Register
Register here for the annual meeting and to begin or renew an ASA membership
Register here to submit a proposal through the ASA's 2012 submission site.
Register here for JHU Press and ASA membership services, including online access to American Quarterly and the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online.Register here to join an ASA community. Only current ASA members may contribute to the community blogs. Registration is not required to submit display or text ads or news and events or to view many pages. We will refuse posts that are not of professional interest to ASA members.
Click here for membership FAQ's
Group Members
The following people are members of this group:
The following people are administrators of this group:
Member Tools
We're sorry. You are not yet a member of the Early American Matters Caucus.
Register or login to join this group.
Main | Research | Publications | Contact | Contact Members
Early American Matters Caucus
“EARLY AMERICAN MATTERS” Caucus within the American Studies Association
A question that this title raises is “By ‘early,’ do you mean pre-1900? Prior to the so-called American Renaissance? pre-1800? Maybe even pre-European contact?,” and a legitimate answer would be Yes, as in Yes to all of the above.
We know that a number of our colleagues who attend A.S.A. conferences—as well as many more prospective participants—have research interests touching on those earlier periods. We know that alongside the re-invigoration of American Studies during the past two decades there has been a flourishing of interdisciplinary attention to America before the Civil War, before the Revolutionary War, before slavery came to the English colonies, before there were European colonies throughout these continents. We know too that many of today’s most fiercely contested issues have their sources in the first two centuries of European settlement. We also know that as scholarship flourishes around such questions and issues, it not only crosses these fairly arbitrary temporal boundaries (1900, the 1850s, 1800, and so on) but also takes us across traditional disciplinary lines.
We also know, alas, that for the past decade and more, the programs of A.S.A. conferences have included a paucity of matters early American. For us, matters include everything from the material culture of pre-European contact archeology to the pseudo-scientific racial theories of the antebellum decades; in short, we look at matters textual, ideological, material, and historical. Another question, then, suggests itself:
Shouldn’t the A.S.A.‘s menu of caucuses include one
whose title bears these keywords EARLY and MATTERS?
We say Yes, and we relish that prospect. Why don’t you Join Us? Why don’t you Sign-Up for our e-mail list-serve?
Community Blog
Early America Matters at ASA Baltimore 2011
Oct ‘011
behold quite the array of early-American-flavored moments at this year’s A.S.A. CONFERENCE in Baltimore
the two sessions our Caucus is sponsoring at this fall’s A.S.A.
Good morning. The votes’re in, and among the 14 early-American-flavored panels on this October’s program, the two that our Caucus is sponsoring are:
EARLY AMERICAN METHODOLOGIES
and
EARLY AMERICAN BIOPOLITICS
CONGRATS to latest recipient, FLIEGELMAN PRIZE FOR MENTORING AWARD
At the mid-March meeting of ASECS, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, one of our Caucus’s original co-proposers became the most recent recipient of the JAY FLIEGELMAN EXCELLENCE IN MENTORSHIP AWARD:
Categories:
“Keywords in Early American Studies”: session we’ll sponsor this November
The votes are in, and among the six early-American-flavored panels on this November’s program, the one that our Caucus is sponsoring is “KEYWORDS IN EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES”
Categories:
Looking to provide Early-American Content for the 2010 A.S.A.
Let’s see HOW MANY FIRST-RATE PANEL PROPOSALS we can get to the 2010 Program Committee by their January 26 deadline! Toward that end, Peter Reed, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), has generously offered to help MATCH UP colleagues who are considering proposing an early-American-flavored panel (or paper) with colleagues who are also considering proposing a paper!
Categories:
Quick Links
American Quarterly [official journal site]
American Quarterly [editorial site]
Encyclopedia of American Studies
Encyclopedia of American Studies [editorial site]