Nordic Association for american studies
Welcome
Welcome to the home page of the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS).
The purpose of NAAS is to encourage the study of the United States, particularly in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.
NAAS organizes biennial conferences, publishes a peer-reviewed journal (American Studies in Scandinavia) and a newsletter, and engages in other activities in keeping with its purpose.
NEWS
University of Southern Denmark Center for American Studies
American Studies Festival
November 21-22, 2024
*This event is live and streamed!
Thursday, November 21
Auditorium U110
12.15-12.25
Welcome. Simon Møberg Torp, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, SDU.
12.25-13.25
Nicole Hemmer, Associate Professor of History, Director of Graduate Studies; Director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the American Presidency, Vanderbilt University:
The MAGA Revolution: How the Party of Reagan Became the Party of Trump.
Live streaming option: https://syddanskuni.zoom.us/j/69688800824
13.25-14.00
Andreas Brunebjerg Jørgensen and Alexander de Summer-Brason Welford, MAs in American Studies and alumni from SDU:
The Continued Fight for the Soul of America: Reflections from Election Week in the Battleground State of Wisconsin.
Live streaming option: https://syddanskuni.zoom.us/j/69688800824
14.00-14.15
Coffee break and change of auditorium
Auditorium U1
14.15-16.00
Your Job Prospects as an American Studies Candidate
Panel of MAs in American Studies who are alumni from SDU.
Live streaming option: https://syddanskuni.zoom.us/j/69870050518
Friday, November 22
DIAS Auditorium
10.15-11.45
The Annual Honora Rankine-Galloway Address
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Joseph S. Atha Professor in Humanities, Professor of English, and Professor by Courtesy of African and African American Studies and former President of the American Studies Association:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Trojan Horse in the Classroom?
Live streaming option: https://syddanskuni.zoom.us/j/67893037506
11.45-12.45
Lunch (not included).
12.45-13.45
James Fishkin, Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication and Professor of Communication and Political Science (by Courtesy) and Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab at Stanford University:
Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?
Live streaming option: https://syddanskuni.zoom.us/j/65340864578
13.45-14.00
Coffee break.
14.00-15.00
Gina Caison, Kenneth England Professor in Southern American Literature, Georgia State University:
Lewis Baltz, California Exceptionalism, and the Horizons of Possibility.
Media streaming option: https://syddanskuni.zoom.us/j/61244102907
15.00-17.00
Student Presentations and the American Studies Student Award
Public Diplomacy Officer Phillip Assis of the United States Embassy in Denmark administers the American Studies Student Award ceremony.
Johanna Laura Béres:
The Mistreatment of Gay American Football Players in the NFL.
Camila Gudmundsen-Holmgreen:
Hollywood's Transformation: The Impact of Deregulation and Streaming on the Film and TV Industry.
Mathias Schmeltzer Vingaard Nielsen and Lukas Rode Fausing:
First-Hand Experiences from the 2024 Presidential Election.
Live streaming option: https://syddanskuni.zoom.us/j/66590009523
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
22nd Annual Spring Academy Conference
Heidelberg, Germany, 24-28 March, 2025
Call for Papers
The twenty-second HCA Spring Academy on American Culture, Economics, Geography, History, Literature, Politics, and Religion will be held from March 24-28, 2025. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one-week conference that provides twenty international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and discuss their Ph.D. projects.
We encourage applications that pursue an interdisciplinary approach and range broadly across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Papers can be presented on any subject relating to the study of the United States of America. We are also accepting applications that focus on the North American continent at large, including Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Possible topics include American identity, migration, issues of ethnicity, gender, transatlantic relations, U.S. domestic and foreign policy, economics, as well as various aspects of American history, literature, religion, geography, law, musicology, and culture. Proposals should include a preliminary title and run to no more than 300 words.
Participants are requested to prepare a 20-minute presentation of their research project, which will be followed by a 40-minute discussion. The presentations will be arranged into ten panel groups.
In addition to cross-disciplinary and international discussions during the panel sessions, the Spring Academy aims at creating a pleasant collegial atmosphere for further scholarly exchange and contact.
Accommodation will be provided by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies.
Thanks to a small travel fund, the Spring Academy is able to subsidize travel expenses for participants registered and residing in soft-currency countries. Scholarship applicants will need to document the necessity for financial aid and explain how they plan to cover any potentially remaining expenses. In addition, a letter of recommendation from their doctoral advisor is required.
DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS: November 01, 2024
SELECTIONS WILL BE MADE BY: January 2025
PLEASE USE OUR ONLINE APPLICATION FORM: https://www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de/spring/applicationspring_en.html
MORE INFORMATION: https://www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de/spring/index_en.html
FOR FURTHER QUESTIONS: lmayerle@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
jbuchholz@hca.uni-heidelberg.de
THE UNCANNY STATES OF AMERICA: ENCOUNTERING THE PLANETARY
A special issue of THE EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
Editors: Dominik Steinhilber (University of Konstanz), Florian Wagner (University of Jena)
Taking into consideration recent developments toward a Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies, this special issue of The European Journal of American Studies aims to rethink and recontextualize the American project not through the homogenizing impulses of the global sublime but through the decentered relationality of planetarity—the act of “making our home unheimlich or uncanny” (Spivak 74). Such a planetary approach to American Studies may be able to more adequately address the multilayered social, political, and ecological crises of the 21st century than previous cosmopolitanist, globalist, or post- as well as transnationalist approaches.
To this day, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass stands as the poetic bible of American democracy and its project of nationhood. Yet the voice that speaks “I am large. I contain multitudes” also connotes the sublime dream of an American national experiment that cannot be contained by the nation alone, “the manifest destiny redreamed” into “a spiritual and secular unity that will unite the globe as one organism” (Fuller 2022). Through the sublime experience of being able to contain multitudes beyond itself (Kant 109), the rational self transcends, sublimity figuring the world as little more than a resource to be absorbed and consumed. Applying the sublime’s inherently anthropocentric and logocentric logic to the national project reveals justifications of dominance over the Other that is ‘Not-Me’. The sublime greatness of the American experiment hence always already contained its deepest abysses, from the exploitation of the racialized other and the environment, excessive nationalism, to U.S. imperialism. Globalization, primarily driven by American capital and culture, and the subsequent crises of global climate change are only the last figuration of the sublime idea of America.
While (ecologically) regulative principles have remained largely inaccessible to the likes of post- and transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and globalism,1 the ecocritically informed discourse of planetarity may be better positioned to take on a sense of “stewardship” with fewer politically fraught connotations of paternalism, colonialism, and monopoly capital. In its orientation toward “the radical otherness of the planet” (Chakrabarty 25), planetary thought can leave behind all too narrow notions of nationness and think ethics and relationality beyond the human and beyond national borders and global structures. A form of stewardship based on the planet’s uncanny otherness may thus connote “both an ethics of care for both organic and inorganic planetary resources and a social stance mindful to conserve cultural legacies” (Elias & Moraru xxiv). In this vein, we propose the planetary uncanny as an alternative mode of thinking about our current planet-wide crises. In many ways an uncanny double of the sublime that, however, rescinds sublimity’s sense of closed-offness, mastery, elevation, and control—the uncanny may help construct horizontal ethics and imaginaries of intimacy and
contact grounded in otherness. To think globally, is to think the sublime; to think the planetary, on the other hand, is to think uncannily.
Against this background, we seek to mobilize the uncanny as a mode or method of a literary and cultural examination of (a not-yet-realized) planetarity. The special issue invites contributors to think through different modes of the uncanny in order to investigate its potential for subversion, destabilization, and defamiliarization, but also for contact, affect, and jouissance. We want to encourage American Studies scholars from various fields and disciplines to rethink the American project through the planetary uncanny to explore modes of imagining coexistence and contact not through increasing familiarity—meaning an absorption of the other into the self that may only serve homogenization and control—but rather through a profound and indelible, radical alterity. How can American Studies (re)think the sublimity of the American experiment, egalitarianism, democracy, humanism, yet also ecology at large, in terms of the uncanny? How may a closer look at the uncanny states of America, from its beginnings until now, destabilize our traditional perspectives on U.S. ideology, imperialism, and globalism, and allow for the return of a repressed planetary thought and imaginaries that deal in coexistence and uncertainty?
Potential contributors should send a 500 word abstract and a short biographical note to dominik.steinhilber@uni-konstanz.de and florian.wagner@uni-jena.de by December 31, 2024. Contributors will be notified of their acceptance by January 19, 2025. Finished articles (5,000-7,500 words; newest MLA style) should be submitted by May 31, 2025. All disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, and topics may include, but are not limited to:
Critical (re)readings of American canonical and non-canonical texts through a planetary lens
Theoretical and historical reflections on the sublime and the uncanny in the context of globalism, imperialism, and the planetary.
Indigenous methodologies and literatures in relation to planetarity.
Issues of planetarity and eco-cosmopolitanism, environmental responsibility.
Critiques of the Anthropocene and related concepts (e.g., Capitalocene, Cthulucene etc)
Human and non-human agencies in the Anthropocene in relation to notions of the uncanny, the eerie, and the weird.
Issues relating to material ecocriticism (e.g. questions of materiality and ‘storied’ matter)
Multi-species ethnography, plant life (writing)
Engagement with petrocultures, petrochemical landscapes
Religion and the supernatural in American literature and thought
The special issue is planned to be published in late 2026. Please feel free to contact dominik.steinhilber@uni-konstanz.de and florian.wagner@uni-jena if you need further information.
