Over the past two years l have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to attend the annual BAAS and BAAS PG conferences. These events have given me the chance to hear thought provoking research papers and be a part of the open, lively, and ever-evolving dialogues in American Studies. At King’s College London, where I am a PhD candidate, our American Studies department was recently restructured and has become a virtual Institute. After the loss of this focal point for our studies, the PhD cohort I am part of formed a student research group. Organisations such as these are important spaces for facilitating academic discussion but in particular they provide PhD students with invaluable social support networks that help

individuals through what can be a challenging and isolating experience. There are many similar networks to ours across universities in Britain, where PGs and ECRs would further benefit from being in dialogue with each other, and by being affiliated with BAAS. I ran for the role of postgraduate representative to engage with and connect networks of postgraduates, meet individual members, and to help the American and Canadian Studies community at BAAS continue to grow.

In my new role, I would like to begin my first term by thanking everyone at the annual conference at Queens University in Belfast for making me feel welcome and supported after the election. In the next few months I will be supporting the organising committee at Leeds University, hosts of the next BAAS PG conference. I am hoping to build on the success of my predecessor Rachael Alexander who together with the previous year’s committee, and in collaboration with HOTCUS, put on a tremendous event at the University of Glasgow. Throughout this year I will also be attending Executive Committee meetings and sitting in on the Conferences Subcommittee, where I hope I can best represent the concerns of postgraduates and raise any pertinent issues.

Currently, I am working on putting together a manifesto that addresses the immediate needs of the wider postgraduate community. In order to do this I would really like to hear from ACS students and academics, through U.S. Studies Online and the @baas_pgs twitter account. I am really looking forward to working with the new co-editors of U.S. Studies Online, Jade Tullett and Todd Carter, as well as the ECR representative, Ben Offiler. I think U.S. Studies Online has proved to be an invaluable resource and forum for highlighting the work of PGs and ECRs, voicing the issues academics are currently facing, and promoting American Studies events. Digital spaces are important for introducing researchers to one another, and I think that profiles like the 60 seconds interviews on U.S. Studies Online are great for ‘meeting’ academics before conferences. I would like to help further develop this digital infrastructure to link student networks together before events take place, and to encourage members to attend BAAS conferences to make the vital contributions and connections that keep our ACS community so vibrant.

I do not wish to speak for all postgraduates but I believe that concerns over finding a job, building a successful CV, and meeting the expectations of academic employers loom larger than ever over those about to complete their PhDs. I feel the advice of early career researchers who have tackled or are facing the challenges of getting published, choosing to pursue research posts or teaching jobs, and developing their next projects, is crucial. I think ensuring that professional development sessions continue to be on the BAAS programme, and the events it sponsors, will be a key facet of my role as postgraduate representative. However, I would also like to see these sessions expand not only to address the practical concerns of employment but also to acknowledge the pressures and stresses individual researchers can experience. Conferences and online journals provide postgraduate researchers with diverse opportunities to present their work, but most often they are the indispensable spaces where academics connect with one another.

I am keen to see that BAAS goes from strength to strength and continues to provide postgraduates in the ACS community with that confidence boost which comes from sharing ideas in a supportive environment.

Please get in touch with any concerns, problems or suggestions, or just to say hello, over at @baas_pgs!

Katerina Webb-Bourne is a Ph.D. candidate at King’s College London. Her research explores the racial politics, gender dynamics, and commemorative practises of the Black Indian community of New Orleans.

As an Eccles Centre Fellow during 2013, I was able to benefit from the wide range of resources available at the British Library for the study of American foreign policy in a transnational context. My research project, which has since resulted in the publication of peer reviewed articles in prominent journals such as Diplomatic History and History, book chapters with Bloomsbury, Manchester University Press and Georgetown University Press, and a forthcoming monograph, involved examining aspects of the interrelationship between US intelligence activity and American diplomacy in South Asia, a nexus of the on-going ‘War on Terror’. Alongside broad considerations of the political, economic and cultural implications of intelligence

and security connections forged between the United States, India and Pakistan, from late 1940s to the present, I wanted to explore how relationships conceived by American intelligence agencies and South Asian governments for the purposes of promoting regional stability and democracy, evolved into justifications for conflict and repression. Moreover, there was the challenge of evaluating why Americans had come to think of intelligence primarily in terms of surveillance, personal freedom and civil liberties, while in South Asia, it is associated with covert action, subversion and grand conspiracy. My overall objective was to assess whether, in an age when the United States has championed democracy promotion, neo-imperialist labels attached to American intelligence activities in the Indian subcontinent can be considered reflective of a collective South Asian cultural neurosis.

Access to the Library’s exceptional collections of literature addressing the evolution of American intelligence activity after 1947, and more particularly that within South Asia, proved invaluable in providing the research with firm conceptual anchors. From a North American perspective, I was able to access a wide range of primary sources illuminating key aspects of the post-1945 US foreign policy. Notably, the need to undertake many costly and time consuming research visits to the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and Presidential Libraries across the United States, was obviated to a considerable extent by access afforded to the Library’s extensive suite of digital primary materials. The on-line Declassified Documents Reference System, Digital National Security Archive and Foreign Information Broadcasting Service Records, yielded especially rich and significant insights into the impact of American intelligence activity on wider US representation in, and relations with, the Indian subcontinent. Equally, digital access to records of Congressional hearings and other legislative documents enabled my work to reflect upon broader legislative and public voices, and contrast these with official government narratives.

Crucially, the Library’s collections also facilitated the incorporation into my work of a strong and distinct sense of South Asian agency. The diverse private papers and institutional records contained within the India Office Records, offered up priceless perspectives on shifts in the subcontinents political and cultural responses to Western intelligence activity, from the British colonial period through to the present. Likewise, the Library’s comprehensive holdings of South Asian newspapers, published in India and Pakistan, and in English and vernacular languages, provided a means of evaluating how intelligence issues were covered in the subcontinent, and the sociopolitical significance that they came to occupy in public discourse.

My research has benefited immeasurably from the opportunities opened up by an extended period of work at the Library. The breadth and depth of secondary and primary materials available for consultation, and the expert assistance and sage advice offered by Philip Davies and the staff at the Eccles Centre, proved crucial in transforming an embryonic research project into a series of published articles, edited chapters and a forthcoming book. Moreover, my fellowship has left me with a far deeper and more nuanced understanding of the innumerable ways in which the resources of the Library and the Eccles Centre (both intellectual and material) can serve as a catalyst for original research and knowledge exchange in the field of American Studies.

Paul McGarr is Assistant Professor in American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham.

