Success for History PHD candidate Natasha Neary

Congratulations to history PhD student Natasha Neary who has been accepted into the the Spring Academy on American History, Culture & Politics at Heidelberg University. The competition for places at the Academy was intense - there were a total of approximately 120 applicants who applied for 20 slots.  The Spring Academy is an annual, one-week interdisciplinary conference for PhD candidates at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA). The conference is targeted at PhD candidates working in different fields of American studies. Read more about the programme here:

http://www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de/spring/index_en.html

American Studies Early Career Visiting Scholarship

American Studies at Northumbria University is offering a short Early Career Visiting Scholarship during Semester 2, 2017. This Scholarship forms part of Northumbria’s American Studies program.

Scene from the San Antonio, Texas, Stock Show, 2014.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The successful candidate will have been awarded (within the last 3 years) a PhD in any aspect of American culture, history, or literature, but will not yet hold a permanent full-time academic post. The Visiting Scholar will have a growing research profile and teaching experience and will be able to demonstrate exceptional promise in their chosen field. We welcome applicants with research interests in any aspect of American Studies, but particularly in US politics.

During their 2-day visit, successful applicants will:

 •  Deliver a research presentation to the American Studies Research Seminar.

 •  Lead a workshop on theory or methodology for Northumbria postgraduate students working in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

 •  Participate in at least one formal undergraduate teaching session (lecture or seminar). American-themed modules running in Semester 2 may include: ‘Introduction to American Studies ’, ‘The West in US History and Mythology’, ‘Modernism and Modernity’, and ‘American Gothic’.

 •  Receive a £500 honorarium to cover accommodation and travel expenses.

How To Apply
To apply, please download the online application form and submit to Dr Julie Taylor at Julie.taylor@northumbria.ac.uk

Application Deadline
Deadline for applications is 7 November 2016

General Enquiries 
Informal enquiries are welcome – for further details please contact

Dr Henry Knight Lozano henry.knight-lozano@northumbria.ac.uk

Dr Julie Taylor Julie.taylor@northumbria.ac.uk

HOTCUS Annual Postgraduate Conference: ‘Winning minds and hearts: constructing national identity in US history'

Historians of the Twentieth Century US, Friday 9th September 2016, Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Keynote speaker: Dr Simon Hall (Senior Lecturer in American History, Leeds University)

On 1 February 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asserted that ‘Americanism is a matter of the mind and the heart.’ Just a year after he approved the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, FDR’s statement about the inclusivity of American identity highlights one of the key questions scholars face when writing the history of the United States: what do we actually mean when we talk about US national identity?

The distinction between what is and isn’t American has dominated the history of the twentieth century United States, from the Hollywood Blacklists of the 1950s and protests in the streets of Selma, Alabama in 1965, to clashes between construction workers and anti- Vietnam War protesters in New York City and debates over U.S. military strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan. In these instances and many others, the process of defining national identity remains central to our understanding of U.S. history.

This conference will explore the constructions and limitations of American national identity in the twentieth century. Panels and twenty-minute paper proposals are invited from postgraduate students and early career researchers on the constructions and manifestations of Americanism in the last century.
Topics for papers or panels might include:

• Political and policy history
• Citizenship, identity and immigration
• Domesticity, home and national identity
• The cultural and intellectual history of Americanism
• ‘Un- Americanism’ in the 20th Century
• Protest history
• Gender and Sexuality
• Memorialization, commemoration and national identity
• Border Cultures in the U.S.
• Labour history, workers’ rights in U.S.
• Presidential history
• National identity in film, media, and journalism
• Local and regional history
• Foreign, military and diplomatic history

The conference will primarily be formed of traditional academic panels, with a keynote lecture from Dr Simon Hall. An interactive workshop on postgraduate and early career issues and concerns will also feature, with discussions of grant applications, teaching, and publishing.

Abstracts for papers or panels (300 words per paper) and a brief bio (100 words) should be submitted to hotcuspostgrads@gmail.com by Friday July 15th 2016. For more information/queries please contact the HOTCUS postgraduate secretary, Megan Hunt (megan.hunt@northumbria.ac.uk).
Supported by the British Association for American Studies.

“In BAAS I found an intellectual home”: Meet the new Chair of BAAS, Professor Brian Ward

The following is excerpted from the British Association for American Studies website.

