60th Annual Conference of the British Association for American Studies
9-12 April, 2015
Law and Business Building
Northumbria University
THURSDAY
14.30: Registration (central area, Law and Business)
17.00 -18.30: Welcome and Plenary, sponsored by Northumbria University
BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Level One Hall
Lucy Winskell, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Northumbria University
Elizabeth L. Dibble (Deputy Chief of Mission, United States Embassy, London)
‘Explaining the American Experiment’
Gary Younge (The Guardian, The Nation)
‘A Nation of Laws and a History of Injustice’
Chair: Brian Ward (Northumbria University)
18.30-19.45: Reception and Buffet (BALTIC River Terrace)
There will be two buses to the gallery, leaving from the Law Building, at 3.45 and 4.15
One bus will return from the Gallery at 8.00.
BALTIC is a pleasant walk (all downhill!) from the Law Building, via the Quayside. There is a walking
map appended to the conference programme and there will be regular group walks through the
afternoon.
Unfortunately, the Baltic galleries close at 6pm in the evening, and so it will not be possible to
visit them after the address. They will, however, be open as normal during the days of the
conference (and before the plenary begins). A visit is highly recommended if you have time.
Please visit the website for further information: http://www.balticmill.com/
Journey to Justice: Footsteps to Freedom in the North East
At Discovery Museum, Blandford Sq, NE1 4JA
Mon-Fri 10-4 and Sunday 11-4
April 4 – May 4, 2015
ADMISSION FREE
For the past year or so, the American Studies programme at Northumbria University has been working
closely with Journey to Justice and other partners to put together an exciting public project that uses the
African American freedom struggle to dramatize historic and contemporary campaigns for social justice in
the United Kingdom.
The pilot is being launched in Newcastle in April 2015 as part of Northumbria’s Shadow of Selma initiative
and to coincide with University’s hosting of the 60th Anniversary Conference of the British Association for
American Studies.
Journey to Justice: Footsteps to Freedom in the North East comprises a stunning new exhibition about
the US civil rights movement and struggles for freedom, democracy, justice and equality on Tyneside and
across the UK. Using a series of ‘bus stops’, it focuses on the stories of some of the less well-known men,
women and children involved in the Movement, without whom it would not have happened. Journey to
Justice has also organized a wide range of related educational and entertainment activities across the
region.
For a full programme of events – and to see if you might want to bring Journey to Justice to your city,
please visit: http://journeytojustice.org.uk/projects/footsteps-to-freedom/
Journey to Justice inspires people to take action for social justice through learning about human rights
movements.
FRIDAY 10 April
9.00-10.30: SESSION A
Panel A1: Room 011
Nineteenth Century Orientations (sponsored by BrANCA)
Chair: Tom F. Wright (University of Sussex)
Bridget Bennett (Leeds University), "'There's No Place Like Home': Home, Homelands and the Nineteenth
Century Wizard of Oz."
Dominic Jaeckle (Goldsmiths, University of London), ‘The Satellite and its Circuit: “Erinnerung” & the
Emersonian circle’
Hannah Murray (University of Nottingham), ‘Inexplicable Voices: Liminal Whiteness in Antebellum American
Literature’
Panel A2: Room 012
Jewish American Fictions
Chair: Rachael McLennan (University of East Anglia)
Joshua Lander (Glasgow University), “Blurred Borders: Hybridism through Narrative Form in Philip Roth’s
American Pastoral and The Human Stain”
Mike Witcombe (Southampton University), “America Unbound: Rereading Philip Roth’s Satires”
Jamal Assadi (College of Sakhnin for Teacher Education) “The Art of Control: Theatrical Watching, Apostrophe
and Acting in Saul Bellow’s Herzog”
Panel A3: Room 021
Colonial and Revolutionary America
Chair: Matthew Shaw (British Library)
Jacob M. Blosser (Texas Woman’s University), “Unholy Communion: Inattentive Communion Practices and
‘Horse Shed’ Christianity in Colonial Virginia
Gary Sellick (University of South Carolina), “Undistinguished Destruction”: How Smallpox Changed British
Emancipation Policy in the Revolutionary War'
Richard Follett (University of Sussex), ‘White Fright: Slave Revolts in American Memory’
Panel A4: Room 024
Heroism, Masculinity, and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century
Chair: Nick Witham (Canterbury Christ Church University)
Simon Hall (Leeds University), “Heroism, Nationalism, and the Perils of Patriotism: Gay Rights from the Cold
War to the War on Terror.”
George Lewis (Leicester University), “The American Legion and the Cloaking of Military Heroism after WWI.”
