BAAS 2006 forthcoming

Lord a mucksy. Did my proposal really get accepted???

Guess I should write it then....?!

Given that I will have just got back from NZ and have done a days work at the office to "catch up" (pah!), BAAS's hallucinatory qualities will no doubt be as bizarre as ever!

51st BAAS Annual Conference 2005: The University of Kent, Canterbury, UK 20-23 April 2006

PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME

Thursday, 20 April
2.00-5.00 Registration Keynes (hereinafter ‘K’) foyer
3.00 Tour of Canterbury Meet K Foyer
5.00 Keynote Speaker: Prof. Michael Zuckerman (University of Pennsylvania) KLT1 Brabourne
6.30 Reception & Welcome from the Vice Chancellor, sponsored by the University of Leicester (BAAS 2007 conference host) K Foyer
7.30 Dinner Eliot Hall
9.00 A Musical Performance by Will Kaufman Keynes Bar


Friday, 21 April
7.30-9.00 Breakfast Eliot Hall

9.00-11.00 Session A
1. Franklin’s Via Negativa: Emerson, James & Adams Negotiate Franklin
David Greenham (Nottingham Trent) Unrepresentative Man: Emerson’s Neglect of Benjamin Franklin
Peter Kuryla (Vanderbilt) The Dynamo & the Leyden Jar: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, & the American Impoverishment of Sexual Electricity
Peter Rawlings (UWE) ‘This is the Age of Experiments’: Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, & the Empirical Tradition

2. Nineteenth Century Poetics: Nature, the Body and Death
Claire Elliott (Glasgow) Restoring the Winged Life: Religious Fervour and the Veneration of the Natural in Blake, Emerson and Whitman
Paraic Finnerty (Portsmouth) To Make Me Fairest on Earth: Emily Dickinson and the Beautiful Body in America
Linda Sher (King’s London) ‘Even unto Death’: Gethsemane & the Place of Poetic Making in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

3. Topics on Civil Rights
Chair: Adam Fairclough (Leiden)
Walter David Greason (Ursinus) Race Organizing at the Shore: The NAACP, UNIA, and the Urban League in Central New Jersey, 1920-1950
Rebecca Karol (Rowan) Mary’s Café, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Forgotten Beginnings of a Civil Rights Leader
Jonathan Watson (Sussex) The Los Angeles NAACP 1940-1945: Fighting for Justice in the Struggle for Double Victory

4. The Language of Business: A Roundtable Discussion
Chair and Moderator: Graham Thompson (Nottingham)
Eric Guthey (Copenhagen Business School) The Construction of Image
Mara Keire (Queen Mary, London) Reputation or Lack Thereof
Christopher McKenna (Said Business School, Oxford) The Influence of Institutions
Marina Moskowitz (Glasgow) The Culture of the Market

5. Theoretical Questions in Contemporary American Literary Studies
Graeme Finnie (Dundee) Land (Ab)use in New Mexico: An Ecocritical Look at the Fiction of Castillo, Silko and Nichols
James Mackay (Glasgow) and David Rees (Bergen) Science, Non-science & Nonsense in Vine Deloria, Jr’s Evolution, Creationism and Other Myths
Steven Van Hagen (Kent) Protect Everything, Detect Everything, Contain Everything - Obsessional Society: Narratives of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in Twentieth-Century American Fiction

6. Frontiers Then and Now
Karen Jones (Kent) The Strange Tale of the Goose and the Beaver: Revisiting Lewis and Clark in the 2lst Century
William Van Vugt (Calvin) The Agrarian Myth Meets Reality on the American Frontier: the English Courtauld Settlement of the 1820s
John Wills (Kent) Playing Cowboys and Indians: Videogames and the American West

7. New Work on Native America
Chair: Mick Gidley (Leeds)
Deborah Madsen (Geneva)
David Murray (Nottingham)
Joy Porter (Swansea)

8. American Fiction and 9/11
Martyn Colebrook (Hull) The Problems of Representation
Ann Hurford (Nottingham) From 12/7 to 9/11: History Destabilises the Expected in Anne Tyler’s The Amateur Marriage
Aliki Varvogli (Dundee) The Uses of Africa: Identity, Idealism & Post-National Crisis in Russell Bank’s The Darling

11.00-11.30 Coffee K foyer

11.30-1.00 Session B
1. Benjamin Franklin and Public History
Marcia Balisciano (Benjamin Franklin House, London) Restoring Benjamin Franklin House
Matthew Shaw (The British Library) Franklin and his Modern Public: Presenting the Printer and Scientist

2. Women’s Roles in Public Life
Jennifer Black, (Cambridge) Race, Rest Rooms and Reluctant Legislators: Jury Service for Women in 1950s South Carolina
Pierre-Marie Loiszeau (Angers) A Women’s Place is in the House. Or is It?

3. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919
Cheryl Hudson (Vanderbilt/Oxford) Citizenship by Race Division: The Chicago Commission on Race Relations, 1919-1921
Kevin Yuill (Sunderland) Reformulating Race: Robert Ezra Park’s Pivotal Role in U.S. Race Theory

4. Early Twentieth-Century Art
John Fagg (Birmingham) Genre Painting as a ‘Residual’ Presence in Early-Twentieth Century Illustration
Douglas Tallack (Nottingham) Awkward Commissions: Illustrating New York, 1880s-1910s

5. Women & Race in Literature
Rachel McLennan (Glasgow) Stories to Pass On: Signifying Adolescence in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex
Pi-hua Ni (National U. of Kiaohsiung, Taiwan) On the Fluid Gender Construction in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

6. Analysis of Mid-Century Democrats
Robert Mason (Edinburgh) ‘As Goes Maine, So Goes Vermont’ Republican analysis of New Deal realignment, 1933-1940
Jonathan Pearson (Durham) The Harry S Truman Presidential Library and the Development of Public Identification with the Presidency

7. Representing the Chinese Experience in the U.S.
Christine Cynn (Abidjan/Fulbright) ‘The ludicrous transition of gender & sentiment’: Representations of Chinese labour in Ambrose Bierce’s The Haunted Valley and Bret Harte’s Plain Language of Truthful James
Fiona Wong (Warwick) Effective ‘translation’: Talk-stories in Selected Works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan

8. The Virgina Company: A Roundtable on the Company, Jamestown and its Consequences, held in conjunction with Kent County Council
Chair: Stephen Mills, Keele
Discussants: John Finch (William & Mary) and others be be announced

1.00-2.00 Lunch Eliot Hall

2.00-3.30 Session C

1. Benjamin Franklin and Public Matters
Louis J. Kern (Hofstra) The ‘Man of Science’ and the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’: Benjamin Franklin and the Reasonable Science of Virtue
Stephen Shapiro (Warwick) The ‘Public Sphere’ of a Circumatlantic World-System: Franklin and the African Slave Traders

2. Post-War Women Authors
David Evans (Dalhousie) The Apotemnophilac Text: Flannery O’Connor’s Fraudulent Bodies
Richard Larschan (Massachusetts-Dartmouth) Art & Artifice in Sylvia Plath’s Self-Portrayals

3. Henry James
Maeve Pearson (Goldsmith’s) Henry James and the ‘Colossal Machine’ of American Education
Theresa Saxon (Manchester Met) Experiments in the Line of Comedy Pure and Simple: The ‘Comicality’ of Henry James’ Theatricals

4. Abstract Expressionism
Christopher Gair (Birmingham) Not AbEx, not New York: Wally Hedrick & American Art in the 1950s
Lisa Rull (Independent Scholar) ‘Them Wide Open Spaces’: Jackson Pollock & the American Landscape

5. Liberalism, Backlash and Cultural Representation
Sarah MacLachlan (Manchester Met) Backlash on the Border: Violence & Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men
Eithne Quinn (Manchester) Liberalism, Backlash & the Blaxploitation Film Cycle

6. Presidents and their Behaviour
Tim Blessing (Alverna) Comparing the First & Last Nine Presidents: The Breakdown of the Selection Process
Timothy Lynch (ISA, London) Woodrow Wilson’s 9/11: Assessing America’s Response to the Luisitania

7. Two Intellectuals on Race
Mark Ellis (Strathclyde) Interracial Co-operation and Social Science: The Contribution of Thomas Jackson Woofter, Jr.
Fred Arthur Bailey (Abilene Christian) All Men are Created Equal: M. E. Bradford, Race and the Reagan Revolution

8. Problems in Telling American History
John-Paul Colgan (Trinity College Dublin) ‘Everything Now is “Was”’: Memory and Nostalgia in John Updike’s Recent Fiction
Laura MacDonald (Toronto) Musical Theatre and Politics in the ‘60s: Two Case Studies, Hair and 1776

3.30-4.00 Tea K foyer

4.00-5.30 Session D

1. Benjamin Franklin and his Image
Matthew Pethers (Independent Scholar) ‘That Grub Street Sect’: Partisan Politics and the Franklinian Image, 1790-1808
Finn Pollard (Glasgow) Benjamin Franklin and the Problem of American National Character Revisited

2. The Photography of the Rural United States
John Hensley (Saint Louis U. & Westminster) The Ozarks Mountains Body: Images of Hillbillies & Mountaineers at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904
Mark Rawlinson (Nottingham) ‘A Photograph has edges, the world does not’: The Uncanny in Stephen Shore’s American Landscape Photography

3. Congressional Debates
Elisabeth Boulot (Marne-le-Vallee) Privatization or Disentitlement? The Reform of the American Welfare State.
Laurence Horton (Essex) Political Connecting: House Members & the 1981 Budget

