£350 up for grabs: Calling all budding artists and graphic designers in the making....

Stop the Press:

The School of American Studies is organising a public exhibition about slavery, race, and the American South to coincide with Black History Month 2012 (Monday 1^st – Sunday 14^th October).

The exhibition to be hosted at the Millennium Library, Norwich, includes letters written by Sarah Hicks Williams, an antebellum woman born and raised in New York State as part of the genteel middle class, who, in 1853 married Benjamin Williams, a slaveholder from Greene County, North Carolina. The letters chart her experience as a slaveholding mistress through the Civil War and into Reconstruction. The eleven letters included in the exhibition highlight the stark differences between Sarah’s family’s home in New Hartford (and the antebellum North in general) and Greene County, (where the Williams' plantation was located), North Carolina and the South. The letters mark Sarah’s transition as she became more attuned to Southern life, slaveholding, and her status as plantation mistress. They also include letters written during and after the Civil War when the enslaved owned by the Williams’ family are emancipated and Sarah faces African Americans as their employer rather than mistress.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of public lectures by members of faculty and research students, hosted by Fusion at the Forum, in addition to a number of public cafes discussing the ways in which Black history and lives are represented in American society.

Creativity Needed:

What we need now is some eye-grabbing artwork to promote the exhibition and related events. Framing the event around the catchy title “Containing Multitudes” and thinking thorough the events we have planned, AMS is running a competition beginning mid-April (i.e. now) through mid-June (closing date: Friday 15^th June) to provide AMS students with the opportunity to promote your talents (and of course the event itself!) through your artwork.

What Do I Need to Do to Enter?:

Submit a copy of your artwork via email attachment by the closing date of 15^th June. Entrants will be judged by myself, as organiser of the exhibition, Nick Selby, as head of school, and another member of the AMS faculty (yet to be chosen). Winners will be notified by the end of June 2012.

Saving the Important Bit until Last:

The winning design will be used on all promotional material for the event and the successful entrant will win prize money of £200. There will also be additional prize of £100 for the entrant who is judged runner-up, and £50 for third place. The award ceremony (including all three designs) will take place during the exhibition in October.

If you have any further questions in relation to the competition or the events themselves please contact me at becky.fraser@uea.ac.uk or else pop by my office (Arts Building, 1.37).

News: Special Seminar on Henry David Thoreau

Exciting news: the School of American Studies is delighted to announce that it will be hosting a special seminar for graduate students and faculty members on American writer Henry David Thoreau in May.

Symposium: Carlisle, PA: Site of Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations

On October 5-6, 2012, the School of American Studies is co-sponsoring an international symposium in the USA that will bring together Native and non-Native scholars, leaders, artists, and community members to share their work, concerns, and perspectives.

Carlisle was the location of the first government Indian boarding school. The school’s goal was to obliterate Native cultures and prepare Native American children for citizenship. Carlisle Indian School is a research topic of Jacqueline Fear-Segal and several American Studies graduate students; the University holds copies of the school’s newspaper archive.

Learn more here.

AMS Discussion Cafés: Crisis and Contemporary America

The first in a series of Discussion Cafés hosted by students from the School of American Studies' final year module "New American Century: Culture and Crisis" takes place tomorrow! No need to book, no charge, and refreshments provided. Tomorrow's session:

‘How do national cultures deal with globalisation and Americanisation?’ October 25, 11-12, The Maddermarket Theatre, St. John’s Alley, Norwich.

You can see the full programme of events here. The Discussion Cafés are taking place throughout October and November.

AMS Film Screenings: Real to Reel

As an offshoot of our first year History modules this semester, we're running Real to Reel, a series of film screenings which serve as another way of introducing some of the issues at stake in the study of American history. These screenings will be of interest to students of American Studies more generally, and everyone is welcome. Below, the schedule.

News: Kevin Smith's Red State

by Natasha Broad

Whilst filmmaker Kevin Smith is well known for making comedies, his latest offering concerns a far more serious topic. Released at the Sundance Film Festival amongst controversy, Red State is a hard-hitting film about religious extremism in the USA but, unexpectedly, also offers a thought provoking image of the American government post 9/11.

News: Urban Prep, and the Ongoing Battle between Education and Poverty in Chicago

(via)

by Andi Bawden

Hidden amongst a mass of BBC news stories focusing on the United States, an article by Mark Mardell with a brief video illustrates the success of a school in Chicago.  Although attracting relatively little attention in the UK until now, Urban Prep made American national news at the beginning of this summer after 100% of its graduating seniors were awarded places in American colleges.

Extreme Right-Wing Pundits Love Steve Almond’s Latest Much To The Confusion Of, Uh, Everyone

By Neekta Khorsand

Steve Almond, beloved DIY-publishing, bad-poetry-writing, experimental “candy freak,” is releasing a new book entitled God Bless America at the end of October of “comic and forlorn” short stories about the United States and its many delights. Much to Almond’s bewilderment--and that of many others--his book has been touted by members of the right wing extreme & Fox News pundits—most notably, teddy bear lookalike Glenn Beck. Almond explains the whole situation in the trailer video for his book.