As the new Chair of BAAS I want to ensure that the Association continues to provide for all its members the sort of nurturing and intellectually generous environment that has meant so much to me over the past three decades, writes Professor Brian Ward. It was at BAAS that I first found an intellectual home among people who saw the virtues of multiple, sometimes genuinely integrated approaches to the study of the American experience.

The first BAAS conference I ever attended was in the mid-1980s at King Alfred’s College, the forerunner of the University of Winchester. At the time I was a postgraduate in history at Cambridge University, working on a thesis that explored the links among African American popular music, black consciousness and race relations during the civil rights and black power eras. That thesis bore all the hallmarks of my BA in American Studies from the University of East Anglia at a time when there really wasn’t much inter-disciplinarity in traditional history departments. More than a few eyebrows were raised as I gamely tried to argue that Motown songs were as revealing as Malcolm’s speeches and that James Brown meant a good deal more to most African Americans in the 1960s than H. Rap Brown. Still, I did manage to secure college funds to build a discography of esoteric rhythm and blues and soul records from a postgraduate tutor who was more used to disbursing money for additional palaeography instruction. I mention this only to note that it was at BAAS, amid the panels and pints of the annual conference, that I first found an intellectual home among people who saw the virtues of multiple, sometimes genuinely integrated approaches to the study of the American experience. >>>read more

CFP: American Studies Association of Norway, 2016 Conference

CFP: “Fear and friendliness in the United States”
American Studies Association of Norway Oslo, Norway
Oct. 28-30, 2016
Conference venue: Scandic Helsfyr, Oslo

The American Studies Association of Norway (ASANOR) is a professional, academic organization for people who are actively interested in American Studies. ASANOR is pleased to call for proposals for its 41st annual conference in Oslo, 28-30 October 2016.

President Obama's 2012 victory speech, Chicago.

Conference theme: “Fear and friendliness in the United States”

The USA has a culture of fear, but American culture is also a culture of friendliness. In a sense, the USA is torn between fear and friendliness; closeness and openness; and pessimism and optimism. This tension is visible in many areas. The election and reelection of president Barack Obama on the one hand evoked fear of a socialist, foreign take-over of America, but also was an expression of friendliness towards talented people despite their ethnic and class background. In Fargo, the widely acclaimed film and TV-series, the niceness of the Upper Midwest is contrasted with the harshness of big city crime. The graphic novel turned into hit TV-series The Walking Dead explores how a group of survivors balance fear of strangers with friendliness towards fellow human beings in a post-apocalyptic era.

The tension has deep roots in American history. Alexis de Tocqueville noted Americans’ enduring optimism, but just a few years later, nativist sentiments drew on people’s fear of the new and unknown. Sinclair Lewis' novel Main Street (1920) explored how friendly Midwesterners fostered a narrow culture where outsiders remained outsiders. During the 20th century fear was sometimes

used in the name of defending a free and open republic: the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924 and the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the McCarthy Era excluded alien elements that were a perceived threat to American freedoms. Today, fear of Islamic terrorism lead presidential candidate Donald Trump to call for a temporary ban on Muslims from entering the United States.

We seek proposals for papers and panels addressing the role of fear and/or friendliness in American culture and in relation to other cultures. Each paper should last for no more than 20 minutes. As an interdisciplinary academic organization, ASANOR wishes to include presentations from a wide range of disciplines.

Topics include, but are not limited to:
• Film and popular culture • Literature • Race and ethnicity • National politics • Crime • Regionalism • Immigration • Religion • Legal issues • Foreign relations • Nationalism

Invited speakers:

Keynote speaker
Professor Amy Louise Wood (Illinois State University) will deliver the keynote address. Her current research investigates ideas about criminality at the turn of the 20th century, which wavered between fear and friendliness toward the criminal, and the effect of these ideas on prison reform. Professor Wood has previously published the book Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) for which she received the Lillian Smith Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History.

Panel on academic publishing
Michelle Houston, commissioning editor with the Edinburgh University Press, has been invited to participate on a panel on academic publishing along with scholars in the field (tbd).

Panel on writing for/speaking to a general audience
We have also invited a group of scholars to share their experiences on writing for and speaking to a general audience. How can we as Americanists explain current events to the average Norwegian?

