This year the Irish Association for American Studies Postgraduate Symposium invites papers that investigate the myriad ways in which American history and culture has been recorded and rerecorded, across all media. Organizers welcome proposals for papers that consider how America is engaging continuously in a dialogue with its own history and culture.
What, when & where
AAS Postgraduate Symposium: This is America? Shaping, Making and Recreating.
Trinity College Dublin. 10 November 2018.
2018 marks several important milestones in American history, such as Frederick Douglass’s 200th birthday, the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One, and fifty years since the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. With these events in mind and considering the current climate in the United States, this symposium will provide a forum to discuss the ways in which narratives – political, historical, literary – are created, sustained, interrogated, and distorted. Organizers invite proposals for papers on any topic across the entire spectrum of American Studies. Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Remembrance and forgetting in American popular culture and social media
Ways in which American prose, poetry, and music, respectively, have adapted to incorporate new American narratives - How narratives of privilege continue to influence representations of American history
- The possibilities and limits of rewriting already familiar narratives in a time of cinematic reboots and franchises
- The importance of historical knowledge in relation to current social justice movements
- How representations of war (both on American soil and worldwide) have changed throughout the decades and centuries
- Ways in which African American, Latinx, migrant and other minority groups and individuals have sought to reclaim their own histories
- Changing international relations in the United States, Canada, and South America.
Deadline & how to apply
Proposals of no more than 300 words along with a short bio (max 50 words) should be sent to postgrad@iaas.ie by September 23rd.
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