Works Cited:
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 46, no. 1, 2019, pp. 167–92.
Elias, Amy J and Christian Moraru, eds. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Northwestern UP, 2015.
Fuller, William R. "Love and Imperialism: Reading Whitman's Leaves of Grass Through Edward Carpenter and Maurice Bucke." Inquiries Journal vol. 14, no. 03, 2022.
Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford UP, 2008.
Horn, Eva and Hannes Bergthaller. The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities. Routledge, 2020.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. Columbia University Press, 2003.
INDIVIDUALITY AND COMMUNITY IN MID-CENTURY AMERICAN CULTURE:
A special issue of American studies in Scandinavia
Please note that we have updated the deadline for this CFP until October 31, 2024. We look forward to reading your abstracts!
We are planning a peer-reviewed special issue of American Studies in Scandinaviafocused on the topics of individuality and community in mid-century American culture (1945-1964), inviting explorations of the literature, film, art, and thought of the period. We seek 8,000-word articles that focus either on individual writers/artists/thinkers in the period or engage with the topic more broadly.
Mid-century US culture tends to be described in both simplified and paradoxical terms. On the one hand, it is thought of as a period of ‘containment’ culture, ‘Red-Scare’ rhetoric, and McCarthyism: a time when norms were strong, and it was difficult to be different. On the other hand, it is a period romanticized as the great era of American exceptionalism and industry. As today’s politicians from left to right increasingly rely on nostalgia for an idealized past, it becomes relevant to ask questions about the culture and values of mid-century America, and to challenge stereotypical images of this time, especially that of the white, churchgoing nuclear family, which has become an almost indelible image of the ‘long’ 1950s.
At this pivotal moment in American history, the individual was often seen as being in conflict with society. Early Cold-War culture saw an increased focus on the negative effects of social conformity on the individual, whether in the form of Holden Caulfield’s restless depression in Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951) or Guy Montag’s awakening from totalitarianism in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Elsewhere, individualism and self-expressionwere celebrated, as can be seen, for example, in the Beat Generation’s rebellion against conformity and in the deep subjectivity in some of the work of the so-called Confessional Poets.
Conformity was not necessarily only a negative aspect of social life in post-war US, however; the period was also characterized by a very real sense of community and the importance of ‘sticking together’ through thick and thin, especially in the early post-war period. A sense of community can also be noted in how the rights and needs of individual groups of people began to be emphasized, which is clearly seen in how the Civil Rights movement gained traction and in the burgeoning feminist movement. While some cultural groupings dominated the cultural scene and appear to have been impermeable, marginal groups developed their own literature and arts scene. In American Literature in Transition, Stephen Belletto writes that ‘one reason the 1950s can still seem bland and white bread, with a literature to match, is because at the time the same kind of writers tended to be celebrated while whole groups of others were seen as unliterary’ (4). Further research into alternative cultural output is needed in order to paint a more inclusive and accurate picture of the 1950s, moving beyond WASP culture and the image of the white, nuclear family.
Delving into the complexities of mid-century American culture, our proposed special issue serves as more than just a historical exploration; by inviting perspectives on diversity and voices from the margins, we seek to paint a more inclusive and accurate portrait of this era. We think a reevaluation of the legacy of the 1950s, and its relevance in today's socio-political landscape, is urgently needed. Our special issue will challenge readers to reconsider their assumptions and critically engage with the complexities of the past.
For this special issue, we seek articles that approach the topics of individuality and community in the period more broadly, but also articles that focus on individual writers, artists, and thinkers. Topics include but are not limited to:
Individualism and conformity culture
Individual and community
Individual works/authors/artists/thinkers
Literary groups or movements
Mainstream or avantgarde perceptions of literature and culture
The political influence on cultural output
National or transnational cultural relations and exchanges
The legacy of mid-century American culture and values
The legacy of colonialism in mid-century US
The commercialization of literature and culture
Cultural representations of family
Religion
LGBTQIA+ culture and mid-century America
We are calling for 500-word abstracts to be submitted by October 31, 2024; to submit, send by email to annika.lindskog@englund.lu.se. Selected submissions will be notified by November 8, 2024. Finished articles are planned for production in autumn 2025.
Annika J. Lindskog, Lund University, Sweden
Sanna Melin Schyllert, University of York, UK
extended deadline!
August 16, 2024
The 28th Biennial Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies
University of Turku, Finland
June 4-6, 2025
PLEASE CLICK THE LINK TO SUBMIT!
