american

From David Simon’s Homicide, The Corner, and The Wire to the novels of George Pelecanos, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s books and blog, and Jelani Cobb’s journalistic histories of the city, Baltimore has become a focus of cultural and scholarly engagements with issues of race, class, community, justice, and identity in contemporary America. In this roundtable, we’ll consider these and other voices and texts, using their works and Baltimore itself to help us discuss and analyze the place and role of artistic, journalistic, and public scholarly engagements with 21st-century America.

Please consider submitting a proposal to this accepted panel for the 2017 Society of Early Americanists Conference (March 2-4, 2017, Tulsa, Oklahoma)

Spaces of Death in the Cultures of the Atlantic World

Seeking panelists or participants for ASLE panel/roundtable: “Nuclear Waste(lands)”

Decades after the fall of the Soviet Union and end of the arms race, the nuclear bomb and its attendant Cold War anxieties seem already deeply buried in the past. While the weapons themselves remain housed in storage facilities and silos across the globe, much of the cultural and even political thinking about nuclear weapons is outdated, malformed and covered, as it were, in rust. And yet the technologies remain relevant today, and recent world events have brought nuclear technologies back to the fore—the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, the Iran nuclear deal and even Donald Trump’s alleged remark, “If we have [nukes], why can’t we use them?”

“The mother sea and fountainhead of all religions lies in the mystical experiences of the individual.”
—William James to Henry Rankin, 1901

This roundtable session is seeking papers that consider how first person pronouns and declarative clauses are used in the American lyric and how their use potentially highlights the ways in which place and nationality work to construct notions of the self in relation to the collective body—work to construct a political economy of empathetic identification.

To submit papers, go to: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers/submit.html