Category Archives: EAAS

EAAS Conference 2024 Munich April 4-6 1924-2024: The American Immigrant Narrative Revisited

https://www.amerikahaus.de/en/bavarian-american-academy/eaas2024/program

Keynote lectures are on Youtube and everybody is welcome to attend

 

Fifth Biennial EAAS Women’s Network Symposium: Access to Equality: Reproductive Justice in the United States (March 31-April 1, 2023)

At University of Debrecen, Hungary, tomorrow starts Fifth Biennial EAAS Women’s Network Symposium: Access to Equality: Reproductive Justice in the United States (March 31-April 1, 2023). It can be attended online without charge and registration.

The Program is available at EAAS Women’s Network webpage

Conferences

 

Women’s Symposium

KEYNOTE LECTURE

Friday, March 31, 11.15 – 12.45

Password if necessary: EAAS_Keynote

Keynote lecture

American Studies Association of Norway (ASANOR) Conference: “Appalling Ocean, Verdant Land: America and the Sea”

Nord University (Bodø, Norway) will be hosting the 2022 Conference for the American Studies Association of Norway (ASANOR): “Appalling Ocean, Verdant Land: America and the Sea” from 29 September – 1 October 2022. The deadline for proposals is 8 April 2022 and there are some stipends available to graduate students travelling to the conference from outside of Norway.

The event website: https://blogg.nord.no/asanor2022/

Invitation and CFP

EAAS Conference 2022: Deadline extention until tomorrow – you can still apply!

Wastelands
34TH EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR AMERICAN STUDIES CONFERENCE
UNED, Madrid 6-8 April 2022

WASTELANDS – CALL FOR PAPERS-Deadline extension

The year 2022 marks the centenary of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.
The title of the conference alludes to Eliot’s work and the main themes in it, expanding the
idea of the wasteland to the study of the United States. Hence, the overarching theme of
the conference is open to all kinds of reflections around the concept of “wasteland” and
waste. EAAS 2022 invites proposals that address the concept of waste in U.S. culture,
history, and politics.
Proposals may address (but are not restricted to) the following topics:
WASTELANDS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
• Environmental waste (water, land, e-waste, etc.).
• Anti-Waste: degrowth philosophy.
• “Zero waste” movement and consumerism.
• Food waste.
• Wastelands as devastation of spaces.
• Waste of resources (human, natural, economic, etc.).
THE ETHICS OF WASTE
• Moral waste: deterioration of democracies and other values. Empty discourses
(political, cultural, etc.).
• Wasted opportunities (land of opportunities, American dream).
• Waste as a “negative store”, as opposed to the archive; forgetting, destruction,
and latent cultural memory.
CORPOREAL WASTE
• Illnesses and pathologies.
• Age: The Growing Land.
• Emotional wastelands: real or metaphorical alexithymia.
• Pandemics and other physical threats.
LITERARY AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF WASTELANDS
• ‘Wasteland” as an image of decadence, crisis, and postwar.
• Barrenness vs. fertility, hopelessness vs. regeneration.
• T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and its literary / cultural influence.
• Literary representations of wastelands.
• (Audio)visual representations of wastelands.
• Ruins, trash, in painting, music, film, and other artistic representations

• Waste of information: useless and redundant data, technology, media, etc.

Today Opens EAAS Conference 2021 20/20 Vision: Citizenship, Space, Renewal. April 30-May 3. Warsaw, Poland

EAAS2020_program

All EAAS members who have not yet registered can see the program and join the  conference  at the end of this week as non-presenting participants at http://eaas2020.eu/registration-payment/

It is only 4 dollars to have access to interesting discussions of this very well designed conference.

Deadline for EAAS Biennial conference in Warsaw extended till December 15

There are a few extra days for those who consider participating this year. And new members of RSACS are strongly encouraged to apply already this year, starting participating in EAAS activities. Please see below the information about the conference. The link to the conference website is also in the end.