ASPIRATIONS
We welcome proposals that think through, reflect upon, and reconsider the significance of Aspirations in the pasts, presents, and futures of the United States. Aspirational ideals and beliefs have always been at the crux of the United States’ national ethos, but they have also evolved during the course of history.
Inviting colleagues to consider a range of temporal, spatial, and performative aspects of aspirations, we pose the following questions:
How has aspirational thinking, rhetoric, and action evolved over the course of U.S. history?
What meanings does aspirational thinking carry in the 21st century and in anticipation of the future?
Where does aspirational behavior, action, or performance find fruitful ground?
What kinds of creative, expressive, or aesthetic forms do aspirations take?
What do we make of unfulfilled aspirations, aspirations gone astray, or destructive aspirations?
How do we conceptualize American Studies research, teaching, and institutions by way of aspirations?
Alongside these questions, we encourage colleagues to tease out novel approaches and explorations of aspirations, framed around one or more of these thematic clusters:
pasts | presents | futures
beliefs | politics | ideologies
sites | locations | geographies
communities | organizations | movements
concepts | rhetoric | mediation
creation | expression | sound
looking | seeing | envisioning
images | imaging | imaginaries
blind-spots | tensions | failures
research | teaching | dialogue
In particular, we seek unexpected juxtapositions and collaborations between participants from different institutions and fields of study, hoping that the conference will serve as a forum for advancing our scholarly, epistemological, and creative aspirations.
In addition to the traditional paper and panel formats, we accept workshop sessions as well as alternative format proposals that reinvent the traditional paper session.
The conference is open to scholars and students from all countries, but we offer lower registration fees to members of NAAS (Nordic Association for American Studies), EAAS (European Association for American Studies), and ASA (American Studies Association, United States).
The conference is organized by the John Morton Center for North American Studies (JMC), University of Turku, and the Finnish American Studies Association (FASA).
Abstract Submission: Abstracts for individual papers are max. 250 words and for panel/workshop/alternative sessions max. 500 words.
Inquiries: naasturku2025@gmail.com
Twitter: @naas2025 #NAASpirations2025
American Studies in Scandinavia 55:1
The new issue of American Studies in Scandinavia is now available.
Click here to read this new special issue or any previous issue, all available fully digital.
Visiting Phd Student program
The Swedish Institute for North American Studies (SINAS) at Uppsala University is offering a Visiting PhD Student Program in the fall of 2023. Please see the attached flyer and Call for Applications for more information. Deadline is August 6, 2023
American Studies in Scandinavia 54:2
The US and the Arctic special issue
The new issue of American Studies in Scandinavia is now available.
Click here to read this new special issue or any previous issue, all available fully digital.
Heidelberg Center for American Studies 20th Annual Spring Academy Conference
Heidelberg, Germany, 20–24 March, 2023
The twentieth HCA Spring Academy on American Culture, Economics, Geography, History, Literature, Politics, and Religion will be held from March 20-24, 2023. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one-week conference that provides twenty international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and discuss their Ph.D. projects.
Please fill out your application by using the online application system. For more information please visit the website and for further questions please contact Spring Academy via e-mail.
Second Call for Papers
Crises and Turns: Continuities and Discontinuities in American Culture
The 27th Biennial NAAS Conference in Uppsala
May 25-27, 2023
FOR DETAILS ON HOW TO SUBMIT VISIT OUR CONFERENCE WEBSITE
Deadline for Submission
Submit a proposal for the NAAS conference in Uppsala, May 25-27 2023
The deadline for the submissions – September 1 – is now approaching! Please visit the conference site: NAAS 2023 – The Biennial Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS) for more information on how to submit.
We are delighted to announce that our keynote speakers are now confirmed, Professor Kristin Hoganson and Professor Imre Szeman. More information about them here: Keynote Speakers – NAAS 2023.
Please feel free to contact the conference committee via email naasinfo2023@gmail.com if you have any questions.
NAAS Conference
Crises and Turns: Continuities and Discontinuities in American Culture
The 27th Biennial NAAS Conference in Uppsala May 25-27, 2023
CFP: October 1, 2022
American Stuidies in scandinavia 54:1
American Studies in Scandinavia is now fully digital. Our first open access issue showcases some fantastic work by Clara Juncker, Marianne Kongerslev, Melih Levi and numerous (book) reviewers.
Check out the cureent issue, along with all previous issues, here.
Civil War Settlers
Anders Bo Rasmussen, Associate Professor, SDU
Civil War Settlers is the first comprehensive analysis of Scandinavian Americans and their participation in the US Civil War.
For purchasing options please visit Cambridge University Press. Discount code CWS2022.
Seven Sublimes
David Nye, Professor Emeritus, SDU
A reconception of the sublime to include experiences of disaster, war, outer space, virtual reality, and the Anthropocene.
For purchasing options please visit MIT Press.