Friday Night Lights: The Story Continues

Christopher Bigsby continues his Friday Night Lights odyssey.

News: We're Hiring

We want YOU to work in the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. We're currently looking for a Lecturer in American Studies (History and Culture). Full details of the post are available here, but the highlights are available below.

News: East St Louis Toodle-oo

Malcolm McLaughlin is just back from his trip to East St. Louis, IL, and brings us a few snaps from his travels around town.

News: North and South (Yorkshire)

As the Civil War Sesquicentennial rolls forward, a different perspective. You might not know it but the American Civil War has been raging in the north of England for almost 40 years. Follow the link to see some wonderful photographs, courtesy of The Guardian,.of a recent battle between the Union Army and the Confederate forces of General Lee at Cusworth Hall, South Yorks., all thanks to the UK’s American Civil War Society, founded 1975.

Première of The Lost Ones!

On Wednesday July 6th, at the Norwich Forum, a documentary based on the work of AMS's Jacqueline Fear-Segal will receive its European première! Below, you can watch the trailer. And below that, you can see the press release.

Lighting Out: Malcolm McLaughlin Heading to St. Louis

UEA’s Malcolm McLaughlin will be visiting East St. Louis, Illinois, next week to make an appearance as a guest speaker at a conference that has been organized by Professor Andrew Theising of Southern Illinois University and the local Action Research Project, as part of the city’s 150^th anniversary celebrations.

East St. Louis is one of America’s forgotten corners. It was basically a city of factories and when those shut down in the 1960s-1980s there was almost nothing left. Thousands of people moved away and its population shrank from over 100,000 to under 30,000 today. In places where factories once stood there are now acres of abandoned land – the urban prairie. But there are good things happening, too, like the community gardens project which is letting the people of East St. Louis reclaim their city and turn the urban wilderness into plots of flowers, fruits, and vegetables. 

More from Malcolm when he's on the road.

Next Week: American Lives at the Forum

Next week, the School of American Studies is heading out into Norwich for a series of exciting events exploring what America 'means' to it's diverse population and the variety of ways in which it is imagined from within its national borders. The American Lives programme is available here, but a sneak preview of events at the Forum is available below. See you there!

Geoffrey Plank’s work contributes to the renaming of a Nova Scotia Junior High School

Nova Scotia Governor Edward Cornwallis has long been celebrated in the province as the founder of the capital Halifax.  His name is attached to several landmarks, including a park in the centre of the city, where a statue honouring him was erected in 1931.  In his 1994 Princeton dissertation, and in his subsequent book An Unsettled Conquest, UEA School of American Studies Professor Geoffrey Plank recounted in detail how Cornwallis conducted his campaign against the local indigenous people, the Mi’kmaq.  While he was still on shipboard, anchored off the coast where he planned to establish Halifax, he resolved to offer bounties for the scalps of Mi’kmaq men, women and children. 

Plank’s work appeared just as a local campaign to remove Cornwallis’s name from local landmarks was gaining momentum.  The driving force behind this effort was the Mi’kmaq elder Danny Paul.  Paul’s sweeping history of the Mi’kmaq people, We Were Not the Savages, first appeared in 1994, is now in its third edition.  Paul helped publicize Plank’s work and partly as a consequence, Plank received attention in the local press, including an extended article in 1998 which was accompanied by an editorial cartoon, above, mocking the statue in Cornwallis Park.

Paul has pursued his campaign tirelessly since the 1980s, but a critical turning point came in 2008, when Cheryl LeBlanc-Weldon, a local elementary school teacher, began circulating an online petition to remove Cornwallis’s name from all streets, parks, schools and other public institutions.  The petition quoted Plank’s scholarly work, and it was circulated in the Mi’kmaq language and French as well as English.  More than 3,000 signatures were collected, and within a year the campaign had its first success, when the Canadian coastguard’s icebreaker Edward Cornwallis was decommissioned, and the coastguard promised not to launch another vessel with that name.  The campaign has continued, and responding to increasing pressure, on June 21, 2011, the Halifax Regional School Board voted unanimously to change the name of Cornwallis Jr. High School.   After the vote, Paul suggested that Cornwallis Park should be renamed Freedom Park, and new statue erected “to all the immigrants who came to this country and helped to build the country into the powerhouse that it is.” 

Within a week of the appearance of the online petition, one local historian wrote Plank to warn him, “If the petition were fully accepted and acted upon, the name of a Nova Scotia town would be changed, the names of several military installations would be altered, street names would be revised, and a number of schools and parks would be renamed.”  The writer suggested that the result would be disastrous.  “This bit of proposed historical revisionism seems like a throwback to the Stalin era in the USSR.”  The campaign to rename the Cornwallis landmarks has always been locally-led, and though Plank’s name appeared in the text of the petition, he did not sign it or directly participate in the subsequent debate.