Chris Parkes (London School of Economics), ‘Imperial Outsider: Sumner Welles, Masculinity, and Creating
American Foreign Policy’
Panel A5: Room 025
Race in American History and Culture
Chair: Rosemary Pearce (Nottingham University)
Eithne Quinn (University of Manchester), ‘“A Piece of the Action”: Minority Participation and Diversity Policies in
Contemporary Hollywood’
Barbara Harris Combs (University of Mississippi), ‘Teaching Race to "Post-Racial" American Students’
Simon Topping (Plymouth University), ‘American Military Justice in Northern Ireland during World War Two’
Panel A6: Room 026
Capitalist Crises
Chair: Doug Haynes (University of Sussex)
Sarah Cullen (Newcastle University), “‘What Kind of Baseball Talk is That?’: Baseball and the ‘fabulous textuality
of the Cold War in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977)
Sarah Daw (Exeter University), “Capitalism’s Rubbish: Socialism and ‘Nature’ in Mary McCarthy’s Birds of
America”
Daniel Mattingly (Swansea University), ‘Secrets are Lies, Sharing is Caring, Privacy is Theft: Dave Eggers’ The
Circle and the Sinister Turn of the Post-Postmodern (Anti)Social Network
Exhibitor Panel: Room 008
ProQuest for Academics with Andy Neale (Proquest)
10.30-11.00: Tea/Coffee (central area)
11.00-12.30: SESSION B
Panel B1: Room 011
The Irish Transatlantic: Literary Crosscurrents of (Black) American and Irish Experience
Chair: Tara Stubbs (Oxford University)
Sinéad Moynihan (Exeter University), “‘Just like an American letter’: Omission and the Unsaid in Narratives of
Irish Migration to the United States”
Louise Walsh (University College, Dublin), “Real Borders, Imaginary Spaces: Zora Neale Hurston and Bram
Stoker”
Alison Garden (University of Edinburgh), “White and black and green: Irishness, blackness and interracial
romance in transatlantic literature”
Panel B2: Room 012
Domestic Politics and Political Activism (sponsored by the Histories of Activism Research Group, Northumbria
University)
Chair: Mike Cullinane (Northumbria University)
Sarah Hellawell (Northumbria University), ‘International Sisterhood: The U.S. section of the Women’s
International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915 - 1925,’
Sinead McEneaney (St. Mary's University), ‘A ‘Great Society’ or a ‘New Era’? Anti-poverty strategies of the New
Left in the 1960s.’
Jon Coburn (Northumbria University), ‘All Leaders’? : Nonorganisation, Hierarchy and Women Strike for Peace
in 1965
Panel B3: Room 021
Disability and Death in the American West and South
Chair: Martin Halliwell (Leicester University)
Ashley Riley Sousa (Middle Tennessee State University), ‘“This Dire Calamity”: Indians and Epidemic Disease
in Central California, 1833-1847’
Kristine M. McCusker (Middle Tennessee State University), ‘“Reentering the World”: The American South,
World War I and the Experience of Death’
Jude Riley (Northumbria University), ‘'With the change of one or two externals' – Disability and Eugenics in
Elizabeth Madox Roberts's The Time of Man’
Panel B4: Room 024
Race and Performance in Nineteenth-Century America
Chair: Bryce Traister (Western University, Ontario)
Luke Devlin (University of Edinburgh), ‘The African Grove theatre: The first African American theatre’
Hannah-Rose Murray (University of Nottingham), ‘“The Low Growl of the Lion”: Former Enslaved African
Americans as Celebrities’
Jack Noe (University of Leeds), ‘‘Centenniadelphia:’ White Southerners and the International Exhibition of 1876’
Panel B5: Room 025
Fifty Years On: New Approaches to Black Freedom Struggles
Chair: Christopher Phelps (University of Nottingham)
Leah Wright Rigueur (Harvard University), ‘The Loneliness of the Black Republican’
Brett Gadsden (Emory University), ‘Rethinking Civil Rights Liberalism: The Figurative Use of Place in School
Desegregation Movements’
Robert Patterson (Georgetown University), ‘Beyond Exodus Politics: Rethinking Black Leadership in the PostCivil Rights Era’
Panel B6: Room 026
Avant-Garde America
Chair: Zalfa Feghali (Canterbury Christ Church University)
Emilia Borowska (Royal Holloway, University of London),“Beyond Appropriation: Sherrie Levine and Kathy
Acker’s Use of the Russian Avant-Garde”
Karolina Rosiejka (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan), ‘Women's art as result of sexist art critique (?) The
case of Georgia O'Keeffe’
Robert Jones, (Leicester University), ‘Everybody Wants Some: Sexual Energy and the American Avant-garde’
Panel B7: Room 007
Hollywood, Film and Politics in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Chair: Cara Rodway (British Library)
Michael Dennis (Acadia University), ‘The Other Good Fight: Hollywood Activists and the Social Movement of the
New Deal Era’
Hannah Graves (Warwick University), ‘The Citizen Writer Inside the Studio Gates: Albert Maltz and Warner Bros.
in the War Years’
Barnaby Haran (University of Hull), ‘Interdisciplinary Radical Culture: Collaborations between Nykino and The
Group Theatre’
Panel B8: Room 008
Queer Fictions
Chair: Julie Taylor (Northumbria University)
Nikolai Endres (Western Kentucky University), “Gay Athletes and Gay Marriage: Civil Rights in Patricia Nell
Warren’s The Front Runner”
S. Lou Stratton (University of Birmingham), “Subverting a Culture of Conformity: Locating implicit messages in
Packer’s Spring Fire (1952)
Joanna Stolarek (Siedlce University of Natural Sciences and Humanities), “Marginalisation and exclusion verses
crime and art in Patricia Highsmith’s selected works”
12.30-13.30: Lunch (central area)
Publisher session (Lecture Theatre 003)
Meredith Babb (University Press of Florida)
Michelle Houston (Edinburgh University Press)
Emily West and Martin Halliwell (series editors, BAAS Paperbacks) http://www.euppublishing.com/series/baas
If you are interested in publishing a BAAS Paperback with EUP please feel free to attend the session and discuss
your ideas informally or email Martin ([email protected]) or Emily ([email protected]) in advance to
arrange an appointment during the conference. They are equally keen to speak to established and early career
authors.
