Past practice, which has been effective, has been to have one editor based in the UK and one in the US, and for both to be of at least mid-career status (i.e.: senior lecturer in the UK/associate professor in the US). We welcome both individual applications and applications from prospective duos.

The new editorial team will begin their work on 1 January 2027, and the usual term of appointment is three-to-five years. The new editors will receive training (in person or via Zoom) from the current team and from Taylor & Francis staff. Editors will receive a modest annual stipend from T&F for their work, and will be ex officio members of the BrANCH Committee.

Responsibilities:

• Soliciting, acknowledging, and reading all submissions and deciding whether to desk-reject them or to send them to readers;
• Recruiting two readers to evaluate each approved submission, editing their reports for clarity, and communicating their decisions to the author(s);
• Working with authors who have been invited to revise and resubmit their manuscripts to ensure that they have responded effectively to the readers’ comments;
• Editing the revised manuscripts for clarity and in line with T&F house style;
• Responding to queries from T&F editorial and production staff;
• Working with colleagues who are interested in serving as editors of special issues of the journal;
• Liaising with the journal’s book review editors (currently David Ballantyne of Keele University and Chelsea McNutt of Cornell University);
• Replacing members of the editorial board with new recruits, as needed;
• For the UK-based editor, attending the annual BrANCH conference (September or October) and the BrANCH Committee meeting (January); the latter is usually held online;
• Serving each year as a judge on BrANCH’s dissertation prize committees.

If you are interested in this opportunity but not sure if it’s for you, feel free to contact the current editors, David S. Doddington (doddingtond@cardiff.ac.uk), Margot Minardi (minardi@reed.edu) and Jonathan Daniel Wells (jonwells@umich.edu).

The post American Nineteenth Century History Journal – SEARCH FOR NEW EDITORS appeared first on Âé¶čAV.

ALT-AC is a dynamic, responsive platform within the Journal of American Studies dedicated to engaging with the evolving landscape of American culture, politics, and society in real time. Moving beyond the traditional boundaries of academic publishing, ALT-AC offers a space where scholars, writers, and practitioners can reflect on urgent issues as they unfold, bridging the gap between scholarly analysis and contemporary public discourse.

The blog foregrounds a wide range of topics central to American Studies, including literature, popular culture, history and politics, while also amplifying conversations around community outreach, social justice, and grassroots activism. It is equally committed to exploring the complexities of American history and its ongoing reverberations, particularly in relation to trauma, memory, and processes of rehabilitation and repair.

By fostering timely, accessible, and critically engaged contributions, ALT-AC seeks to cultivate an inclusive intellectual community that responds to the immediacy of the present moment without losing sight of historical context. In doing so, it reimagines American Studies as an active, interventionist field—one that not only interprets the world but participates in shaping it.

ALT-AC’s featured contributions will typically be between 800 to 1000 words long. Source citation is required and a suggested reading list designed with non-specialists in mind is recommended.

Nicole Gipson and Ahmed Honeini

The post Upcoming Blog Launch: ALT-AC appeared first on Âé¶čAV.

The event will be introduced by Professor Eloise Scotford, Dean of the UCL Faculty of Laws and will conclude with remarks by Dr Michael Spence AC, the President and Provost of University College London. Professor Erin Delaney, Director of the UCL Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism, will chair the conversation.

Event Details

• Date: 19 May 2026
• Time: 6.30pm
• Location: University College London, main campus
• Tickets: ÂŁ5

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https://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/events/2026/may/state-united-states-universities-and-higher-education

The post The State of the United States: Universities and Higher Education – Frederick M. Lawrence in Conversation with Professor Larry Kramer (19 May 2026) appeared first on Âé¶čAV.

Mark Twain’s life as told by more than 200 contemporaries including Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, and many more.

A master storyteller, Mark Twain inspired his friends, family, fellow authors, and others to reminisce about him at every stage of his life and everywhere he lived. In Mark Twain Remembered: An Anecdotal Biography, Gary Scharnhorst transcribes and annotates over two hundred memoirs by people who knew Twain personally—boyhood friends in Hannibal; family members; mining partners and fellow journalists in Nevada and California; neighbors in Hartford and New York. Commentaries from editors, publishers, lecture managers, and politicians of all stripes—from Prime Ministers and Presidents to grassroots activists—grace these pages. Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Jean Webster, Maxim Gorky, Ambrose Bierce, Booker T. Washington, and P. T. Barnum are all heard from. The greatness of these recollections are the breadth of experience, intimacy, and depth of understanding from Twain’s contemporaries, notable and otherwise.