I am grateful to the Eccles Centre for awarding me a Visiting European Fellowship in North American Studies in 2015. The fellowship enabled me to travel from Berlin to London in early January 2016 and to spend a dedicated period of four weeks at the British Library. The fellowship supported my primary research on early American print culture; I am at present completing a monograph on early American political caricature prints published between 1790 and 1830. My research is focused on analyzing primary documents and sifting through largely uncatalogued and rare material, including the caricatures themselves, letters, diaries, and newspapers. It was for this

purpose, to work on early American newspapers, that I was awarded the fellowship.

There has been scarce scholarship on separately published late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century political American caricature, despite their frequent inclusion as illustrations in modern texts on history, politics, art, and geography. Satirical images from this period provide important yet heretofore unrecognized models that can better inform scholars on national identity and artistic exchange. This research void contrasts sharply with topical publications on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century European caricatures. Recent scholarship, such as Diana Donald’s The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (1996) and Vic Gattrell’s City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London (2006) explore the dynamic and complicated relationships found in British satirical print culture and high art, social classes, and politics, demonstrating that images had the potency to impact, rather than merely reflect, cultural tensions. Recent research, found primarily on English and French caricature, underscores the importance of an analytic study on American satirical print culture, and affords the occasion for a comparative study between political satirical prints published in America and Europe directly after the American Revolution.

My current research project connects historical, political, and art history scholarship by critically examining early American satirical prints, concentrating primarily on iconographical cues and historically specific circumstances, which have been frequently misidentified or misconstrued. To do this, newspapers and other primary documents are required. Over the course of my fellowship, I returned to the newspapers in the BL collection in order to locate specific information on caricatures. This also included using the Readex database of early American newspapers, an invaluable tool for any scholar working in early American print culture. The database allows for researchers to enter keywords to better locate relevant newspapers, narrowing time spent combing through the physical object or pointing you in new, previously unknown direction of enquiry. Advertisements and published editorials are particularly relevant to my research as they provide a wealth of information on early American caricatures. I have been able to find dates of publication, the price for sale of an individual caricature, and artist’s names for caricatures from this period.

While a fellow, I spent the majority of my time going through advertisements in Philadelphia newspapers, attempting to locate dates publication for a number of caricatures believed to have been published during the War of 1812. I am happy to report that several discoveries were made and I am pleased to include these in the final book manuscript.

My short time at the British Library was wonderfully productive and I only wish that my fellowship was for a longer duration. The British Library has an outstanding collection of objects necessary for my own research, but it is really the members of staff that makes the BL completely unique. I have yet to find a better place to work. Thanks are due to Matthew Shaw and Phil Davies for their generosity and obvious joy at talking about American subject matter, and to the all the wonderful staff members in the Rare Books reading room. Five years ago I completed my Ph.D. at University College London and as a graduate student, I researched and wrote the majority of my dissertation in the Rare Books reading room. It was such a pleasure to walk into the reading room as an Eccles Fellow, and have many of those staff members that had been so present during my Ph.D. welcome me back. Many thanks to the Eccles Centre for providing these funding opportunities to scholars working on American topics.

Allison M. Stagg holds an IPODI postdoctoral fellowship in the department of Art History at the Technische Universität Berlin.

I undertook a ten day research trip at the British Library, generously funded by the Eccles Centre for American Studies. The purpose of the trip was to consult a number of manuscript materials for my PhD project, which considers the impact of the Jacobite uprising of 1745-46 on British imperialism in North America in the years preceding the American Revolution. The project examines the process of militarisation and, particularly, pacification in the Scottish Highlands and considers how this affected the way that

British army officers and government officials approached and countered military threats in North America. It seeks to show what cultural preconceptions existed in the minds of members of the British imperial elite and how these were altered by militarisation in two separate fringes of the British Empire.

I consulted a wide range of manuscripts from several collections in the British Library including the Haldimand, Hardwicke and Newcastle Papers. As the project is concerned with the experiences of the British army, the Haldimand Papers were of particular interest as they document the military experience of Henry Bouquet during the French and Indian War in North America and Sir Frederick Haldimand during the same period and later commanding in various colonies and acting as Commander-in-Chief during the absence of Thomas Gage. The papers of these two officers provide a vast trove of correspondence between various army officers in the colonies and members of the British government in Whitehall. This provides a detailed account of the militarisation of North America and the encounters of a number of military officers in different colonies with colonial settlers, Native Americans and French Canadians. In particular, Haldimand’s correspondence during his time stationed in the Floridas and upon his temporary promotion to Commander-in-Chief of the forces in North America illuminates the hardening attitudes of many in the British army and government towards the disaffected colonists.

One consideration of my current research is the importance of trade, and particularly government control over trade, as a method of pacification in Scotland and North America. Studying correspondence from the period after the Jacobite uprising and the papers of the Commission of Forfeited Estates in the National Records of Scotland highlighted that the annexing of forfeited estates in the Highlands and the appointing of a committee to manage them and introduce industry and manufactures was a key aim of the British in order to ensure long-term peace in the region. A number of documents within the Hardwicke Papers supported this point, emphasising that such a plan was the quickest and easiest way to ensure peace in the Highlands and to improve that region. As well as confirming the importance of a well-regulated trade in the Scottish Highlands, my research at the British Library also illuminated that members of the British imperial elite at home and in North America were convinced that a well-regulated trade was similarly important for ensuring lasting peace in the North American backcountry. The importance of regulating and controlling trade there is stated numerous times in various manuscripts and collections and this will allow me to draw connections between attitudes and policy in Scotland and those in North America, particularly with regards to Native Americans.

One interesting and unforeseen connection between Scotland and North America uncovered during my research at the British Library was found in the Haldimand Papers in a series of letters from Thomas Gage, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in North America, to Henry Bouquet in October 1764 during Pontiac’s War. Gage questions what the fate of colonists who have conspired with the Native Americans should be and notes that in Scotland during the Jacobite uprising those who were rebelling against the British crown were treated as traitors to their country and tried by the civil courts. He suggests that, similarly, those in North America currently rebelling against the crown ought to be treated in the same way. However, it is clear in his correspondence that Gage is only referring to those settlers who have been fighting with the Native Americans and not the Native Americans themselves. The Native American tribes fighting the British were treated as guilty by association so that not only the fighters but whole villages were killed or had their houses destroyed. Despite Gage’s claim that all the rebels in Scotland were treated as traitors and tried by civil courts many Highlanders were in fact treated similarly to the Native Americans and assumed to be guilty through association. This meant that many, including women and children, were killed or lost their homes without facing trial. As a result, this is a very valuable letter which documents a previously unexplored connection between events in Scotland and North America. Additionally, it provides useful evidence that will be further explored as to how the eighteenth-century rules of warfare regarding different types of combatants were interpreted by military officers at that juncture.

