New Members
Anne Marie Acklam is a PhD candidate at the Departments of Art History & Theory at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on the performance and installation work of Luiseño artist James Luna and draws upon a broader context of Native/-American art. This has included the organisation of an ‘artist in residence’ project by James Luna at the University of Essex and research visits to the U.S. and Canada.Nicholas Allen is an undergraduate at the University of Reading where he studies international relations and politics. His American Studies interests include race and ethnicity, specifically race and slavery in English Colonial America from 1607-1770.
David Anderson completed his PhD at the University of Dundee in 2004 and currently holds a teaching assistantship at Dundee’s Department of American Studies. His main subject interest is in the post-Civil War American South and his current research examines post-Civil War nostalgia for the Old South and Christmas in the Confederacy. His research has taken him to Chapel Hill, Duke, Emory, the University of Florida, University of Georgia, Ole Miss, Vanderbilt and the University of Virginia. He has published in the Journal of Southern History and Crossroads Annual.
Kathryn Ashton is an M.Res student at the University of Keele. Her research interests lie in late 19th Century literature, particularly the work of Edith Wharton.
Emma Barber is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her academic background is in English but her current research is in the field of medical history, specifically the American Civil War and its impact on the medical profession.
Guy Barefoot has been a lecturer in Film Studies and a member of the Centre for American Studies at the University of Leicester since 2003. As a film specialist, his main interest has been Hollywood during the era of the studio system. His book, Gaslight Melodrama: From Victorian London to 1940s Hollywood, was published in 2001, and his interest in melodrama in American cinema and culture is currently being extended in a project on the Hollywood sound serial, with a particular focus on the 1930s.
Martyn Beer is a history teacher at the Queen Elizabeth Secondary School in Cumbria. He teaches the AQA A-Level History syllabus, focusing on 20th Century US domestic and foreign policy.
Alex Benchimal teaches 20th Century American literature at the University of Glasgow. His research interests include Jewish-American and African-American intellectual culture in the 20th Century. He is also interested in the cultural practices of the I.W.W. and intellectual sociability in the Transcendentalist movement.
David Boulting is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant at the University of Salford. He holds an M.Phil from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth. His current research interests include American war literature and representation of war in American popular culture.
Anthony Caleshu is originally from the United States and has been teaching in Ireland and England since the 1990s. He currently holds the post of Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Plymouth. His research interest is primarily in postmodern and contemporary poetry. At the moment he is working on the poets John Berryman and James Tate and on ‘posture in poetry.’
Hamilton Carroll is a Research Fellow at the Clinton institute for American Studies at University College Dublin. He was educated at Indiana University and has published in Modern Fiction Studies on Asian-American Literature. He is currently completing a monograph on neo-liberalism and masculinity in US culture.
Chin-jau Chyan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. Her research focuses on female hard-boiled detective fiction.
Michael James Collins is a graduate student at the University of Nottingham. His work examines the writing of Bret Easton Ellis, spatiality and architecture. He is about to commence a PhD on Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk and Coupland.
Sally Connolly is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Harvard. She has recently completed her doctoral dissertation, ‘A Genealogy of Poetry: Elegies for Poets Since 1939.’
Paul Crosthwaite is engaged on a PhD project, ‘Shock Waves: Temporality, History and Trauma in the Postmodernist Response to WWII’, at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His essay, ‘Time Bombs: Pynchon, Postmodernism, and the Temporality of Total War’, will appear in The Stories of World War II (Amsterdam: Vrije UP, 2006). In 2005 he co-organised an international conference on the work of Paul Virilio.
Nina Dietrich is a postgraduate student at the University of Kent. Her research interests include American modernist literature, with a particular interest in Willa Cather.
Roy Drummond graduated from St. John’s College Cambridge before becoming Head of English at Framlingham College. He is currently completing a thesis on Henry James’s short fiction of the 1890s, beyond which he has interests in American prose fiction and film.
Leonard James Ellison is a retired engineer and has spent the last forty years researching the ACW. Most of his research has been on the effect the ACW had on Merseyside and Lancs. He gives regular talks in the North War and in the US on the Civil War and he is a member of ACWRT(UK) and the Librarian and the Civil War Preservation Trust in Washington. He has written many articles on the ACW, including the Liverpool Daily Post and the Washington Post. He has also spoken for the BBC and various local radio stations on the ACW.
Jacqueline Fear-Segal is a lecturer at the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her main interest is in Native American history but she also works on the history of childhood and 20th Century US social history.
Andrew Fearnley is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. His work examines the intersection of ideas about race and mental health in the post-bellum United States.
Serena Formica is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include divergence and convergence in the work of Peter Weir and in American and Australian film more generally. She has spent time at the Mongonet Herrick Library and USC in Los Angeles.
James Fountain is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow. His work looks at British and American literary responses to the Wall Street Crash in the 1930s. The authors under scrutiny include John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, George Orwell and Joseph McLeod.
