This two-day conference will showcase the work of our postgraduate students, as well as the work of staff and students in American studies at Brown University, University of Copenhagen, and University of Mississipi. All welcome
Thursday 17 May, C1.18 Ellen Wilkinson Building
9.00-9.15 Registration
9.15-10.15 Opening Keynote Address: Leigh Anne Duck, " Neoliberal Nostalgia: Re-purposing Katrina's Ruins in Hollywood South"
10.30-12.15 Panel 1: Representation and Preservation
Chair: Douglas Field
Natalie Zacek (Manchester), "Picturing Slavery and Abolition: Thoughts from an Exhibition"
Jeffrey T. Jackson (Mississippi), "Researching and Interpreting Slavery at the University of Mississippi:A Brief History of the University of Mississippi Research Group"
Joseph Morton (Manchester), "Doors to Yesterday: Practices of Historical Collecting in Early Twentieth-Century Southern California"
Anni Pullagura (Brown), "Reusing Violence: Emmett Till and the Politics of Preservation"
12.15-13.15 Lunch (atrium)
13.15-14.45 Panel 2: Performing the Literary and the Popular
Chair: Peter Knight
Stefanos Despositos (Manchester), "Suicide as a Social(ist) Fact: A Literary Examination of Henry James and Ivan Turgenev
Louisa Hann (Manchester), "Subverting Millenarianism: American HIV/AIDS Theatre at the fin-de-millenaire"
Gwynne George (Manchester), "Queering Whitney Houston"
15.00-16.30 Panel 3: America in Crisis
Chair: Molly Geidel
Louise Clare (Manchester), "Media and Cultural Influences in the Prelude to the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War"
Nicole Gipson (Manchester), "Paupers, Paper Tigers, Triage, and Turf Wars in Washington DC"
Patrick Massey (Manchester), "Representing New Orleans and Recovering the Victim in the Cultural Response to Hurricane Katrina"
16.30-17.00 Coffee (atrium)
17.00-18.30 Panel 4: Slavery in Mississippi
Chair: David Brown
Chet Bush (Mississippi), "Too Much His Own Master’: Faith and Resistance in the Slave Community at the University of Mississippi”
Suzanne R. Davidson (Mississippi), “The Big House as Home: African Americans and Sites of Slavery in Mississippi”
Jodi Skipper (Mississippi), “Behind the Big House: Contested Spaces and the Politics of Representing Slavery in Mississippi”
Friday 18 May--NEW LOCATION: Room A7, Samuel Alexander Building
10.00-11.45 Panel 5: Writing and Identity
Chair: Kerry Pimblott
Martyn Bone (Copenhagen), “Race, Sex, and Danish-American Intertextual Geographies: Cecil Brown’s The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger
Lucy Burns (Manchester), “Black Mountain College in the Program Era”
Martina Koegeler-Abdi (Copenhagen), “The Repertoire of Respectability: Syrian-American Perspectives”
Ralph Rodriguez (Brown), “Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation”
11.45-12.45 Lunch (EAC Common Room, W.1.14)
12.45-14.15 Panel 6: Ritual and Process
Chair: Thomas Tunstall Allcock
Jennifer Ford (Mississippi), “ ‘Try to Meet Me in Heaven’: Mississippians, Death, and Ritual in the Aftermath of the American Civil War”
Katherine Reed (Manchester), “ ‘The prison where I have found myself’: Graffiti at Ellis Island Immigration Station, New York 1900-14”
Christa Holm Vogelius (Copenhagen), “The Bilingualism of Jacob Riis’s Image-Text”
14.15-14.45 Coffee (EAC Common Room, W.1.14)
14.45-16.15 Panel 7: Slavery and the Market
Chair: Eithne Quinn
Gunvor Simonson (Copenhagen), “Race, Slavery, and the Market: African Lives in Eighteenth-Century Copenhagen”
Amy Bride (Manchester), “Back from the Dead and Demanding Dollar: American Gothic Monsters, Finance, and Slavery”
Felicia Bevel (Brown), “Remembering the Past in the Present: The Old Plantation Exhibit at the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair
16.30-17.30 Closing Keynote Address: Matthew Guterl (Brown), “Things Falling Apart: Race and the Memories of the Irish and Harlem Renaissances”
