AMS Undergraduate Published in Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal

Some exciting news: AMS Undergraduate Hamish Jackson, who's returning to the UEA in September after his Year Abroad, has had an article published in Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal. His essay, "Henry Miller's Black Spring Through the Looking Glass of Jacques Lacan", shares page space with a contribution from Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. More information here.

BAAS: American Studies in the UK, 2000-2010

The British Association for American Studies has just released a report into the state of American Studies in the UK 2000-2010. It contains much that will be of interest to anyone involved in the field. Available here.

"America Changed Through Music": Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music at 60

Ross Hair and Thomas Ruys Smith are currently organising a one-day conference to mark the 60th anniversary of Harry Smith's landmark Anthology of American Folk Music. Taking place at the UEA London Campus on Saturday September 15th, the day features a keynote from Professor Geoff Ward, a variety of papers from an international panel of speakers, and free musical performances. Booking is now open, so for more information and to download a booking form visit http://www.americachangedthroughmusic.com/.

Containing Multitudes at the Forum

The School of American Studies presents a public exhibition of the letters of Sarah Hicks Williams, a northerner in the slaveholding South, hosted at the Millennium Library Norwich, this October as part of Norfolk's Black History Month 2012. In addition, there will be a series of free public lectures and cafe conversations hosted by Fusion at Forum and the Millennium Library, with cafe conversations at Cafe Bar Marzano. Further details on the exhibition, public lectures, and cafe conversations can be found here.

AMS Poster Competition: Winners Announced!

Alex Francis's winning entry!

The panel of judges for the AMS poster competition met last week and although the quality of entries was outstanding, we all agreed that Alex Francis’s design (above) wonderfully encapsulated the themes of the exhibition and the wider one of Black History Month for 2012, “Black Champions”. Alex was therefore awarded first place and his design will be used on all promotional material relating to the exhibition and the series of public lectures and cafe conversations during the 1st – 14th October. Both Victoria Mccollum’s and Megan Snyders’ designs (below) were also judged as serious contenders and they were awarded second and third place respectively. An awards ceremony will be held during the two week exhibition (date to be confirmed) where Alex, Victoria, and Megan will receive their prize money. It is hoped that all artwork submitted to the competition will be exhibited at Fusion in the Forum during the exhibition. Congratulations again to the winners, and thanks to all those who submitted designs.

Victoria Mccollum

Megan Snyder

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.