Edward [‘Ed’] Abramson died of cancer at his home in Hull on the 9^th of May. He had only recently returned from a memorable and exciting cruise taking in visits to Cambodia, Vietnam and Malaysia with his wife Nikki. A Service of Thanksgiving for his life and work was held at Chanterlands Crematorium on 28^th May, followed by interment at the Western Cemetery. Ed will be remembered by many BAAS members as a frequent book reviewer in the Journal of American Studies, and for his presentation of papers at several BAAS annual conferences.

Born in New York City, Ed received a B.A. from the City University of New York (1965), an M.A. from the University of Iowa (1966), and a Ph.D. from the University of Manchester (1977). From 1966-69 he was an Instructor in English at East Carolina University, North Carolina. In 1971 he was appointed as an Assistant Lecturer in American Literature in the Department of

American Studies at the University of Hull. During the academic year 1986-87, he was Visiting Professor of English at The College of William and Mary, Virginia. On his return, he remained at Hull until his retirement as a Senior Fellow of the University in 2008.

A natural and gifted teacher, Ed’s lectures, tutorials and seminars were highly regarded and well-attended. A genuinely modest person, his abilities were recognised not only by his colleagues at Hull, but in the larger American Studies communities in the UK, Europe and the United States. Ed introduced generations of Hull undergraduates to the joys (and sorrows) of American-Jewish literature. He also supervised M.A. and Ph.D. dissertations in this field, as well as acting as External Examiner of doctoral dissertations submitted to the universities of Ulster, East Anglia, Central England and Nottingham. Ed published two critical monographs: Chaim Potok (Twayne Publishers, New York, 1986), and Bernard Malamud Revisited (Twayne Publishers, 1993), and a BAAS Pamphlet, The Immigrant Experience in American Literature (1982). He also contributed articles on aspects of American Jewish culture and literature to Studies in American Jewish Literature, the European Association for American Studies Newsletter, and Modern Jewish Studies. He wore his learning lightly and liked to say to Nikki: “How many people are paid for reading what they love to read?”

I was Ed’s colleague (he had an office next to mine) for 30 years, and we remained close friends until his death. Over the years I got to know him not only as a dedicated and innovative teacher, but also as a loving husband, father and grandfather, never happier than when surrounded by his family and dog, Sally. He was proud of his boyhood distinction as an American Eagle Scout and in later life was a skilled amateur sailor. In her eulogy, Nikki reminded mourners that Ed was (literally) a Samaritan, who “tried to see good in all those he met”. To his student supervisees, he offered Kleenex, comfort and sage advice on their academic and personal problems. For many years he was a member of the Hull Reform Synagogue, and as Nikki recalled, sometimes led the services “in impeccable Hebrew”. Later, Ed was drawn to Soto Zen Buddhism, but retained an abiding affection for his Jewish heritage. Appropriately, his memorial service incorporated both these elements of his faith and philosophy, while emotional tributes were paid by his daughter, Elise, sons David and Dorian, and grandson Max (aged 10) who read a poem he had composed, which closed with the lines:

“Grandpa – you are the brightest star

It’s time to say goodbye, I will try not to cry.”

I was privileged to have known him, and will remember him as a confidante, counsellor, and someone who (almost) always laughed at my jokes.

Contributed by John White, Emeritus Reader in American History, University of Hull.

My research project ‘Cold War Computing and the American Novel’ explores the relationship between postwar American writers and the institutional centres that gave us mass computing and global networking. In an interdisciplinary study of writers who had direct ties to the institutions of the Cold War military-industrial complex, I describe how American fiction after World War II helped to invent and to shape the concept of a digital age. The generous funding of BAAS has allowed me to visit the Boeing Historical Archives in Seattle, Washington, in support of my on-going research.

The Boeing archive houses some of American novelist Thomas Pynchon’s earliest published writings, and while it is well known that Pynchon wrote for Boeing between the years of 1960 and 1962 while drafting his first novel V. (1963), researchers have yet to fully understand the relationship between Pynchon’s

technical writing and his imaginative prose. The technical articles Pynchon drafted for the Bomarc Service News were not widely circulated, given the sensitivity of the material they contained, so few scholars interested in this period of Pynchon’s writing career have been able to read the entire run. As far as I know, Boeing holds the only complete run of its internally produced service bulletins, and I was fortunate enough to spend a few days with the Service News in April 2015.

The Bomarc Service News was the informational publication supporting the Bomarc Service Program administered at first by Boeing’s Pilotless Aircraft Division and, later, by the Aero-Space Division in support of the IM-99A/B Bomarc missile jointly developed by Boeing and the Michigan Aeronautical Research Center (MARC) for the United States Air Force. In service from 1959 to 1972, Bomarc was Boeing’s first mass-produced surface-to-air supersonic missile and, under NORAD’s automated early warning system Semiautomatic Ground Control Environment (SAGE), became the company’s first foray into large-scale systems integration. Boeing not only manufactured the missile but also produced launching bays, analogue computers, and other infrastructure essential to the missile’s automation; critically, Boeing provided as well full service support for missile maintenance and deployment.  The Bomarc Service News was launched in April 1959 and was designed as a ‘semi-technical’ support manual to facilitate information exchange between Boeing’s Technical Representatives and the Air Force servicemen tasked with operating and maintaining the Bomarc missile.[1]

About the Bomarc Service News, a fascinating historical document in its own right, there is much more to say, of course, but since my particular research interest involves Pynchon’s contributions to the publication, I will move on to describe what I found in the pages of the BSN and some of the challenges I faced in identifying Pynchon’s articles. For pieces published in the Bomarc Service News are without by-line. If one hopes, therefore, to say something about how Pynchon wrote for the BSN—and about the relationship of that writing to his fiction—one first must figure out what Pynchon wrote for the BSN, and this task is not straightforward.

About fifteen years ago, Adrian Wisnicki looked at the BSN and determined a number of articles he suspected to have been authored by Pynchon.[2] Wisnicki established sensible criteria for attributing authorship, but his criteria depended on qualitative assessment of visible rhetorical and typographical features—use of dashes and ellipses, funny anecdotes, arcane historical detail, and so on. I decided to test Wisnicki’s attributions using computational analysis, which offers the added potential to identify quantitatively some of the deeper textures of Pynchon’s technical writing.

This part of the story gets a bit technical itself, and is much condensed for the sake of space. Having sampled a series of articles that seemed Pynchonesque and a series of articles that seemed less so, I used an authorship attribution tool to test each batch against Pynchon’s known non-fiction prose and against articles written for the BSN prior to Pynchon’s employment at Boeing. This enabled me to make a strong guess about which articles Pynchon actually wrote. Many, but not all, of these coincide with Wisnicki’s attributions. More interestingly, however, the authorship attribution algorithm—in concert with some additional analysis, computational and human—has allowed me to identify the most important features distinguishing Pynchon’s likely contributions to the BSN from those of other Boeing staff writers. In other words, I was able to identify the ‘hallmarks’ of Pynchon’s technical prose. These, it turns out, are not quite what readers of Pynchon might expect. And they have, I will argue, important implications for the way we understand Pynchon’s early novels and stories and for the way we read postwar American fiction more broadly.

I am currently in the process of writing up my findings for publication and look forward to updating readers of American Studies in Britain with further details once that publication is in press. In the interest of not giving too much away just now, I’ll close by saying that this research trip has proven surprising and more fruitful even than I’d initially hoped, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the BAAS. I owe, too, a debt of gratitude to Michael Lombardi and Thomas Lubbesmeyer at Boeing, whose patience in guiding a newcomer through midcentury military history seems only to be outdone by the generosity of their assistance, even in matters most elementary.

Footnotes

[1] Lysle A. Wood, “Dear Reader,” Bomarc Service News 1 (April 1959): 3.

[2] Adrian Wisnicki, ‘A Trove of New Work by Thomas Pynchon? Bomarc Service News Rediscovered’, Pynchon Notes 46–49 (2000–2001): 9–34.

Katie Muth teaches twentieth and twenty-first century fiction at the University of St Andrews. Her current research project explores the relationship among technical writing and other technical work, institutions of Cold War science, industry, and education, and the postwar novel. Other research interests include critical theory, experimental fiction, periodization, and the ethics of literature. 

With the assistance of the 2015 BAAS Peter Parish Prize, I recently spent just under five weeks in the United States conducting archival research for my PhD. My doctorate examines the career of the Keynesian economist Walter W. Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) under Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. I’ve been researching Heller’s career for nearly two years now (one year as a Masters student and another as a PhD

student), so felt it was the right time for a research trip to the United States. When I applied for the Peter Parish Prize, I’d originally planned a three week trip, but upon realising just how much material there was to get through I decided to extend it to five weeks.