Lucy Frank works on nineteenth-century women’s writing and literary and popular responses to the Civil War. In March 2007 she will spend some time at the Philadelphia Library Company as a Barra International Scholar. She is currently working on a project that examines the representation of mourning in relation to the Civil War, focusing specifically on Mark Twain, Henry James and Charles Chesnutt. Her edited collection of essays, ‘Representations of Death in Nineteenth-Century American Writing and Culture’ is forthcoming with Ashgate in 2007.
Danielle Fuller is Director of the Regional Centre for Canadian Studies in the Department of American & Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her background is in American and Canadian literary studies but she continues to shunt sideways into book history, cultural studies and the sociology of literature. She is currently collaborating with DeNel Rehberg Sedo on an interdisciplinary project, “Beyond the Book: Mass Reading Events and Contemporary Cultures of Reading in the UK, USA and Canada,” (www.beyondthebookproject.org) funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (2005-2008). This project aims to produce a trans-national analysis of shared reading mediating by mass reading events such as “One Book, One Chicago” and “Richard & Judy’s Book Club.” US research sites for this study include Chicago, Seattle and Arizona.
Alexander Hincliffe is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham. He is researching the construction of the ‘Other’ in early Cold War (1947-1959) Hollywood cinema.
Jayne Hoare is a librarian at Cambridge University Library working in English-language collection development, with special emphasis on American Studies. She holds a degree in American Studies from the University of Birmingham and a Postgraduate Dip. In Library and Information Studies from UCE, Birmingham.
Zoe Hyman is currently doing an M.Phil at the University of Sussex. Her research is based on the Killen trial of 2005 in order to examine a ‘truth and reconciliation’ model in the American South.
Nadja Anna Janssen holds an MA in American History, Sociology and Political Science from the Free University of Berlin. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Sussex undertaking a thesis on the Neo-Conservative Critique of Post-WWII Liberalism. Her other fields of interest include American-Jewish history and American diplomatic history after WWII.
Mara Keire is a Lecturer in the Department of History at Queen Mary, University of London.
Louis J. Kern is Professor of History at Hofstra. He teaches American cultural history, American literature, film and popular culture. His current interest examines the early eugenics movement from 1870-1900.
Nicole King is the Academic Coordinator of the English Subject Centre. She is based at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Aurelia Laitano is a postgraduate student at the Unviersity of Glasgow. Her main interests are 18th, 19th and 20th Century American literature with a particular interest in writers of the American Renaissance.
Richard Larscham is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. His main interests are in the poets of New England and the work on Sylvia Plath.
Jason Michael Lippy is a postgraduate student at the Research Institute for Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He received his BA from Dickinson College, Pennsylvania and further postgraduate qualifications from Penn State University and the University of North Carolina. In addition, he has participated in historical research at the Ephrata Cloister Pennsylvania, the Centre for Pennsylvania Culture Studies and the Charlotte History Museum.
Scott Lucas is Professor of American Studies at the University of Birmingham, having moved from Modern History to American and Canadian Studies in 1997. His background is in international history (particularly in relation to US and British foreign policy) and international relations. Professor Lucas’s most recent books have all been on US foreign policy in the early Cold War, on George Orwell, and on the concept of the ‘betrayal of dissent’ within US and British political culture. He is currently working on a project that aspires to reconsider US foreign policy from the Cold War to the War on Terror, based on the concept of ‘political warfare’ and the perpetual tension between the objectives of power and liberation.
Laura McDonald is based at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto. She is interested in American musical theatre.
James Mackay is based at the University of Glasgow where he is undertaking a thesis entitled ‘Ethnic Imposture in Native American Literature.’ His case studies include Hysmeyohsts Storm and Forrest Carter - among others. His research interests include: Native American literature, society and history; faking literature; spiritual and religious literature; authority and authenticity in the humanities.
Polina Mackay holds a PhD in American literature and her interests include Beat Generation literature, especially the works of Willaim S. Burroughs, experimental fiction and film, and the contemporary Gothic. Her next major project is a book on Burroughs’s influence on women artists and a collection of essays on Beat literature and travel.
Christina Makris is an associate tutor at the University of Sussex.
Rachel M. E. Malkin is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her thesis considers aspects on the discourse of the ordinary in 20th Century American thought and writing. She is particularly interested in literary-philosophical convergences, both in America and between the US and Europe.
Sarah Martin completed a PhD in 2003 on Histories of Law and Space in Contemporary Native American Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is currently researching further topics in Native American literature as well as pursuing a developing interest in Jeffersonian politics in American literature.
Christopher McKenna is a Lecturer at the Said Business School, University of Oxford.
Artemis Michailidou is a Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Athiens. Her research interests include modern American poetry, feminist criticism, comparative literature and the fiction of the American South. She has recently published articles in the Journal of American Studies and in Comparative American Studies.
HollyGale Millette is a postgraduate research student with interests in transatlantic popular culture and biography of the 19th and 20th centuries. She is also interests in 19th American theatre, fine art, Native-American and African-American culture, as well as globalisation.