In addition to the documents themselves, which were valuable resources for my project, the experience of researching at such a prestigious institution has certainly contributed to my development as a researcher. Discussing my research with one of the curators of American materials at the library during an earlier trip gave me the opportunity to focus on the documents that would prove most relevant for my research and encouraged me to think more widely about my topic in order to discover some interesting manuscripts I may have previously passed over. Having a set period of time to examine the many relevant materials I had picked out honed my ability to quickly analyse a large amount of material and find the relevant information from it. Not to mention ten days pouring over eighteenth century letters improved my eye for deciphering awkward handwriting! These skills will be of much use moving forward with both my PhD and future research as I have large volumes of material in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom still to examine.

I thoroughly enjoyed my research at the British Library and look forward to detailing my findings in my dissertation. Additionally, I will be using some of the evidence discovered at the British Library to support my thesis in an upcoming conference paper I will be giving to the European Association for American Studies in April. At that conference I will be part of an Eccles Centre panel considering transatlantic experiences of empire and I am delighted that my involvement with the Eccles Centre will carry on to that conference.

Nicola Martin is a PhD student in the department of History at the University of Stirling.

Having just embarked upon a project intended to offer an empirical and theoretical reshaping of the Anglo-American literary canon through the recovery of a long-neglected but culturally significant canon of novels written about the New World before the Revolution, my recent Eccles Centre Fellowship proved to be an ideal means of finding my feet amid a potentially elusive and intimidating mass of sources. So far my research has been dedicated to establishing the contents and parameters of five key genres of colonial-era American-set fiction – the Robinsonade, the Transportation Novel, the Plantation Novel, the Captivity Novel, and the Loyalist Novel – each of which offers a distinct spin on a set of shared questions about the transformations that life in America wrought upon British social identities, sexual relations and racial

categories. In seeking to map a much broader novelistic engagement with colonial America than that familiar from a handful of much-discussed texts like Aphra Behn’s Oronooko (1688) and Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), I was fortunate to have access to the British Library’s unrivalled holdings in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature. Digging around in the outer reaches of the BL’s catalogue not only allowed me to fill in some important holes in my corpus by offering me books whose titles I’d previously only encountered as footnotes in secondary sources, it also turned up some unexpected, and previously unheralded, gems – such as Charles Croke’s Fortune’s Uncertainty (1667), a fascinating tale of a young rake’s deportation to Virginia as an indentured servant that now stands as perhaps the first extant novel to incorporate an American setting.

As it happened, during the Fellowship my eventual fate, like Croke’s hero Rodolphus, was to follow the path of the indentured servant to the colonies, since I soon became immersed in multiple examples of the Transportation Novel, as well as the scattered but substantial literature surrounding it. In addition to roman â clef like the anonymous Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman Returned from a Thirteen Years Slavery in America (1745) and Virtue Triumphant; or, Elizabeth Canning in America (1757), both based (very loosely) on sensational court cases and their aftermath, for example, I was able to find a host of autobiographies, tracts and ballads dealing with indentured servitude – ranging from The Vain Prodigal Life, and Tragical Penitent Death of Thomas Hellier (1680) to The Sufferings of William Green (1775). Crucially, this plethora of material enabled me to comprehensively situate the Transportation Novel within wider cultural debates over indenture and to fully comprehend the distinctive agenda of this form, which presents, among other things, a much more optimistic and individualistic take on indenture than its counterparts in other genres. It was very much the depth and breadth of the British Library’s archive that allowed me to develop such a fully-rounded angle on the texts I am concerned with. Indeed, my Fellowship has already borne fruit in an essay on the various cultural representations of indenture during the colonial period that is forthcoming in The Cambridge History of American Working-Class Literature.

Since completing my Fellowship I have continued to draw on my research at the British Library as I begin to wrestle with the analytical questions raised by the category of the Transportation Narrative (an issue I have written about for BAAS on U.S. Studies Online), and I have already made invaluable headway in investigating the wider cultural reception of many of the novels I have been working on thanks to the material I gathered from eighteenth-century newspapers and magazines while at the BL. Much work remains to be done: on the material production and circulation of the “colonial American novel”; on the different ways in which these novels were apprehended in Britain and America; on their relation to a wider body of colonial writing; on the careers of their authors (some of whom had first-hand experience of the New World); and on the implications of this corpus for current models of transatlanticism, fictionality and book history. As I chart these various paths I am sure that the British Library will again prove indispensable.

Matthew Pethers is an Assistant Professor of American Intellectual and Cultural History at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature, history and print culture, including articles in Early American Literature, History of Science, and American Studies, and book chapters in John Neal and Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (Bucknell University Press, 2012), The Materials of Exchange Between Britain and North East America, 1750-1900 (Ashgate, 2013), and New Directions in the History of the Novel (Palgrave, 2014). He is a co-editor of the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing.

Generous funding from the BAAS Founders’ Travel Award allowed me to spend three weeks in the United States in March 2016 conducting archival sleuthing towards the completion of my first monograph and the launch of two new projects, as well as enabling participation in two major conferences in my field. In a nutshell: it was quite a trip!

My first stop on this whistle-stop tour was Penn State University, where I attended the biennial meeting of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists conference and delivered a paper entitled “‘Splendid Failure’: the Print Culture of Radical Postbellum Pasts” as part of a larger panel on the topic of radical literary histories of the long nineteenth century which was chaired by Prof. Bridget Bennett and included papers by John Funchion, Michael Drexler, and Eric Lott. The

discussion sparked by the panel, as well as conversations at the newly-formed Archives Caucus cluster lunch, gave me a fantastic opportunity to brainstorm how to get a new project that’s been percolating on the back burner for some time now—a digital critical edition of African-American anarchist and labor activist Lucy Parsons’ Life of Albert Parsons—more firmly off the ground. Attendance at the conference also gave me a chance to meet with a group of C19 Americanists who share my interest in Transatlanticism, Franco-American style, and talk through ways we might concretely collaborate in future.

I then headed to New York City, where I was able to spend a week digging into a variety of materials related to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century anarchism, as well as a variety of pamphlets and broadsides related to the memory-culture surrounding the Paris Commune in the United States, at the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. The former will provide an invaluable springboard towards my new Lucy Parsons project, while the latter allowed me to tie up some final loose ends related to my forthcoming monograph, Sensational Internationalism (Edinburgh UP, 2016), which recovers the now largely-forgotten story of the Paris Commune’s spectacular afterlife as specter and spectacle in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American culture. In putting 1871—and, more particularly, the Paris Commune’s “audacious internationalism”—back on the map of American literary and cultural studies, my book contributes to the conversation begun by the seminal work of Michael Rogin and Larry J. Reynolds to recover the influence of the European uprisings of 1848 on the literary imagination of writers like Emerson and Melville and the literary history of the American Renaissance as well as more recent work to trace what Anna Brickhouse has termed the lingering “Franco-Africanist shadow” on American literary and cultural history in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.  But Sensational Internationalism offers another angle on that story of distant uprisings resounding at home: namely, how a foreign revolution came back to life as a domestic commodity, and why for decades another nation’s memory came to feel so much our own. Chronicling the Commune’s returns across a surprisingly vast and visually striking archive of periodical poems and illustrations, panoramic spectacles, children’s adventure fiction, popular and canonical novels, political pamphlets, avant-garde theater productions, and radical pulp, my book argues that the Commune became, for writers and readers across virtually all classes and political persuasions, a critical locus for re-occupying both radical and mainstream memory of revolution and empire, a key site for negotiating post-bellum gender trouble and regional reconciliation, and a vital terrain for rethinking Paris—and what it meant to be an American there—in U.S. fiction and culture.