I started in Massachusetts, where I spent the first three weeks (between 24 May and 13 June) conducting research at both the JFK Library and Harvard University. The bulk of my time was spent at the former, which holds Heller’s personal papers for the duration he served as CEA chairman, as well as the papers of other post-war Keynesian economists. These collections proved very useful: they provided me with a deeper understanding of Heller’s role in the economic policy debates of the early 1960s, enabled me to gain a more rounded picture of the post-war ascendancy of American Keynesianism (something I want to map in my thesis), and provided me with a wealth of evidence to substantiate an original argument that I plan to make. Moreover, finally being able to look through Heller’s papers after so long researching his career was very exciting, and finding out answers to some of the questions I’ve long had about him was also fantastic.

After leaving Massachusetts, I then visited Minnesota for just under two weeks (between 13 and 25 June), where I split my time between the University of Minnesota (where Heller was a professor) and the Minnesota Historical Society. At the University of Minnesota, I was able to consult Heller’s personal papers for his whole career and, upon arriving at the archive, was surprised to learn that no other researcher had looked through this collection before. I came across a lot of material to use in my thesis and it is clear that this resource will be integral to the originality of my project. During my time at the Historical Society, I examined the personal papers of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Orville Freeman — three key liberal political figures whom Heller advised as a Keynesian economist — and came away with a better understanding of how he helped shape liberal economic policies throughout his whole career.

In addition to archival research, I also conducted interviews with two individuals who personally knew Walter Heller. One was with his son, Professor Eric Heller, who is a physicist at Harvard, while the other was with an economist, Professor Louis Johnston, who was taught by Heller as an undergraduate. Both interviewees provided me with a better understanding of what Heller was like as a person, told me some interesting, and useful, anecdotes, and were able to answer some of the questions I had about Heller that I did not find answers to in the archives. Overall, my trip was extremely productive and I have returned with enough material to complete two solid draft chapters for my upgrade (which will take place next year), as well as a full working draft of my thesis by the end of my third year. I am, therefore, extremely grateful for the financial assistance provided by BAAS.

James Hillyer is a PhD candidate at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. He is researching the career of former Kennedy-Johnson CEA chairman Walter W. Heller, which he plans to use as a lens onto the rise, ascendancy and eclipse of Keynesian political economy in the United States. He holds a BA in Modern History from Queen Mary, University of London and an MA in United States Studies from UCL.

Buoyed by the wonderfully collegial and intellectually stimulating atmosphere at Northumbria University during this year’s annual BAAS conference I decided to put my hat into the ring for the role of Early Career Representative on the Executive Committee. Having completed my PhD in December 2013 and as Co-Editor of U.S. Studies Online since April 2014 I figured I was in a good position to act as

an advocate for American Studies scholars at an early stage in their career. I was delighted therefore when, after a hard-fought but scrupulously managed campaign, it was revealed I would be the Early Career rep for BAAS for the next two years.

It turns out that the cliché proclaimed by politicians the world over that “the hard work begins now” isn’t far off the mark. While the 2015 BAAS conference, not to mention the forthcoming Postgraduate BAAS conference in December at Glasgow and next year’s joint BAAS conference with the Irish Association for American Studies in Belfast, showed without a doubt the continuing vibrancy and innovation of the American Studies community the bigger picture isn’t necessarily so rosy. Recent developments in the HE sector, including the increase in tuition fees, has led to higher expectations from students and a tightening of purse strings in many American Studies departments. These two factors have combined to see even greater pressure on teaching staff to take on considerable workloads, potentially deteriorating the working conditions of many academics. For many early career researchers trying to get their foot on the academic ladder, limited departmental funds and pressure from senior management has in turn resulted in a reliance on short-term, casualised teaching contracts. It is the norm for early career researchers across disciplines to be forced to balance the job insecurity and instability that comes with casualised contracts alongside the pressure to publish in order to make themselves attractive when applying for research grants, Teaching Fellowships and Lectureships. While there are certainly jobs available in American Studies at the moment (I should know; I’ve written enough covering letters in the last 12 months), the competition is naturally fierce, reflecting both the quality of the applicants and the relatively limited number of opportunities.

Despite these wider issues within Higher Education, it is not all doom and gloom. Although American Studies departments are rarely the largest or wealthiest at most universities, we are fortunate to be well represented by the British Association for American Studies. Just as Rachael Alexander has done a fantastic job representing our postgraduate community, Zalfa Feghali has worked incredibly hard these last few years to ensure that ECRs are recognised as a distinct ‘category’ from PGs and established academics, facing as they do a different set of unique challenges in their careers. I am extremely grateful, therefore, that I am able to follow in Zalfa’s footsteps in representing the interests of ECRs. We are also lucky to have Sue Currell as the Chair of BAAS who, alongside the rest of the Executive Committee, continues to show a serious and welcome commitment to providing support for ECRs, postgraduates, and the American Studies community in general.

For my part, I see the role of Early Career Representative as one that seeks to create opportunities and provide support for ECRs. Along these lines, a few of the ideas I will be looking to implement include projects such as writing prizes, research/travel grants, widening participation events involving ECRs in BAAS outreach programmes, and training symposia offering professional development guidance. It is too early to tell how these things will develop over the next two years but I am sure that with the enthusiastic support of the Executive Committee we will be able to make good progress defending and furthering the interests of early career researchers within the American Studies community.

With that in mind, I welcome any comments, concerns and ideas that ECRs have about the current situation facing American Studies. Please feel free to get in touch at ben.offiler@baas.ac.uk. I look forward to hearing from and working with you!

Ben Offiler completed his PhD at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on American foreign relations, in particular US-Iranian relations, modernization, development, and philanthropic NGOs. His first book, US Foreign Policy and the Modernization of Iran: Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and the Shah (Palgrave), will be published in July 2015.

Welcome to the 60^th Anniversary AGM for the British Association for American Studies. I’d like to begin by thanking Northumbria University for hosting us and in particular Joe Street for all of the work he’s put in to getting us here. And thank you BAAS members for attending this meeting and taking part in forming the future direction of the Association.

This year, I could say ‘once again’, the BAAS executive committee has lived up to the founding goals of the Association 60 years ago to support the study of the US

in the UK, to publish research papers, to communicate our research knowledge and to hold conferences. To me it’s quite remarkable that we – and former BAAS committees – have continued to do this in such a consistent way over such a long period and in such a shifting educational and economic landscape. As Chair it’s been important for me to return to those founding goals to think about what we do and where we are going, not so that we keep things the same but so that we harness that original ambition as a way to implement changes and enable a future generation of scholars to continue working in this fascinating field. The hard work of the executive committee has resulted in huge gains for American studies as discipline this year, gains that reflect the original goals of the first committee 60 years ago but which create a new legacy for the future.

I want to draw attention to a few of these gains here. Last June, on your behalf, I signed a new partnership agreement with Cambridge University Press establishing and confirming our joint ownership of the Journal of American Studies. As the original contract had been signed in 1966 it clearly needed updating — no one back then could have foreseen the changes in the publishing industry, technology or academia. This new agreement puts into writing much of what we were already doing as set out in the founding mission (when it was then known as the ‘Bulletin’). The new contract establishes procedures and responsibilities on both sides and enables us to look forward to a stable and productive future in which mutual support is guaranteed. To push this through effectively as volunteer trustees of BAAS, the officers in particular have had to take crash courses in publishing law, charities law, business law and to investigate BAAS’s history as well as plan for the future, including second guessing the shape of academic publishing. I can proudly say that we’ve done our very best for you.

Much of this work will remain invisible but what will be clear to see for a long time into the future is that we now have a great new working relationship with Cambridge University Press as well as the editors of the Journal of American Studies. The overhaul of our contracts and processes took place just as Scott Lucas’s term as editor ended and as we advertised for and appointed the new editors. I would like to thank Scott for all of his great work on JAS and welcome the new joint editors – Celeste-Marie Bernier and Bevan Sewell — and the new associate editors — Sinead Moynihan and Nick Witham – and to say how much we look forward to our productive new partnership with you all.

There are other very important benefits of the new relationship that will impact on our future activities: when the original agreement was signed there was no provision made for any royalty payment to BAAS. Way back then I think that our founders saw publishing papers as a costly venture and not a profit-making one, they were glad to have the costs met by a high quality academic publisher. The publishing environment did change and of course the new agreement had to take this into account and include an annual profit-share royalty agreement.

