Arthur Miller First Book Prize

Winner: Erin Pearson, Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of Virginia Press, 2025)

The panel commented: Blending insights and methods from literature, history and cultural studies, Grievous Entanglements is a remarkable work of American Studies which brings new insights to well-trodden topics — from abolitionism to blackface minstrelsy. The new insights may well shape the way that we teach this period of history, particularly slave narratives. Between its rigorous research, creation of a new methodological approach, and the connections it draws between multiple different fields of study, it offers a new and important insight while also written in clear and engaging prose. At a time when global boycotts bring up scores of ethical, moral and strategic issues, Grievous Entanglements illuminates how consumers and deliberate forms of consumption can become effective tools for positive change in the world.

Arthur Miller Article Prize

Winner: Sian Round, “Lillian Smith’ s Strange Fruit and Periodical Readerships”, Journal of American Studies, April 2025

The panel commented: Round’s article demonstrates a new approach to thinking about Smith’s novel through the lens of understudied other writings.  The study of the magazine South Today and its role in shaping ideas and beliefs offers a different angle on the work of white Southern civil rights supporters, placing Smith’s novel in a new and revealing light. The panel were especially impressed with the depth of engagement with the primary sources and the witty, clear, and engaging writing.

Honourable Mention: Isobel Bloom, “A Position Which My Gayness Itself Leads Me to Take”: Sexual-Minority Antiabortion Activists, Journal of American Studies, Jan. 2025

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University of Łódź
Faculty of Philology

Sorbonne Université
Research Unit VALE

Online conference
Call for Papers

“God help the poor fellow who squares his life according to this,” wrote Melville in the margin of his copy of Emerson’s essay “Prudence.” Since then, Emerson has often been accused of excessive optimism and an incomprehension of evil. Today, in a world marked by the recent pandemic, the devastation of wars, climate catastrophe, and global political instability, are Emerson and Thoreau obsolete in their unshaken faith in the powers of the individual, or do they continue to be relevant? As organizers of this conference, we follow in the footsteps of Stanley Cavell, who believed that Emerson’s philosophy consisted not in optimism, but in a struggle against despair. In Cavell’s reading, what Emerson called “silent melancholy” and what Thoreau referred to as “quiet desperation” was the main context of American Romanticism (Cavell 130). Our purpose, among others, is therefore to question the well-worn dichotomy of the optimistic ‘Transcendentalists’ and the ‘Dark Romantics’.

Recent scholarly voices suggest that both authors can be fruitfully studied with reference to contemporary issues. Among the more philosophically inclined critics, Cavell’s heritage has been continued by scholars interested in Emerson as a proto-pragmatist (e.g. Robinson 1993; Levin 1999). Another important issue has been literary form and its interconnection with rhetorical purpose (e.g. Voelz 2010). However, the majority of scholarly books devoted to Emerson and Thoreau over the last two decades have dealt with political issues (e.g. Levine and Malachuk 2014; Case et al., 2021). Pessimist themes have been addressed by Arsić (2016), as well as by a number of biographically-oriented studies, most notably Hanlon (2017) and Richardson (2023). Our conference inscribes itself into both trends, assessing the two writers’ ongoing relevance and focusing on the ‘dark’ themes in their writing.

The Department of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Łódź, Poland, and the Research Unit VALE at Sorbonne Université, France, cordially invite scholars working across various disciplines to submit paper and panel proposals which consider the theme of pessimism in the field of Emerson and/or Thoreau studies. Interdisciplinary perspectives are certainly encouraged; we also welcome abstract submissions from postgraduate students.

Following the success of our 2022 digital conference “Whales and Veils: Obsessions in Melville and Hawthorne” and in an effort to minimize the conference’s carbon footprint while facilitating international participation, we have decided to hold the event online. We believe that, despite the digital format, the conference will constitute an opportunity not only to exchange research results, but also to network and connect with scholars from all over the world.

Although we encourage presentations dealing with one or more of the suggested topics below, the following list is neither exhaustive nor prescriptive:

• Social responsibility vs. social withdrawal
• Economic pessimism
• Melancholy
• Illness and disability
• Death and grief
• The problem of evil
• Eco-pessimism
• Skepticism toward language and representation
• Emerson and Thoreau as inspirations for other writers and artists

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Johannes Voelz is Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. He is the author of two monographs, Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge (University Press of New England, 2010) and Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Among his articles on the Transcendentalists is the essay “Democracy,” included in The New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson (2026). He is the Director of the interdisciplinary PhD program “Aesthetics of Democracy,” funded by the German Research Foundation, and the Founding Co-Director of “Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World,” a research collective at Frankfurt’s Institute for Advanced Studies. In the summer term 2026, he will be Harris Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. Currently he is completing a monograph on the Aesthetics of Populism.