Proposals for Individual Papers
Please provide the title and an abstract (300 words max.) of the paper you are proposing: your name, institutional affiliation, and email address; and a brief biographical statement (100 words max.). Please include the biographical statement at the end of your abstract. Proposals for Panels Please provide a description (700 words max) of the topic of the panel and each panelist’s contribution; the title of the panel and titles and abstracts for individual papers; and a brief biographical statement (100 words max.) about each panelist. Please include the biographical statements at the end of the abstracts.

Please send proposal and CV to Dr. Hilde Løvdal Stephens at hildelovdal@gmail.com and associate professor Alf Tomas Tønnessen at toenness@hivolda.no by April 15, 2016.

Conference organizers: Hilde Løvdal Stephens, Alf Tomas Tennessean, and Mia Jønnum

Northumbria University Acquires the Books of the Late Historian Michael O'Brien

Northumbria University has recently acquired the book collection of the late, esteemed historian Michael O’Brien.  This is wonderful news for American Studies, History, and the Humanities Department at Northumbria.

The collection amounts to approximately 3,300 books, occupying 90 metres of shelving space. Books in the collection cover US history, culture, and the American South from the colonial period to the twentieth century.

Michael O'Brien collection.

Michael O’Brien was Professor of American Intellectual History at Jesus College, Cambridge.  In an academic career of great distinction he became a Fellow of the British Academy, was winner of the Bancroft Prize for his seminal work Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860, was twice a nominated finalist for the Pulitzer Prize (for History and Biography and Autobiography), and was honoured by a number of American historical societies. Further information on Michael O’Brien’s life and achievements is available from his obituary in the Guardian and at Cambridge University.

Before his death, Michael had discussed disposal of his book collection with Northumbria University Professor in American Studies Brian Ward. Subsequently, the collection was offered to Northumbria University by one of Michael O’Brien’s executors, Joel Isaac, Senior Lecturer in the History of Modern Political Thought, and Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge through contact with both Randall Stephens, Reader in American History, and Brian Ward.  Philip Judd (Collection and Digital Services Librarian, Collection Management, Student and Library Services) has also been instrumental in securing the collection and processing it for the library.

The broad themes of the collection include:

• History of the southern states including

o Architecture;

o Cultural issues;
o Education including universities; the education of women;
o Experience of different societal groups, including German and Jewish communities;
o Gender issues;
o General history of the southern states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries;
o Intellectual history;
o Medicine;
o Politics generally and ‘high’ politics (the politics of parties and state legislatures);
o Race and racism;
o Religious history;
o Social history;
o Urban history.

• The Civil War;
• Slavery;

• Biographies of politicians and people of influence.

In addition, the collection on contains books on twentieth century American history and political biographies of presidents.

The collection includes a small number of multi-volume collections including:

• Forty-five volumes of The Adams Papers Project founded in 1954 to edit and publish the writings of the family of John Adams and published by Harvard University Press;
• E.W. Knight: A Documentary History of Education in the South (Five volumes), published by the University of North Carolina;
• Reprints of nineteenth century books on slavery, published by The Negro Universities Press (a division of Greenwood Press).

The vast majority of the books in the collection are monographs ranging from general histories to books on very specific subjects. All of the books in the collection will be placed on Northumbria’s open shelves.

The American Studies Newsletter, 2015

Haven't had a chance to look at the the 2015 American Studies Newsletter? Download it here and find out about all the exciting things happening at Northumbria University, past, present, and future.  The Newsletter includes interviews with an undergrad and a grad student, the latest about grant success, conferences that have taken place and those planned for 2016, and information about a visiting scholar.  See also important updates on staff, new publications, and more.  

Prof Brian Ward writes in his intro to the Newsletter:

In 2014-2015, the American Studies programme at Northumbria University continued to enhance its reputation as home to one of the UK’s most impressive constellations of researchers and teachers in US history, literature, and popular culture. As you’ll see from the features in this latest edition of the newsletter, during the last year we have published an im- pressive array of books and articles, given countless talks at schools, conferences, and universities around the globe, hosted a couple of major international conferences, participated in a wide range of media work in television, radio, and online, been involved with a variety of public events that have showcased our expertise on everything from US religion and politics, to the impact in Britain of American popular music.