This has meant that we have been able to make other changes to our activities and procedures. We needed a new logo that would print well on the journal cover, we needed to create new editors contracts and refocus some of our committee priorities – all of which are reflected in changes that we’ve made to the standing orders and leading to some of the constitution amendments. We are continuing with the process of investigating all of our contracts and charitable activities and this has led to some involving legal conversations with a variety of experts. On your behalf I joined BAAS as a member of the Foundation for Science and Technology, a society that offers support and legal advice to academic associations like ours so that we get the correct legal information into the future. As the Treasurer’s report will explain, the new agreement has also been a catalyst for changing our financial structures and operations.

Making sure that we get it right has sometimes taken a lot of time and necessitated developing new areas of expertise but the benefits are huge and will be long-lasting. We have been able to extend the support we give to the other aspects of the BAAS founders mission. Not that they would have known what a website was, but we have been able to fund the website overhaul that you will hear about later, to create a new website assistant post, we have been able to support more conferences and symposia and we have created a new Journal of American Studies postgraduate travel award. It’s also meant we have kept subscription fees low and yet also offer access to the Journal of American Studies online which will be accessible via the new members space on the website as part of the membership fee. Having some additional income also opens up the real possibility of increasing the number of symposia, research and travel grants and fellowships and support for scholars in the future.

Much of this I didn’t know I would be doing when I started my term 2 years ago. My mission statement did focus on the need to extend our communications and in that area I feel we have made clear progress. Much of this is down to the great work by our webmaster Katie McGettigan, who revamped our communications and email newsletter – which now goes out every Sunday evening. I think we should applaud Katie for that alone.  But Katie has also been working diligently behind the scenes on the website overhaul. I also want to highlight how extremely pleased I am with the relaunch of the BAAS postgraduate journal U.S. Studies Online – the editors Ben and Michelle have changed the landscape of our community to create a site that offers a more informal forum for new scholarship in the field as well as gathering up all the news of interest to members, as well as giving invaluable early careers support and information. I’m incredibly optimistic about the future of BAAS when I look at their activities. I also want to thank Kal Ashraf for going paperless with American Studies in Britain (ASIB) last year which saved us print costs when we most desperately needed to. A particular thanks for his last ASIB in December 2014 (Issue 110) with the wonderful 60^th Anniversary cover.

Other activities that we’ve continued to support include the BAAS Postgraduate conference which was a huge success in Sussex last November with the apt theme of Protest: Resistance and Dissent in America. Thanks to Cara

Rodway’s organization BAAS also ran a Schools Politics conference in Reading in early March with over 80 students and teachers in attendance. We wouldn’t have been able to do any of this work without your membership fee and all of the many hours the executive committee have volunteered for.

The AGM is a chance for us to celebrate and sing ourselves as well:

• Our former Chair, Prof. Martin Halliwell was elected as the Chair of the English Association.
• Simon Newman at Glasgow University was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant of £300,000 for a study of ‘Runaway Slaves in Britain: Bondage, Freedom and Race in the Eighteenth Century.’
• Katie McGettigan was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at Nottingham for work titled ‘Transatlantic Nationalism: The Invention of American Literature in Britain, 1820-1860.’
• Michael Cullinane at Northumbria University has been awarded an AHRC Early Career Fellowship for the project ‘Memorial Communities and Presidential Legacy: Remembering Theodore Roosevelt.’
• Zoe Colley at Dundee University was awarded an AHRC Early Career Fellowship for the project ‘Universities of the Revolution: Black Nationalism and the Prison from the Nation of Islam to the Black Panther Party.’
• Nick Witham was awarded a Fulbright American Studies Scholarship for a visit to NYU this summer and an AHRC International Placement Scheme Fellowship to go to the Library of Congress, both furthering research on ‘Popular American History Writing during the Cold War.’
• The University of Liverpool appointed Professor Janet Beer as its next Vice-Chancellor. Professor Beer, formerly VC at Oxford Brookes University, is the university’s first female Vice-Chancellor and one of only three in the elite Russell Group.

• Professor Clive Webb was promoted to Head the School of History, Art History and Philosophy at the University of Sussex.
• Sue Wedlake has taken early retirement after 22 yrs at the Embassy
• Carole Holden (British Library) has also taken early retirement.
• December 2014, former ASIB editor Kal Ashraf (Sheffield) passed his PhD, entitled “Beyond Authentication: African American Speech Representation (AASR) in Brown, Chesnutt and Hurston.”
• Dr. Martin Padget, Aberystwyth University was awarded a fellowship in the Tanner Center for the Humanities at the University of Utah for 2015-16.
• A new American studies group formed to add to the array of our specialist focus groups: Scholars of American Visual Arts and Text (SAVAnT).
• Clodagh Harrington of De Montfort University became the new American Politics Group Chair.
• Jo Gill was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship for research on Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination. £42,000 over c. 16 months, starting 1st Sept 2015.
• Apologies for anyone I’ve missed out – I’m sure there will be more so send me the details to add to this if you like.

On the 10th October 2014 the closure of the American Studies Resource Centre was announced. ASRC was founded in 1987 to provide an educational and information service to students, teachers and the general public in the UK on all aspects of American culture, a mission that quickly expanded to include the HE sector as well. The ASRC has provided an excellent service to the American studies community over the years, running schools conferences, providing speakers for events and coordinating and collating information. Many thanks go to Ian Ralston and Bella Adams as the most recent directors of the centre. The BAAS executive will be discussing ways to continue with aspects of the ASRC’s mission.

• IAAS Treasurer and Membership Secretary and former Treasurer to the EAAS Tony Emmerson died on on 9th December 2014 after a short illness.
• Rupert Wilkinson, Professor Emeritus of American History (Sussex University) died just before Christmas 2014.

John Whitley, Emeritus Reader in American Studies, has written a personal appreciation of Professor Rupert Wilkinson (1936-2014).

On the 25^th of May 2014, then education minister Michael Gove announced the removal of American texts from the GCSE curriculum. The new list of requirements pertaining to literature ‘from the British Isles’ is more restrictive. The exam boards – and indeed individual schools – are free to add any extra books they see fit, but the new rules left them very little room for any twentieth-century writing from outside of Britain. After discussion with my literature colleagues I added a list of nineteenth-century American texts to the website (under ‘Schools’) for further consultation. Additions to this list would be welcome. But there is far more to be done and BAAS continues to expand its work with schools to try and support a greater knowledge and understanding of American culture, literature, film, politics and history among the next generation of students. Our goal is also to increase interest that will lead to more students seeing the value of an American studies degree and wanting to study the subject further.

On behalf of BAAS this year I have attended meetings of the Learned Societies and Subject Associations Network at the British Academy; UKCASA; the Arts and Humanities Alliance at the Royal Historical Society in University College London. At these meetings I have taken part in discussions about the REF 2014, REF 2020, Open Access, UG and PG issues in HE. I have tried to keep on top of all the policy changes and transitions and to have our voice included in the discussions. Certain changes in HE have made it increasingly hard to get a clear picture of the effect of HE policy on the American Studies community nationally. Not only are privatized departments increasingly in competition with each other, but even within the humanities in a single institution literature and history have often become separate and competing budgetary units. Rather than summarize this now I am planning this year to conduct a survey on the problems and effects of national policy and aim to use the website as a space to convey my thoughts on this further.

BAAS and this conference have also received generous support for its activities from the US Embassy in London throughout the year, so I also want to thank the embassy for the support they’ve given and for inviting me to so many of their cultural activities.

• On 3 July 2014 a small BAAS delegation attended the Independence Day celebrations at the Ambassador’s mansion, an excellent event.
• 17 Sept, 2014 I attended a welcome event to meet the new Cultural Affairs Officer Anneliese Reinmeyer and the new Minister Counselor for Public Affairs (the “Public Affairs Officer,” or PAO Eric Johnson).
• On 22 Sept, 2014. I attended a U.S. Embassy Screening of ‘The Roosevelts’ and a talk by Ken Burns in conversation with Stanley Tucci,
• 24 Sept, 2014, I attended a dinner in honor of Ken Burns, documentary film director and producer hosted by the Ambassador Matthew Barzun and Mrs Barzun. A very memorable and sparkling evening.

Thanks also must go to Professor Phil Davies at the Eccles centre for American studies in the British Library. BAAS supported the Eccles Centre’s Congress to Campus UK programme, the latest episode of which took place in November 2014, the conferences on 10^th and 11^th November in London attracted a total audience approaching 500: for invitations to their programme of events throughout the year and for funding an array of awards to American studies scholars, which will also be presented at the banquet also to Phil personally for funding an extra travel award this year in honour of Elizabeth Atkins and her late husband Elisha Atkins.