My next stop was Washington, D.C., where I spent a fruitful three days exploring the Paul Avrich anarchist collection in the Rare Books and Special Collections room at the Library of Congress, where I was able to consult a number of different editions of pamphlets that Lucy Parsons edited and published, including the 25^th anniversary edition of The Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists in Court (1911), a limited-run biographical sketch of Voltairine de Cleyre which Emma Goldman published in 1933, and ephemera and other materials related to de Cleyre, Goldman, and Parsons in Chicago, all of which will provide invaluable context for my digital critical edition and material towards further work I’d like to do on anarchist women’s activism, a project I’m tentatively entitling “Radical Circles.”

Finally, my trip concluded in Princeton, NJ where I participated in the Critical Consumption: The Future of Food Studies conference organized by Prof. Anne A. Cheng and delivered a talk entitled, “Archiving the Senses,” which considers the matter of the senses in nineteenth-century American literary studies and, more generally, taste as an under-valued aesthetic register and under-historicized sensory one. Both the Q and A after my panel and the energizing two days of talks and keynote addresses enriched my thinking and helped me think more deeply about my new book project, Culinary Designs, which explores the rise of food writing and the making of American taste in the long nineteenth century.

In short, I am very grateful to BAAS for giving me the opportunity to embark on archival research and scholarly conversation that would have been unthinkable without this whirlwind trip.

Michelle Coghlan is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Manchester.

In January 2016, I undertook a research trip to the British Library supported by postgraduate fellowship funding from the Eccles Centre. My visit focused on primary and rare secondary sources in the Library’s American Civil War archives. It helped my research into the Irish experience of the conflict and sentiments expressed in accounts, letters and contemporary song lyrics.

The main focus of my research was a collection of over two hundred ballads gathered in a scrapbook of American Civil War song-sheets. These individual songs were bound together, making the Library’s collection incredibly rare. They form the foundation of my doctoral project as some thirty songs relate to Irish soldiers who fought in the

conflict. They complement other Civil War Irish American song-sheets and songsters I have researched in American, Irish, English and Scottish archives. They sing about Irish military service, views of the war, home-front experiences and hopes for an independent Ireland. The sources are also works of art; publishers decorated lyrics with intricate designs including drawings of soldiers, flags and African American minstrel caricatures. These were occasionally dyed in yellow, red and blue, and a few still retain vivid colouring. As song-sheets are ephemeral, their survival makes them special items in Civil War archives.

The Library also holds larger scrapbooks of Confederate musical song scores, including a collection entitled Celebrated Songs of the Confederate States of America. This contained a copy of the Confederate anthem The Bonnie Blue Flag, first written in 1861 by Ulster-Scotsman Harry Macarthy and set to a popular eighteenth century tune. Macarthy, the song and tune’s histories connect to my research into Irish music’s transmission across the Atlantic. This particular version of the song is unusual as it was part of a collection printed in London during the war and ‘Dedicated to the Confederate Exiles in Europe’. The collection also contained another song entitled Our Queen Varine, dedicated to Varina Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. While not relevant to my research specifically, it was an intriguing archive discovery. The songs hints at British and Confederate ties during the Civil War when the possibility of British recognition of Confederate sovereignty was a contemporary concern.

Other research at the Library included finding more Macarthy productions, including a one-act minstrel play, Deeds of Darkness, written in 1876. A ‘moral and laughable Ethiopian Extravaganza’, the piece reveals the continuance of popular racist minstrel shows in post-bellum America and provides evidence of Macarthy’s post-war career. My research had only traced the Ulster-Scot migrant’s pre-war and wartime professions, and it was interesting to find evidence of his post-Civil War activities. I also researched the histories of other Irishmen important to the history of Irish American Civil War songs and music. This included analysing works by and about General Thomas Francis Meagher, commander of the Union Army’s Irish Brigade, who became the subject of several Irish wartime verses. Furthermore, I studied works by and about Charles G. Halpine. Originally from County Meath, Halpine served in the Union Army and wrote popular stories and songs from the perspective of fictional Irish solider Miles O’Reilly. His writings offer a particular satirical and lyrical commentary of the conflict.

A week of reading Irish American Civil War archives relevant to my research into Irish wartime experiences and sentiments expressed in song and music has provided me with excellent sources that support my doctoral project’s findings. It has also generated new avenues of enquiry for further research. Many thanks to the Eccles Centre for awarding the postgraduate fellowship and providing assistance in making my trip to the British Library’s American archives possible and successful.

Catherine Bateson is a second year History doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh, researching songs produced about the Irish during the American Civil War and the sentiments they expressed. She analyses the topics these songs sang about, how they maintained a transnational diasporic cultural heritage through the use of Irish tunes, and what these sources suggest about 1860s Irish American identity formation.

Thanks to the support of the Eccles Centre, I have been able to visit the British Library for three weeks in December 2015. The research that I have been able to do has been a vital part of my PhD research entitled “The Role of Dutch Mediators and African American Actors in the Black Theatre Scene of London in the 1950s”. My PhD thesis focuses on Rosey E. Pool (1905-1971), a Dutch multilingual writer, translator, and anthologist of African American poetry, of Jewish descent. During the Second World War she worked as a teacher (Anne Frank was amongst her pupils), was a member of a German-Jewish resistance

group, and escaped from the Westerbork Nazi transit camp. Her experiences during the war transformed her interest in Black Poetry into a political strive, and she became involved in the American and British Black Arts Movements. Pool moved to Highgate, London, in 1949, and frequently visited the United States. At the British Library, I have focused on her period in London.