4. Race and Schools
Catherine Maddison (Cambridge) ‘This Intolerable School System’: The Politics of Education in the District of Columbia, 1960-1975
Keith Olson (Maryland) Brown v. Board of Education: A Fifty Year Critique

5. Women’s Autobiographies
Joanne Hall (Nottingham) Deviance, Difference and the Exception to the Rule: The Construction of the Female Hobo through Autobiography
Elizabeth Nolan (Manchester Met) Authorising the Female War Text: Women’s Autobiographical Narratives of Conflict

6. Explanations: Race & Class
Andrew Fearnley (Sidney Sussex, Cambridge) How Much Further do we have to go in Explaining Racial Change in the United States?
Andrew Lawson (Leeds Met) Why Class (Still) Counts

7. American Writers and ‘Abroad’
Tatsushi Narita (Nagoya City) T.S. Eliot’ s Virtual Transoceanic Crossing Over & Unitarianism
Mary Lou O’Neill (Kadir Has, Turkey) ‘More than Just Passing Through’: American Expatriate Travel Writing

5.30-6.30 Eccles Centre Lecture, Prof. Margaret Walsh: At Home at the Wheel? The Woman and Her Car in the 1950s (University of Nottingham) KLT1 Brabourne

6.30-7.30 Canterbury City Reception K foyer

7.30 Banquet and Awards Eliot Hall
Saturday, 22 April

7.30-9.00 Breakfast Eliot Hall
9.00-11.00 Session E

1. Inter-War Literature
James Fountain (Glasgow) Fighting ‘the enemy of the arts’: British & American Literary Reactions to the Spanish Civil War
Paul-Vincent McInnes (Glasgow) Campus Culture: Percy Marks’s Campus Novels and Youth Culture in the 1920s
J. E. Smyth (Warwick) From Here to Eternity, Robert E. Lee Prewitt and James Jones’ One-Volume History of Interwar America

2. Violence against Mexican Americans
Chair: Arturo Rosales (Arizona St.)
William Carrigan (Rowan) The Law & Anti-Mexican-American Mob Violence in Texas 1848-1926
Nancy Gonzalez (Texas-El Paso) Violence and Unequal Justice against Mexicans in El Paso, Texas, 1880-1920
Clive Webb (Sussex) African-American Reaction to Mob Violence against Mexican –Americans

3. American Decades
Martin Halliwell (Leicester) The 1950s Beyond the Cold War
Duco van Oostrum (Sheffield) Sports & the Nation in the 1970s
Graham Thompson (Nottingham) The 1980s: Ronald Reagan’s America?

4. The Post-Post Modern
Chin-jau Chyan (Essex) Gender and Genre: Marcia Muller & Hardboiled Detective Fiction
Danielle Fuller (Birmingham) One Book, One Chicago: ReadingMatters
Jaroslav Kusnir (Presov) American Fiction after the Post-Modern: Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace

5. Recent and Contemporary American Poetics
Catherine Martin (Sussex) In the Analytic Hour that is Midnight: Susan Howe’s The Midnight
Nick Selby (Glasgow) ‘...and the professors’ wives licked popsicles’: Non-conformity, gender & the poetics of the body at Black Mountain
John Wrighton (Aberystwyth) Face-work: Bruce Andrews’ Poethical Praxis

6. American Indians : Memory and Healing (I)
Chair: Rebecca Tillett (East Anglia)
Native Studies Research Network, UK

7. Conservatives and Neo-conservatives
Lee Ruddin (University of Sheffield) There's no 'neo-con' revolution, stupid! The myth of United States foreign policy, the
Bush Administration and the international security corollary
George Tzogopoulos (Loughborough) Understanding neo-conservativism in the press of Britain, France, Germany and Italy

8. Civil Rights : Case Studies
Zoe Colley (Dundee) ‘We’ve Baptised Brother Wilkins’: The NAACP & Civil Rights Prisoners in the South, 1960-1965
Mark Newman (Edinburgh) The Tennessee Catholic Church & Desegregation, 1954-1971
Kevern Verney (Edge Hill) Long is the Way and Hard: The NAACP in Alabama, 1913-1915

11.00-11.30 Coffee K foyer

11.30-1.00 Session F
1. 19th c. Philadelphia looks Outside: Business and Morals
John Killick (Leeds) The Decline of Philadelphia ’s Foreign Trade
George Conyne (Kent) Philadelphia Quakers & the Civil War

2. Europeans on Americans
Ioana Luca (Bucharest & Linacre, Oxford) Romanian Lands on American Reality: Andrei Codrescu’s Imaginary (M)Otherlands
Kathryn Nicol (Edinburgh) Cultural Appropriations and Cultural Hegemony: Contemporary Scottish Writing and Representations of American Culture