None of our activities would be possible without the dedicated work and support of the BAAS executive committee who I’d like to publicly thank for the extra work they have each taken on this year.

• A special thanks to Theresa Saxon for being willing to step into the role of Treasurer at the 11^th hour for a one-year stint to cover Sylvia’s unexpired term.
• Further thanks to Jo Gill and Cara Rodway, both coopted onto the exec for the year – Jo for taking on the secretarial duties until January while Jenny Terry was on research leave in the US and Cara for being our schools representative and working on the development sub-committee. I am hugely grateful for the indispensable work both of them have committed to us.
• I want to thank Zalfa Feghali for stepping in to chair the Development sub-committee at a time when I was hugely overburdened.
• and finally a massive thank you to Professor Bridget Bennett, the BAAS Vice-Chair and Chair of Publications sub-committee, whose term ends today. The work you’ve done for BAAS is incalculable and you have been a huge rock to me through unnavigated territory. I have enjoyed working with you and learning from you these past 2 years. On behalf of all the members I wish you a well-deserved break from exec committee work but also a million thanks from all those future BAAS members who will never realize how much they owe you.

I want to end by looking forward to Belfast next year, when my term will end and you will elect a new Chair, where we will have a reception in the Belfast City Hall, where the author Richard Ford will be our plenary, where we will banquet on the Titanic! I look forward to seeing you all there of course and at that point looking backwards with you to last year’s fantastic conference here in Newcastle.

Sue Currell is the current Chair of the British Association for American Studies and a Reader in American Literature at Sussex University. Her academic studies focus on the cultural history of early 20th century America and she has published on the history of eugenics in America, the culture of the Great Depression and America in the 1920s. She is currently working on a history of a radical arts magazine, New Masses, which was produced in New York between 1926-48. .

I arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2014 feeling just as nervous as I was excited about starting a master’s degree and teaching assistantship at the University of Virginia. Much as I love my subject, I was intimidated by the prospect of standing at the front of a classroom of students not much older than myself, with no training as a teacher and only a few months between the end of my own undergraduate English degree and my new life as a TA. This isn’t to say that I had no support from UVa, which has a dedicated Teaching Resources Centre that ran a training day just before the beginning of the semester and many kind English professors who are always happy to give nervous graduate students their own teaching tips.  Ultimately, however, it was my responsibility to hastily read Heart of Darkness for the first time and, at the end of the first week of my own classes, make my way to an unfamiliar classroom to lead a discussion on Conrad’s challenging novel.

As I write this ten months later, teaching has become one of the very best things about my experience at UVa. Seeing a student make progress in their work or build brilliantly upon ideas discussed in class in an essay is truly gratifying, to the point where I am now considering becoming an English teacher, a career I had previously almost ruled out for myself. I’ve discovered that there is no better way to get to know a text than to lead a discussion on it in which diverse voices and opinions come through, and working out ways to encourage quieter students to contribute and feel like valued members of the class has been a particularly rewarding task. Even my own academic work has benefited from the process of grading student essays and providing feedback.

Aside from teaching, Charlottesville is a wonderful place to live and study. It embodies much of what I love about America in its history and dramatically beautiful campus and surroundings, and in the enthusiasm and friendliness of its people. My own classes are just as stimulating and challenging as one would expect from a prestigious university, and the English department just as full of inspiring and welcoming people. This year I participated in an anti-rape culture march around campus, at which English was by far the best-represented department in terms of both faculty and students, and the UVa Graduate English Conference, which not only drew speakers from around the country but also gave UVa a platform to celebrate the work of its own students. These two events are emblematic of the community spirit and energy of the UVa English department of which I am lucky enough to be a member. I encourage anyone who is interested in further study in America to apply for a BAAS award – it was one of the very best decisions I have ever made.

Anna Béar completed her undergraduate degree in English literature at the University of Exeter. She also spent a year at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and was delighted to return to the States to study for a master’s in English when she received the BAAS Graduate Teaching Assistantship for the University of Virginia. She is currently preparing to write her thesis on American cultural identities in the literary imagination. 

In June 2015 I completed a five day research trip to the British Library after being awarded an Eccles Centre Postgraduate Fellowship. The primary purpose of my visit was to build on the insights offered by my PhD which examined the British understanding of American Sectionalism between 1832 and 1863 (completed at Northumbria University in 2014) with a view to developing a new project analysing British popular opinion of the 1812 Anglo-American War.

My PhD research demonstrated a level of complexity within the Anglo-American relationship which has often been ignored. As part of the background reading for my project I became increasingly aware of a considerable black-hole when it came to scholarly analysis of the connection between the two nations during the 1812 war. Studies of the Revolutionary War are relatively common, as is work on the period after the 1830s, yet little exists (beyond military and diplomatic history) examining this crucial era of active military conflict between Britain and the US. I therefore decided to undertake an analysis of British public debate over the meaning of the war and to attempt to understand how popular discourse may have affected political policy.

I had already undertaken preliminary work on a number of major newspapers and the published output of writers of the era prior to my British Library visit. As a result I already had a firm grasp of mainstream British views regarding the war. The purpose of my British Library trip was to consult a number of radical political publications to understand how a community which was usually very sympathetic to the US interpreted the conflict. I spent the majority of my time examining Drakard’s Paper, The Champion, Independent Whig and the Public Cause. Studying the content of these publications for the duration of the war has demonstrated a level of debate within the radical community previously entirely overlooked by historians. Relatively abstract discussions about the relationship between democracy, monarchy and warfare run alongside more specific disputes relating to the implications of stop and search, trade policy and the status of Canada. These debates then feed into different concepts of liberty and the ways in which Britain or the US embodied the socio-political system which particular radicals saw as desirable.

As a result of my research in the British Library I am now in a position to take my project forward having established the fractures which the 1812 war created even among those who were most sympathetic to the US in Britain. I intend to continue to work with newspapers from the period but will be extending my research in the political sphere to consider the views of cabinet members such as Lord Liverpool and Lord Eldon alongside radicals like Sir Frances Burdett and William Cobbett. I also wish to examine the correspondence these figures had with their American colleagues to begin to establish how popular opinion influenced diplomatic discussion.

Peter O’Connor completed his PhD at Northumbria University in 2014 with a thesis entitled ‘”The Inextinguishable Struggle Between North and South”: American Sectionalism in the British Mind, 1832-1863.’ He has published work on the British legacy of Thomas Jefferson and the Presidency of John Quincy Adams and is currently working on a new project examining British responses to the 1812 Anglo-American War.

A generation has passed since the last joint annual conference of BAAS and its Irish counterpart the IAAS. In 1992 Stranmillis College played host to a joint conference of the two Associations; next year, between 7-9 April, Queen’s University Belfast has the honour of welcoming hundreds of Americanists to a city much changed since the pre-ceasefire days of the early 1990s.

There’s a number of reasons why Belfast is an apt venue for 2016 and also why another joint conference is timely. For the last four years the two associations have been working very closely together, particularly on joint postgraduate initiatives and reciprocal funding support for research students to travel to the annual postgraduate conferences of each Association. 2016 will be another confirmation of the strong links that connect us as scholars on these islands.

As for 2016 itself, it marks a number of anniversaries, most notably the centenary of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. Meanwhile Americanists will mark the 240^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and there is no better place in the UK or Ireland to be for that event than Belfast. The Belfast News Letter was the first English language newspaper in Europe to publish details of the Declaration of Independence in 1776; in 1796, George Washington established a US Consulate in Belfast, appointing Belfast-born James Holmes on 20 May (coincidentally, Holmes’ brother-in-law Henry Joy was owner of the News Letter) as the first US Consul to Belfast. Other notable anniversaries with an American slant occurring next year include the centenary of the first appearance of James Montgomery Flagg’s Uncle Sam recruitment image in July 1916, and also the bicentenary of Uncle Sam’s first appearance in literature in Frederick Augustus Fidfaddy’s The Adventures of Uncle Sam, in Search After His Lost Honor.

We are delighted to have lined up some excellent plenary speakers for next year’s event. John Howard (Professor of American Studies, King’s London), known to many in both Associations, will be the Eccles Centre plenary lecturer while the new editorial team of the Journal of American Studies (Celeste-Marie Bernier and Bevan Sewell) has secured Deborah Willis (Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU) as their keynote speaker. Traditionally at the annual IAAS conference the keynote delivers the Alan Graham Memorial lecture in honour of one of the most significant influences on American Studies in Ireland. Alan Graham was a founding member of the IAAS in 1970 and was a pre-eminent member of the School of History at Queen’s University Belfast from the 1960s until his untimely death in the mid-1980s. In 2016, the Alan Graham lecture will have a slightly different feel to it as acclaimed novelist Richard Ford will read and take part in a question and answer session at Titanic Belfast before the conference’s closing banquet.

