal moment, there is no doubt that it has shaped global politics and underpinned subsequent American nationalism and militarization; however, as can be observed from the clichés entrenched in much representation and discussion of the events, their memory and influence remain cast in terms of depoliticised memorialisation. Although both the Western military responses and the popularly recounted political prehistory of alleged American neocolonialism and the CIA’s ‘creation’ of al-Qaeda are well-known, much political and cultural discourse remains opaque and partisan, ideologically obscuring attempts to understand the events whose memory has crystallised into ‘9/11’.

Confirmed Plenary Speakers include Professor Sean O Riain, Sociology Department, NUI Maynooth and Professor Tom Inglis, UCD School of Sociology

Conference Date: 22 September 2010 William Jefferson Clinton Auditorium, University College Dublin