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Annual Meeting: Call for Topics
The American Studies Association invites members to advertise possible sessions for the 2013 annual meeting to be held November 21-24: at the Hilton Washington, Washington, DC. Interested members are invited to examine these abstracts and contact the authors to construct session proposals for the 2013 Annual Meeting.
These proposed abstracts are an excellent way for both established scholars working in new fields and graduate students seeking panel members to find and network with interested colleagues.
Proposed topics should include a tentative session title, 200-word description, and proposer’s contact information. Indicate your due date for receiving an abstract or paper. A staff member will review your submission for missing information prior to posting.
After the suggested topics have been published, individuals can send abstracts or papers to the session organizer who will then be responsible for accepting papers, finding a chair and commentator, and submitting the session for consideration to the Program Committee. In the recent past, the odds of acceptance of a pre-packaged session have been much higher than for acceptance of individual papers, which not only need to pass the test of excellence but also must fit with other individual papers to form a panel with internal coherence.
Pre-proposal networking circumvents this problem.
The session abstracts are posted on the ASA website as a service to the association’s members who are developing panel proposals for the annual meeting. But this does not imply endorsement of the proposals by the 2013 ASA Program Committee. In fact, the Program Committee will not have seen the abstracts prior to their publication.
If you do plan to post a topic abstract please be aware of your responsibility to inform each person who may submit an abstract or paper directly to you, in a timely and collegial manner, whether or not you intend to include his or her abstract in your proposal. This is important because each person is allowed to make and/or be listed as a participant on only one submission.
Submit your topic abstract (“work in progress”) using our topics submission form Please limit your topic abstract to a maximum of 200 words.
Submit your final proposal using our proposal submission form. The ASA submission site will open on December 1, 2012 and should be used only for the submission of final proposal. The final deadline for actual session proposals will be January 26, 2013.
All proposal submitters must be current ASA members (or an affiliated international American studies association) at the time of submission. Each panel submission should also include a second current ASA member (in addition the panel organizer) at the time of submission. All other panelists, including chairs and commentators, must become current individual members of the ASA (or an affiliated international American studies association). All participants must buy *both* a membership and a registration in order to be properly registered for the conference.
WORKS IN PROGRESS (2013 Annual Meeting Call for Topics)
Comparative Ethnicities: Intersectional Identities in the New Millennium
This panel will look at the way race, ethnicity, nationality and even religion, often times associated with one group from a geographical region, are expected to share a set of cultural values. The goals of the papers in this panel will be to employ a transnational comparative methodological approach and to challenge how stereotypical assumptions made in popular culture can and do frequently appear. Put another way, the presence of people who belong to two (or more) different, and even opposing, identity categories are no longer able to be denied in public discourses in the new millennium. Papers on a broad range of topics are welcome. Please submit the following: 1) an abstract that takes a comparative approach to texts (literary, creative, artistic, legal, visual, etc) about race, ethnicity, nationality and religion, 2) a brief biography with institutional affiliation, and 3) whether or not you are, or plan to be, a member of the American Studies Association (ASA). This call for topics is very open, however, please do specify in the abstract some authors/theorists/artists/subject matters that will be the primary sources that your paper(s) will analyze.
Please submit paper abstracts (200 words) and biographical statements to Christopher Rivera (christopher.rivera.phd@gmail.com) by January 23, 2013.
This is OUR Heritage: African American Writers and Dissenting Views on History
W.E.B. Du Bois famously exclaimed in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that African American religion, music, toil, and strife are not segregated parts of American history belonging to a specific racial group but rather that they are the very heart and soul of America. In the chapter “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Du Bois calls the music of the Negro slave the “spirit” of America—America being a country reduced to a “dusty desert of dollars and smartness” that yearns to realize its bastion of “simple faith and reverence” in the African American soul. The chapter concludes with a call for “human brotherhood” through an exchange of characteristics and heritage between whites and blacks, asserting that “there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave,” and that it can replace the “vulgar music” of white America with the goal of bettering the republic. This panel will examine the works of African American writers who move beyond a logic of historical and cultural debt and toward a notion of collective dissent in claiming that the problems of America are AMERICA’S problems, thereby highlighting a collective responsibility and a dream of shared growth as a country.
Please submit paper abstracts (200-300 words) and C.V.s to Shawn Higgins (shawn.higgins@uconn.edu) by January 23, 2013.
Representing Moral Bankruptcy on Television
This proposed panel would look at problematic representations of morals and ethics on television, particularly the draw of immoral and corrupt characters. Some of the questions papers on this panel could consider are: Are “guilty pleasures” simply a waste of time, or can they be related to our ethics? How is the consumption of such programming related to ethical considerations? Are we simply passive witnesses, or is there something more at stake? What relationships are there between reality television and other programming? Recent television shows such as Dexter, Mad Men, Archer, South Park, The Simpsons, The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy, Breaking Bad, Weeds, as well as past programming, reality television, sports programming, and news shows are possible topics.
Please submit paper abstracts (200 words) and brief biographical statements (50 words) to Amy Parziale (parziale@email.arizona.edu) by January 24, 2013
Quick Links
American Quarterly [official journal site]
American Quarterly [editorial site]
Encyclopedia of American Studies
Encyclopedia of American Studies [editorial site]