As researchers and teachers predominantly working in the Arts and Humanities, we do find ourselves having to argue the case for our very existence as the twenty-first century reaches the middle of its second decade. One thing the 2016 conference will be doing is to interrogate precisely what conferences like these are for and what we are doing as Americanists at this point in time. For this conference we are looking to move away where feasible from what can be a rather rigid paper-after-paper panel format that conferences typically follow. Sessions that wish to discuss the teaching of American subjects or that would like to trial pre-circulating papers so that the formal presentations are shorter thus allowing more time for discussion are encouraged. Proposals for 20-minute presentations have been coming in steadily over the summer to the conference email address (baasiaas2016@qub.ac.uk). If you are thinking of offering a talk, your proposal should be a maximum of 250 words and include a provisional title. Moreover, proposals by two or more people sharing a common theme are warmly invited and we welcome panels that cross disciplinary boundaries or which are keen to develop a workshop theme across more than one session. The closing date for proposals is 1 November 2015.

While academic endeavor will be central to the three days next April, we do also hope that you will have time to enjoy what Belfast has to offer. Whether it is the weekend St George’s market in the city centre, tours of this historic city, our vibrant nightlife and the many galleries and museums within walking distance of Queen’s, or the iconic Titanic building itself there’s going to be plenty for you to do while you’re here. We’re really looking forward to what you will see on twitter hashtagged as #IBAAS16 and we hope to see you here come April.

Philip McGowan is the current Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies and teaches American Literature at Queen’s University Belfast.

Lois Green Carr, preeminent historian of colonial Maryland, died peacefully at her home on June 28, 2015. She was 93 years of age.

Born on March 7, 1922 in Holyoke, Massachusetts to Donald Ross Green and Constance McLaughlin Green, Dr. Carr was a third-generation historian. She may be the only seven-year-old to have asked her mother to explain the medieval feudal system, an early hint of her lifelong intellectual curiosity. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1943, Dr. Carr obtained her M.A. from Radcliffe College in 1944. In 1968 she earned her Ph.D. in History from Harvard, with her dissertation County Government in Maryland, perhaps the lengthiest (more than a thousand typed pages) and most detailed study of local colonial government.

After moving to Annapolis in 1954, Dr. Carr joined the Hall of Records (now Maryland State Archives) staff as a junior archivist in 1956. In 1967 she became Historian for Historic St. Mary’s City (HSMC), a position she retained for 45 years. She continued to work primarily at the state archives where she had ready access to the documentary records vital to her research. Her great passions were historical research and public history. She saw St. Mary’s City as her classroom, where the public could learn about the past by experiencing it in new ways. Dr. Carr founded the research program at HSMC; participated in the development of every exhibit at the museum, including numerous seventeenth-century reconstructions; and provided the key historical evidence for identifying the Calvert family members buried in lead coffins discovered under the 1660s Brick Chapel. Of them all, she perhaps had the greatest role in creating the Godiah Spray Tobacco Plantation, directly based on the research later published as Robert Cole’s World.

Internationally recognized as one of the leading social and economic historians of the colonial Chesapeake region, Dr. Carr co-authored and contributed to numerous books, articles, and papers, including Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture & Society in Early Maryland; Maryland’s Revolution of Government 1689-1692; Colonial Chesapeake Society; and Maryland: A New Guide to the Old Line State. She attended and participated in many conferences and symposiums in the fields of colonial social and economic history. As HSMC’s first historian, in support of the programming needs of an ambitious young museum, Dr. Carr undertook original research on a broader range of subjects than professional historians typically address. She believed that public history museums should offer interpretations adhering to the same high standards for quality and originality as leading academic institutions. As a result, a number of the research reports she produced for HSMC became the basis for books and articles making major contributions to the fields of political, social, economic, and women’s history.

Although modest about her own achievements, Dr. Carr was widely recognized and admired by her colleagues. She was president of the Economic History Association in 1990-1991. In 1992 a conference in her honor, held at the University of Maryland at College Park, brought together leading colonial scholars whom she had known and worked with during her career. The HSMC awarded Dr. Carr its highest award, the cross bottony,[1] in 1995 and she was one of the first two recipients in 1996 of the Maryland Humanities Council’s Eisenberg Prize for Excellence in the Humanities. In 2000, Dr. Carr was inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame and in 2001 she received an honorary degree from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her co-authored volume Robert Cole’s World received numerous awards. Today, many of the articles and books she helped produce remain essential reading for all scholars of early American history.

Dr. Carr’s intellectual creativity and enthusiasm attracted numerous young researchers to the study of colonial Maryland history, a group often characterized as the “Maryland Mafia,” with Dr. Carr as its godmother. Her passion was to write and teach history for a broad public audience through museum programs rather than in an academic institution, but through her generous mentoring of dozens of younger scholars, Dr. Carr played a major role in shaping research, writing, teaching, and interpreting the history of the region. Many scholars owe her an immense debt for her invaluable advice on all stages of a project from research design to polishing a final manuscript. A demanding critic, Dr. Carr pushed scholars to aspire to high levels of achievement.

She was a pioneer in the field of colonial history, especially in the use of probate records to reveal the contours of the lives of ordinary as well as prominent people of the past. Her research approach—integrating archival history with archaeology and architecture—was considered novel at the time. And she was in the forefront of using computers to manage and analyze large amounts of historical data. Dr. Carr designed and directed several long-term team history research projects which won support from the National Science Foundation and from the National Endowment for the Humanities. One notable product of the work undertaken for HSMC by Dr. Carr and her project colleagues is the career file that documents every known seventeenth-century St. Mary’s resident, part of the research files maintained among the collections of the Maryland State Archives and HSMC.

Dr. Carr served as a Senior Adjunct Scholar at the Archives from 1988 until 2005. In 1989, she assumed the position of Senior Historian of the Maryland Historic Trust, continuing to focus her work on St. Mary’s City, an activity she sustained even after her retirement in November 2005. She was an adjunct professor of history at the University of Maryland College Park from 1982 until her retirement, and was a visiting professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 1971.

In addition to her passion for history, Dr. Carr loved her Quarter Landing neighborhood, listening to classical music, gardening, cooking, entertaining guests, and participating in a play-reading group with her husband, Jack Ladd Carr, who preceded her in death in 2010. The couple regularly attended Annapolis Symphony Orchestra concerts and Colonial Players productions. Visiting colleagues always received a warm welcome at her home and Annapolis friends gathered at her annual Christmas party.

Dr. Carr was also preceded in death by her brother, Donald Ross Green, and her sister, Elizabeth Langford Green. She is survived by her only child, Andrew Clark, of Baltimore, Maryland; a nephew, Mitchell Green, of Washington State; and a niece, Alice Green, of California. She leaves behind many friends and colleagues who loved, respected, and admired her for the work that contributed so much to our understanding of early Maryland.

Memorial Services celebrating her life will take place at two locations. There will be a service at 4 pm on September 19 at the reconstruction Brick Chapel at Historic St. Mary’s City with a reception following at the 1676 State House. Tours will be offered prior to the service at St. Mary’s City of the various exhibit sites Dr. Carr played a major role in interpreting. A second Memorial Service will be held in Annapolis at 1 pm on September 20 at the Maryland State Archives. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Friends of the Maryland State Archives, (350 Rowe Boulevard, Annapolis, Maryland, 21401) or to the Carr Fund at the Historic St. Mary’s City Foundation (P.O. Box 24, St. Mary’s City, 20686) for support of the plantation exhibits directly based on Dr. Carr’s scholarship in Robert Cole’s World.

Footnote

[1] A “cross bottony” is a cross having each arm terminating in three rounded lobes, forming a sort of trefoil. From the religious point of view, the cross bottony can be used as a symbol of the Christian Trinity. A cross bottony which is heraldically “counterchanged” occurs on the flag of Maryland.

John J. McCusker is the Ewing Halsell Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American History and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas.

The work conducted during this research trip supports my Ph.D. dissertation ‘Addicts on the American Stage,’ a piece which explores a shift in the dramatic representation of addiction in American theatre after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.  At this time playwrights departed from the didactic moralism of the temperance movement’s theatrical propaganda and moved towards a depiction of the addict as a symbol of nationalized political and social anxieties. Through chronological author-centric case

studies, I investigate the various manifestations of addiction in American stage drama and suggest that after Prohibition and prior to the War on Drugs, the addict was an important symbol of American life.  Working within the catalogs of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Sam Shepard some of America’s most popular Broadway dramas are read as historical documents in this transition.  The generous financial support of BAAS’s Malcolm Bradbury Award has allowed me the opportunity to explore one of these author’s archives in depth: The Eugene O’Neill Collection at the Yale University Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library.