13.30-15.30: SESSION C
Panel C1: Room 011
Reconsidering African American Histories in the Nineteenth Century (sponsored by BrANCH)
Chair: David Gleeson (Northumbria University)
Emily West and Rosie Knight (University of Reading), “Enslaved wetnurses in the antebellum United States”
Neil Kinghan (University College London), “A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in
South Carolina”
Lydia Plath (Canterbury Christ Church University), “Mammy, Mandingo, Django and Solomon: A Century of
American Slavery in Cinema from The Birth of A Nation to 12 Years a Slave”
Shaun Wallace (University of Stirling), ‘“What he most dreaded, I most desired”: The Fugitive Slaves of the US
South, 1790-1810’
Panel C2: Room 012
Spirit Sounds: The Demonic in American Music
Chair: Simon Hall (Leeds University)
Sean McCloud (The University of North Carolina at Charlotte), “There was a Demon in the CD: Third Wave
Spiritual Warfare and the Impure Physicality of Satanic Music,”
Jason Bivins (North Carolina State University), “A Dirty Word: ‘Jazz’ and the Secular Modern,”
Panel C3: Room 021
Symbols of Englishness in Modern American Literary Culture
Chair: Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University)
Andrew Blades (Bristol University), ‘Auden’s OED in American Poetry’
Tara Stubbs (Oxford University), ‘Swans, gardens, rivers and queens: Marianne Moore's English (re)visions’
Will May (Southampton University), ‘A Guileless Inheritance: Ballooning in American Poetry’
David Barnes (Oxford University), ‘American Modernism’s English Accent: James, Fitzgerald, Hemingway’
Panel C4: Room 024
Rethinking David Foster Wallace
Chair: Doug Haynes (University of Sussex)
Joel Roberts (Brighton University) & Edward Jackson (University of Birmingham), “White Guys: Questioning the
(Post) ‘Human’ in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest” Content note: this paper discusses themes of sexual
violence and abuse
Iain Williams (University of Edinburgh), “A Pluralistic Universe: David Foster Wallace and William James”
Mark West (Glasgow University), “‘Observation of these Articles’: Surveillance and the 1970s in David Foster
Wallace’s The Pale King”
S. J. Taylor (Glasgow University) “The B(are)room of the System: The Mathematical Foundations of Wittgenstein
and David Foster Wallace”
Panel C5: Room 025
Twentieth-Century Fiction
Chair: Kate Dossett (Leeds University)
Shima Jalal Kamali (University of Sussex), “‘Poet of the People’: The Development of Langston Hughes’s
Political Identity”
Sima Jalal Kamali (University of Sussex), “A Song Flung up to Heaven: A Political Autobiography’
Katie Hamilton (University of Nottingham), “‘Good reading for morons?’: Examining the unpublished works of
Estelle Oldham Faulkner”
Panel C6: Room 026
Religion, Race, and the Twentieth-Century South
Chair: Uta Balbier (King’s College, London)
Andrew Carruthers (St. Andrews University), ‘Let Justice Roll On Like A River: Religion and Politics in the
American South, 1933-1941’
Megan Hunt (Northumbria University), ‘‘They take the Bible literally you know’: Religion, race, and class in the
celluloid South’
Christian O’Connell (University of Gloucestershire), ‘Imagining Dixie: The Black American South on British
Television’
Panel C7: Room 007
Textual Scholarship and Memory
Chair: Sinéad Moynihan (Exeter University)
Grzegorz Kosc (University of Warsaw), “Robert Lowell’s Forgotten Prose Memoirs of 1954-1956: Questions of
Textual Scholarship and Editorial Choices”
Ian Davidson (Northumbria University) “Beat Women, Mobility and Memoirs”
Paul Williams (Exeter University), “Social Critique, Commercial Opportunity and the Culture of the Early Graphic
Novel: Steve Gerber’s Stewart the Rat (1980)
Panel C8: Room 008
Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Chair: Katie McGettigan (Nottingham University)
Jimmy Packham (Bristol University), “Chance Imprints: Passivity and Disruption in Melville’s Battle-Pieces
Lawrence T. McDonnell (Iowa State University), “Mysterious Mose: Masculinity, Melodrama and Working-Class
Respectablilty in Antebellum America”
A.J. McDonnell (Durham University), “Satire, Symbolism and the Exorcising of Historical Ghosts in Herman
Melville’s The Confidence Man (1857)”
Steven Bembridge (University of East Anglia), “Upton Sinclair and the Socialist Millennium”
15.30-15.45: Tea/Coffee (central area)
15.45 - 17.15: BAAS AGM (Lecture Theatre 003)
17.30-18.45: Plenary sponsored by the Eccles Centre at the British Library
Professor Sarah Churchwell (University of East Anglia)
(Lecture Theatre 001)
18.45-20.30: Wine reception hosted by Queen’s University, Belfast, hosts of BAAS 2016
Laing Art Gallery
The Laing is a short walk from the Law and Business Building, during which you walk over Newcastle’s
delightful city motorway.
Alternatively, a bus will leave the Law Building at 6.45pm
Information on local and city centre restaurants and other eating establishments is at the end of the
conference programme.
