CALL FOR PAPERS TO COLLEAGUES IN DENMARK
Center for Transnational American Studies, University of Copenhagen, second biennial
symposium: “Region, Nation, Globalization: Place in American Culture,” Thursday 23 and
Friday 24 April 2015
The Center for Transnational American Studies’ (CTAS) second biennial symposium follows
on from our 2013 inaugural event, “American Cultures of Work.” The 2015 conference will be
organized around the theme of “Region, Nation, Globalization: Place in American Culture.”
This second symposium will also inaugurate CTAS’ newly established American studies
research network with three collaborating universities: Brown University and the University of
Mississippi in the United States, and the University of Manchester in Britain. As such, thanks to
financial support from Carlsbergfondet, we welcome keynote speakers from each of the three research
partners:
1. Prof. Matthew Pratt Guterl, Head of American Studies at Brown University. Author of
Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe (Harvard University Press, 2014); Seeing Race in America
(University of North Carolina Press, 2013); American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the
Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2008); and The Color of Race in America, 19001940 (Harvard University Press, 2001).
2. Dr. Jaime Harker, Head of the Sarah Isom Center for Gender Studies at the University of
Mississippi and Associate Professor of English. Author of Middlebrow Queer: Christopher
Isherwood in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and America the Middlebrow
(University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).
3. Dr. Ian Scott, Senior Lecturer in the School of English and American Studies at the
University of Manchester. Author of American Politics in Hollywood Cinema (Edinburgh
University Press, 2011) and In Capra's Shadow (University Press of Kentucky, 2006).
For this second CTAS symposium, we also welcome paper and panel proposals from our
Danish university colleagues in American studies and related fields. We intend for the biennial CTAS
symposium to become a regular research event for American Studies in Denmark.
Following the adaptation of the “American Cultures of Work” symposium into a recent special
issue of American Studies in Scandinavia (vol. 46, no. 1, 2014), we hope to transform selected
presentations from this second symposium into a publication too.
Symposium theme
The experience and idea of place—of spatial metaphors and material realities--has had a central
role in the history of the United States, as well as the history of American studies as an interdisciplinary
field. Well established examples include myths of the western frontier and manifest destiny; the
purported “sense of place” of the U.S. South and its literature; the plantation and the Middle Passage as
sites of slavery, and the North and Canada as sites of liberation; contact zones of European-Native
encounter, followed by Indian “removal” and reservations; and the Jeffersonian vision of an agrarian
republic, in conflict with an increasingly metropolitan built landscape. However, the recent
“transnational turn” in American studies, as well as the “spatial turn” in various related disciplines, has
recast some of these ideas and ideologies in new ways, as well as generating new questions. For
example: has the “space of flows” of global capitalism really, as some critics claim, generated a “sense
of placelessness” or “time-space compression”? To what extent is the “place” of the nation recalibrated
by transnational movements of capital, commodities, peoples, and cultures? To what degree do various
“borderlands” complicate or regenerate traditional notions of regional, or national American identity
and geography? Does transnationalism and globalization erase U.S. regional identities, as many
commentators have tended to assume, or does “critical regionalism” enable us to understand how
regional identity increases or adapts when exposed to such processes? These are some of the questions
that we invite prospective participants to consider, though other angles on “place” are also welcome.
Submission of proposals
Please submit proposals to Martina Koegeler-Abdi of the Center for Transnational American
Studies at jbz327@hum.ku.dk. The deadline for proposals is Monday 2 March 2015. Proposals for
individual papers should be no longer than 300 words; proposals for panels (three presenters) should
be no longer than 1,000 words, and should include both the overall title of the panel and
titles/descriptions for each of the individual presentations. Proposals should also include a short
biography of each presenter. PhD students are especially encouraged to submit proposals.
(NB: We anticipate that, aside from the keynotes, each presenter will be allotted 20 minutes,
within a panel session of 90 minutes. However, the final format of the symposium will be contingent
on the number of presentations.)
If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Martyn Bone, coordinator of the Center for
Transnational American Studies, at bone@hum.ku.dk.