Yale University’s Eugene O’Neill Collection maintains the most extensive body of literary ephemera relating to O’Neill and his work. This includes sensitive documents pertaining to the author’s personal, spousal, and filial relationships to addiction, as well as the drafts, proofs, and stage designs of the author’s most popular addict-centric plays.  While much research has been conducted to uncover the autobiographical addiction narratives of O’Neill’s work, particularly those of his childhood under the maternal care of a morphine addict or of frequenting Greenwich flop houses as an alcoholic young-adult, far less attention has been paid to an extended period of sobriety in the author’s life, one which was particularly formidable for the author’s late-career works.

Between 1926 and 1953 O’Neill maintained sobriety, but addiction was never far from his mind. For, throughout this period O’Neill’s son, Shane, developed a criminal heroin addiction, his oldest son committed suicide after a long battle with alcoholism, his third-wife suffered from Bromide toxicity, and  his second-wife developed alcoholism.  Often overlooked, this gap in criticism not only neglects an enormous portion of the author’s biography, but fails to recognize the ways in which these daily experiences with addiction informed various formal and philosophical approaches to the subject in O’Neill’s highly acclaimed late-career works, particularly The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night.  It was with this period which I was primarily concerned.    

In the Agnes Boulton Collection, one of the three archival bodies composing the O’Neill library, and that which preserves the correspondence and ephemera of the author’s second wife, I uncovered detailed documentation of Eugene O’Neill’s alcoholic rehabilitation which had previously only been referenced to peripherally in biographies on the author.  These records showed that in 1926, under Boulton’s recommendation, Eugene O’Neill attended several sessions with the psychoanalyst G.V. Hamilton with hopes of curing his alcoholism.  Here, in addition to being prescribed Bromide – a minor-tranquilizer later discovered to be highly addictive and toxic – O’Neill was encouraged to read Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.  Meticulously kept expense reports from the period show that O’Neill filled this prescription and read several of Freud’s publications over the next few years.  While the author belittled Freudian readings of his plays, this strong association between Freudian psychoanalysis and addiction invites, and perhaps validates, readings of formal symmetry between O’Neill’s late-career representations of addiction and Freudian metapsychology.

Research into the Carlotta O’Neill archive, O’Neill’s third-wife, proved similar fruitful.  For, according Carlotta’s correspondence and financial records, O’Neill financially supported many of his childhood friends, those who, unlike O’Neill, never moved beyond their days as alcoholic Greenwich bohemians.  Paying for funerals, picking up bar-tabs, and covering rent for a number of the alcoholic leftists who O’Neill associated with in his youth for nearly twenty years kept memories of dypsomania and New York’s addict culture indelible, even in the authors most sober years.

Likewise, much of my research into O’Neill’s unpublished correspondence has offered an alternative narrative to popular perspectives of the author, which often portray him as a solitary creative, willfully outside the social circles of the mid-twentieth century intelligentsia.  Rather, unpublished letters from Theodore Dreiser, Hart Crane, Arthur Davies, Marjorie Stevens, William Faulkner, Therése Bonney, and George Bellows begin to trace the contours of a playwright who was far more central, at least for a period of time, to the American tastemakers and intellectual elite.

I am currently in the process of incorporating these findings into my dissertation and will be seeking publication soon after.  Many thanks to BAAS for their generous support and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library for their cooperation, for without them this research would not have been possible.

Grant Gosizk is a second year Ph.D Candidate at the University of Kent’s Centre for American Studies and School of English.  His dissertation explores the afterlife of temperance drama, and particularly the representation of addiction, in post-Prohibition America theatre.  Other research interests include masked performance, and the interactions between visual cultures and literature in twentieth century America. 

My project offers the first in-depth urban cultural analysis of the network of community activism in Loisaida (part of the Lower East Side). This community organized itself to fight against postwar urban deindustrialization, housing disinvestment, and gentrification, which negatively affected low-income areas. By recreating the urban history of sustainable activism in Loisaida and focusing on the initiatives and projects of key community organizations, I demonstrate how they sought to reclaim urban space, educational space, and cultural space. I argue that

analyzing the interplay of sustainable activism, community organizations, and space in a small urban neighbourhood such as Loisaida, provides three crucial insights: (1) the necessity for community organizations to adapt their activism to changing needs of the community, (2) the importance of neighbourhood control over both physical and non-physical (spiritual, cultural, educational) space, and (3) Puerto Ricans’ ideas about and practices of their ‘right to the city.’

Thanks to both the Elizabeth and Elisha Atkins Postgraduate Travel Award (British Association for American Studies) and the Postgraduate Transatlantic Travel Grant (European Association for American Studies), I was fortunate enough to travel to New York City for two months from 20 June to 20 August 2015. I found a room in Brooklyn’s iconic Bed-Stuy neighbourhood from which it only took me between 20 to 40 minutes to my research sites. Mainly I visited New York University’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, the Centro Archives and Library, the New York Public Library, as well as some community organizations in Loisaida.

I spent two weeks in the impressive Elmer Bobst Library, which houses Tamiment, to examine the Ronald Lawson Research Files for the Tenant Movement in New York City. This collection includes vital organizational and personal documents about the community organization Interfaith Adopt-a-Building (AAB), to which I devote an entire chapter in my thesis. This organization was at the forefront of turning abandoned and decaying buildings on the Lower East Side into newly renovated and affordable homes for lower income earners. The documents in this collection includes interviews with key leaders of the organization as well as details on specific projects and their overall working ethic: sweat equity as a means to home ownership.

At the New York Public Library’s Schwarzman building, I examined the holdings of the Vincent Astor Foundation’s archives, which holds letters and forms pertaining to AAB and another primary organization in my thesis, The Real Great Society or RGS (the foundation funded AAB and RGS for several years). This helped me to get a picture of the financial requirements for the largely self-help initiatives of AAB and RGS.

Finally, I went to the biggest Puerto Rican archive in the US: the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in East Harlem. They hold collections on key organizations such as Charas, Seven Loaves, El Puerto Rican Embassy, AAB, and RGS. I was one of the first scholars to fully examine the still unprocessed 17 boxes of material on Charas, which operated for almost 40 years in Loisaida and kept records dating back to their beginnings in the mid 1960s.

I will return to New York City in 2016 to conduct additional interviews with people active in the organizations as well as curate an exhibit on Charas at the Loisaida Center—a project that I’m working on with the director of that center. This key research trip would not have been possible without the support of BAAS and EAAS and the material I found will enrich my research, which I look forward to presenting at the prestigious American Historical Association Annual Meeting 2016 in Atlanta.

Timo Schrader is a Ph.D. student at the University of Nottingham and recipient of the Vice Chancellor’s Scholarship for Research Excellence, researching the history of Puerto Rican community activism in Loisaida in the post-World War II decades. He is also the Associate Postgraduate Director of the Centre for Research in Race and Rights (C3R) at the University of Nottingham.

Between January and March of this year, I was able to spend two days per week at UCL’s Institute of the Americas. The BAAS/UCL-IA Visiting Fellowship allowed me to begin work on a new research project that explores the manner in which the American South has been represented on British television over the last half decade. It focuses on a number of documentaries, such as Trevor McDonald’s ‘The Mighty Mississippi’ (2012), TV chef Rick Stein’s ‘Tasting the Blues’ (2012), the comedian Hugh

Laurie’s ‘Down By the River’ (2011), and the series ‘Stephen Fry in America’ (2009), which I believe are all indicative of the current popular transatlantic interest in the life and culture of the South. They reproduce and maintain myths and stereotypes of the region that scholars of the South have been working hard to dispel. Importantly, they also demonstrate that the South is maintained and experienced as a construct through heritage tourism within an international context, not just within internal American discourses of heritage and identity.

The fellowship was therefore a great way to dedicate time to a new project, something which is not easy immediately following a PhD. Quite early on I gave a paper on my initial findings and early thoughts, which gave me a good basis from which to continue the project. The Institute has a very vibrant academic community, and while there I was able to get to know and draw on the experience of excellent scholars like Jonathan Bell and Iwan Morgan, as well as all the academics that regularly attend the Institute of Historical Research’s seminars. Being in London also offers a number of possibilities given the amount of resources available through the various university libraries but also the British Library, Senate House and the Institute of Historical Research. Being in London also allowed me to attend numerous events, such as the talks by Jeanne Theoharis and Tim Stanley. Overall, it was a great experience which I would recommend to all early career scholars who need some time and space to devote to a new or existing project.