Nick Monk is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Warwick. He holds an MA from Rutgers (The State University of New Jersey) and an MA from the University of Warwick in 1999. He has recently published an article on Cormac McCarthy; taught in the US; lectured for the Open University; and taught at Warwick.
Carolyn Morningstar teaches at Mansfield College, University of Oxford. Her current research interests include Walt Whitman, the St. Louis Philosophical Society, the ‘Phrenological Fowlers’, twentieth-century theatre and the influence of German idealist philosophy on American nineteenth-century literary production.
Louise Mousseau is a PhD candidate at the Unviersity of Sheffield. Her work studies narrative ecphrasis in contemporary New York fiction, looking at the ways in which depictions on the New York art scene create an alternative historiography of American culture.
Tom Packer is researching a D. Phil at St. Cross College, University of Oxford, on ‘Senator Jesse Helms and North Carolina Politcs 1972-1984.’ He holds a BSc in Government and History from the LSE and an MA in the History of International Relations (also from the LSE). His interests include Conservatism, Religion and recent political history.
Bruce Pilbeam is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at London Metropolitan University. His research interests are primarily in the area of contemporary political ideologies, with a special interest in conservatism. He was published various articles in this area, as well as a book entitled Conservatism in Crisis? Anglo-American Conservative Ideology after the Cold War.
Finn Pollard is a Lecturer in American History at the University of Glasgow. His interests include the literature, culture and politics of the early American Republic, in particular the life and writings of Washington Orving and Hugh Henry Brackenridge. He is also interested in the life and writings of Henry Adams.
Claire Powell is a student at Dame Alice Owens School in Hertfordshire. Her interests lie in the Civil Rights Movement and in the Vietnam War.
Nicola Presley is a postgraduate student at Bath Spa University. She has research interests in contemporary women’s poetry, especially Plath, Sexton and Olds. She is also interested in representations of motherhood, indeterminacy and the relationship between self and place.
Diego Quiroz is a PhD candidate, researching corporate social responsibility, at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. He holds an LL.M in international Human Rights Law and advanced studies in European Community law, peace and conflict resolution, intellectual property and human rights. His current interests include international human rights, refugee and humanitarian law, literature and art.
Edward Ragg completed a PhD on Wallace Stevens (University of Cambridge) in 2004 and was co-organiser of ‘Fifty Years On: Wallace Stevens in Europe’ – the first international conference (held at the Rothermere American Institute) to address the modernist aspects of Stevens’s work. Edward teaches at Cambridge and is currently planning a book entitled The Question of Abstraction: Wallace Stevens’s Poetry and Prose as well as articles derived from this research. He also writes poetry and has published poems in PN Review, Aesthetica and other magazines.
Lucas Richert is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, UCL. His research interests include the Reagan era and the pharmaceutical industry.
Katharina Elisabeth Rietzler has recently commenced a PhD at UCL on the topic of ‘American Philanthropic Organisations in Interwar Europe.’
Cara Rodway is a PhD candidate at Kings College London. Her interests lie in 20th Century American history and literature. Her doctoral work examines the social and cultural history of road-side spaces, briefly summarized as mobility, motels and moral holidays!
Tessa Kate Roynon is a doctoral student at the University of Warwick. Her research interests include American literature, African-American literature – especially Toni Morrison, and the classical tradition in the Black Atlantic.
Barbara Roy-Macauley is an advisory teacher in the London borough of Redbridge. She is interested in inner city communities and has been an interviewer at the Broadwater Farm Estate after the Tottenham riots. Her current work is with vulnerable children and she is researching an article on the behaviour of boys in the Caribbean community, with possible links to other aspects of the black Diaspora.
David Sarias is a postgraduate student at the University of Sheffield. He is in the final stages of a doctoral thesis entitled ‘Anatomy of Counter-Hegemony: The New Right in the United States from Buckley to Nixon (1955-1974).’
Linda Sher is a research student in the Department of American Studies at Kings College London.
Gary Smith is a research student at tutor in the Department of History at the University of Dundee.
Tara Stubbs is a PhD candidate at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Her thesis focuses on the American modernist poet Marianne Moore and her interests in Irish writers and writing. Tara’s broader interests include American immigrant literature and the development of Irish-American culture in the US.
Alex Symons is currently studying for a doctoral degree at the University of Nottingham. His research is a reception study about the filmmaker Mel Brooks. His interests include comedy theory, reputation and distinctions of audience, taste and class cultures.
Sarah Louise Thwaites is a PhD student at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Her research project is an interdisciplinary study of American prose fiction between 1826 and 1855 and the scientific origins of photography which arrived in America in 1939. She will focus on the work of Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne and Melville.
William E. Van Vugt is Professor of English and American History at Calvin College, Michigan. He is the author of numerous books on topics such as British migration and the history of South Africa.
Robin Cheyne Vandome is a PhD student working on American intellectual history at Christ’s College Cambridge. His current focus is on the presence of modernist thought in Progressive Era America. Previous research has included a study of Richard Hofstadter’s intellectual development.