2020 EAAS Conference — 20/20 vision

2020 EAAS Conference — Warsaw, May 1–3, 2020 20/20 vision: Citizenship, Space, Renewal EAAS 2020 Conference coincides with the 400th anniversary of the establishment of the Plymouth Plantation. Falling on the quadricentennial, EAAS 2020 invites broader contemplations of American history, politics, and culture. The conference seeks to underscore questions of optics, distance, and acuity. The concept of “20/20 vision,” an optical term denoting “normal” visual clarity and sharpness of sight, invites a reflection on historical distance, focal points, visibility and invisibility of socio-historical, cultural, and literary aspects of American citizenship, space, and renewal until today. Citizenship The first thematic scope of “20/20 Vision” is citizenship. We thus welcome papers targeting the idea of citizenship from various historical, political, ethical, and aesthetic perspectives, and addressing questions about the archaic, residual or emergent forms, styles and norms of being a citizen. Papers and pre-formed panels may focus on the following problem points:
  • the evolution or devolution of the idea of a democratic citizen in American politics
  • legal fiction, the citizen, and citizenship in history and literature
  • the problems of citizenship and agency in the days of the early Republic
  • the relation between citizenship and economy
  • citizenship and mobility
  • citizenship and migration
  • citizenship and slavery
  • citizenship and disability
  • citizenship and the changing idea of freedom
  • citizenship and community
  • civil rights
  • limits of responsibility
  • limits of engagement
Space The second theme “20/20 Vision” addresses is space, a general umbrella term for the issues related to the environment:
  • land exploration and exploitation in the US
  • American history of land property
  • US borderland issues
  • US problem of natural resources
  • climate change and the US policy
  • climate change and the American landscape
  • pollution and toxic waste
  • ecological disasters
  • space exploration
The theme of space also relates issues connected with spatiality on 
a different dimension such as the issues of
  • private vs public space
  • social media and internet space
  • architecture, mortgage problem
  • rural vs. urban space
  • utopias in American history, politics and literature
  • dystopias in American history, politics and literature
  • American heterotopias
Renewal The last focus area of “20/20 Vision” is perhaps the broadest of the three: the idea of renewal. While strongly related to the issues of citizenship and space, where it may also serve as a reflective angle, the theme of renewal on its own relates to a strong appeal in the American culture of the discourse of rebirth, reawakening, and revolution. Long before “make it new” became the slogan of the modernist artists on both sides of the Atlantic, making things new and resetting the parameters had always been part of the American life ethos. We welcome individual papers as well as pre-formed panels. Submissions We welcome abstracts and proposals in a range of formats, including individual papers; complete three-paper sessions (do note that
 a proposed session cannot feature scholars from the same institution and the same country); roundtables; and workshops. Individual paper abstracts should be no longer than 350 words (excluding bibliography, if you choose to have one). Session proposals must include a short description of the session as well as the title and abstracts of all three papers. Deadline for abstracts: December 15, 2019 Acceptance notifications: January 6, 2019
http://eaas2020.eu/

Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung: Das Romantisch-Fantastische – The Romantic Fantastic

September 18th–23rd, 2019 at the Free University of Berlin, Cinepoetics – Center for Advanced Film Studies and Department of Film Studies

Romanticism again and again! In autumn 1979, Michael Ende’s novel The Neverending Story was published in the Federal Republic of Germany. Even to Ende’s contemporaries, Bastian’s journey to Fantastica and back seemed to be the beginning of a revitalization of romantic longings and ideas within popular culture. Almost at the same time, US-American cinema discovers the genre of fantasy film. The motif of Campbell’s hero’s journey, a world that needs healing and the interconnectedness of all things becomes a constitutive trait of these films’ poetics. On the one hand, the corresponding novels and films emerged in answer to the uncertainty of a bipolar world – fear of the atomic bomb and nuclear fallout as ultima ratio of the Cold War – and the nascent awareness of environmental vulnerability. On the other hand, they, like their famous predecessors, have been accused of a penchant for escapism and ill-conceived inwardness.

A similar area of tension can be observed in the fantasic today. Once again, the potential of recent speculative fiction as well as its critique seem to be indicating a core collection of romantic notions. Like at the end of the 18th century, romanticism and the fantastic provide a corrective to the frigid, mercantile rationality of a world that no longer knows any secrets. In light of contemporary political, economic and ecological distortions, speculative fiction is looking for ways of rethinking the world – and man’s place in it. And once again, the fantastic is accused of turning its back on hard facts and necessities to take refuge in sentimentalized other-worlds.

Based on these findings, the conference will pursue two goals: First, it intends to take a critical look into the relationship of romantic ideas, poetics, and images to possible genealogies of the fantastic. What is to be gained by locating fantastic works in a romantic tradition? Does this dialogue facilitate a deeper understanding of the continued effect of romanticism or poetics of the fantastic? Second, the resilience of speculative fiction’s inherent capability for critique is to be scrutinized in reference to its romantic origins. Can the relation between fantastic worlds and everyday reality be conceptualized in a way that forgoes the dichotomy of critical realism and ahistorical escapism? Would it be possible to illustrate, using its stories, images, and audiovisual presentations, the untenability of accusations which label the fantastic as being politically reactionary and aesthetically conservative – or do the subversive moments in its poetics remain marginal?