SATURDAY 11 April
09.00-11.00: Session D
Panel D1: Room 011
Towards a Global History of American Evangelicalism: The Transnational Work of the Billy Graham Evangelistic
Association, Prison Fellowship International, and Sharing of Ministries Abroad
Chair: Hilde Løvdal Stephens (independent scholar)
Uta Balbier (King’s College, London), ‘Creating the Spiritual Free World: the Billy Graham Evangelistic
Association in Europe, 1954-1973’
John Maiden (Open University), ‘Transnationalising Anglican charismatic renewal: Sharing of Ministries Abroad
USA’
Kendrick Oliver (University of Southampton), ‘Pluralism, Ecumenism and American Leadership in the
Evangelical World 1974-2006: The Origin and Development of Prison Fellowship International’
Panel D2: Room 012
The Present and Its Discontents: Race, Culture, and The Politics of Temporality
Chair: Brian Ward (Northumbria University)
Janet Neary (Hunter College, CUNY), ‘Animating History: Kara Walker, Racial Violence, and Modes of Invention’
th
Lisa Merrill (Hofstra University), ‘Soundscapes of Race: Attending to Orality in 19 Century Black Voices’
Kelvin Black (Hunter College, CUNY), ‘What It Means to Choose the Constitution: Anglo-American Conditions of
Choice across the Long Nineteenth Century & the Politics of Change’
Bruce Barnhart (University of Oslo), ‘Studs Lonigan and the Temporal Structures of Racial Violence’
Panel D3: Room 021
Post-9/11 Culture and Politics
Chair: Sinéad Moynihan (Exeter University)
Rebecca Justice (University of Birmingham), ‘Reframing Philippe Petit’s Twin Towers High Wire Walk’
Thomas Cobb (University of Birmingham), ‘Richard Linklater’s Boyhood as a Western treatise on post 9/11
American political culture’
Victoria Carroll (King’s College, London), ‘From the Sons of Liberty to the Al-Qaeda of AIDS: ACT UP/San
Francisco and the Limits of U.S. Patriotism’
Arin Keeble (Newcastle University), “Conspiracy and Apathy in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge”
Panel D4: Room 024
Fictional Legacies of the Civil War
Chair: Katie McGettigan (Nottingham University)
Irina B. Arkhangelskaya (Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod) “Margaret Mitchell vs. Southern
Agrarians”
Nicolas Stangherlin (Ca' Foscari University, Venice) “Mark Twain, the Civil War and the Mixed Blessings of
Progress”
Kyle Shook (Adam Mickiewicz University), “Children of the Battlefield: Whitman, Alcott, and the Crisis of Civil
War Death”
Ayesha Siddiqua (Durham University), “Decoding Legal ‘Fictions’: The Relativity of Legality in Harriet Jacob’s
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”
Panel D5: Room 025
Crime Fiction
Chair: Philip McGowan (Queen’s University Belfast)
Nicole King (Reading University),“Is Crime Fiction the New Black? Attica Locke and the African American
Literary Canon”
Ruth Hawthorn (independent scholar) “Detective Fiction in the American Wilderness: Nevada Barr’s Blind
Descent”
Maysa Jaber (University of Baghdad), “Duality in Jim Thompson’s Crime Fiction”
Helen Oakley (Open University), “Crime and Latino/a indentity: Sebastian Rotella’s Triple Crossing”
Panel D6: Room 026
Visions of America
Chair: Zalfa Feghali (Canterbury Christ Church University)
Lyndsay Miller (University of Nottingham), “Vladimir Nabokov and David Lynch’s Anti-didatic Americana”
Laura MacDonald (Portsmouth University), “This is My Quest: Man of La Mancha’s Circulation of Impossible
American Dreams”
Joseph Morton (University of Manchester), “Reconsidering the Dream: Critically Approaching Southern
California Literature and Histography”
Antonia MacKay (Oxford Brookes University), ‘Cowboys and the Cold War’
Panel D7: Room 007
Periodicals, Poetry and the Avant Garde
Chair: Sue Currell (University of Sussex)
David Hull (University of Sussex), “Ezra Pound and American Imperialism, 1910-1917”
Michael Jolliffe (Leicester University), “Seeds of Anarchy: The Battle of the Italian Avant-Gardes in 1910s New
York”
Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University), “The Art of Editing Modernism: Marianne Moore at The Dial Magazine”
Francesca Bratton (Durham University), “Hart Crane ‘From this Side’: The Criterion, The Calendar of Modern
Letters and publishing in London Magazine”
11.00-11.30 Tea/coffee (central area)
11.30-12.30: SESSION E
Panel E1: Room 011
Women, Gender & Knowledge Construction in U.S. history
Chair: Jenny Terry (Durham University)
Kate Dossett (Leeds University), ‘“I fear I have no papers of historical interest”: Why U.S. history is so often a
history of men’
Say Burgin (Leeds University), ‘What’s the use of women’s suffrage?: The debate in the women’s liberation
movement’
Panel E2: Room 012
Race, Religion, and Pop Music in the Modern US (sponsored by HOTCUS)
Chair: Uta Balbier (King’s College, London)
Randall J. Stephens (Northumbria University), “‘Ask your preacher about jungle music’: Race, Rock, and
Religion”
Hilde Løvdal Stephens (independent scholar), “DC Talk and the Negotiation Religion, Race, and Evangelical
Rap in the 1990s”
Panel E3: Room 021
th
th
Race, Violence, and Memory in the 19 and 20 Centuries
Chair: Henry Knight Lozano (Northumbria University)
Susannah Hopson (University of Hull), ‘The Topographies of Memory: The Sand Creek Massacre of 1864’
Tessa Roynon (Oxford University), “‘By Myself’: Ralph Ellison, Magazines, and the ‘Preparation’ of the 1940s”
Panel E4: Room 024
Revisiting and Remembering War
Chair: Kendrick Oliver (Southampton University)
Daniel O’Gorman (Oxford Brookes University), ‘“Connective Dissonance” in Three Novels of the Iraq War’
Carl Mirra (Adelphi University, New York), ‘Dissent and Political Engagement in oral history interviews of
Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans’
Panel E5: Room 025
Transatlantic Texts
Chair: Rachel McLennan (University of East Anglia)
Sophie Baldock (University of Sheffield), “Transatlantic Epistolary Voyages: Amy Clampitt’s Use of Keats’s
Letters in What the Light Was Like (1985)”
Clare Elliott (Northumbria University), “Atlantic Literary Sisters: The Peabodys, Alcotts and Brontës”
Panel E6: Room 026
Consumerism in the Early Twentieth Century
Chair: Michael Cullinane (Northumbria University)
Cara Rodway (Eccles Centre), ‘From Cottage Courts to Camps of Crime: Money, Morality, and Motoring in
Depression-era America’
Bianca Scoti (Glasgow University), ‘Purchasing the Oriental Dream: Persian Rugs in American Homes at The
Turn of The Twentieth Century’
12.30-13.30: Lunch (central area)
13.30-15.30: Session F
Panel F1: Room 011
th
Religion and Identity in 20 Century America (sponsored by HOTCUS)
Chair: Emma Long (University of East Anglia)
Benjamin Huskinson (University of Glasgow), “Evolution, Creationism, and Fundamentalists: Three Decades of
Debate”
Amber Thomas (University of Edinburgh), “Evangelical Christianity, American Citizenship, and Civil Religion:
Herbert J. Taylor’s Influence from the Great Depression to Vietnam”
Jennifer Vannette (University of Strathclyde/Central Michigan University), “Uneasy Pluralism: Anti-Communism
and Anti-Semitism in the United States, 1947-1962”
Francesca Cadeddu (University of Cagliari), “‘I did this as a religious action’. Self-immolation against the
Vietnam war and the American Catholic Church.”