Christian O’Connell is a Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Gloucestershire. Primarily a cultural historian, his research examines the transatlantic diffusion of African American culture in Europe. His first book Blues, How Do You Do? Paul Oliver and the Transatlantic Story of the Blues will be published by the University of Michigan Press in August 2015. He has also been recently awarded the Fulbright-Elon Scholar Award, for which he will be teaching and researching at Elon University in North Carolina between January and May 2016.

It is with profound and heartfelt regret that the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham announces the retirement as of September this year of Professor Judie Newman O.B.E., a world-renowned scholar of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century American literature, Postcolonial literature and the literature of slavery, among much much more.

Professor Newman was brought up and educated in Thurso, Caithness, Scotland. She gained Honours MA in English Language and Literature (1972) and in French Language and Literature (1974) at the University of Edinburgh. She worked at the University of Metz, (1972-3), then gained a Carnegie fellowship for doctoral study (Clare College, Cambridge, PhD American literature 1982). From 1976 to 1999 she was Lecturer, Reader, and then Professor of American and Postcolonial Literature, School of English, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, moving in 2000 to the Chair of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is a recipient of the Arthur Miller Prize in American Studies, a former Chair of the British Association for American Studies, a Founding Fellow of the English Association, and an Academician, Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences.

As testament to Professor Newman’s stellar contributions to her intellectual fields over the decades, she was awarded the OBE in June 2012 for services to scholarship.

A prolific and exceptional researcher as well as a beautifully eloquent and brilliantly erudite writer, Professor Newman’s publications are vastly wide-ranging, intellectually expansive and theoretically cutting-edge. Covering a breath-taking array of timeframes, national contexts, intellectual concerns and thematic issues, she has published numerous monographs over the decades which have all augured a sea change in scholarship. These include: Saul Bellow and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), John Updike (Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), Nadine Gordimer (Routledge 1988), Nadine Gordimer: Palabra, Sexo y Consciencia en Africa (1997), The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions (Hodder Education, 1995); Alison Lurie (Editions Rodopi B. V., 2000); Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter: A Casebook (Oxford University Press, 2003), Fictions of America: Narratives of Global Empire (Routledge, 2007); ed. with Celeste-Marie Bernier, Public Art, Memorials and Atlantic Slavery (Routledge 2009. 2010); and Utopia and Terror in Contemporary American Fiction (Routledge 2013, 2014). Leading the intellectual vanguard, she was the first scholar to edit Harriet Beecher Stowe’s lesser known yet hauntingly powerful tale of black revolutionary heroism, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (Edinburgh University Press, 1992, 1999, 2014). Among Professor Newman’s numerous forthcoming publications is her co-edited volume (with Celeste-Marie Bernier and Matthew Pethers) titled, Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century Letters and Letter Writing (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press, 2016) for which she has written a seminal essay on Louisa May Alcott. In addition to her superlative array of book publications, she has written over one hundred essays on a breathtaking number of topics including slave narratives and neo-slave narratives, Black Atlanticism, Utopia and Dystopia, and in addition to excavating and examining a vast array of works written by Anglo American, African American, Jewish American, Chinese American authors.

Professor Judie Newman’s stellar accomplishments are by no means restricted to her inspirational and seminal contributions to national and international research arenas in her role as the leading Professor of American Studies of her generation. In addition to her exemplary achievements in research, she is a world-class teacher who has committed her career to inspiring, motivating, supporting and caring for students. Always a source not only of intellectual dynamism, inspirational leadership and visionary expertise, Professor Newman is an exceptionally kind and generous colleague who provides any and every support by freely offering her advice and also by acting as an exceptional mentor, advisor and friend.

As the UK Higher Education landscape shifts and turns in a myriad of constellations, words fail to express the fundamental honour it has been to have the privilege of working alongside Professor Newman. The corridors of the Trent Building will never be the same without Professor Newman’s joyful, whistling, inspirational presence and so this is a perfect reason, if any were needed, to entice her back at any and every opportunity. We will miss you.

Celeste-Marie Bernier is a Professor of African American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK, and Associate Editor of the Journal of American Studies (Cambridge University Press). Currently Celeste is a Visiting Professor at the North American Institute, King’s College London.

First, I would like to thank the Eccles Centre and Eccles Centre staff, Phil Davies, Cara Rodway, and Phil Hatfield, for the tremendous opportunity that this fellowship has represented. I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of my time at the British Library and also the opportunity that was provided to give a talk about my project which is a history of terrorism and counterterrorism in Canada. In particular,

the questions posed to me in response the talk have raised important issues that I intend to incorporate directly into my research and final monograph.

This entire 4 weeks has been a revelation. I had never previously conducted research at the British Library before the fellowship. Now, I cannot imagine not working there every day as I have been for the past few weeks. My time spent has been extremely useful in relation to me beginning to frame the key aspects of what is a rather large research project. Specifically, I had the opportunity to read and think, something that is rarely available over such a sustained period of time.

During my time at the British Library, I read numerous books as starting points for what will be different chapters in my eventual monograph. Especially useful was the sustained period of time reading about and thinking about Fenianism and Fenians and what they represented in terms of political violence directed at Canada in the 19^th century. In addition to useful secondary sources, I accessed a number of microfiche containing rare 19^th century reports and other documents related to Fenianism and the assassination of Canadian parliamentarian, Thomas D’Arcy McGee. It was through this work that I envisioned how I will begin my book as I discovered that the first killing through political violence in Canadian history occurred just over 100 metres from where the most recent killing through political violence, the October 2014 attack in Ottawa, took place.

In addition to the work on Fenianism, I spent days reading and thinking about two other major incidents of political violence in Canadian history, the attacks of the Front de Liberation de Quebec across the 1960s and culminating in the 1970 October Crisis kidnappings, and the Air India bombing in 1985 in which 329 people were killed by a bomb planted by Sikh nationalists. The British Library had several key texts, in particular the English translation of Louis Fournier’s comprehensive history of the FLQ, which are not available at my home university. This detailed reading has allowed me to think in depth about these incidents and what they represent in terms of both Canadian history and the history of international terrorism.

Steve Hewitt is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of a number of books and articles related to security and intelligence in the past and present in a US, Canada, and UK context. Currently, he is working on a history of terrorism and counter-terrorism in Canada.

I feel fortunate to have been granted an Eccles Postgraduate Student Award, which gave me the opportunity to make use of resources at the British Library that are invaluable for my research. I am a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Glasgow carrying out a thesis on Persian rugs in American homes during the Gilded Age. Rugs and carpets played a central role in transforming houses into elegant yet comfortable homes.   My findings at the British Library allowed me to explore discourses related to home decor and domesticity in American women’s magazines at the turn of the

Twentieth century such as The Ladies’ Homes Journal, Harper’s Weekly or Harper’s Bazar. Additionally, I consulted volumes on home decorating advice such as Edith Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses. These sources inform a section of my thesis that addresses the ways in which advice literature and home decorators wished to ‘educate’ Americans on incorporating the elegance of the ‘Orient’ into their homes.

Amongst numerous types of floor coverings, Oriental rugs, Persian in particular, have fascinated decorators, authors of advice books and American consumers as they were often regarded as the embodiment of the mystery and sophistication of the Orient. During my month long stay in London over the summer, I had the opportunity to further explore the American home as the site where Gilded Age middle-class home-makers expressed their taste and desires, what it meant for them to purchase Persian rugs and the ways in which these rugs informed issues of domesticity and comfort that were the building blocks of the American middle-class home. In particular, in the middle-class domestic space, Persian rugs can be read as a hybrid space where conflicting ideas about home and middle class life-style came together. I look at these objects, not only as material manifestations of refinement and cosmopolitanism, but as symbols of the strategies that the middle-class adopted to construct its identity through the appropriation of objects and ideas that were once prerogative of the elites.

Furthermore, I analyzed the advertisements of Persian, or more generally, Oriental rugs that featured in the magazines I researched.  These sources will provide evidence for another section of my thesis that focuses on the imagined sites of consumption, such as novels, serialized novels in magazines, pictures and advertisements that inspired American home-makers when decorating their homes. This part of my research looks at the ways in which the advertising and manufacturing world tapped into ‘orientalist’ stereotypes that linked Persian rugs to the ideas of mystery and sophistication that were associated with the ‘Orient’.