These anecdotes chronicle Twain’s brief service in a Missouri militia during the Civil War; his residences in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London, and Florence; his campaigns against colonialism in Africa and Asia and US imperialism in the Philippines; his advocacy for international copyright; his opinions on issues of race and ethnicity; and his triumphant trip to England to receive an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University in 1907. This mosaic of his life should interest general readers, teachers of Twain’s writings, and specialists in American literature.

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When British explorer George Vancouver arrived at the San Francisco presidio in 1792, he described it as resembling a “compound for cattle”—hardly the opulent outpost he had expected of Spanish California. Today San Francisco is a bustling metropolis with picturesque neighborhoods, dramatic engineering feats such as the Golden Gate Bridge, and innovative tech companies. How did we get here? To answer that question,ÌęA Short History of San FranciscoÌęmoves from the first Ohlone settlements to the Spanish missions and Gold Rush mansions, to the glaring inequalities of the Gilded Age and the turbulent labor politics of the early and mid-twentieth century, to the birth of the counterculture and the rise of the tech companies that now define the region. Concise yet packed with information, this book is vital reading for anyone who wants to understand the city at the Golden Gate.

The post A Short History of San Francisco, By Robert W. Cherny appeared first on Âé¶čAV.

A revelatory history of Black radio productions from the 1950s to the present.

Audiofuturism uncovers the vibrant, overlooked history of radio adaptations that placed Black speculative writing before mass audiences, showing how sound shaped the politics and pleasures of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. While adaptation studies has long privileged film and sound studies has centered Black music, andré m. carrington redirects attention to radio drama to demonstrate how performance translates the Black fantastic imagination into an audible cultural heritage. Drawing on scripts, surviving recordings, production files, and author archives, the book reconstructs how radio made listeners hear literature differently and how those sonic interpretations reverberate through American Studies, media history, and Black literary traditions.

Organized as a scan across the dial, the study moves from World War II to the digital age. It begins with New World A-Coming, a wartime series inspired by Roi Ottley that folded antiracist reporting and Popular Front ideals into weekly dramatizations aligned with the Black press’s Double Victory campaign against fascism at home and abroad. It then tunes to bohemian 1960s New York, where Samuel R. Delany’s The Star-Pit became a striking radio play in which voice, silence, and experimental effects stage queer futurity. The book next considers the 2002 Seeing Ear Theatre adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, showing how audible epigraphs drawn from enslaved women’s narratives converse with Butler’s negotiations over dramatic audio rights, and how per­formance intensifies the novel’s reckoning with slavery and memory. Finally, Audiofuturism listens to the BBC’s 2016 adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, written by Patricia Cumper, to track how Black British theatre traditions and national broadcasting reshape a canonical American ghost story for twenty-first-century ears.

Across these case studies, carrington shows how radio dramatists and authors collaborated, compromised, and innovated to make speculative literature speak. The result is a fresh account of adaptation that enlarges the archive of Black sound, reframes radio as a site of cultural world-making, and invites scholars and general readers to listen again to the past in order to imagine different futures.

The post Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black Fantastic Imagination, By AndrĂ© Carrington appeared first on Âé¶čAV.

We very much hope you’ll be able to join us. If you would like to attend, you can register via this Eventbrite link (which also includes the full schedule) by offering a donation of your choice: If you’re able to, we would also be grateful if you could share the schedule and registration details with colleagues, students, and friends who might be interested in attending.

As with our previous events, the conference is independently run, and while it is affiliated with the Âé¶čAV and Royal Holloway, it does not receive direct financial support from these institutions. Donations help us to cover costs and support future events, and we are grateful for any support you are able to offer.

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PROGRAMME
ALL timings below are according to BRITISH SUMMER TIME (BST), the standard time in the UK during May. Please may all presenters and attendees ensure the times below correspond to their local time zones to avoid unnecessary delays and potential inconvenience.

Day I, Saturday May 2nd, 2026

9:00–10:20 — PANEL 1: “THE DARK HOUSE AND BEYOND: SPACE, FORM, AND ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIENCE IN ABSALOM, ABSALOM!”
Khawla Bendjemil, “The Decaying Landscape as Narrative of Slow Violence: Environmental Memory in Absalom, Absalom!”
Françoise Buisson, “‘The lost irrevocable might-have-been which haunts all houses’: Inchoateness and Chaotic Completion in Absalom, Absalom!”
Mattias Pirholt, “Entangled Elements in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!”