Meanwhile, Northumbria graduate students, whether doing MAs or PhDs on American-themed topics, are now a major and respected part of the American Studies landscape in Britain—a status exemplified by the election of doctoral student Megan Hunt as the postgraduate secretary for the admirably named HOTCUS (Historians of the Twentieth Century United States). Moreover, with the arrival of our third undergraduate intake in 2015, we also now have students in place at all three levels of the American Studies BA, while undergraduates majoring in history and literature continue to flock to US-themed modules. As ever, one of our priorities this year is to do all we can to make sure that those students have a thoroughly enjoyable educational experience and that they emerge from Northumbria with the kinds of skills, knowledge, attitudes and aptitudes that will set them up well for employment or further study. American Studies students at Northumbria do not only get the opportunity to learn about the US, its history, politics, and cultures, from a cracking team of world-class teacher-researchers, they also get to develop the kinds of analytical and communication skills that are invaluable in any number of careers. Another priority is to work even more closely with schools and colleges to make sure that they and their students are aware of the attractions of American Studies as a degree programme, and the many advantages of doing it at Northumbria. >>>read on

Professor in American Studies Brian Ward to Deliver Public Lecture

"Delius, Davidson and the Drive-by Truckers: 

What is Southern about the Music of the US South?"

18 January, 2016
Presentation Hall, Design Building, City Campus East at Northumbria University. Refreshments will be available from 6pm. The lecture will begin at 6.30pm

Synopsis

This lecture discusses the unlikely coincidence that British-born classical composer Fredrick Delius, Tennessee poet-critic Donald Davidson, and Alabama alternative country rockers the Drive-By Truckers each wrote an “opera” about the southern United States. The lecture will consider how these very different artists, working in different musical styles, at different historical moments, each tried to evoke aspects of the US South in musical form and how “musical southern-ness” has been created and consumed both nationally and internationally.

About the Speaker

Brian Ward is Professor in American Studies at Northumbria University.

He is the author of numerous book chapters and scholarly articles and has published nine books, including Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations, which won Organization of American Historian’s James A. Rawley prize for the best book on the history of United States race relations and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Outstanding Literary Achievement. In 2013, the book was also selected by The Guardian as one of the ten best history books written on the United States civil rights movement.

He is also author of Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (2004), which won the Best History Book Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. His most recent books are three co-edited volumes on Creating and Consuming the American South (2015), The American South and the Atlantic World (2013), and Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South (2013).

Renowned Author Caryl Phillips Lecture and Workshop at Northumbria

Clare Elliott

On Tuesday 26th May colleagues in American Studies and English welcomed the critically-acclaimed author Caryl Phillips to the University. Phillips is one of the most highly acclaimed novelists and essayist of his generation. His numerous works of fiction and non-fiction include The Lost Child (2015), Colour Me English (2011), Dancing in the Dark (2005), The Atlantic Sound (2000) and Crossing the River (1994) He was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for his novel, A Distant Shore (2003) and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Crossing the River. His many other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Phillips' lecture for staff and students.

The University held two main events that day. The first was a Creative Practice and Critical Engagement Workshop which was attended by literature and creative writing students. This was an inspiring event where Phillips answered questions about his novel Crossing the River. After a long interview with Dr Clare Elliott, Phillips engaged with several students in discussion about this text and his other work. We talked about how Phillips’s fiction and non-fiction deals with the Black Diaspora and notices a tension between a sense of homelessness and an African belonging that is often experienced by his diasporan characters. We discussed issues of class and race and how Phillips connects the two in his writing and we talked about gender, place and identity, and reimagining histories of migration. In the latter half of the workshop creative writing students were asked to write a short piece with these themes in mind. The exercise was fruitful and the author gave a full critique of each short story. In the evening we had the pleasure of hearing from Phillips again as he read from his new novel The Lost Child. This was a public event where the audience heard Phillips in conversation with Professor Brian Ward and Dr Clare Elliott. We talked about The Lost Child as a response to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; themes of education, class and race in the novel as well as music and literature more broadly. The day was full, enriching and thoroughly enjoyed by all!

Northumbria Hosts International Conference for British Association of American Studies

American studies at Northumbria University attracted an international array of delegates for the 60th Anniversary conference of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) between April 9-12. Current BAAS chair, Sue Currell of the University of Sussex, was delighted with the conference which attracted over 250 people: “It seemed very fitting to look back on 60 years of the British Association for American Studies while being hosted by one of the newest and most ambitious American Studies programmes in the country. As we approach another US election, I think the success of the conference speaks volumes about the vitality and significance of research and teaching on American topics around the UK.” 