Panel F2: Room 012
SAVAnT Panel: Objects and Narrative
Chair: TBC
Joanna Pawlik (University of Sussex), ‘Wish You Were Here: Charles Henri Ford between the ready-made and
the found object’
Kristen Treen (Cambridge University), ‘Between Things and Objects: On the Literary Materiality of Broken
Southern Furniture’
Stephanie Lewthwaite (University of Nottingham), ‘Memory and Migration Trails in Contemporary Latino/a Art’
Doug Haynes (University of Sussex), ‘Jeff Koons Bears All’
Panel F3: Room 021
Trauma and Apocalypse in American Fiction
Chair: Martin Halliwell (Leicester University)
Jennie Chapman (University of Hull), “Apocalyptic Alzheimer’s: Dementia as Metaphor in Post-9/11 American
Fiction”
Kathryn Lee Seidel (University of Central Florida), “The Terrorist in the Garden: Florida and the 9-11 Terrorist in
The Garden of the Last Days”
Laura Michiels (Free University of Brussels), ‘Layering Lyre with Liturgy: Generic Transformations in Tennessee
Williams’s Battle of Angels and Orpheus Descending’
Panel F4: Room 024
Art, Culture and Politics in Cold War America
Chair: Nick Witham (Canterbury Christ Church University)
Simon Newman (University of Glasgow), ‘Disney’s American Revolution’
Will Norman (University of Kent), ‘Steinberg’s Vanishing Trick: Espionage, Complicity and the State’
John Sharples (Lancaster University), ‘American Hero / American Monster: Cultural Representations of Robert
“Bobby” J. Fischer and Chess, 1956-1971’
Panel F5: Room 025
Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Chair: Bridget Bennett (University of Leeds)
Nadine Allan-Vaught (University of South Florida), “A Bolshevist, a Negro and a Gun”
Michelle Coghlan (University of Manchester), “Seeing Red in Black and White: The Commune Rising and Postbellum Internationalism Across the Color Line”
Jonathan Sudholt (Brandeis University), “Prophecy for Whose Sake?: The Reader’s Good Intentions and the
Southern Lynch Mob in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition”
Panel F6: Room 026
African American Women Writers and “misogynoir”
Chair: Jenny Terry (Durham University)
M. Zanganeh (Durham University) “Great Minds Think Alike: A Depiction of Female Homosociality in Toni
Morrison’s Paradise and Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women without Men”
Rosamund M Lewis (Durham University), Mythical Margins: Archiving the Unimaginable: Audre Lorde and the
Black Lesbian Feminist Archival Debate”
Anna Maguire (University of Sussex) “Home Sweet Home: Reconstruction and African American Domesticity in
Toni Morrison’s Beloved”
Panel F7: Room 007
Gender Trouble
Chair: Rosemary Pearce (Nottingham University)
Ayra Aryan (Durham University), “The Madwoman Leaves the Attic: The Case of Sylvia Plath
Clive Baldwin (independent scholar), “Murder and Masculinity in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me and
Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley”
Julie Scanlon (Northumbria University), “Reading American Masculinities in Annie Proulx’s Close Range:
Wyoming Stories”
Ruben Cenamor (no affiliation) “Giving Birth to Tragedy in Postwar America: Reading Richard Yates’s
Revolutionary Road as a Novel About Abortions”
Panel F8: Room 009
Fictions of Finance
Chair: Julie Taylor (Northumbria University)
Andrew Lawson (Leeds Beckett University), ‘Becoming Bourgeois: Benjamin Franklin’s Account of the Self’
Peter Knight (University of Manchester), ‘Reading the Market: Popular Investment Advice Manuals in the First
Gilded Age’
Paul Crosthwaite (University of Edinburgh), “The Invisible Hand of the Market runs everything”: Utopia and
Efficient Market Thinking, from Players (1977) to Bleeding Edge (2013)
Sadek Kessous (Newcastle University), ‘Noise, Neoliberalism, and Sociality in William Gaddis’s JR’
15.30-16.00: Tea/Coffee (central area)
16.00-17.00: Session G
Panel G1: Room 011
Approaching the United States in a Global Context
Chair: Hugh Wilford (California State University, Long Beach)
Mehdi Bahmani (Clinton Institute for American Studies, Dublin), ‘Diaspora and USA Foreign Policy: the Case
Study of American-Iraqis’
Panel G2: Room 012
The US in the Age of World War One
Chair: Matthew Shaw (British Library)
Vernon Pedersen (American University, Sharjah), ‘Disingenuous Opponents: The Montana Council of Defense
and the Trials of Bill Dunne’
Bethan Hughes (Queens University, Belfast), ‘La Force Noire: Franco-American Relations, Racial Hypocrisy,
and the Debate on Colonial Troops in the Aftermath of World War I’
Panel G3: Room 021
The Presidency and Politics in the Age of Obama
Chair: Michael Cullinane (Northumbria University)