UPDATE 18/08/2011: The campaign has now extended to the Cornwallis River, as reported here.

Beyond Cowboys and Indians: The American West in Film, Television and History

Advance warning that two UEA students, Elizabeth Rawitsch from FTV and Beth Southard from HIS, are going to be giving a public lecture at the 2nd Air Division Memorial Library at the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library.

News: Interdisciplinary Seminar Series, How Wide is the Atlantic?

Alongside our regular series of research seminars, this semester the School of American Studies is very pleased to be hosting the Arts & Humanities Interdisciplinary Seminar Series, "How Wide is the Atlantic?" Here's a brief introduction:

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar provides scholars in a variety of disciplines an opportunity to consult with one another about the broad implications of their work.  This year’s seminar revolves around the question, “How Wide is the Atlantic?”  We will examine transatlantic travel, migration, commerce, cultural exchange, expropriation and miscommunication up to the twenty-first century.  We will discuss novels, paintings and movies, diplomatic crises, insurrections and moral panics, assessing whether it continues to be appropriate to view Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas as component parts of a chaotic Atlantic World.

The next session takes place today (Monday February 7th) at 3pm in Arts 3.01. You can view a full schedule of seminars here. See you there.

News: Public Discussion Series

So Containing Multitudes blog posts are like buses - two exciting announcements about the School of American Studies on the same day. Starting next week, AMS is pioneering a series of public discussions at the Forum in Norwich. You can find out more here, but here are some details to whet your appetite:

From art after 9/11 and stateside civil liberties to the end of the American Dream, a new series of discussion cafes will be launching in the Forum next week. Five hour-long public events will focus on contemporary American issues, bringing them to the public arena for discussion.

The free series has been organised by the university’s community engagement project CUE East in collaboration with final year American Studies students as part of a module entitled ‘The New American Century: Culture and Crisis’.

The course has been designed and run by Dr Wendy McMahon and is the subject of her research. She said: “This will be a great opportunity for people of all ages and backgrounds to engage in discussion about the pressing issues of our time, which concern not just America but people in the UK too, as well as to engage with what we do in the School of American Studies at UEA.”

The first discussion, 'Globalisation: is the world becoming more American?' takes place on Wednesday, October 20.

Then on November 3, the subject will be 'Should artists and writers depict 9/11 and war in their work?'.

'Civil liberties and America: the land of the free?' will be discussed on November 17, followed by 'Should America be leading the world in protecting the environment?' on December 1.

The final café takes place on December 15 on the subject of 'Financial crisis: the end of the American Dream?'.

All discussions are free, open to the public, and take place from 2.30pm-3.30pm. To find out more contact Dr Wendy McMahon, w.mcmahon@uea.ac.uk.

Conference: American Identities on Stage

Things are going to be a little quiet around here over the next semester. But fear not: we'll be back in full effect come 2011. In the meantime, expect news snippets like this. The School of American Studies is very excited to be hosting an international conference marking the centennial of Tennessee Williams. You can find out more information here or visit the official conference website here. Here's the call for papers:

Celebrating 100 Years of Tennessee Williams (1911-2011)

American Identities on Stage:
20th Century American Drama International Postgraduate Conference

To commemorate the Tennessee Williams’s centennial, the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, will host a one-day international conference on 26 March 2011, focusing on theatrical representations of American identities. The invited keynote speaker is Professor Stephen Bottoms (University of Leeds).

On the day of Tennessee Williams’s 100th birthday, the 20th Century American Drama International Postgraduate Conference looks to revisit the theatre produced in the last century, considering a plurality of approaches from literary to theatre and performance studies, film, gender and GLBTQ studies, reflecting on the most recent critical and academic canon. Stressing the importance of Tennessee Williams, the conference hopes to be an international point of intersection for all those interested in Williams’s work and 20th century American drama in general. Topics of individual talks or collective panel discussions might include, but are not limited to:

• Identity authenticity, representation, construction, and performativity;
• Identity permanence, plurality, multiplicity, fluidity, and fragmentation;
• Private versus public identity;
• Identity and the other;
• Dissidence and identity;
• Selfhood and identity;
• Identity now and then;
• Identity and identification;
• Aspects of/informing identity, such as age, class, culture, gender, politics, race, religion, and sexuality;
• Theoretically inflected discussions of identity (Psychoanalytic, Feminist, Queer, etc.);
• Contesting/Subverting prescribed identity constructions.

The conference will commence with a plenary speech, followed by the different panels, and will conclude with a round table discussion, which will consider themes arising from the day. Please send a titled abstract between 200-300 words (for 20-minute paper presentations) and a brief CV to f.costa@uea.ac.uk by 17 December 2010.