Andrew McMurry is a Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo, where he teaches discourse analysis, rhetoric, and environmental communication. He has published widely on American literature, ecocriticism, and political rhetoric. His books are Environmental Renaissance: Emerson, Thoreau and the System of Nature and Entertaining Futility: Despair and Hope in the Time of Climate Change. His current project, Our Dumb Necropolis; and Other Monstrations, reads ecocide and end-times fascism through the lens of horror, a genre well-equipped to explore our planet-devouring death cult. The cautionary tales, the monstrous tropes, the moods of dread, the ineffable terrors, the false resolutions, the haunted, the dead, and the damned—horror contains all the dark paraphernalia our age requires to represent its hostility to the principle of life.

Deadline for abstracts: 31 October 2026
Notification of acceptance: 1 December 2026
Proposal submission address: quietdesperation2027@gmail.com
Proposals (in English) should be 300-400 words long. Please attach a 200-word bio to your conference paper proposal.

There is no conference fee.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Justyna Fruzińska (University of Łódź)
Krzysztof Majer (University of Łódź)
Anna Shmatenko (Sorbonne Université)
Barbara Bandos (University of Łódź)

Bibliography
Arsić, Branka. Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau, Harvard UP, 2016.
Case, Kristen, Rochelle L. Johnson, and Henrik Otterberg, eds. Thoreau in an Age of Crisis: Uses and Abuses of an American Icon, Brill︱Fink, 2021.
Cavell, Stanley. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. U of Chicago P, 1990.
Hanlon, Christopher. Emerson’s Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style. Oxford UP, 2017.
Levin, Jonathan. The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, & American Literary Modernism. Duke UP, 1999.
Levine, Alan M. and Daniel S. Malachuk, eds. A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson. UP of Kentucky, 2014.
Richardson, Robert D. Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives. Princeton UP, 2023.
Robinson, David M. Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work. Cambridge UP, 1993.
Voelz, Johannes. Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge. Dartmouth College P, 2010.

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The special dossier is meant to delve into the evolution of (discursive, cultural, visual, and digital) aesthetics and performance that characterize Trumpism specifically, and/or cultural artifacts produced and “consumed” in the so-called Trump era. As we witness an increasing fascistization of culture—intended as a constellation of phenomena (see Strick 2018; 2021; forthcoming 2026) that shape current cultural expressions in the context of the US political landscape—many have theorized for example in relation to the “Trump effect” (see Messham-Muir and Uroš Cvoro 2022) on culture, the evolution of the “dreampolitik of Trumpism” (Kennedy 2025), the articulations of the “Trump carnival” (see Gaufman and Ganesh 2024).
The approach sought by the dossier encompasses a wide prolific spectrum of diverse and opposing discourses and cultural expressions. Some might align with the current administration’s stances, articulating the White supremacist aspiration to collective participation “in the fantasy of [a] regression to the primal scene of their white settler ancestors’ acts of dispossession and reappropriation” (Pease 2020, 26). Some might instead tap into memetic aesthetics (see Alican 2024) to counter such discourses, propelling activist action and resistance into the public digital and cultural sphere. Likewise, the shaping of mainstream popular culture, as well as independent creation, has inevitably been influenced by the evolution of the political climate since the Obama administrations.

Possible topics may be (but are not limited to):
• film, TV series, games, graphic narratives, literature, theater and art performance that resonate with (whether aligning with or in response to) the evolution of cultural Trumpism
• memeification of politics
• forms of resistance against fascistization
• activism as performance, meme material, and viral circulation
• the evolution of kitsch aesthetics in 21st-century US culture
• gender roles and characterization, as well as queer and trans representation, in the Trump era
• the (re)shaping of transgression, boundaries, and the “unthinkable”
• the performance of “sincerity,” authenticity and truthfulness
• celebrity and performed political stances
• the use of generative AI and the resulting aesthetic trends
• the performative appeal and expression of conspiracy, paranoia, and truthiness
• foreign cultural expressions that draw on current US trends
• iterations of the grotesque and escalations of aesthetic excess
• reinforcement, reclamation, reshaping of identities in response to Trumpism
• exclusionary / exclusionary discourses and representations

Deadline for submission of full papers: November 1, 2026 | To be published in vol 8 no 2 (May 2027)

Submission guidelines
REDEN accepts proposals of full articles (6000-7000 words approximately including references) about any aspect related to the call. For any inquiry or doubts about the call’s topics, refer to revista.reden@uah.es.
Please, upload your article to https://erevistas.publicaciones.uah.es/ojs/index.php/reden/index as a single file (.doc, .docx, .odt). Keep in mind that you will have to upload an abstract and keywords as well during the submission process.