Gregory Frame (University of Warwick), ‘The Leader of the Free World?: The Decline of the Presidency in House
of Cards and Scandal’
H. Howell Williams (New School for Social Research), ‘Dreams Fulfilled: Melancholia and Race in Obama’s
Fatherhood Politics’
Panel G4: Room 024
Magazine Culture
Chair: Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University)
Jason Harding (Durham University), ‘Encounter Magazine and a Usable Literary Past’
Nicholas Grant (University of East Anglia), ‘The Negro Digest: Reading Africa through the lens of the American
South, 1942-1951’
Panel G5: Room 025
Reconsidering the Civil War
Chair: Bridget Bennett (Leeds University)
Brian Langley (Northumbria University), ‘“If I Had Been A Man I Would Have Been Killed”: Dissent, Discontent,
and Gender Disruption in the Confederate South’
17.15-18.30 – Plenary sponsored by Journal of American Studies
Dana D. Nelson (Vanderbilt University)
‘A Passion for Democracy: Proximity to Power and the Sovereign Immunity Test’
Prof Nelson will be updating her arguments in Bad For Democracy (2008), which
was published on the eve of President Obama’s election, to include an analysis
of his presidency and trends in current scholarship on it.
(Lecture Theatre 001)
Evening: gala dinner at Newcastle Civic Centre, followed by the return of the BAAS Disco!
6.45: Bar opens at Civic Centre
7.30: Dinner served
10ish: THE BAAS DISCO. BAD DANCING COMPULSORY!
Sputnik, BAAS’s very own glitterball, is booked to reappear. Miss this at your peril.
The dinner is being held in the Civic Centre ballroom, which may be found just by the Blakean statue inside
the Civic Centre Grounds, to the right of the rotunda that you’ll see from the street (below, with rotunda to left,
entrance to right). Be sure to check out the Mad Men-tastic cloakrooms!
SUNDAY 12 April
09.30-11.00: SESSION H
Panel H1: Room 011
Black Power and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century
Chair: Simon Hall (Leeds University)
Zoe Colley (Dundee University), “Academy of Struggle: Revolutionary Politics, Black Power, and the Carceral
State.”
Tom Lennon (York University), ‘‘Let us who believe in fighting fight like the devil.’ Garveyism, violence, and
nonviolence in the early civil rights movement, 1918-1927.’
Dawn-Marie Gibson (Royal Holloway, University of London), ‘Black Muslim Men on Faith, Family and Ummah’
Panel H2: Room 012
Infrastructures of Culture (sponsored by BrANCA)
Chair: Michelle Coghlan (University of Manchester)
Katie McGettigan (University of Nottingham), ‘Uniform with the Above’: The American Book and the British
Publisher’s Series’
Tom F. Wright (University of Sussex), ‘The Embodied Telegraph’
Panel H3: Room 021
The Korean War in Cold War culture
Chair: Alex Goodall (University College London)
Oliver Elliott (London School of Economics), ‘Syngman Rhee: Democrat or despot?’
Mara Oliva (University of Reading), ‘American Images of Chinese Communists during the Korean War’
Jessica Johnson (University of Queensland), ‘A Weaker Generation: The Image of Korean War POW in
American Culture, 1953 – 1963’
Panel H4: Room 024
Don DeLillo
Chair: Paul Crosthwaite (University of Edinburgh)
Xavier Marco del Pont (Royal Holloway, University of London), “The Artist in the Message: Performance Art and
Avant-Garde Praxis in the Work of Don DeLillo
Gabriela-Alexandra Banica (University of Bucharest), “Don DeLillo’s Writers of Earth in Mao II
Panel H5: Room 025
Babies, Teens, and Baptists: Religious Conservatives and Abortion Policy in the Era of the Religious Right
Chair: Randall J. Stephens (Northumbria University)
Will Riddington (Cambridge University), ‘"A Basic Attitude About Life": The Baby Doe Cases, the Reagan
Administration, and Social Conservatism’
Charlie Jeffries (Cambridge University), ‘Adolescent Women and Anti-Abortion Politics in Reagan’s Right’
Panel H6: Room 026
Theodore Roosevelt in the Transatlantic Context
Chair: Henry Knight Lozano (Northumbria University)
Simon J. Rofe (SOAS, University of London), ‘Strenuous Competition on the Field of Play, Diplomacy off It: The
1908 London Olympics, Theodore Roosevelt and Arthur Balfour, and Transatlantic Relations’
Serge Ricard (Sorbonne Nouvelle Universite Paris III), ‘Theodore Roosevelt’ Neutralist Stance in 1914-1915:
The Strange Silence of ‘the Bugle That Woke America’
Mike Cullinane (Northumbria University), ‘Theodore Roosevelt in the Eyes of the Allies, 1919-1920’
Panel H7: Room 007
Singing America: Musical Perspectives on US Culture
Chair: Laura MacDonald (University of Portsmouth)
Adam Rush (University of Lincoln), ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mormon: Tracing Rodgers and Hammerstein within
The Book of Mormon.’