I have compared Pool to Paul Breman (1931-2008), another Dutch anthologist of African American poetry, also living in London. Both Rosey Pool and Paul Breman contributed to making London a contact zone (Pratt 1991) for African Americans, especially in the field of literature and theatre. Here, I will focus on Rosey Pool. Pool was one of the few people of her family to survive the Holocaust. In London she felt at home again, she wrote in her autobiography: ‘London has gained warmth through the presence of decolonized immigrants. […] [T]he great capital has gained colour, tone, and relaxation.’ Through correspondence and her travels, Rosey Pool formed a life line between her London home and various African American celebrities, such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and his wife Shirley Graham, Owen Dodson, and many others. Pool maintained contact with various organisations in London, such as the West African Arts Club (with Seth Cudjoe and Ben Enwonwu), the Negro Theatre Workshop (with Pearl Connor and Edric Connor), the Royal Court Theatre (Wole Soyinka, Oscar Lewenstein, and George Devine).

As these names suggest, this research touches many histories. In the 1950s and early 1960s London was an ‘in-between space’ (Homi Bhabha 1994:1-2) for both immigrants and temporary citizens. London often served as a training ground of political education. Writing transnational histories such as these always provides a challenge. You have to get acquainted with multiple historiographies that are often written within national contexts. Much of the sources I needed were not available in the Netherlands. Therefore I am very grateful for the Eccles Centre, BAAS, and the British Library. My time at the BL was spent examining books on the American and British Black Arts Movements, with Rosey Pool’s London home as a hub for black culture in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Rosey Pool’s contact were often not just friendships, but also formed the foundation for cultural and political mobilisation. Both Pool and Breman actively pursued both their own careers and the careers of others, while simultaneously creating political awareness. They both edited poetry anthologies, organised poetry recitals, and Pool also participated in theatre performances. As Paul Gilroy has pointed out (Gilroy in: Ugwu 1995:12), the link between black cultural practice and political aspirations has been a long tradition. Cultural practices have been highly significant in the ‘claiming of voice’ (bell hooks in: Ugwu 1995:212) for people in the Black Diaspora, and often a first step in emancipating – both in the U.S. and the U.K.

The 1947 performance of the American social protest play Deep Are the Roots is a good example. Set in the spring of 1945 in the parlour of a retired U.S. Senator, the play revolves around the deep-rooted (hence the title) racism and prejudice in the Deep South. In 1945 and 1946 the African American actor Gordon Heath (1918-1991) played the leading role in the Broadway adaption of the play, turning him into a Broadway star. Following its success, the play came to the Wyndham’s Theatre in London with the same cast. The theatre magazine The Stage noted in an article – simply called ‘Negro’ – that the presence of African Americans in the British theatres made ‘us feel more kindly towards them, it is obvious that we respect them as artists and are pleased to see them in our midst.’ Perhaps somewhat naively the writer emphasised that the ‘colour-bar’ was not an issue at all: ‘Both are artists and that is all that matters.’ Heath himself wryly remarked that when he came to Britain in 1947, ‘the “colour problem” was considered in England as someone else’s business’, reflecting the dominant, white voice. But to the black community in London performances such as Deep Are the Roots  meant much more. The American ‘race problem’ was used as a by-proxy way of raising political consciousness amongst the existing of colonial students, non-white immigrants, and even to African Americans themselves, passing through London. The period before the Nottingham/ Notting Hill riots of 1958 is often perceived as an ‘age of innocence’ in British historiography. As James Procter has argued, Britain’s early post-war black communities were in no sense ‘pre-political’ (Procter 2000:15).

Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, London served as an eye-opener for African Americans who visited the city. Gordon Heath for example, grew accustomed to the liberal climate in the London theatres. When he occasionally revisited his home country, it always shocked him to be treated as a second-class citizen (Bourne 2001:103). Pool and Heath met in Heath’s dressing room in Wyndham’s Theatre in London 1947. He was amazed by her knowledge: ‘How did this roly-poly Dutch lady who had never set foot in America come by her firmly-held opinions, her acute perceptions, her formidable intuitions, her informed passions?’ They soon became friends and kept in touch. In 1958, they both appeared on Dutch TV, in a Dutch translation of the BBC TV drama For the Defence (Stanley Mann, 1956). Heath played the role of a lawyer assigned to defend a white teenager who was accused of starting a race riot. For the performance Heath learned Dutch, and Pool taught him the correct pronunciation. Through theatre performances the Dutch audience was informed about racial issues abroad, and also making them aware of racial issues at home.

Rosey Pool, herself a victim of racial persecution by the Nazis, made the fight against racism her life mission. Her international activities show the intersectional scope of this research. Pool held several jobs at the BBC: between 1954 and 1957 she was involved in the BBC’s Dutch programmes. She also presented programmes on African American poetry, simply called ‘Negro Poetry’. In October 1952 Pool wrote to her friend Langston Hughes:

‘Did I or didn’t I tell you that our cherished child the Negro Poetry Programme in the BBC Third is coming off at last? This BBC is the strangest of broadcasting organisations I ever met and the Third Programme although a wonderful thing is rather Bohemian in its administration. This means that programmes are recorded and filed and just do as good English people do: they take their place in the queue. Well, at last we have reached our turn. We shall go on the air on two consecutive nights Thursday 13th November [1952] … and Friday 14th… Now keep your fingers crossed for all of us.’ (Anneke Buys 1986, n.p.)

In the years that followed Pool organised a variety of activities in London, all focusing on black poetry and black theatre. In September 1958 a poetry recital was held at the Royal Court Theatre, with poetry selected by Rosey Pool and Harlem Renaissance celebrity Eric Walrond. When Langston Hughes’ play Black Nativity was performed in the United Kingdom in 1962 (and again in 1965), Pool served as his ‘eyes on the ground’. She collected all the reviews of the play and sent them to Hughes.

The ‘invasion’ of African American actors on the British stage in this period was also an important reason for black British actors to organise themselves as well (Chambers 2011:112). On the one hand the references to American segregation made British actors more aware of the colour bar. In 1947 the play Anna Lucasta was performed with an all African American cast at His Majesty’s Theatre. Shortly afterwards the Negro Theatre Company was founded by Edric Connor. A somewhat similar organisation, Negro Theatre Workshop, was founded in 1961 by Pearl Connor. Rosey Pool was named as one of its patrons (‘Letters. The Negro Theatre Workshop Trust’, The Stage and Television Today, 2 December 1965, p. 11). On the other hand, African American actors were sometimes met with hostility, especially when they were more successful than their British peers. The Trinidadian playwright Errol John (1924-1988), for example, felt that his plays couldn’t succeed without having Americans in the cast of his stage productions (Stephen Bourne 2001:64).

The findings from my time at the British Library are a fundamental part of my doctoral work, and I therefore wish to thank the BAAS/Eccles Centre for their generous support.

Lonneke Geerlings is a PhD student at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. 

What is the new Assistant Editor role at U.S. Studies Online? Why was it created? 

