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War and Peace Studies Caucus Main Page
The War and Peace Studies Caucus will identify the analysis of violence and conflict as a primary field of study within American Studies scholarship and provide a dedicated space in which scholars interested in exploring how these issues intersect with the critical questions central to the study of American culture can share ideas, network, and collaborate to generate new directions for research and teaching. Recent scholarship that interrogates questions of transnationalism, imperialism, and borderlands studies, as well as that which seeks to historicize and explore the significance in American culture of the “War on Terror” and the on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have led to much excellent work that critically engages these issues. However, scholars working on these issues often remain separated because their alignment with particular subfields and historical periods prohibits collaboration with scholars working on similar issues in other fields or with regard to other historical moments.
The War and Peace Studies Caucus will seek to bridge this gap by encouraging collaboration across subfields and historical periods to develop new directions for teaching and research regarding how issues of violence and conflict intersect with issues ranging from notions of patriotism and nationalism to the role of technology and religion in American life. We are interested in interrogating specific historical incidents, theoretical questions about violence and conflict, the relationship between the study of war and peace and other subfields in American Studies, and all other issues that allow us to critically interrogate both issues of war and peace and the larger question of the location of these issues within the American Studies project.
We are particularly interested in encouraging partnerships that will lead to increased consideration of how the methodological and theoretical approaches central to the study of war and peace are useful in producing new understandings of those topics, and, concurrently, how examining those intersections will lead to innovative understandings of the historical and contemporary significance of war and peace in American culture.
Contact information:
*David Kieran, American Culture Studies Program, Washington University in St. Louis (dkieran@artsci.wustl.edu)
* Aaron DeRosa, English Department, Purdue University (aderosa@purdue.edu)
Community Blog
CFP: “We Create our own Reality”: The War on Terror and Visual Narrative Representation (ASA 2011)
Call for Papers:
Panel Proposal, American Studies Association Annual Conference, Baltimore, MD, 2011
Categories:
Update on 2010 Business Meeting
Dear Members of the War and Peace Studies Caucus,
I hope that everyone had a relaxing holiday and is managing to stay above water during the final few weeks of the semester. The War and Peace Studies Caucus had a productive business meeting at the ASA Annual Meeting in San Antonio, and I wanted to take a moment to update you on some news, including some panels that are in the works for next year’s meeting in Baltimore.
1. Possible Panels for Next Year’s ASA: At the caucus meeting, we reiterated that our primary goal is to create more opportunities to share our work within the structure of the ASA, and to do so in the form of panels and roundtables at the annual meeting and publications in related journals. To that end, we brainstormed several panel/roundtable topics for next year. As you will see, each of these remains rather nebulous and can be refined in any number of directions:
a. The National Museum of American History’s “The Price of Freedom” exhibit. Papers in these sessions (we envision a set of linked panels) would use the exhibit, which being located at the NMAH in Washington is somewhat close to next year’s Annual Meeting site, as a point of departure for the interrogation of issues surrounding the representation of war, peace, empire, and nation in U.S. culture; for investigation, critique, or discussion of issues of interest to the panelists; and for the presentation of the panelists’ own research on related topics. Anyone interested in considering these issues should contact Kristin Haas (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
b. “War” and “Empire.” We discussed how these terms, clearly related, are not always used together. Should they be? Are they used in the same way by scholars who see their primary focus as issues of war as those most interested in issues of empire? How should we rethink issues of war and empire? Can war and empire be discussed separately? If not, how, exactly, are they related, and what issues arise at their intersection and as a result of their connections? Folks interested in this topic should contact Mike Hill (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) and Irene Garza (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
c. War and the Environment. This panel will build upon and complicate the discussion begun at the successful “Ecologies of War” panel that Mike Hill put together for this year’s ASA, and continue an examination of the intersections of war and the environment. Possible questions include: In what ways have wars reshaped the environment or shaped environmental issues? How have those who fight in or plan wars sought to utilize or exploit the natural environment? How do new forms of technology—unmanned drones, for instance—change the physical and psychological landscapes of war? How “new” are the new technologies and strategies that capitalize upon or exploit the terrain on which wars are fought? How has the natural environment been significant in the consideration of war’s’ legacies? Interested folks should contact Ed Martini (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) and Bob Marzec (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
d. Visual Culture and War: This panel or roundtable will examine intersections of war and visual culture in a range of historical moments. How have wars and the people impacted by them been represented in visual media, and what is at stake in such representations? How have ways of seeing been weaponized? If you are interested in contributing, please contact Rebecca Adelman (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
e. Civil War History: In our effort to move beyond what tends to be a focus on recent history both in the caucus and the ASA more generally, and to recognize the Civil War sesquicentennial, this panel will examine issues of Civil War history. Papers on the culture of the war itself as well as the war’s legacies are welcome. Contact Megan Kate Nelson (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
f. Peace and Resistance: This panel aims to interrogate how efforts to oppose and end wars have been significant within U.S. culture. What role have pacifist and resistance movements played in historical and contemporary conflicts? How are they related to other efforts to define or claim rights or to contest inequality? How have they been produced and circulated? Contact Michael Coventry (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
2. Other news:
a. Ed Martini, who graciously lent his name and ideas to the caucus in its first year, has stepped aside. I’m grateful to Ed for signing on. Taking his place as one of the administrators is Aaron DeRosa, who is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at Purdue University, where he is working on a dissertation that examines the relationship between discourses of Cold War containment culture and post-9/11 cultural production. I’m sure Aaron will do a great job helping us stay organized and moving forward. We could always use more help, however, so if you’re interested in becoming more formally involved in the caucus, please email me.