James Peacock (Keele University), ‘Mutually Assured Dis-Funk-tion: Global and Local Conflicts in “Ivan Meets
G.I. Joe” by The Clash’
Caleb Bailey (University of Nottingham), ‘Born in the U.S.A.? The Transnational Poetics of Bruce Springsteen’
Panel H8: Room 008
Motifs of Violence
Chair: Rachel McLennan (University of East Anglia)
Coco d’Hont (University of East Anglia), ‘But Look What What Happened to Gekko’: Fear Fetishism and
Financial Collapse in American Psycho
David McWilliam (Lancaster University), Loving the Antichrist: Forgiveness After a School Shooting in Lionel
Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin
Iman Hami (Essex University), Possessing the Secret Joy by Alice Walker: Tashi’s Circumcision and Question of
Female Agency
11.00-11.30 – Tea/Coffee (central area)
11.30-13.00 - SESSION I
BAAS at 60: A Celebration (Lecture Theatre 002)
Chair: Sue Currell (University of Sussex and current BAAS Chair)
Nick Witham (Canterbury Christ Church University), ‘BAAS, American Studies, and the Early Cold War
Intellectual Scene: Some Reconsiderations’
Sue Wedlake (US Embassy), ‘Thoughts from the US Embassy’
th
The 60 Anniversary BAAS Chair Roundtable
Featuring former BAAS Chairs Martin Halliwell; Judie Newman; Philip Davies; Richard King
13.00-14.00 – Lunch (central area) and closing of Conference
Restaurant List
There are two easily accessible areas for a meal. Jesmond is a short walk from the Holiday Inn and
is a hub for swanky bars, bistros and Italian restaurants. It tends to attract the Geordie Shore types,
the occasional hen and stag party and some of Newcastle’s richer students. This makes it sound
awful, but it is pretty pleasant, if increasingly boisterous as the night progresses. The main strip is
Osborne Road, on which most of the following restaurants lie (there are more if you want to explore;
these are just the ones that the Northumbria staff have visited recently). We’d recommend booking in
advance, particularly if you have a large group:
Italian
Fratellos
Jesmond Road (next door to the Holiday Inn)
0191 212 5500
Scalinis
61 Osborne Road NA2 2AN
0191 240 7777
Firenze
The Courtyard off Holly Avenue West, 7 Osborne Road NE2 2AE 0191 281 2136
There are also a number of other Italian places along Osborne Road, including some chain restaurants.
Indian
Valley Junction
Mrs. Ali’s
Old Jesmond Station, Archbold Terrace NE2 1BF
(yes, this is based in an old railway carriage)
Scottish Life House, Block B, 11-17 Archbold Terrace NE2 1DP
Daraz
4 Holly Avenue, West Jesmond NE2 2AR
0191 281 6397
0191 281 9988
0191 281 8431
Bistro-style
Louis’ Restaurant
71-73 Osborne Road NE2 2AN
0191 281 4545
Cherry Tree
9 Osborne Road NE2 2AE
0191 239 9924
As You Like It
Archbold Terrace NE2 1DB
0191 281 2277
There are also a large number of bars on Osborne Road which offer food and beer.
The second area is the city centre (or, in local parlance, tha Toon). Things are a little more spread
out here. Newcastle’s reputation as a party/fighting city is overblown, and the rowdier elements tend
to stick to three areas – the so-called ‘diamond strip’ (Collingwood Street and Mosley Street; NE1
1JF), the Bigg Market (NE1 1UN) and The Gate (NE1 5RZ). They are worth a visit from an
anthropological point of view, although the food tends to be of the fast variety. Elsewhere there are a
number of very fine real ale pubs and some excellent restaurants. Again, booking is worthwhile.
There are dozens of restaurants spread throughout, so please don’t consider this list exhaustive.
Bistro
Blackfriars (expensive but excellent)
Friars Street NE1 4XN
0191 261 5945
Broad Chare
25 Broad Chare, Quayside NE1 3DQ
0191 211 2144
Pan Haggerty
19-21 Queen Street NE1 3UG
0191 221 0904
Red House
32 Sandhill, Quayside NE1 3JF
0191 261 1037
Rasa
27 Queen Street NE1 3UG
0191 232 7799
Dabba Wal
69-75 High Bridge, NE1 6BX
0191 232 5133
Sabatinis
25 King Street, NE1 3UQ
0191 261 4415
Marco Polo
33 Dean Street NE1 1PQ
0191 232 5533
Caffe Vivo
27 Broad Chare NE1 3DQ
0191 232 1331
Pani’s (a Newcastle institution)
61-65 High Bridge, NE1 6BX
0191 2324366
Indian
Italian
There are numerous other Italian restaurants dotted about town. You are never far from one!
Vietnamese
Little Saigon
6 Bigg Market NE1 1UW
0191 233 0766
(yes, on the Bigg Market, but it’s an oasis of calm)
Other
Chinatown has lots of places on Stowell Street NE1 4XQ. If one is full, just try next door!
Big Mussel
15 Side NE1 3JE
0191 232 1057
Real Ale pubs in town
This is a list of Northumbria staff-approved pubs in the centre of town. There are many, many more to
choose from, but at these you can be guaranteed a decent pint of ale (if that is what you fancy) and a
friendly atmosphere. The food on offer is also normally of good quality. Most will get quite busy as the
night progresses. Beards may be observed at many of them.