Jade and Todd, Co-Editors of U.S. Studies Online: The Assistant Editor for European Relations role centres on extending and establishing relationships with European networks and scholars. Through this position we are hoping to build on the success of past collaborations

and to widen the scope of research, and the geography of our readership. It will play an important part in amplifying the European voice, which has become even more crucial in the post-referendum climate. We envision that U.S. Studies Online will use these relations and links to feature regular posts from across Europe, further supported by a specific ‘Euro-centric’ series later on in our publishing calendar.

Katharina brings extensive trans-European experience to this position, which is further complimented by her astute and creative thinking, and editorial talent. We hope that this marks the beginning of the next stage of U.S. Studies Online’s outreach, and will help to establish our position within wider European scholarly frameworks whilst also strengthening the voice of Postgraduates and ECRs.

Katharina, what are your short-term and long-term plans for the role?

Katharina Donn: My role centres on commissioning posts written by an international researcher or related to a European topic, and contributing to a USSO strand at the next BAAS and EAAS conferences. The position was launched with a call for contributions on the topic of transnationalising American Studies, enquiring how to define key concepts central issues such as the ‘border’, ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, both within and beyond the Americas. Graduate representatives of American Studies associations across Europe have been invited to contribute, with colleagues in Cadiz writing as we speak.

While awaiting responses, the European contribution to USSO in July will focus on current events. In a Brexit interview, Professor Leif Johan Eliasson, author of America’s Perceptions of Europe (2010), offers his evaluation of the EU referendum, his expectations on the impact of transatlantic ties, and a comparison with similar populist tendencies in the US. Where research resources are concerned, I am also in the process of putting together a list of exchange and research opportunities in Europe.

With an eye to the future, the focus will be on the BAAS 2017 and particularly the EAAS 2018 conference. These will offer opportunities to initiate international dialogues beyond the USSO blog, whilst developing the USSO spirit of collaborative enquiry in a conference setting.

Katharina Donn is a lecturer and post-doctoral academic fellow at the University of Augsburg, and currently a visiting research fellow at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. This summer, term she will be joining the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin as Visiting Professor. Her research focuses on trauma studies, and her first book, A Poetics of Trauma after 9/11: Representing Vulnerability in a Digitized Present ( Routledge) is forthcoming this year. She is also defining a post-doctoral project, “Risking Thought. Modernist Practices of Experimental Prose Writing,” exploring textualities on the borderlines between genres as practices of critique. Her work in public outreach includes a co-editing role with the literary magazine Litro, and she is a post-doctoral tutor with the Charity “Brilliant Club.”

The Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR) at the University of Central Lancashire held an interdisciplinary academic event to showcase Transnational figures in historical Black Atlantic culture and to highlight important new figures and movements in African Atlantic culture. An exciting feature of the event were two performances, one by Liverpool-based, Tayo Aluko, who presented Call Mr Robeson, a show that highlighted the career of the seminal performer, actor and political activist, Paul Robeson.

Aluko’s rich Nigerian baritone voice highlighted the power of Robeson’s voice and personality in a play that also foregrounded his oppression by the American State and his reaction to it. The other performance was by Benbo Productions from Dublin who brought their show The Cambria, which showcased Frederick Douglass’s liberating sojourn to Ireland in 1845.

Donal O’Kelly and Sorcha Fox’s wonderful renditions of a multitude of characters including Douglass captivated the audience. As well as theatre, the symposium showcased young black Scarborough-based artist Jade Montserrat who presented her video performances of Paris domiciled dancer, Josephine Baker’s Rainbow Tribe, that explored Baker’s adoption of a multi-racial family of children.

The academic element of the symposium interweaved amidst these artistic elements and included keynotes from George Lipsitz and Barbara Tomlinson from University of California, Santa Barbara’s Black Studies Department who discussed contemporary race relations in the United States, especially police violence against black people. Other keynotes were Celeste Marie Bernier from Nottingham on portrayals of Douglass and his family and Lisa Merrill from Hofstra, New York on black bodies in antebellum spaces.

The audience overall was around 30 people, with academics from Swansea to Durham and American Literature and culture undergraduates and postgraduates supported through BAAS funding.

Alan Rice is Professor in English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire.

One of the most pressing concerns currently facing the HE sector in the UK today is how to improve and maintain records on equality and diversity. It is a question that is both philosophically and institutionally challenging, requiring serious consideration and active response. Within the broad, interdisciplinary field of American Studies – which continues to produce exciting scholarship on issues of class, gender, sexuality, and race – the issue of how to ensure equal opportunities and diverse representation

across the board is an important one. BAAS is initiating a series of conversations and initiatives in the coming months to work with its membership on how best to tackle inequalities in Higher Education.

Since becoming Chair of BAAS in April, Professor Brian Ward has, alongside Kate Dossett, Chair of the Development and Education Subcommittee, sought to prioritise this question of diversity. A first, and important, step has been to co-opt Nicole King as Equality & Diversity Representative on the Development Subcommittee. To ensure that this position is given the significance it is due, BAAS will move towards making it a fixed role for a member of the executive (rather than through co-opting), thereby institutionalising the need to continually monitor and act on issues of equality and diversity.

Equalities work cannot be the work of individuals and so at the Executive Committee meeting held in June at King’s College London, it was decided that each subcommittee, as well as the executive committee, will make it a priority to look into how their work can respond to and shape new initiatives in equality and diversity.

We will also be looking to amend the BAAS constitution and relevant sections of the website to reiterate our commitment to monitoring, learning about and promoting best practice regarding issues of equality and diversity. As scholars, we all recognise the power that the language we use can have when it comes to creating safe spaces, changing behaviour and challenging bad practice. In 2017 we will be launching a demographic survey of BAAS members that will consider the state and future health of American Studies but also ask members to engage in a dialogue about their experience, concerns, and priorities regarding equality and diversity.  It will be adapted from the Royal Historical Society’s Report on Gender Equality to shed light on the key issues facing American Studies scholars, including questions focused on equality and diversity, in addition to sections concerned with the field’s broader development in other areas.

There are no quick fixes, nor easy answers. Institutionalised sexism and racism within HE will not be solved with a few strokes of a keyboard. It is important, however, that BAAS, as the leading association for American Studies in the UK, should help develop an academic environment that prioritises equality and diversity in all its forms. As always, we welcome the suggestions and advice of BAAS members, so please get in touch if you have any thoughts on these important matters.

Contributed by Ben Offiler. Ben is currently Lecturer in History at Sheffield Hallam University and BAAS Early Career Representative. 

William Gerard de Brahm’s “Report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America” (1764) provides historians with a uniquely detailed series of observations about the ecological and economic opportunities awaiting European colonists in what is today the Southeastern United States. Critical to de Brahm’s report were his observations of the rivers, streams, and swamps – the waterscapes – of the Southeast.