The opening plenary was well-attended lecture given by Guardian journalist Gary Younge that featured in the newspaper the following day. The full transcript will be published in a forthcoming collection of essays on voting rights in the United States to be edited by Dr Henry Knight Lozano and Dr Joe Street both of Northumbria University. Current political events in the US were also central to another plenary lecture delivered by Professor Dana Nelson from Vanderbilt University, who spoke about the politics of Presidential power. Professor Nelson updated the audience on the findings of her 2008 book Bad for Democracy, to include observations on the current Obama administration. American literature Professor and Guardian columnist, Sarah Churchwell, also gave a lively guided tour of the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald as it appeared in The Great Gatsby. Speakers were sponsored and supported by the Journal of American Studies and the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. The audience and participants included members of the public as well as representatives from the cultural affairs office of the US Embassy, who generously supported postgraduate student attendance at the conference.

Alongside numerous academic panels in a wide variety of subjects of significance to American studies scholars, there were publishing workshops and representation from over 20 international publishers. Delegates also took the opportunity to visit the University’s library holdings in American materials, including the papers of the Black Panther Party and the Records of Students for a Democratic Society.  Local hotels and the local economy also benefited from such a large influx of extra guests as delegates took advantage of visiting the city, many for the first time. Sue Currell noted that “The annual conference is central to sustaining the network of scholars who are researching the history, culture and politics of America in the UK. BAAS is very grateful to the hosts at Northumbria University for creating such a welcoming and successful event to celebrate our Anniversary: there is no doubt in my mind that everyone who attended is now looking forward to the nearest opportunity to come back.”

60 Anniversary BAAS Programme

The programme is now online for the 2015 British Association of American Studies meeting, 9-12 April, 2015, Northumbria University.  Download a copy of it here.

More on the conference:

The 60th annual conference of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) will be hosted by the Department of Humanities at Northumbria University, Newcastle, 9-12 April, 2015.

The British Association for American Studies was founded in 1955. It exists to promote, support and encourage the study of the United States in the Universities, Colleges and Schools of the United Kingdom, and by independent scholars. The 2015 conference commemorates the 60th anniversary of the founding of BAAS and promises to be a hugely stimulating and enjoyable occasion. We look forward to welcoming you to Newcastle upon Tyne, the most vibrant urban centre in the North East of England.

The conference will begin after lunch on Thursday April 9, and will close after lunch on Sunday April 12.

We are delighted to announce our plenary speakers:

• Gary Younge. Author, broadcaster and award-winning columnist for The Guardian and The Nation.

• Dana Nelson. Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University.

• Sarah Churchwell. Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities, University of East Anglia

More on BAAS here.  Listen to an interview with conference organizer Joe Street here.

Introducing the Film Selma

Brian Ward

A screenshot from an original newsreel of the
1965 Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights.

It's always a nerve-wracking experience for a professional historian to watch a feature film or television drama that purports to depict real events, particularly if it’s on a topic where we like to claim some expertise. Will the drama get the basic facts and chronology right?; will the on-screen characterisations ring true?; will the film get the clothes and hair right?

As a historian of the US South and the civil rights movement, all those thoughts were rushing through my mind as I watched the Oscar-nominated Selma for the first time, especially knowing that I had been asked to deliver introductions to the film in Newcastle at special screenings at the Star and Shadow and Tyneside cinemas.

As I explained to those audiences, the good news is that Selma is a powerful, often inspirational film that only occasionally plays fast and loose with the historical record or offers up dubious interpretations of events. The film recounts the story of the historic campaign for Voting Rights in an Alabama city where a mix of white violence, intimidation, and legal chicanery meant that in 1965 only 383 of a potential black electorate of more than 15,000 were registered to vote. A series of nonviolent demonstrations met with brutal, sometimes lethal white resistance from local law enforcement agencies and vigilante groups. The protests culminated in the events of Bloody Sunday, March 7, when state troopers, some of them mounted on horseback, beat and tear-gassed marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as they tried to walk to Montgomery, the state capital, to protest before Alabama governor and segregationist icon George Wallace. A march two days later led by Martin Luther King was aborted on what became known as Turnaround Tuesday, but a third march, attracting as many as 25,000 supporters from around the nation, eventually made it Montgomery. read more>>>

My Sabbatical in Brief

Julie Taylor

While on sabbatical last semester I had the opportunity to complete one research project and begin another.

