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. Levine. Prof. 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.

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.

Call for Papers: Transitions 3 Interdisciplinary Comics Symposium

We're excited to announce that American Studies PhD student Ed Clough is organising the Transitions 3 Interdisciplinary Comics Symposium! Here's the Call for Papers.

Letter from North Carolina: Barack Obama (and Amendment One)

by Tom Macarte

If you were on the internet over the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably seen Barack Obama slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots.



What the rest of the episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon made clear was that it was filmed in Memorial Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This photo was posted by the White House Twitter account.

The filming came after Obama gave a speech about student loans to thousands of students, some of whom had waited outside overnight to get tickets. Fallon tickets, on the other hand, were distributed only to Seniors (as in, fourth year undergraduates) first through an online ‘reservation’ lottery, which gave you the right to queue up for hours to hopefully get a seat assignment. They made it very clear that, with all the security, students should pick one or the other, they would not be able to get across campus in time.

I picked Fallon. I slyly entered the lottery through the link emailed out to Seniors, and queued for three hours, getting fairly good seats.

I’m maybe 60% sure this is me. I was around that area, in a Carolina blue sweater, so at least you get the idea.

Obama was preaching to the converted here, reminding students why they (probably) voted for him. It didn’t hurt that he’d predicted the UNC Tar Heels basketball team to win the NCAA Championship (WE WERE ROBBED: mostly down to poorly timed injuries).

I’d seen a tweet explaining that POTUS had chosen UNC because it was such a great academic institution, which is partially true but a fairly naïve assessment.  With North Carolina a swing state for Obama, where the young voters would make all the difference, there was clearly an ulterior motive.

There was also a reason he’d chosen UNC, and not just his college basketball fandom. North Carolina’s universities are all pretty great, local rivalries aside (DUKE SUCKS), but Chapel Hill is often referred to as the liberal centre of the State, sometimes of the whole American South. When someone asked Jesse Helms, notorious early '90s right-winger (his name should be familiar to any Bill Hicks fans), about a state zoo, he responded by suggesting they just fence off Chapel Hill. As you can imagine, this quote is recounted with rather a lot of pride.

But back to Obama. He was as wonderful and charming as a liberal foreigner would imagine. I was still hoping for a full musical number (he has been known to sing, and if it was going to happen under any circumstances, it would’ve been then, backed by the Roots), but it was all pretty great. I wasn’t anticipating seeing POTUS, but it was a great day, a real treat for an American Studies student on his year abroad.

Something else happened really recently (yesterday, at the time of writing) that I wanted to write about in terms of Chapel Hill being a liberal centre. You might be aware of Amendment One, a motion to rewrite the state constitution to redefine marriage and civil partnership. It’s largely a move against gay marriage, but that is far from the only thing that the amendment affects.

This morning, I found out that, as I had feared, the majority of the vote yesterday had been FOR rather than against the Amendment. I just wanted to say that that is not the North Carolina that I know. Yes, a lot of this has to do with the liberal bubble I’m in, but I hate that this vote sends out a particular message about the state. It only recently dawned on me that it was likely to pass: here, in Chapel Hill, it seemed that everyone was strongly against such a breach of rights. So basically, I just wanted to work against the message it sends out. North Carolina is a beautiful state, and I have encountered nothing but friendliness and compassion, both in Chapel Hill and further out, in the mountains and on the coast.

The message that Amendment One sends out: that is not the North Carolina that I know.

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Editor's note: in the wake of Amendment One, President Obama has just declared his support for same-sex marriage: “At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

Update: Patrick Chura's Special Seminar on Thoreau

More details about Patrick Chura's seminar on Henry David Thoreau.

Research Seminar: Mike Lee

The speaker at this week's research seminar is Mike Lee, a former American television newsman who was originally hired by none other than Walter Cronkite. As he puts it on his website:

Mike Lee is an Emmy and Peabody award winning former U.S. TV network correspondent.  Mike covered the world for 47 years for ABC (see ABC News Bio), CBS, and other news organizations.    Mike Lee has reported from over 40 nations.   His global news reporting includes virtually every major news story from Europe, Russia, Middle East, and Africa.    Mike has produced human interest feature profiles of people and issues in dozens of locations from the Artic Circle to the South Pacific.

And you can follow Mike on Twitter here.

Wednesday 25th April 2012, A2.51, 3pm. All welcome.

£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.

Guest Lecture: Prof. Drew Isenberg, Temple University, Philadelphia

Tomorrow lunchtime, Prof. Drew Isenberg, visiting the School of American Studies from Temple University, Philadelphia, will be talking about "The Code of the West: Sexuality, Homosociality, and Wyatt Earp".

Wednesday 7th March, 12pm, ARTS 3.02.

There will also be a follow up discussion group, directly afterwards in ARTS 1.07, 13:00 – 14:00.  Please email Sarah.Garland@uea.ac.uk to confirm attendance at the discussion group.  No email is necessary if you wish to attend the lecture only. All welcome, see you there!