3. Colonial Governance and Ethnicity
Emily Blanck (Rowan) The Battle over Thomas Jeremiah: South Carolina Revolutionaries vs. the Royal Government
David Watson (Dundee) Proclamation? What Proclamation? The British Army, Colonial Governors and Native Americans after the Seven Years’ War

4. Blackness Across the Waters
Jennifer Lewis (Bath Spa) ‘Something out of Nothing’: The Inscription of Female Pleasure in Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse
Heidi Slettedahl MacPherson (Central Lancashire) Transatlantic Blackness: (Self)Constructions of the Other in Neila Larson’s Quicksand

5. Realism and Imperialism
Lane Crothers (Illinois St.) Salsa, American Popular Culture and the Limits of Cultural Imperialism
Richard Lock-Pullan (Birmingham) Religion and Realism in US Security: The Legacy of Neibuhr?

6. American Indians: Memory and Healing (II)
Chair: Rebecca Tillett (East Anglia)
Native Studies Research Network, UK

7. Anglo-American Literature and Film
Vernon Williams (Abilene Christian) The Documentary Film & the Anglo-American Home Front in East Anglia, 1942-1945
Paul Woolf (Birmingham) The American Dream of English Aristocracy, from Sentimental Fiction to Reality Television: Susan Warner’s Queechy (1852) and the Women’s Entertainment Network’s American Princess (2005)

8. Looking at the Nixon Years
David Sarias (Sheffield) All the President’s Conservatives (1968-1974)
Will Kaufman (Central Lancashire) What Was So Funny in Nixon's America? Vonnegut's Jailbird and the limits of
satire

1.00-2.00 Lunch Eliot Hall

2.00-3.30 British Association for American Studies Annual General Meeting KLT 1 Brabourne

3.30-4.00 Tea

4.00-5.30 Session G

1. Hate and Fear
Peter Knight (Manchester) Enemy Without, Enemy Within: Conspiracy Theories since 9/11
Christopher McKinlay (Glasgow) & John McKinlay (Abertay Dundee) The Duality of Hate & Patriotism: Hate Terrorism & the Politics of Identity in the American Radical Right

2. Constitutional Matters
Emma Long (Kent) ‘And What’s the Evil You See?’: School prayer before Engel and Schempp
Bill Merkel (Washburn) The New Contextual History of Marbury vs. Madison

3. Matters Post-Modern
Benjamin Bird (Leeds) The Capitalist Schizophrenic: The Postmodern Consciousness in Don DeLillo’s Libra
Polina Mackay (Independent Scholar) William Burroughs’ Women
Tessa Roynon (Warwick) The Story of Margaret Garnier: Toni Morrison’s Opera as Resistance or Submission

4. Race and Memory
John Moe (Ohio St.) Civil Liberties and Ordinary Racism: The Klan, Images of Prejudice and the Continuity of American Race Problems
Alan Rice (Central Lancashire) Making Visible the Formerly Invisible: Memorials in Britain & their Black Atlantic Resonances
John Smylie (Independent Scholar) Fire on the Bluff: Reporting and Memorials in Music of the Natchez fire of 1940

5. Mothers, Family and Work
Eveline Thevenard (Paris IV) The Family Policy Debate in the US: Toward Paid Leave?
Kirsten Swinth (Fordham) The ‘Problem’ of the Working Mother

6. Elastic Identities : Embodying Race, Place and Americanness
Kandice Chuh (Maryland) Bodies in Motion: The Circum-Pacific logic of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Fiction
Nicole King (California-San Diego) Malleable Plastic Surfaces: Corporeality and ‘Race’ in Caribbean/American Literature
Karen Shimakawa (NYU) On Walking & Stumbling: Inhabiting the ‘Chinese-American Body’

7. The U.S.-Mexican Border
Neil Campbell (Derby) Ruben Martinez and the ‘non-border’
Elizabeth Jacobs (Rothermere, Oxford) Mexican & Mexican-American Women on the Border
Martin Padget (Aberystwyth) Recent Representations of the Border

8. Topics in Urban Film Culture
Hamilton Carroll (University College Dublin) Detroit Confidential: 8 Mile & the Vicissitudes of Race & Class or the Epistemologies of Eninem’s Closet
Dennis Klein (Kean) Jews and Jersey: the Origins of the Motion Picture Industry
Brian Neve (Bath) Both Ends of the Telescope: Art Film, Psychology & Semi-documentary in Elia Kazan’s Independent Work on the American South

6.30-7.30 Journal of American Studies Lecture: Michael Berube (Penn State University) KLT 1 Brabourne

8.00 Dinner Eliot Hall

9.30 Disco Mungo’s, Eliot College

Sunday, 23 April
7.30-9.00 Breakfast Eliot Hall