Jean Toomer, courtesy of the Beinecke,
Library, Yale University.

Modernism and Affect, which will be published by Edinburgh UP later in 2015, brings together essays by scholars working across several disciplines within modernist studies. Reconsidering modernism’s complex relationship with questions of emotion, feeling, and embodiment after theory’s ‘affective turn’, the collection encompasses work on literature, architecture, philosophy, dance, visual art, and design. In the introduction I outline some of the key works and concepts within the humanities’ recent engagement with affect, and chart modernism’s troubled relationship to matters affective. My own chapter contribution to the book considers the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer’s critical deployment of a racist stereotype that links African American subjectivity to extreme emotional expressiveness.

The sabbatical also gave me time to explore my new research project.  It is an examination of the pedagogical dimensions of American modernism, taking up the implications of Hugh Kenner’s famous claim that the modernists were ‘poets at the blackboard’. My key questions revolve around the points of contact between experiments in writing and experiments in education in the early twentieth century, which included theories and projects as diverse as Bauhaus, Montessori, Deweyism, and psychoanalytic approaches to learning. My research has so far centered on the literary innovator and theorist, modernist mentor, and occasional lecturer, Gertrude Stein. Stein expressed scepticism about certain educational innovations she encountered (such as the ‘Great Books’ scheme at Chicago University), but her work guides us towards a reading practice that challenges many traditional ideas about pedagogy. Recently, I have become fascinated by Stein’s writing for children, including her 1939 book, The World is Round, written on the invitation of the successful children’s author, would-be modernist, and member of New York’s Bank Street Experimental School, Margaret Wise Brown. Stein’s work invites us to ask important questions about the relationship between modernism, children’s literature, and theories of learning at the beginning of the twentieth century.

American Studies Seminars and Events, Spring 2015

American Studies has an excellent lineup of seminars, roundtables, and conferences for this semester.  Stay tuned here for further details.

Wed 28 Jan: Bruce Baker (Newcastle Univ), “The Politics of Ratproofing: Fighting Plague in New Orleans in the Progressive Era,” 5:00pm (new time), Lipman 033. Co-sponsored with the history programme.

Th 12 Feb: Clare Elliott (Northumbria Univ), “Atlantic Literary Sisters: The Peabodys, Alcotts and Brontës,” 5:30pm, Lipman 033.

Th 12 March: Doug Haynes (Univ of Sussex), “Terror, Transference, Telepathy: Don DeLillo and Gerhard Richter,” 5:30pm, Lipman 033.

Th 26 March: Religion in American History: A Roundtable, Northumbria’s US History Group with Newcastle University’s Americas Research Group, Newcastle University, Armstrong Building, Room 2.50, 3:30-6:45pm.

April 8-9: A Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of Selma & the Voting Rights Act.

April 9-12: British Association of American Studies Conference (60th Anniversary).

TBD: Alison Garden (Univ of Edinburgh), Early Career Visiting Scholarship.

From the Archives: A Research Fellowship at the Huntington Library

Henry Knight Lozano

Being a scholar of the US based in the UK presents certain obvious geographical challenges – there is no archive down the road to help kick-start a new project – and thus any research trip stateside needs to be considered carefully to get the most value for the time and money being spent. 

With this in mind, in August, I spent a month as a Research Fellow at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, and found it to be both a welcoming and distinctive place to do research. Founded in 1919 by railroad and real estate magnate Henry E. Huntington, the Huntington is a stand-alone research and educational institution that does not belong to any university (although the recent USC-Huntington Institute on California and the West represents an exciting new collaboration). The library offers a wide range of funded fellowships (over 150 annually) typically from one to six months; moreover, it sits in stunning botanical gardens dotted with fine art galleries that, if you’re not careful, can stretch a quick coffee break into a meandering wander through the grounds. 

