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
Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
McGehee, Margaret. "On Margaret Mitchell's Grave: Women Writers Imagining Modern Atlanta," American Studies, Emory University, May 2007. Advisor: Allen Tullos
On Margaret Mitchell’s Grave examines depictions of Atlanta, Georgia, from World War II to the present in the fiction and non-fiction of three women writers: Celestine Sibley (1914-1999), Anne Rivers Siddons (1936- ), and Pearl Cleage (1948- ), all of whom worked in journalism and wrote popular fiction. Through their narrative constructions of place, these writers dismantle enduring identifications of the city with Margaret Mitchell and her epic novel, Gone With the Wind (1936), in part by exploring tensions related to race, gender, class, and geography that bubbled below Atlanta’s image as a progressive southern city. Each writer wavers between support and critique of the changing political, economic, social, and physical landscapes of Atlanta, at times reiterating the prevailing triumphal story of the city’s postwar development and in other moments confronting its neglect of women’s and African Americans’ complex negotiations of the turbulent forces unleashed by Atlanta’s postwar prosperity.
Through an urban pastoral that rendered Atlanta quaintly charming and white and through a traditional pastoral that imagined suburbia as an idyllic retreat separate from the city but under threat of urban sprawl, Sibley’s work lent stability during an era of rapid change. In her ambivalent representations of Buckhead, Siddons attempted to challenge social norms of Atlanta and southern society but could not transcend those norms in her writing or life. Influenced by feminism and black nationalism, Pearl Cleage re-imagines Atlanta’s West End as a black utopia geared towards inspiring her predominately African American readership, but this vision is ultimately limited by a patriarchal and exclusive construction of place.
On Margaret Mitchell’s Grave relies on close reading of the authors’ newspaper columns, magazine articles, and novels and on interviews, articles in the popular press, and archival materials. It seeks to draw attention to three writers who have been almost completely ignored within academic circles partially because they have written for a popular audience. Located within regional, national, and global marketplaces, their representations of Atlanta have traveled, moving beyond a southern circuit of consumption and helping to shape wider conceptions of southern places in the process.
Quick Links
American Quarterly [official journal site]
American Quarterly [editorial site]
Encyclopedia of American Studies
Encyclopedia of American Studies [editorial site]