Bacchus
NE1 6BX
The Bridge Hotel
NE1 1RQ (also does food)
The Broad Chare
as the restaurant (magnificent bar snacks)
The Crown Posada
NE1 3JE (a quite wonderful pub)
The Forth Hotel
NE1 5DW (also does food; loud in the evening)
The Hotspur
NE1 7RY
Lady Grey’s
NE1 6AQ (also does food)
The New Bridge
NE1 6PF
The Red House
as the restaurant
The Town Wall
NE1 5DW (also does food)
Travel directions and maps
Please find below travel information in order for you to plan your visit to Newcastle. You will find
instructions on how to reach the conference accommodation from Newcastle’s two central transport
hubs: Central Station, for those arriving by train, and Newcastle International Airport. You will also
find maps showing you how to get to conference venues across the city.
We hope that you have a safe and pleasant journey to Newcastle and look forward to welcoming you
to Northumbria University.
From Central Station to Thistle Hotel: it’s right outside, just to your right!
From Central Station to Sleeperz: turn right once you leave the main exit of the station, stay on the
same side of the street and walk past the Royal Station Hotel, bear right past the Miners Institute and
turn into Westgate Road. Sleeperz is halfway down the road on your right.
From Central Station to Holiday Inn, Jesmond
Taxi
A taxi from Central Station to the Holiday Inn, Jesmond will take around ten minutes. Please follow
signs in the station to the rank.
Metro
Newcastle has an extensive Metro system; this is the easiest and least expensive way to get around
the city. The nearest station to the hotel is Jesmond Station which is only two minutes’ walk from the
Holiday Inn (see map). For information about local Metro and bus services, see
http://www.nexus.org.uk/. The Metro at Central Station is easily accessible from the platforms. Make
sure you disembark at Jesmond and NOT West Jesmond!
Walking map from Jesmond Metro to Holiday Inn
From Newcastle International Airport
Taxi: http://www.airport-taxis.co.uk/
Taxis are available outside the airport at all times every day of the week. A taxi to the city centre
should cost around £15-20 per journey and not much less to Jesmond; however it is normal to ask
how much the journey will cost before you get into the car. You should be given a price which would
normally not vary by more than one or two pounds. If you use airport taxis – see link above – you can
pay by cheque, cash or all major credit cards. If you use another taxi company you would normally
have to pay cash so please ensure you have sterling with you.
Taking a taxi is simple – just step outside the airport and there should be taxis waiting. Alternatively,
you can ask at any airport information desk and they will help you.
Metro: http://www.newcastleairport.com/GettingHere/ByMetro.htm
The airport is on the Metro line and has a station within the building. Metro services are frequent –
trains run every 12 minutes on average and are the least expensive way to get to Newcastle, with
journeys taking just 25 minutes. For Sleeperz or Thistle take the Metro to Central Station; your hotels
can be found if you follow the walking directions above. For the Holiday Inn take the Metro to
Jesmond (not West Jesmond!); the hotel is just a few minutes’ walk from here.
Bus
http://www.newcastleairport.com/GettingHere/ByBus.htm
There are regular bus services from the airport to Newcastle city centre and Jesmond. Full timetables
for Metro and bus services can be found on the Nexus website.
City Centre hotels to City Campus East (NE1 2SW)
The easiest way to get to the conference venue is to take the Metro to the Manors Station, which is
within view of the Law and Business Building. If you prefer to walk, the following map shows the most
convenient route (from Sleeperz; the Thistle is simply further to the left on Neville Street). It should
take you about twenty minutes.
1) Head onto Mosley Street, and follow until the major roundabout (Fat Buddha in front of you [not a real
one])
2) Turn left up Pilgrim Street and then right at Market Street (Virgin Bank on your left)
3) Turn left onto Oxford Street, where you should see the Laing Art Gallery to your left and a staircase
more or less in front of you (before you reach the Premier Inn)
4) Up the staircase and follow the route through the buildings and onto a walkway over the city motorway.
5) You will see the Law and Business Building in front of you. It’s that big shiny thing with strange
architectural bits on the outside.
6) Follow the staircase and then cross the road.
7) You’re here!
8) Alternatively, get the Metro.
Holiday Inn, Jesmond (NE2 1PR) to City Campus East (NE1 2SW)
1. Leaving the Holiday Inn, cross the
carriageway and leave Jesmond Road
(A1058) onto Portland Terrace (B1600).
2. At the end of Portland Terrace take a right on
Sandyford Road then a left onto Chester
Street.
Road name changes to Byron Street
3. Continue on until the end of the road and then
turn left on to Camden Street.
Road name changes to Falconar Street
4. At the bottom of this road, as you approach
Simpson Terrace, City Campus East will be in
sight.
5. The Law and Business Building is the farther
building. The entrance is in between the two
buildings.
City Campus East
City Campus East (NE1 2SW) to BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (NE8 3BA)
1.
Head south on Argyle Street, towards Trafalgar Street.
2.
Turn right onto Melbourne Street.
3.
Turn left onto Pandon Bank (A186).
4.
Turn left to stay on Pandon Bank (A186).
5.
Turn left onto Pilgrim Street.
6.
Continue onto Milk Market.
7.
Milk Market turns slightly left to become Sandgate.
8.
Turn right towards Quayside.
9.
Another slight right towards Quayside.
10.
Cross the Gateshead Millennium Bridge.
11.
The BALTIC will be to your left.
The walk is mostly downhill and should not take more than fifteen minutes.