Thursday 21 June 2012

AMS welcomes Prof. Robert S. Levine to give keynote lecture at “Melville and Americanness”, Friday 29th June


At next Friday's conference on Melville and Americanness one of the many exciting events will be the keynote speech delivered by Professor Robert S. LevineProf. Levine visits us from his home University of Maryland to give his talk, “Melville and Americanness: - A Problem”, which will raise questions about the very term "Americanness" and explore how Melville connects to this concept that, he proposes, “seems always in flux.” Described by his peers as “impressively prolific”, Prof. Levine’s weighty body of works includes studies on Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, to name a few. A recent recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, his latest publication on Melville, The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, is due out later this year.

Taking place in the Thomas Paine Study Centre, the conference kicks off at 9am and promises papers ranging in topics from Gothic, Philosophy and Democracy to Transnationalism.  It’s not too late to register: if you would like to join us, find out more by visiting the conference website.  There are special rates for PGRs – all are welcome.

Wednesday 13 June 2012

New AMS book: Geoffrey Plank's John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom


Professor Geoffrey Plank’s new book John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom is now available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Christopher Brown of Columbia University describes it as “a carefully researched and quietly brilliant work that provides a genuinely new perspective on a familiar figure in the history of antislavery. Plank finds in Woolman not only an early opponent of slavery but also an ardent critic of most every facet of commercial life in the Delaware Valley and, more generally, the British Empire.”

Prof. Plank will be giving talks on his book on the following dates:
  • At the Woodbrooke Quaker Studies Centre in Birmingham, England on the evening of Wednesday, September 26
  • At Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania on the evening of Thursday, October 4
  • At the Pendle Hill Quaker Conference Center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania on Sunday, October 7
  • At Haverford College in Pennsylvania on Monday, October 8 - see http://www.haverford.edu/calendar/details/206361
  • At the Friends House in London on the evening of Tuesday, April 30, 2013.

More details will be posted as they become available.

UPDATE 16/07/2012

Geoff Plank has added two more events to the schedule of his early October trip to the Philadelphia area.  He will be giving the following talks connected to his new biography of John Woolman:
  • “The Other Woolmans” at Swarthmore College on Thursday evening, October 4, and at Mount Holly, New Jersey Quaker Meeting House at 2 p.m. on Saturday, October 6
  • “John Woolman and the Utility of History” at the Pendle Hill Quaker Conference Center on Sunday, October 7
  • “The Other Family living with the Woolmans” at Haverford College at 4:30 p.m. on Monday, October 8. 
  • Additionally he will be presenting a paper drawing on his new work related to his current research (the paper is tentatively entitled “Sheep, Thomas Tryon, and the English Empire”  at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies on the afternoon of Friday, October 5.