De Brahm, a German cartographer and engineer, produced a detailed “Report” following his appointment as surveyor-general in the British colony of Georgia. His observations detailed not only the economic opportunities that awaited settler colonists on the rich soils of the “Southern District,” but underscored the importance of the waterways of the region – riverine environments controlled by Native American people.

Indeed, de Brahm became acutely aware that the land and waterscapes of the Southeast were dominated, and in many cases controlled, by indigenous communities. So too were colonial officials. In the mid eighteenth century, the British decided to divide the governance of, and diplomacy with, Native Americans, into two geopolitical regions: the “Northern District” and the “Southern District.” In the Southern District, which de Brahm made extensive travels through, he encountered the Seminolskees (Seminoles) throughout Florida and larger tribal groups, such as the Cherokees, in the interior and mountainous regions of the Southeast. While generally dismissive of the civilizational attainments of Native Americans, de Brahm made no secret of his belief that these “savages” occupied some of the most fertile lands and navigable rivers and streams in all of North America.

In South Carolina , for example, de Brahm enumerated four streams – the “Wackamaw, Sante, Port Royal Savannas” – and twenty-two rivers – “Yatkins, Black, Catabaw, Congaree, Broad, Pakolet, Tyger, Linwells, Little, Great Saludee, Litte Saludee, Cooper, Ashly, North Edisto, South Edisto, Ashipoo, Cambahee, Pocotalego, Chulifini, Coosahatchee, May, Long Cane.” According to de Brahm, the waterscapes of these rivers and streams provided settlers from Georgia and the Carolinas with vital transportation arteries. They also yielded the raw materials for the manufacture of “earthen vessels.” As de Brahm recorded in his report, “The Sands upon the Rivers and Streams &c if low (commly called Swamp or Marsh Land:) they both are of a very rich black mould with a F[o]undation of blue Clay.”

In de Brahm’s eyes, the waterscapes of Southeastern North America nurtured an “American Canaan.” The Native peoples who long occupied the lands and traveled the region’s rivers had squandered an opportunity to improve – or in de Brahm’s words, “manufacture” – nature’s bounty. This prompted de Brahm to quip that “This Country seems longing for the Hands of Industry.”

William Gerard de Brahm’s two-volume report, housed at the British Library, provides environmental historians with a detailed rendering of how mid-eighteenth-century Europeans saw the land and waterscapes of the Southeast. That knowledge was produced in the service of settler colonial expansion, wealth accumulation, and good health. As de Brahm observed from Florida, “The great Weight of the Sea inclosed [sic] within the vast extent of the Mexican Gulf is set in Agitation by the Trade Winds … whereby the famous Florida Stream is supposed to be effected, and thence called the Gulf Stream, by which Nature conduces both to the Health, and Conveniency of that Region.”

Gregory D. Smithers is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Virginia Commonwealth University.

My five visits to the British Library were instrumental to my PhD thesis. Currently, I am examining the influence and legacy of African Americans on British society and the myriad ways they fought British racism from 1830-1895. African Americans engaged in a strategy I term ‘adaptive resistance’, a multi-pronged oppositional strategy enacted via a medium of performance, by which African Americans challenged racial and gender stereotypes and won support for abolition. This resistance strategy employed both

assimilation and dissonance as African Americans worked to secure their political agenda. They incorporated mimicry, minstrelsy, anglophilia, and exhibitions of their scars into their performances to create an aspect of the familiar to appeal to British audiences. To do this, black activists used language, images and actions as their weapons. Black activists also practiced deliberate dissent against typical Victorian norms, from rejecting racism and racial science, asserting black masculinity and refusing to downplay the violence of slavery. They could use both in the same lecture, walking a tense tightrope between the two, negotiating and pushing the boundaries of both to fight traditional racial stereotypes.

As explained in my application for this award, the main bulk of my sources are digitized newspapers from the British Library. They can reveal so much about British society in the mid nineteenth century but also how people viewed these visiting African Americans. The reports of their speeches are an important medium in which we can reveal hidden voices from the archive, and allow these men and women to speak for themselves.

I have been struggling to complete a chapter for my thesis which centers around Josiah Henson. In 1877, Henson visited Britain and was invited to meet Queen Victoria in Windsor Palace – he was believed to be the inspiration for the character of ‘Uncle Tom’ in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and received nation-wide fame in Britain as a result. To ensure the success of his visit, Henson capitalized on this association and received over two thousand invitations to speak. He was a powerful speaker, and newspaper correspondents waxed lyrical about his impressive stage presence. One reported that Henson, “like a skillful player upon a harp, wrought upon their feelings”, sometimes “provoking them to laughter” and soon after “relating a touching incident moving them to tears.”[1] Word of Henson’s arrival – and speaking ability – spread across the country: in a meeting in Sheffield, hundreds of people were turned away as there was not even standing room left to hear him speak;[2] and his narrative sold tens of thousands of copies.

I wanted to learn more about Henson’s visit here and read several newspaper articles pertaining to his trip. I also perused his updated autobiography and a ‘Young People’s Edition’ of his narrative, written and illustrated especially for children. This is a fascinating book held by the Library, and as far as I can tell unique among visiting African Americans. Henson’s growing disillusionment with the epithet of ‘Uncle Tom’ and denial of the romanticisation of slavery in the British press illustrate his resistance to British racism. These volumes and newspaper articles are crucial to the completion of my chapter, which I can now write over the summer.

In terms of other work consulted, I transcribed some poetry about Frederick Douglass from Laura Wilkes’ In Memoriam to Frederick Douglass. Once my PhD is completed I will write an article/book about abolitionist poetry, and I have added these poems to my small collection of poetry I have found in Victorian newspapers. This is an understudied subject and would prove to be an enriching piece of work.

Furthermore, my supervisor Professor Celeste-Marie Bernier and I have begun to collaborate together on a future book project. This volume will be an anthology of narratives, pamphlets, speeches and letters published by African Americans and black Britons in the nineteenth century. Whilst we will include small works by Frederick Douglass and Josiah Henson (two celebrities on the British stage) we want to include lesser-known works that will highlight the breadth of written work by black authors in the UK. I read Zilpha Elaw’s memoirs of her journey in Britain, as well as the narratives of William Jackson, Lewis Smith, John Lewis and the ‘Horrors of the Virginian Slave Trade’ by John Hawkins Simpson, who interviewed a black woman called Dinah about her experience as an enslaved person in Virginia. I also found an incredible broadsheet written by an African-American named John Coombs, with a very short narrative and poetry surrounding it. This was published in 1861 and is unlike anything I have seen before in the field of slave narratives. This – together with Dinah’s story – will form the centrepiece of our monograph.

