Sarah Churchwell in the Guardian and New Statesman

Sarah Churchwell has recently had new pieces published in the Guardian and New Statesman.

Sarah has reviewed Robert A. Ferguson's Alone in America: The Stories that Matter (Harvard University Press, 2013), which explores the reoccurring theme of solitude in American literature, as well as Ayana Mathis' novel Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a recent 'Oprah's Book Club' selection that addresses race, class, gender and segregation in the United States. She has also contributed to a Guardian piece on the 50th anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath, sharing her thoughts on The Bell Jar as an "acidic satire on the madness of 1950s America and the impossibility of living up to its contradictory ideals of womanhood".

Finally, last Sunday Sarah also gave a talk at the Southbank Centre as part of the year-long 'The Rest Is Noise' festival that explored the influence of Paris on American writers such as Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

You can follow Sarah on twitter here: @sarahchurchwell

Year Abroad Party and Dissertation Prizes

This Wednesday saw the School’s annual Year Abroad Party. This is a chance for our final year students who have just returned from their year abroad to meet students who will be heading to universities across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia and China in the next academic year. 

Anne Marie Tracey and Chris Bigsby

Jacqueline Fear Segal with our AMS undergrads

The event also saw the announcement of the Year Abroad Dissertation prizes, won by Otis Ingrams, Hamish Jackson and Thomas Buckley. Whilst passing on our congratulations to Otis, Hamish and Thomas for achieving the three highest dissertation marks of the year, it should also be noted that a number of our students produced excellent pieces of work and narrowly missed out on being amongst the prizewinners.

Otis and Hamish

Thanks to all of you who attended this event and good luck to all of a students heading abroad for the following academic year. To find out more about the School of American Studies Year Abroad click here or alternatively contact Prof. Christopher Bigsby (c.bigsby@uea.ac.uk). For more on the potential benefits of study abroad see the British Academy website.

AMS Research Seminar Series: Spring 2013

American Borders

Research Seminar Series, School of American Studies

University of East Anglia

 

 

SPRING SEMESTER 2013

 

All seminars, unless otherwise noted, take place on Wednesday 16:00-18:00, in Arts 1.16

 

 

Jan 9^th                                                     *Special AMS-PSI joint seminar*

“‘A Majority is the Best Repartee’: Barack Obama, Congress, and the Elections of 2012”

Andrew Rudalevige, Bowdoin College

Note: This session will be in Arts 3.02

 

 

Jan 23^rd                                 “‘Anne Frank Lives’: Stephanie B. Tolan’s The Liberation of Tansy Warner (1980) as Problem Novel”

Rachael McLennan, UEA

Note: This session will be in Arts 1.07

 

 

Jan 30^th                                 “‘We Are All Harrisburg’: The Three Mile Island Accident and America’s ‘Scariest Nuclear Encounter’”

                                                Mario Del Pero, University of Bologna

 

 

Feb 13^th                                “American Modernism and Irish Culture: Some Poems”

Tara Stubbs, Oxford University

 

 

Feb 27^th                                “On the Edge: The Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic”

Maria Cristina Fumagalli, University of Essex

 

 

Mar 13^th                               “The ‘little’ New Yorker”

Becca Weir, Cambridge University

                                               

 

Apr 17^th                                “Mapping ‘The Slave Ship Imprint’: The Body, Memory and Representation in the African American and Black British Visual Imaginary”

Celeste-Marie Bernier, University of Nottingham

Guest Post: Richard Crockatt, The Far Right Fantasy of an American Golden Age

Richard Crockatt, Emeritus Professor in the School of American Studies, on The Far Right Fantasy of an American Golden Age:

Amid the blizzard of reactions to Obama’s reelection a particular remark of Sarah Palin’s deserves close attention for what it reveals about the mentality of the far right in America. In a Fox News interview she bemoaned the fact that Obama might have the opportunity to appoint new members to the Supreme Court. This, she said, would be a blow against the ‘traditional interpretation of the Constitution.’

Guest Post: Kirsty Callaghan on the Obama campaign in Colorado

Four years ago, AMS student Kirsty Callaghan, then on her Year Abroad, wrote us a firsthand account of the Obama campaign in Kissimee, Florida for the 2008 election. Now, Kirsty is back in the US, teaching and studying at the University of Wyoming. On her own blog, Forever West, she's written a new account of her experiences volunteering for the Obama campaign in Colorado. It's available here - check it out, and marvel at how time flies.