10:20–11:40 — PANEL 2: “CONSUMING THE SOUTH: NARRATIVE PLAY, PERFORMANCE, AND EVERYDAY POETICS IN ABSALOM, ABSALOM!”
Mourad Romdhani, “Rise and Fall: Foodways Poetics in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury”
James Stannard, “‘It’s Something my People Haven’t Got’ – Shreve McCannon as 21st Century Reader”
Laura Wilson, “‘Let Me Play a While Now’: How the South Performs for Shreve McCannon in Absalom, Absalom!”

11:40–12:40 — LUNCH

12:40–14:00 — PANEL 3: “FROM LA MANCHA TO YOKNAPATAWPHA AND BEYOND: THE LATIN ROUTES OF ABSALOM, ABSALOM!”
Ruben Paredes, “Some Quixotic Aspects of Absalom, Absalom!”
Elena Dobre, “Spanish Devotion: The Case of Absalom, Absalom! and its Spanish Reception”
Duncan Chesney, “A(nother) Mexican Faulknerian: Fernanda Melchor”

14:00–14:20 — BREAK

14:20–15:20 — KEYNOTE: MARY BURKE
“‘A Dark House’ and a ‘Big House’? Absalom, Absalom! and the Atlantic World”

15:20–15:40 — BREAK

15:40–17:00 — PANEL 4: “OUT OF JOINT: TIME, HISTORY, AND REWRITING IN AND BEYOND ABSALOM, ABSALOM!”
Tessa Roynon, “Ancient Roman Presences in Absalom, Absalom!”
Alex Miller, “Faulkner, Pontecorvo, and Inconsistent Imposition“
Stephanie Suchet, “William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe Novels: A Deterritorializing Interplay”

17:00–18:20 — PANEL 5: “SENSING NARRATIVE: SOUND, VISION, AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN FAULKNER’S FICTION”
Gabriele Salciute Civiliene, Marcel Karnapke, and Leslie Deere, “Listening to the Klojimas: Sound, Translation, and Narrative Reconstruction in Faulkner’s South and Lithuanian Cultural Memory”
Randall Wilhelm, “‘I’m Looking for Sutpen’: Pictorial Saturation and the Problem of Hypotyposis in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!”
Kaiyue Hou, “A Reader’s Guide to Benjy’s Neurodivergent Consciousness”

Day II, Sunday May 3rd, 2026

10:30–11:50 — PANEL 6: “DESIGNS AND FAILURES: NARRATIVE, POWER, AND THE MAKING OF HISTORY IN ABSALOM, ABSALOM!”
Beatrice Melodia Festa, “Unreliable Bodies, Unreadable Histories: Illness as Narrative Form in Absalom, Absalom!”
Nguyen Viet Hoang, “Petty vs. Grand Ambition: The Sins of the Fathers in As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom!”
Jonathan Hayes, “From Vautrin to ‘Sutpen’s Design’: Reading Absalom, Absalom! Against the Historical Novel”

11:50–13:10 — PANEL 7: “RACE AS STRUCTURE: HISTORY, POWER, AND THE LIMITS OF SOUTHERN NARRATIVE”
Bernard T. Joy, “Between Objective and Subjective Being: The Failed Revolutionary Politics of Thomas Sutpen”
Jein Kim, “Scenes of Kinship in Genealogy Making: A Black Feminist Reading of Absalom, Absalom!”
Carl Rollyson, “Charles Bon and Barack Obama: How a White Novelist Prepared the World for a Black President”

13:10–14:00 — LUNCH

14:00–15:00 — KEYNOTE: JOHN MICHAEL CORRIGAN
“‘In the Empty Air Between Us’: Immanence, Ideology, and Information Flow in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!”

15:00–15:20 — BREAK

15:20–16:40 — PANEL 8: “EMBODYING THE GOTHIC: MONSTROSITY, BREATH, AND RACIAL MEMORY IN FAULKNER’S SOUTH”
Ren Denton, “Narrative Authority and Feminized Monstrosity: The Telling and Retelling of Vampiric Memory in Faulkner’s Gothic South”
Lisa Hinrichsen, “Atmosphere, Aspiration, and the “Heritage of Breathing” in Absalom, Absalom!”
Alice Condry-Power, “Absalom, Absalom! as an Appalachian Gothic”

16:40–18:00 — PANEL 9 (CLOSING PANEL): “PASSING, DESIRE, AND VIOLENCE: QUEER LIVES IN ABSALOM, ABSALOM!”
Madison Willis, “In Memoriam: Queering the Memory of the South in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!”
Emily Shaw, “Conform or Die: Heteronormative Passing in Absalom, Absalom!”
Phillip “Pip” Gordon, “Thomas Sutpen, Heterosexual: A Failed Reading”

ANNOUNCEMENT AND END OF CONFERENCE

The Zoom links and passwords will be sent to all attendees by Friday May 1st, 2026.

