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Southern Chapter
Dear colleagues,
It’s a pleasure to pass along the following text on behalf of Eric Gary Anderson, who will host our next biennial conference, like so:
SASA 2009 /// BEGINNINGS AND RENEWALS: LOCATING AMERICAN STUDIES
Southern American Studies Association’s NEXT biennial meeting
George Mason University / Fairfax, Virginia / February 12-14, 2009
The 2009 biennial meeting of the Southern American Studies Association will be held on the campus of George Mason University in the heart of northern Virginia, a longstanding yet ever-changing site of transatlantic, multiethnic, colonial, urban, and cosmopolitan American beginnings and renewals. About fifteen miles from downtown Washington, DC, and within a few miles of Arlington, Mount Vernon, the Pentagon, Old Town Alexandria, and much more, northern Virginia is a place where the “old” and the “new” continue to meet and reinvent each other.
The Washington, DC, metropolitan area is famous for its many iconic, monumental fashionings of U.S. national identity and cultural memory. But this is of course also a region of tremendous fluidity, a place full of surprises and crisscrossed by routes—of trade, labor, government, law, media, languages, cultures—that continue to be negotiated, constructed, mapped, traveled, toured, enforced, and contested. SASA 2009 offers us an opportunity to consider how these and other networks provoke both connections and disconnections among the local, the federal, the regional, the national, the hemispheric, and the global. We’ll also investigate how routes and roots help us understand beginnings and renewals and help us undertake the work of locating American studies in place, space, and time.
We invite our colleagues in American Studies, Southern Studies, and all related fields of study and areas of interest to join us as we investigate these and other ways of locating American Studies. While we welcome proposals addressing the conference theme and are always happy to consider proposals investigating the South, broadly defined, this conference is open to anyone interested in contributing to the interdisciplinary study of American cultures.
Visit us on the web at sasa.gmu.edu (soon!) and, of course, here within theasa.net.
Please send 2-3-page session proposals and/or one-page individual paper abstracts, as MS Word attachments, to Eric Gary Anderson at George Mason University:
. The deadline for proposals is October 15, 2008.
Conference attendees may be listed in the conference program as participants in a maximum of two sessions. While we welcome a range of panel formats, we ask that panels be designed so that they fit within a 75-minute time frame with at least 15 minutes dedicated to discussion.
As ever, we especially encourage graduate students to attend and present papers. Our CRITOPH PRIZE, honoring the best graduate student paper presented at each biennial conference, includes a framed, certificate, a $250 check, and recognition at the next SASA meeting.
Possible topics for session and individual paper proposals include but are not limited to:
American Indian roots and routes
Colonial and/or other “beginnings”
Urban and/or other “renewals”
New iterations of American Studies
Formations and deformations of American communities/neighborhoods
Growth, sprawl, development, reclamation: cities, suburbs, exurbs, industries
Waterways and waterfronts; ports and maritime culture
Transatlantic / colonial encounters on the Eastern seaboard
Early African American history and culture
Geographics and natural history
Representing and contesting slavery
Travel and tourism, domestic and international, then and now
Contested representations of American Indians
Public cultures
Forms of material culture
Ethnic and multiethnic beginnings, renewals, and/or locations
Memory, commemoration, amnesia
Secrets, disguises, covert identities
Museums and/or monuments
Animals / Animal Rights
Music and musicology
Ethnic enclaves in the South, the mid-Atlantic, and/or the U.S.
Film and media studies
Cultural traumas and contested histories
Performances, theatrical representations, festivals, public spectacles
Photography and national memory/identity
Politics, government, public affairs
Literatures of beginnings and renewals
Transatlantic or transnational literary and cultural relations
Teaching the roots and routes of New Southern Studies
Teaching American Studies in various contexts, settings, etc.
Remaking Native American identities and communities
Borderlands in the South
Contesting notions of region and/or regionalism
Writing / working against the slave trade
Disrupting antebellum / postbellum or other historical / cultural paradigms
Law and American Studies
Locating American Studies in various institutional and other settings
Americans / America / American Studies abroad
Postcolonial Theory and U.S. federal law, government, foreign policy, etc.
ASA 2008 follow-ups about “Integrative American Studies in Theory and Practice”
Again, do visit us on the web at sasa.gmu.edu (soon!)—and, of course, here within theasa.net.
By Dennis Moore, Thu, February 07, 2008 - 9:41 amCategories:
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