EAAS 2016 Conference Announcement ~ Dates and Details for your diary!
The European Association for American Studies is pleased to announce that its next biennial conference will take place in Constanta, Romania from 22nd to 25th April, 2016.
The EAAS conference will be hosted by our colleagues at Ovidius University in Constanta, with the local support of the Romanian Association for American Studies. Constanta is an ancient and beautiful resort city on the Black Sea coast. The easiest entry point for international visitors is likely to be Bucharest airport, and this location provides a great opportunity to add days for vacation and exploration. The conference website currently being designed will give full details of travel and accommodation options.

Open Call for Presentations

To highlight the range and diversity of American Studies in Europe the EAAS is issuing an open call for proposals for the 2016 conference.

Proposers may wish to identify and explore long-standing, current and emerging intellectual debates in American Studies; to explore critically the varying practices and methodologies in American Studies; to bring to life current discussions and to posit potential paradigms in American Studies.

The various anniversaries of 2016 provide a variety of potential foundations for proposals. It will be 150 years since the start of the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction. That was also the era of the dime novel, and Seeley Regester’s The Dead Letter, credited by some as the first full-length American crime novel, appeared in 1866. 125 years will have passed since Thomas Edison patented the motion camera and 100 since the creation of the US National Parks Service.

1916 also saw the opening of the nation’s first birth control clinic, the election from Montana of Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to sit in the US House of Representatives, the release of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and the publication of Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems. It was also the birth year of Shirley Jackson, Walker Percy, and Walter Cronkite. The National Organization for Women celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2016, as does Star Trek.

Contemporary American Studies topics could include, for example, discussion of the USA’s strong, diverse and expanding literary canon; the multi-dimensional character and seemingly endless inventiveness of America’s cultural output; the inventiveness of American culture in an age of new social media; the heritage that might be left after the nation’s first African-American presidency.

The EAAS conference encompasses topics across the disciplinary spectrum in American Studies, as well as interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches to the subject. The themes mentioned here are not intended to be a definitive list, and the conference committee looks forward to receiving many different and stimulating proposals.

Format
The EAAS is moving away from its former Workshop format. Proposals are now invited that may use a variety of presentation styles. The conference structure is expected mainly to consist of traditional panels sessions with papers, and proposals targeted at this format are very welcome indeed, but submissions may also be proposed as roundtables, workshops, shop-talks, dialogues, interviews, performances, individual lecture presentations, readings or in other innovative formats. All proposals are expected to include the opportunity for discussion.

Session chairs
Volunteers are invited to fill the role of chairs or facilitators for sessions where these positions are vacant. Volunteers to chair sessions should include their name and affiliation, and a brief statement of their areas of expertise. The conference committee will gratefully call on volunteers to add them to appropriate sessions where possible.

Selection
The EAAS is committed to a conference that reflects the broadest disciplinary range within American Studies, the multinational membership of the EAAS, and the international participation that its biennial meetings attract.

The conference committee will take these aims into account in reviewing proposals and in constructing the conference programme.

Deadline
The deadline for Proposals will be 15 June 2015. The Proposals process will be managed by the Secretary General of the EAAS and full details of the submission process will appear soon on the EAAS website.

Meanwhile – note the dates in your diary, and take this opportunity to begin drafting your proposal for the 2016 conference.