b. Bob Marzec, who is associate editor of Modern Fiction Studies, announced that the journal is always interested in receiving submissions on war-related topics and may be open to a special issue. The MFS website is http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/mfs/.
c. We discussed working to locate journals that might be interested in doing special issues on topics related to the caucus. This is a continuing project, but we would welcome suggestions for both topics and possible journals.
d. A key goal of the caucus is to provide opportunities for networking; to that end, we hope scholars will reach out to folks junior to them, and particularly graduate students, to spread the word about the caucus and its activities and encourage them to become involved.
e. If you haven’t officially joined the caucus, you can do so by clicking here: http://www.theasa.net/caucus_war_and_peace_studies/.
You’ll see a link to the War and Peace Studies Caucus and, once you get there, a link to join.
f. We also have a Facebook group, “American Studies War and Peace Studies,” which you can find through your Facebook account. We’ll be posting announcements there as well as through the caucus webpage at the ASA site.
The topics above are, of course, only those that we came up with in our brief meeting and are necessarily representative of the interests of those present. Other topics are welcome, and we’re happy to provide a forum for networking and finding panelists, commentators, and chairs. Please let us know how we can help, or use the links above to post your announcements. The deadline for the 2011 program will be upon us soon, so it’s important to get organized even in this busy time of the semester. Please let me know if you have suggestions or announcements to pass along, and feel free to post your own thoughts and announcements on either the caucus home page or on Facebook.
Thanks to everyone for their participation and interest; we look forward to working with all of you to expand the caucus in the coming year.
Best,
Dave Kieran
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Aaron DeRosa
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
CFP: History, Memory, and U.S. Foreign Relations 8-10 April 2011
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 14 January 2011
Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin
Categories:
CFP: Ecologies of War, 2010 Annual Meeting
“Ecologies of War”
That the phrase “weaponizing of culture” is now common within military doctrine reveals that, although surely in quite different ways, military analysts and strategists are interrogating the same cultural, sociological, and ecological issues as scholars within the US and abroad. Indeed, issues of cultural imperialism, ever-increasing cultural hybridity, , growing problems of resource scarcity, the threat of climate change, and other cultural and ecological issues that have emerged as increasingly significant in the twenty-first century scholarship are likewise central to current US war-doctrine—such as the US Army’s Human Terrain Systems, military interest in climate change, and contemporary counter-insurgency doctrine. These programs have emerged from attempts to both foster and manage the globally minoritized sense of planetary risk that such issues raise.
This panel will interrogate the intersections between contemporary military doctrine and the critical questions shaping scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. We will consider such topics as the global contexts of group/identity, formation, techno-militaristic reorientations of geopolitics, the uniquely twenty-first century mutations of time and space, and political commitment with particular interest in understanding how they have been contemplated and deployed within a military context and what the significance of such deployments is.
More specific questions might include:
* How are certain Humanities methods - an awareness of identity politics or social movement theory, for example - being put to work as a new “area of operation” abroad? What is at stake in such developments?
* How can we locate the “weaponizing of culture” that is becoming significant within contemporary doctrine within longer histories of US imperialism and military doctrine?
* How does military interest in crucial global issues (climate change, for example, or women’s rights) intersect with, subvert, or exploit efforts to address these by other government agencies, international organizations, or NGOs?
* How is the “weaponizing of culture” occurring both in the name of advancing the liberal representative state while in the time, perhaps, effectively destroying it?
* How does the cultural turn within military doctrine combine with other forms of “soft”- and “hard-power”—omni-surveilance, drone-war, the absolute mediatization of violence, militarized ethnographic fieldwork, etc.—relate to US planetary ambition?
Please send brief abstracts as well as brief CVs to Mike Hill (mikehill2albany.edu) by January 10, 2010.
Categories:
CFP: ‘The War of My Generation:’ Adolescent Culture and the War on Terror
CFP for the 2010 ASA Annual Meeting
Categories:
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