I am indebted to the British Library for this award, as I would not have been able to finish my PhD without it. I am also grateful that I could use the collections to access material for a future book project that will bring forgotten stories to the light, as well as improving the chance of a steady career in the future.

Endnotes

[1] Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, Thursday 25 January 1877.

[2] Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, Saturday 3 February 1877.

Hannah-Rose Murray is a PhD student at the University of Nottingham.

First, thanks very much to the Eccles Centre for the Visiting Canadian Fellow Award which was ‘offered to help support one month of research at the British Library by a senior scholar from Canada’: this was a wonderful opportunity. With the assistance of excellent British Library employees, such as Cheryl Tipp of the Sound Archive, I was largely successful in realizing my aims concerning my main line of research on the life geography of ecologist, Dr. William W.H. ‘Bill’ Gunn (1913-1984), an international pioneer and key popularizer of ‘nature’ sound recordings. In addition, I made an exciting surprise discovery in a related area of environmental history research: it has become the basis of a book in its own right.

My research program for the period of this award mainly focused on the life geography of ecologist, Dr. William W.H. ‘Bill’ Gunn (1913-1984), an international pioneer and key popularizer of ‘nature’ sound recordings. As the creator of high quality field recordings, including the wildlife soundtracks for CBC’s ‘The Nature of Things’ for over twenty years, Gunn recorded soundscapes across Canada as well as locations in the Galapagos Islands, East Africa, Sri Lanka and Costa Rica. In addition to his founding roles in several nature conservation organizations, he was one of Canada’s first and most respected environmental consultants. Gunn’s research in ethology and migration was actively applied to public education, management and industry, including the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry and the design of Toronto’s CN Tower. This research, which demonstrates the potential of geographical approaches to issues of science, fieldwork and subjectivity, represents the first extensive examination of Gunn´s life and work which shaped fields of ecology, environmental consultancy and sound recording in a formative period for the conservation of Canadian natures. The Eccles award allowed me to explore the British Library’s textual materials on conservation and early sound recordists as well as valuable sound materials, such as the BBC radio programs using Gunn’s recordings held by the British Library Sound Archive, and material from the archives of BBC radio producer Jeffery Boswall. There were numerous transnational links to explore, and I was able to listen to the Library’s holdings of interviews with the acclaimed French sound artist Jean Claude Roche before going to interview him myself. Gunn’s mentors included broadcaster and sound recordist Ludwig Koch who played a parallel role in Britain by encouraging British appreciation of wildlife: the Library has excellent materials on Koch both in sound and text.  Building on methods developed in my study of ecologist Sir Arthur Tansley, the interplay of archival analysis, fieldwork and oral history methods will be integral to developing a well-contextualized life geography. As mentioned, a component of the project involves the critical analysis of Gunn’s sound productions including those held by the British Library and such work is supported by my Sonic Arts of Place Lab and creative collaboration with musicologist/sound artist Matt Rogalsky.  Encouraged by Cheryl Tipp and Philip Hatfield, Rogalsky and I are proposing a sound installation, possibly in the Library’s outdoor courtyard, that would utilize Gunn material from the B.L. Sound Archive.

In addition to the above work, I discovered correspondence between a key figure in Canadian nature conservation, C. Gordon Hewitt, and Marie C. Stopes, paleobotanist, writer and birth control activist. The edited collection of letters along with a thoroughly researched introduction (provided largely by materials at the B.L.) will: 1) provide transnational context to the lives and works of these remarkable individuals and their relationship, 2) shed light on the intriguing character of Charles Gordon Hewitt, and 3) explore the life of Marie Stopes in relation to her experiences in Canada, including her nation-wide tours in 1909 and her 1910 commission from the Geological Survey. The B.L. material led to me believe further material might still be with the Stopes family descendants: a trip to Birmingham led to more discoveries (in the Stopes-Roe attic) and a trip to Dorchester/Portland Bill allowed me to explore the Stopes Museum and meet with a local Stopes expert. As well – and connecting back to the Gunn research – while in Portland Bill, I visited the Portland Bill Bird Observatory, founded by naturalist Sir Peter Scott, for whom Gunn provided bird recordings for an LP project. Additional research in Cambridge University Library benefitted both projects.

My visits to the British Library significantly contributed to two projects(!), results of which will be disseminated in the form of articles, lectures, teaching materials and a book about Gunn that, akin to my publication, ‘Openings’ (McGill-Queen’s) with its complementary hypermedia essay, will address both eyes and ears. For outreach beyond the academy, Dr. Rogalsky and I plan to co-author a one-hour audio documentary and prepare materials for an installation telling Gunn’s life story in sound and site. Thank you again for an extremely productive research adventure.

Laura Jean Cameron is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada.

I spent just under six weeks in the USA, visiting the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the National Archives in Washington DC., and the Tamiment and Columbia Libraries in New York City. In addition, I held a number of oral history interviews with former feminist activists, in interviews that ranged from 45 minutes to over two hours. This has felt like the most interesting and dynamic research that I did!

I was in Madison, Wisconsin for just under two weeks, primarily visiting the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives.

While there, I looked at a number of collections, including the Marlene Gerber Fried papers, the National Women’s Conference Committee papers, the Sarah Harder Papers, the Sharon Lieberman papers and the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights/Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice records. The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Rights papers have proved most valuable so far, and I was lucky to gain access to them, as they are restricted.

I was in Washington DC for a little over a week, and visited the National Archives in Maryland. I accessed a significant number of official state reports for the 1977 National Women’s Conference, which will be a case study in my thesis. In addition, I was able to listen to and copy a lot of oral history ‘vox pops’ taken during the conference.

In New York, I visited two archives – the Tamiment at NYU, and Columbia. I spent the majority of my time at the Tamiment accessing the Leslie Cagan papers and the Karen Stamm papers. At Columbia I accessed the Bella Abzug papers. However, a combination of factors meant that I did not manage to get through all of the material that was available. It would be worth making a short trip to New York on my next research trip to look at the materials that I didn’t get to.

While in the USA I also interviewed six women who were active in work around reproductive rights during the 1970s and 80s. Almost all of them had links with at least one of the events that I’m using as case studies, and they all at least had links with organizations or groups that were central to those events. I interviewed Frances Kissling, Sarah Schulman, Meredith Tax, Margie Fine, Karen Stamm and Marilyn Katz. These interviews were incredibly interesting and valuable, and have opened up avenues which may lead to further interviews with other networks of activists – which could have the potential to be a fascinating project of its own accord.

I’m very grateful to have been awarded a BAAS travel grant; without one, this trip would have had to be considerably shorter and less enjoyable. It has undoubtedly allowed me to have a more effective and fruitful research trip, which will be complemented and built upon by a further trip in Autumn 2016.

Sabina Peck is a PhD student at the University of Leeds.