The post Programme and Registration Link – The Dark House: Absalom, Absalom! at 90 (Faulkner Studies in the UK) appeared first on Âé¶čAV.

Please consider submitting abstracts for a guaranteed stream of panels on Early American Environments to be held at next year’s Society of Early Americanists conference (March 18-20, 2027, Chicago; ). We are interested in scholarship that considers questions of environment and ecology in the early Americas, broadly defined to include the transatlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific worlds. How are concerns such as climate change, extractivism, and environmental justice or methodologies such as ecocriticism shaping our reading of early American texts and materials? How might conversations in early American studies contribute to the expanding field of the environmental humanities? Listed below are brief descriptions of proposed panels, but please feel free to submit if your work leans toward the environmental but falls outside of these topics.Ìę

Early Indigenous Environments

This panel asks how early American literatures conceptualize Indigenous environments as dynamic, relational, and contested domains, foregrounding Indigenous epistemologies of land while remaining attentive to broader environmental approaches within the field. We welcome work on both Indigenous-authored texts and settler archives that engage, represent, or attempt to theorize Indigenous environments as sites of knowledge, survival, dispossession, and relation. More broadly, the panel seeks to connect Indigenous environments to early American literary study across diverse geographies, archives, and methodological approaches.

Plantation Agricultures and SettingsÌę

In “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Sylvia Wynter draws a dichotomy between the plantation, where exchange value and market forces posited “Man” as the aliened master of “Nature,” and the plots of land on which enslaved people grew their own food, sites of alternative, “autochthonous” environmental relations that resisted those of the plantation system. Building off of this distinction, this panel seeks to consider the environments of early American plantations, asking what other environmental practices shaped possibilities for control and resistance within these spaces. We welcome papers that take a variety of approaches to environmental aspects of the plantation broadly defined, extending from, for instance, Bradford’s settlement at Plymouth to the Caribbean.Ìę

Industry and ExtractionÌę

This panel considers the intersection of industrialization and environmental change. Rather than viewing industrialization as antithetical to agrarian economies, this panel positions industrialization in the Early Americas as a driving force behind plantation monoculture and colonial extraction. We welcome papers which examine the many forms of infrastructure, technology, and trade which shaped the plantation industrial complex. Proposals might consider, for example, New England deforestation and the molasses trade, the life-cycle of the cane plant and its influence of architecture, textiles, shipping ports, the sugar mill, soil, timber, and, of course, writing.ÌęÌęÌę

Plants, Animals, and Forms of Life

This panel seeks to explore the presence of non-human life in early American environments. What role do plants and animals play in the literature and history of the early Americas? What are the forms of life that interact with, ignore, or decenter the human in early American writing? Topics discussed might include natural histories, the global trade of plants and animals, scientific or philosophical theories of life, animal studies, ecologies, and non-human worlds, among others.Ìę

Please send a 250-word abstract to Sheila Byers (sheila.byers@ell.ox.ac.uk); Antonia Halsted (Antonia_Halstead@brown.edu); or Lloyd Sy (lloydkevin.sy@yale.edu) by April 27, 2026. Because we would like each panel to include scholars from a variety of backgrounds and career paths, please also include, if applicable, your institutional affiliation and position.Ìę

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Its publication is timely, given that BAAS are holding this year’s annual conference at the University of Glasgow.

The post New Book: Portable City – Modern Glasgow’s Transatlantic Connections appeared first on Âé¶čAV.

The preeminent historians of the founding era speak their mind on the anniversary of the United States’ birth

In these powerful and personal essays, some of the most celebrated historians of the American Revolutionary era reflect on the meaning of 1776 to the nation in 2026, offering fresh insights and food for thought on every page. They tackle the most pressing topics that Americans debated in 1776 and continue to debate today: the meaning of democracy; the nature of information wars; immigration and the rights and obligations of citizenship; race and slavery; public health; the various and conflicting legacies of the founders; and the shifting nature of commemoration itself. Like the Revolutionary generation they know so well, on some issues these scholarly authorities find themselves largely in accord; on others they vehemently disagree. This is historical debate at its most urgent.

The post The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding, Edited by Francis D. Cogliano appeared first on Âé¶čAV.