The Huntington Gardens

This combination of southern California sun, semi-tropical gardens and tourists adrift therein made the Huntington feel a particularly apt location for my new project exploring cultural connections that developed between California and Hawaii in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The library’s archives, though, are lure enough. The Huntington holds an immense amount of Anglo-American materials: the library’s western and Californian sources were my focus – from private letter collections to visual ephemera – but literary scholars and historians of Britain and Europe from the medieval to the early modern are also drawn to its rich manuscript and rare book collections. This creates a lively and collegiate atmosphere among researchers with new fellows constantly arriving and informal talks organised to share projects and insights, often across disciplines and levels of study: postgraduate students, for example, are a notably significant presence among the fellowship community, reflecting the inclusive approach of the library and its funding schemes. In all, I found the Huntington an extremely useful research archive and institution and would recommend it to anyone working in a relevant field – the sun and the grounds are just a bonus!

Henry Knight Lozano is a Lecturer in History and American Studies at Northumbria University.  He is the author of the award-winning Tropic of Hopes: California, Florida, and the Selling of American Paradise, 1869-1929 (University Press of Florida, 2013).

Joe Street on the British Assocation of American Studies 2015 Meeting

Randall Stephens

In the short interview below I speak with Joe Street (Senior Lecturer in History) about the April 9-12, 2015 BAAS annual conference.  Hosted by Northumbria University, it will mark the 60th anniversary of the organization and will draw together historians, literary studies scholars, political scientists, and others who work on American subjects.

In a letter to BAAS members Joe notes that Northumbria is a good fit for the 2015 meeting:

In 2013 Northumbria launched the biggest initiative in American Studies in the UK for more than a generation. Amongst numerous new academic posts was the University’s first Professor in American Studies. The University’s innovative and exciting BA programme in American Studies accepted its first students in September 2013. The research interests of staff include religion, race, ethnicity, presidential studies, horror film, poetry, the South, the San Francisco Bay Area, music, modernist fiction, immigration and urban studies, the Atlantic world and expansionism. The University holds numerous major resources that are of interest to American Studies scholars, including the papers of the Black Panther Party and the Records of Students for a Democratic Society.

(For more on the launch of the programme, see this feature, "Made in America," in the Journal, October 4, 2012.)

The conference promises a variety of excellent panels, roundtables, as well as a great lineup of speakers that Joe has put together:

• Gary Younge, author, broadcaster and award-winning columnist for the Guardian and the Nation
• Dana Nelson, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University
• Sarah Churchwell, Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities, University of East Anglia

See more about panel and single paper proposals, as well as additional details, here on the BAAS website. And keep up with all the latest about the conference over at @BAASconf2015.

Northumbria Welcomes Professor Tony Badger

Brian Ward

This week, we welcome Professor Tony Badger to the American Studies and History programmes at Northumbria. This semester he will be teaching with me on the Level 5 African American Freedom Struggle since 1945 module and doing some guest lectures for From Sea to Shining Sea. It’s hard to imagine that a mere 24 years ago, when I got my first full-time teaching job “across the road,” it was me joining Tony to teach on his year-long Special Subject on Martin Luther King.

Professor Tony Badger

In the intervening years, while Tony has been slumming it as Paul Mellon Professor of American History and Master of Clare College at The University of Cambridge, he has cemented his place as one of the most important historians of the US to emerge since World War Two. His books include Prosperity Road: The New Deal, Tobacco, and North Carolina (1980); The New Deal: The Depression Years 1933-1940 (1990); New Deal/New South: The Anthony J Badger Reader (2007) and FDR: The First Hundred Days (2008) – not to mention a highly regarded, nay indispensable, edited collection on The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, co-edited with yours truly. He is currently working on a biography of southern white liberal Al Gore, Sr. (yep, the fiddle-playing father of former vice president Al Gore, Jr) and completing a book on US history between the two World Wars.

Obviously, it gives me great personal pleasure to welcome Tony back to the North East after his years in the wilderness. But I think his decision to join us also stands as testimony to the ambition and strength of American Studies and history at Northumbria right now. Colleagues throughout the Humanities, and students at all levels will enjoy his company and benefit greatly from his vast teaching, administrative, research, and fund-raising experience. He gets his round in, too.

Brian Ward is Northumbria University's first Professor in American Studies. Brian's teaching and research focuses on the American South, the African American Experience (particularly the civil rights and black power movements), popular music, the mass media, America in the 1920s and 1960s, and various aspects of Anglo-American cultural relations.