“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

Professor Brian Ward Elected Chair of British Association for American Studies

The History and American Studies programmes at Northumbria University are pleased to announce that Professor Brian Ward has been elected Chair of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS).  Founded in 1955, BAAS is this country’s leading learned society that focusses on the study of the United States.  

Brian will serve a three year term and will be working closely with universities, colleges, schools, and independent scholars  to promote the aims of the association in partnership with a range of external bodies, including the American Embassy and the Eccles Centre (British Library).   Contrary to all  rumours, his election to this office had nothing to do with his claret and blue allegiance and everything to do with his reputation as a world-leading scholar of American History and American Studies!  

Well done Brian!

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).

Award for Documentary Film on Martin Luther King Jr's 1967 Visit to Newcastle

At the Royal Television Society Awards last week, the winner in the Best Factual Production category went to A King’s Speech, a documentary about Martin Luther King Jr’s 1967 visit to Newcastle. The documentary was based largely on research conducted by Brian Ward, Northumbria’s Professor in American Studies and a leading expert in the history of the US civil rights movement. In the early 1990s, Brian discovered long-lost footage of the unscheduled speech that King gave in Newcastle and later wrote a scholarly account of the circumstances surrounding King's visit. Thanks to the documentary, narrated by Lenny Henry and produced by David Morrison for BBC North East, public awareness of King’s trip to Newcastle and of his moving speech is growing once again.

If you want to learn more about King’s visit and about the making of this award-winning documentary Brian and BBC Senior Producer Murphy Cobbing will be discussing them at the Great North Museum at 7pm on April 24, 2015. The event will also include music, a wine reception, and screenings of the documentary and King’s speech.

Admission to A King’s Speech on Tyneside: Remembering Martin Luther King’s Historic Visit to Newcastle is free, but you will need to book a place. (For more details, see here.)

This event is part of the Journey to Justice project on the US civil rights movement and its links to struggles for social justice in the North East which will be coming to venues around Tyneside this Spring.

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>>>

Showing of film Selma with Intro Lecture by Prof Brian Ward, January 31

The North East premiere of the new feature film Selma will take place at the Star & Shadow Cinema at 2pm on Saturday, January 31, a week before its official release.  The movie tells the story of a pivotal moment in the African-American fight for voting rights in the 1960s South. Northumbria Professor in American Studies Brian Ward will give a short introductory talk on the film before the screening.

Film critic A.O. Scott writes of the movie in a recent New York Times review:

While entirely satisfying on its own, “Selma” seems to contain the seeds of at least a dozen other movies — a reminder of how fertile the civil rights era is and how poorly it has been explored by popular culture. Spike Lee and Denzel Washington gave us a fine Malcolm X (who shows up here briefly, played by Nigel Thatch), but how long will we have to wait for a biopic devoted to Bayard Rustin (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Toussaint) or Andrew Young (Andre Holland)? Or for a daring director to tackle the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose internal tensions and impatience with Dr. King surface here in arguments between James Forman (Trai Byers) and the future Congressman John Lewis (Stephan James)? Where is the premium-cable mini-series about Diane Nash (Ms. Thompson) and James Bevel (Common)? The Martin Luther King-Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo) buddy movie? The “Law & Order” spinoff about the career of the Justice Department lawyer John Doar (Alessandro Nivola)? They are all here, in miniature, but “Selma” made me impatient for more. . .

Edmund Pettus Bridge scene from the film.

“Selma” is not a manifesto, a battle cry or a history lesson. It’s a movie: warm, smart, generous and moving in two senses of the word. It will call forth tears of grief, anger, gratitude and hope. And like those pilgrims on the road to Montgomery, it does not rest.*

The showing of the film at the Star and Shadow will also serve as a fundraiser for the Journey to Justice/Shadow of Selma Project. In Spring 2015, J2J/SoS will bring an exhibition on the US Civil Rights Movement and its connections to struggles for social justice and democracy in the North East to the Discovery and Great North Museums, as well as running various public engagement and educational events on similar themes.

Tickets cost £10 each and are available here.

For more information on tickets and Journey to Justice, contact Bethany Elen Kirtley Coyle. For more information on the Star & Shadow, go here.

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.

History and American Studies Featured in Humanities Video

For those of you who missed it, check out this short video that Northumbria University has produced for our Humanities Department. It includes some screen time with Brian Ward (Professor in American Studies) and James McConnel (Programme Director and Reader in History). Also featured are two 2013 History graduates Rachael Farnworth and Joe Holt.