You can find the guidelines to prepare your paper, as indicated using the latest Chicago manual of style and author-date citation system, here: https://erevistas.publicaciones.uah.es/ojs/index.php/reden/about/submissions

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The Declaration of Independence articulated the claim that injustice arises not only from active tyranny but also from the refusal to adapt institutions to social change. Its grievances centred upon frozen institutions, suspended laws, and blocked representation for newly settled areas: a catalogue of harms produced by omission and neglect.

Yet today, America’s veto-exceptional political institutions systematically reward inaction. A frozen policy drifts when changing social or economic conditions transform its scope and distributive consequences without formal revision. Drift is hidden because it is typically perpetuated through omission, rather than commission. Across policy domains – from labour markets to criminal justice to redistricting – drifting rules generate deeply partisan and racialized effects. Throughout American history, representatives of established areas have often resisted creating new districts for settlers, immigrants, or growing communities of colour, freezing boundaries that become increasingly biased over time.

The Declaration condemned the politics of neglect; 250 years later, America’s constitutional architecture remains structured by the enduring power of inaction.

Ursula Hackett is Reader in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she specialises in the study of public policymaking and litigation in the US. A former British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, she is the author of the award-winning book, America’s Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State (Cambridge University Press, 2020). She hosts with the New Books Network podcast and has published her research in journals such as Perspectives on Politics, Policy Studies Journal, Studies in American Political Development, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Politics and Religion.

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John-F.-Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, Freie Universität Berlin

Keynotes: Jenny Stümer (Universität Heidelberg) | Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University)

While encompassing the study of US American cultures broadly intended, the conference aims at examining the evolution of their contemporary manifestations and possible futures. As the sociocultural and geopolitical landscapes in the United States are in rapid transformation, they give rise to new forms of expression, resistance and identity formation, characterizing how different groups are coping with change and precariousness. Likewise, the influence of US soft power has also been in transformation, as the global perception of US cultural ascendancy and impact has increasingly reshaped.

Uncertainty has marked the past few decades in many culturally relevant aspects, spanning from the instability of political categories to the increasing repression of targeted groups and the accelerated development of technologies that transform our relationships with artistic and cultural enjoyment. The inevitable role of artificial intelligence tools and in particular generative AI in relation to cultural production and creative processes, can be traced in the propagation of political discourses and aesthetics that manifest the existing polarization. Social media content and its immediacy have been leveraged by the most diverse groups and communities to externalize their feelings and stances, as well as to challenge opposite factions, resist against institutional and media invisibilization, and reach out to people who would otherwise be isolated. The conference seeks to foster debate and critical analysis in relation to the popular culture imaginaries of possible futures and hope, as well as cultural expressions that represent a distorted and polarized present.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

– the trajectory of US popular culture in the 21st century
– representations of diversity and (un)safe spaces
– prescient cultural texts that envisioned current geopolitical unfoldings
– how the Trump era has been represented in film, graphic narratives, and literature
– how are futures and futurity being imagined in cultural texts
– the aesthetics and intrinsic excess of AI-generated images and videos in the Trump era
– social media content related to political conflict and state repression
– far-right social media content and its use of language to foster tribalism and traditionalism
– the (re)shaping of shared identities
– new forms of resistance and protest
– the foreign perception and representation of the United States in cultural texts
– changes and challenges in relation to forms of cultural expression, identity and enjoyment
– the transformation of cultural enjoyment in relation to technological changes

Extended deadline for abstract proposals: June 14, 2026

We accept abstract proposals for individual presentations (≈ 250 words), as well as full panels (3 presenters, ≈ 250-word description of the panel plus brief abstracts of all papers). Please, email your proposal to popmec.frontiers@gmail.com as a single attachment (.doc, .docx, .odt) including name, affiliation (if any), and contact email. Acceptance/rejection will be communicated shortly after the deadline has passed.

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JAS is seeking an Editorial Assistant (Maternity Cover) to support the JAS editors and coeditors with the processing and production of peer-reviewed articles, non-peer reviewed essays, and book reviews. The Editorial Assistant works alongside the Journal Manager and reports to the Co-Editors. 