Arthur Miller Centre Prizes

The Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies is once again offering its annual prizes:

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Call for Nominations: The Arthur Miller Centre Prize, and the Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize

Deadline: 1 March 2013

The Arthur Miller Centre Prize of £500 is awarded annually for the best journal length article on any American Studies topic in the preceding calendar year by a United Kingdom citizen based at home or abroad or by a non-UK citizen who publishes their essay in a United Kingdom journal, providing that the entrant is a member of the British Association of American Studies in the year of submission. Those interested in entering an article for consideration should submit three copies of the essay, including publication details, to: The Arthur Miller Centre Prize Committee School of English and American Studies University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ UK.

The Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize of £500 is awarded annually for the best first book on any American Studies topic in the preceding calendar year by a United Kingdom citizen based at home or abroad or by a non-UK citizen who publishes a book, providing that the entrant is a member of the British Association of American Studies in the year of submission. Those interested in entering a book for consideration should submit four copies, including publication details, to: The Arthur Miller Centre Prize Committee Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ UK

Please Note: Books submitted for consideration for the BAAS book prize are ineligible for consideration for the Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize.

Letter from America: Prof. Geoffrey Plank

Geoff Plank has just returned from a five-day tour of the Philadelphia area during which time he presented five talks related to his new book John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire.  Geoff spoke at the Quaker meeting house in Woolman’s home town of Mount Holly, New Jersey, at Swarthmore College, Haverford College, and the Pendle Hill Quaker Conference Center.   He spoke on a range of topics, including the eighteenth-century abolitionist’s family life, and the Woolman family’s experience of  slaveholding.

Here are some pictures of Geoff in action, at Mount Holly:
Pendle Hill:

And Haverford:

Poetry Reading: Lisa Samuels

TIME: 17:00
DATE: 18 October, 2012
VENUE: REG 3.32 (FTM)

ABOUT: Lisa Samuels teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She publishes essays and edited work on poetry, theory, and critical practice. She is the author of four chapbooks and six books of poetry, including The Invention of Culture, Throe, Tomorrowland , Mama Mortality Corridos, and Gender City, as well as a creative non-fiction book, Anti M. Her current projects include an essay collection, Modernism Is Not Enough, an audio recording of Tomorrowland with soundscapes, and a modular novel experiment, Tender Girl. Having lived in various parts of the United States, as well as in Sweden, Israel / Palestine, Yemen, Malaysia, and now New Zealand / Aotearoa, she is interested in transculturalism, especially as embodied in language and the digitas.

For enquiries please contact Dr Hilary Emmett: h.emmett@uea.ac.uk

Copies of Lisa Samuels’ Throe, published by Oystercatcher Press, will be on sale at the reading.

News: Prof. Chris Bigsby in the Times Higher

AMS's Professor Chris Bigsby is now a regular columnist for THE. You can see an archive of his recent columns here. Enjoy!

Research Seminars, Autumn 2012

Our Research Seminar series - subtitled American Borders this semester - is about to jump into action. You can view the full schedule here.

The first session takes place this Wednesday at 4pm in Arts 1.16.

Our speaker will be John Attridge, Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales. His essays on modernism and twentieth-century literature have appeared in journals such as ELH, Modernism/modernity and The Henry James Review. He is co-editor, with Rod Rosenquist, of an essay collection entitled Incredible Modernism: Literature, Trust and Deception, due out in 2013 from Ashgate. This Wednesday he'll be talking about:


Mind, body and embarrassment in Henry James

Henry James is traditionally regarded as the most inward-looking of all nineteenth-century novelists, preoccupied above all with the representation of consciousness. This focus on the recesses of subjectivity, however, can lead us to overlook the importance of bodies and of public behaviour in his work. In this paper I suggest that James’s late work shows a preoccupation with one such publicly observable behaviour in particular: embarrassment. Focusing mainly on What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1899), I read James’s representation of embarrassment and social awkwardness in the context of debates within late-Victorian psychology about the mind-body relationship. I suggest that blushing and other manifestations of embarrassment were charged with special significance in the context of these debates, and that James’s sensitive depiction of these states is not susceptible to critical analysis in terms of consciousness and interiority.

All welcome - see you there.