Whilst tempting the readers with the allure of the exotic, these advertisements highlight another central theme in my research, the tension between authenticity and imitation. Persian and other Oriental rugs were at the centre of a debate amongst authors of domestic advice books and interior decorators: while some praised authentic Oriental rugs for their quality and durability, others advocated the purchase of imitation Oriental rugs manufactured in the United States because cheaper, therefore available to a wider number of families, but also because they lacked the ‘barbaric’ qualities of the items manufactures in the remote ‘Orient’.

These sources were augmented with the visual record of the images and photographs of home interiors that accompanied the articles in the early twentieth century American women’s magazines that I was able to find at the British Library. These have provided me with a wealth of material for my analysis of the American middle-class’ problematic relationship with notions of luxury and gentility but are also evidence of the new and creative ways in which these were negotiated and incorporated into the middle-class’ home and life style.

Bianca Scoti is a fourth year part-time doctoral candidate in American studies at the University of Glasgow and a member of BAAS and The Glasgow American Studies Postgraduate Research Group.  With her research on Persian rugs in American homes during the Gilded Age, she investigates the meanings behind the purchase of this class of commodities. Ultimately, Scoti aims to illustrate how Persian rugs unveil the American middle-class’ tension between a quest for sophistication and the desire to express a class identity.

SAVAnT: a research network in American visual art and culture

SAVAnT (Scholars of American Visual Arts and Text) is a research network that aims to foster dialogue between Americanists and Art Historians working on American art and visual culture. It was founded by Joanna Pawlik (Art History, Sussex) and Doug Haynes (American Studies, Sussex) in August 2014.

We seek to investigate some of the different methodologies and emphases in approaches to visual material in Art History and American Studies and to think through how our teaching and research might benefit from interdisciplinary and inter-departmental exchange. Participants in the network are based in universities across the UK, at all career levels. We have recently begun working with the CHASE consortium; our plans are to extend the network further to create an academic community and research base in the hitherto relatively unexplored junction of American Studies and Art History.

SAVAnT so far:

An inaugural roundtable took place in September 2014 in Senate House, London. Fourteen invited participants addressed issues of concern to the network, such as how questions of (inter)disciplinarity in the study of American art and visual culture have affected career paths, teaching and research, as well as practical issues of which publishers, journals, conferences and REF panels we submit our research to. This meeting proved very fruitful and some longstanding academic ties were forged there; many participants recognised the institutional disjunction SAVAnT was formed to address.

In April 2015, a SAVAnT panel was convened for the BAAS (British Association for American Studies) conference in Northumbria.  In “Objects in Narrative”, speakers presented to a packed room on a diverse range of American art and visual material – from Civil War paintings of domestic interiors to postcards and mail art, and from the commodity aesthetics of Jeff Koons to cultural production exploring migration and exile by contemporary Chicana and Cuban American artists.

On July 10, 2015 SAVAnT hosted Facing America, a symposium co-sponsored by the Sussex Centre for American Studies and the Eccles Centre at the British Library. Professor Celeste Marie Bernier (Nottingham) and Professor David Peters Corbett (UEA) were keynotes.

The event explored the many ways in which faces, “facingness” and faciality can be understood in American art and visual culture. Papers addressed such areas as the painting of George Caleb Bingham, African-American portraiture, Native American portraits, presidential portraits, post-AIDs identity, Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs of the Soviet Union, faces in surveillance, Scarlet Johansson’s face on the cinema screen, and much else. Speakers came from UK, US and European universities. This was a wonderful event with excellent papers, many guests and plenty of informed and enlightening discussion. An edited collection of essays will, we hope, be forthcoming from this symposium.

In conjunction with the CHASE consortium (in this case primarily working with Sussex, Essex, UEA and the Courtauld), SAVAnT participated in a follow-up event to Facing America: Chasing America! The purpose of this event was to ascertain the range and detail of interest in American visual culture across CHASE in the fields both of PhD students and faculty research. The day showed us that there is considerable interest and expertise in art history, visual culture and American Studies in the consortium; SAVAnT seeks to enhance this intra-CHASE network through its connections with academics and research students from other universities and institutions in the UK and US.

Viewed abstractly, the geography of David Foster Wallace’s life spans the country. He was born on the East Coast, in upstate New York, in 1962, and he died 46 years later on the West Coast, in California. The centre of his creative life, however, arguably lies away from those metropolitan coastal hubs, in the country’s centre. Here, in a pair of small settlements that break-up a landscape that Wallace nearly always described in terms of its iconic flatness and endless corn fields, he enjoyed what Charles B. Harris has called “his most productive period,”[1] writing at least part

of everything he published after 1993, amid a “cartographic obelisk, walled at the sides and tapered to green points at the horizons front and back.”[2] With the generous award of a BAAS Founders Travel Grant, I travelled to the Midwest to give the keynote paper at the second annual Wallace conference (hosted by Illinois State University, where Wallace worked between 1993 and 2002), and spent a week conducting related research in the twinned city and town of Bloomington-Normal.

At the core of both this keynote and the associated research was my ongoing work preparing (in collaboration with the Wallace Literary Trust) a volume of Wallace’s selected letters. Because Wallace did not keep copies of his letters and cards, I’ve spent much of the last five years attempting to reverse-engineer a blueprint of Wallace’s correspondence network, working first, from clues in his published writing and interviews, and, second, from various leads present in the letters that I’ve gathered. Based on this reverse-engineering process, I’ve come to think that what we have in his novels, essays, blurbs, and interviews, is an iceberg map of Wallace’s literary America. That is, these different parts of his published work are the visible signs of deeper connections, intellectual investments, and personal engagements. The letters, by contrast, are the substantial submerged mass that lie beneath the polished, visible surface, and—because Wallace defined himself as a writer so strongly in his letters—what I think they present is an unusually vivid snapshot of an emerging collective of writers whose interchange of ideas and shared social, psychological, and cultural concerns is likely to provide material for later studies of writer networks and their relationship to literary movements.

The Illinois Wallace conference (which is the largest, and, in many ways, the most important event of its kind) provided me with an opportunity to present a skeletal outline of this network as it’s mapped in my edition-in-progress, describing the project’s challenges and my broader discoveries. Both the conference and the later research provided a vast amount of information about Wallace’s life and work in Bloomington that will significantly enrich my efforts to annotate his letters.  Because the conference featured many of Wallace’s former colleagues, friends, and students (including David Anderson, Victoria Frenkel Harris, JT Jackson Robert McLaughlin, Brian Monday, Sally E. Parry), and because many of his friends continue to live nearby, this was a rich atmosphere for a quasi-biographical researcher, and aside from locating new letters, I can only gesture, via one of Wallace’s signature forms—the list—toward the things I discovered: I knew that Wallace’s antipathy to John Barth had been overstated, but I didn’t know that he had been so excited by the appearance of Barth’s “Ad Infinitum” in Harper’s (Jan. 1994) that he’d had a graduate student Xerox the story so that he could press it enthusiastically into the hands of his colleague, Charles B. Harris; I knew that writing about literature and belief was often important to Wallace, but I hadn’t realized that James Wood (despite his many ambivalent comments about Wallace’s work) had specifically requested that Wallace be sent a copy of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate (1999), and that Wallace had read at least parts of the book; I knew that Wallace’s first blurb had probably been written for David Gurr’s The Ring Master (1987), but I didn’t think two Wallace scholars in a diner (Harris and Mary Holland) would completely change the way I saw that blurb in relation to Wallace’s other writing in the late 1980s; I knew that Wallace had been involved at the nexus of the hugely influential Review of Contemporary Fiction and Dalkey Archive Press in the 1990s, but not that he had reworked many of the literary translations undertaken by the journal; I knew that Wallace’s investment in poetry had been understated, but I was still surprised when Gale Walden told me that Wallace’s underlinings in his copy of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets might reveal unexpected lines of structural and thematic influence.

The full range of my findings will eventually underwrite my edition of Wallace’s letters. In the meantime, I’d like to express my gratitude to the BAAS; to Jane Carman and Jeanne Merkle at ISU; to the Harris family; to the David Foster Wallace Memorial Fund (Illinois State University Foundation); and to everyone who took the time to share their Wallace stories with me in Illinois.

Footnotes

[1] Charles B. Harris, “David Foster Wallace: ‘That Distinctive Singular Stamp of Himself.’” Critique 51 (2010): 170.

[2] David Foster Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair. New York: Norton, 1989. 268.

Stephen J. Burn (Reader in American Literature at the University of Glasgow) is the author or editor of five books and numerous essays about contemporary fiction. Forthcoming projects include American Literature in Transition: 1990-2000 (Cambridge UP) and (with Mary Holland) Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace (MLA).