The appointment is for a fixed period of 7 months.  

Key duties of the post include:

• Maintenance, checking, and data inputting into the ScholarOne system. This includes:

updating editorial checklists, assigning readers to submissions in consultation with the editors, completing article production checklists

• Maintaining regular contact with the Co-Editors-in-Chief, including weekly updates regarding new submissions, missing readers’ reports etc. 
• Communicating with authors and reviewers regarding any queries that they may have relating to the review/production/publication process in a timely manner.
• With the Journal Manager, maintaining regular contact with the Production team at CUP in order to ensure timely processing of articles accepted for publication in readiness for appearance in print.
• Supporting the Associate Editors with inviting book reviewers and contributors of non-peer review articles via Scholar One
• Communicating with authors regarding any queries that they may have relating to the review/production/publication process in a timely manner.
• Maintaining a database of books available for review, reviewers, reviews in process, and commissions
• Requesting copies of books assigned from their publishers and keeping a record of these requests

Essential Criteria

• A strong interest in and/or academic background in American Studies and associated fields, as fall within the remit of the Journal of American Studies
• Knowledge of the processes and standards of academic publishing
• Strong organizational and communication skills 
• Attention to detail and ability to follow processes precisely and efficiently –           Ability to work as part of an editorial team and independently

Desirable Criteria

• Experience working for an academic journal or similar
• Experience with ScholarOne journal management software is desirable

The Editorial Assistant role is flexible and has irregular hours, depending on the workflow and needs of the Editorial Team. It is not expected that you will be required to work, on average, more than 45 hours per month. 

If you accept the post, you will be a UK taxpayer (even if you are living outside the UK for all or most of the year) and must be compliant with the following criteria:  

The role will appointed at spine point 6 on the BAAS pay scale, with a salary of £33,332£33.996 FT, pro-rated,

Applicants should send the following materials to Katie Edwards, BAAS Administrator (katie.edwards@baas.ac.uk) Michael Collins, BAAS Chair (chair@baas.ac.uk) and Krysten Blackstone, Chair of Publications Sub-Committee (krysten.blackstone@baas.ac.uk):

1. a CV (no more than 2 pages)
2. cover letter (no more than 1 page) that details their interest in the role and highlights their relevant experience 
3. the names and contact details of two referees who are happy to be contacted about their application

Closing date: 5pm Friday 5 June. 

Interviews will be held online during the week beginning Monday June 15, with the successful candidate beginning their appointment by June 29. 

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Modernist Crossroads: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Beyond
The Florida Hemingway Society invites scholars and enthusiasts to its inaugural virtual conference, a one-day event dedicated to Ernest Hemingway and his literary circle. The program will feature individual papers exploring Hemingway, the Lost Generation, and their connections to the Imagists and other contemporaries, along with a keynote speaker.

Sessions will be held in English in the morning and in Spanish in the afternoon, creating space for a broader, international conversation on modernist literature and influence. Join us for a focused and engaging day of scholarship and discussion.

Morning Session (English) | 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
10:00 – 10:10 AM | Welcome & Opening Remarks
10:10 – 10:30 AM | Lisa Tyler – “Katherine Mansfield and Ernest Hemingway: Canaries for Two”
10:30 – 10:50 AM | Sean C. Hadley – “Pilgrimages & Feasts: Reconsidering Longfellow’s Outre-Mer and Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast”
10:50 – 11:10 AM | Ahmed Honeini – “Go Slow Now, or Liberty Deferred”
11:10 – 11:30 AM | Patrice Boyce – “Hemingway and Art”
11:30 – 12:00 PM | Q&A and Discussion

Keynote Address
Keith Gandal
Professor of English, City College of New York

Afternoon Session (Spanish) | Time TBD
Massiel Pita Hernandez
Alfonso Ballester
Alonso Esposito

Register to attend here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/modernist-crossroads-hemingway-faulkner-fitzgerald-and-beyond-exploring-tickets-1987967587569

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The David Bruce Centre for the Study of the Americas (DBC) is an interdisciplinary research centre located within the Faculty of Business, Law, Humanities and Social Sciences (BLHUMSS). These positions are focussed specifically on US affairs. Successful candidates must hold a PhD on a subject related to US affairs (awarded no more than 24 months before the starting date); be able to demonstrate their excellent, rigorous and innovative research ability; and evidence their competence to carry out the project in a timely manner. Good interpersonal skills are also essential.

Informal inquiries can be directed to the DBC Director, Dr. James Peacock.

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