All contributions are welcome which examine the complex relationship between romanticism and specific implementations/ of the fantastic, its types and genres, protagonists, and media, on a theoretical, historical, and analytical level.
Possible Topics:

  • • Universal poetry and worldmaking (atmosphere, synesthesia, science and art as modes of knowing and experiencing)
  • • Media of the supernatural: romantic concepts of media and their influence on the mediality of the fantastic
  • • Romantic conceptions of history and the faculty of historic imagination as driving forces of the fantastic (recourse to the Middle Ages)
  • • Fairy tales, myths, and legends as genres and modalities of fantastic narratives
  • • Traditions of gothic fiction in modern fantasy
  • • Updating gothic topoi in contemporary horror cinema (for instance ghosts, living dolls and possessed clerics in the Conjuring-franchise, or witches and religious mania in folk horror)
  • • The beautiful and the sublime, the gruesome and the grotesque as models for poetics of affect in horror and fantasy
  • • Romantic imagery and its influence on visual forms of the fantastic (art, comic, film, series, computer game etc.)
  • • Forms, practices and theories of the fantastic in the era of romanticism (ghost and witch lore, demonology, phantasmagoria etc.)
  • • Soundscapes which establish a quasi-natural stance beyond the human (as in Dark Ambient or Drone Metal)
  • • Poetics of fantasy as modes of magical thinking
  • • Romantic poetics and the becoming-fantastic of the ordinary
  • • Forms of romantic love in fantasy
  • • Fantasy as a form of political romanticism

As usual at GFF conferences, there will be an open track for all lectures which are not directly related to the topic of the conference. Hence, we are open to further proposals.

The GFF offers two scholarships of 250 euros each to students to help cover their travel expenses to the conference. Please indicate if you would like to be considered when submitting your abstract.

Deadline for abstracts and short biographies (max. 2000 characters): January 1st-February 28th, 2019. 
Submission of constituted panels (3-4 speakers) is encouraged.
Submission form and further information available at: www.gff2019.cinepoetics.fu-berlin.de.

For additional inquiries, mail to: gff2019@fu-berlin.de.

Conference Board: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Jan-Hendrik Bakels, Regina Brückner, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Matthias Grotkopp, Dr. Tobias Haupts, Dr. Daniel Illger, Cilli Pogodda, Prof. Dr. Michael Wedel

Call for Papers for EAAS 2016 on Where American Art meets American Writing

Negotiating the Seen and the Felt: where American Art meets American Writing

Chairs: Catherine Gander and Philip McGowan, Queen’s University Belfast.

‘Once we start thinking, talking and writing about …art, we discover that the line between abstraction and representation is no more impermeable than the line between images and words.’ (James A.W. Heffernan, Cultivating Picturacy [2006]).

‘Art is the objectification of feeling.’ (Herman Melville)

This panel seeks to bring together papers whose focus is on modern and contemporary American works that address the space between expression and experience in both written and visual terms. This may include imagetext works, literary works that respond to visual arts, or visual arts that respond to literary works.

The recent turn in American literature and art has been toward affect: a position that privileges an embodied encounter of the artwork as an experiential interface rather than as an object removed from the practice of everyday life. According to such approaches, the human body is positioned as central and unbounded; affect is understood to exist in constant motion between it and other bodies, be they human or otherwise. This has meant a renewal of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s primacy of perception, leading to a methodological shift in the connected fields of ekphrastic creative writing, aesthetics, art writing, curatorship and literary studies. In recent years, negotiations between discursive and immersive practices have sought to move beyond old paradigms of the sublime or transcendent influence of aesthetic experience to an understanding of materiality that still acknowledges the persistence of the ineffable. Despite these innovations, however, the spaces in which affective literary and visual practices overlap remain largely untheorised.

Contiguous to this turn is the reappraisal of the physical space of the aesthetic encounter itself. Contemporary installations and exhibitions increasingly take into account the participatory needs of the art-viewer, whose full sensorium is engaged in an often interactive experience. Likewise, creative literature, especially that responding to the visual arts in ekphrastic or critical terms, seeks methods of attending to cross-currents between visual and verbal expression that include visual poetics, the use of three-dimensional space, and the intersections of photography and text, for example.

Papers are therefore encouraged to attend to the interplay between the felt and the seen in American texts Continue reading →