CALL FOR PAPERS

AMERICA: REAL AND IMAGINED
British Association of American Studies Annual Postgraduate Conference
Saturday November 15th, 2008
The University of Exeter

The School for Arts, Languages and Literatures at the University of
Exeter is pleased to be
hosting the annual BAAS postgraduate conference. We are seeking
proposals for 20-minute papers on all topics from all disciplines
within the field of American Studies, including history, music,
literature, philosophy, film studies, politics, sociology, popular
culture, pedagogy and language.

This year we are especially interested in papers presenting new ideas
and arguments that engage with the theme of "America and the West."

The West is often used as a generic term for the civilization that
grew up and out of Greece,
spreading first to Italy and then to northern Europe, before crossing
the Atlantic and taking root in the New World – principally in the
United States. This spread has been accompanied by the dissemination
of core values that originated in classical antiquity, including
limited constitutional government, civil liberties, the free exchange
of ideas, private property, capitalism and the separation between
religious and political/scientific thought – values all variously
embodied in competing and contested ideas about the United States. Yet
within the U.S. there also is a West, both real and imagined.
Annexation, migration and expansion west of the Mississippi was
accompanied by theories about manifest destiny and the movable
frontier as the site of contestation between the competing values of
civilization and wilderness. Today, the "American West" can
alternately conjure images of cowboys in Texas or hippies in San
Francisco.

Possible areas of inquiry might include, but are by no means limited to:

• The American West/America as the West
• American/Western myths
• American and Western politics
• America/the West as represented in visual media
• The West(ern) as genre
• Cultures of/bordering the United States
• The imagined West
• Mapping the West
• America and the heritage of classical antiquity.
• America and its allies.
• East and West.
• Writing America and/or the West
• The movement of history
• Western/westernizing narratives
• Frontiers and borderlands

Interested postgraduate students are encouraged to submit an abstract
of no more than 200
words along with a brief biography (including institutional
affiliation) to baas_at_ex.ac.uk no later than June 30th, 2008. For
more information, please visit http://www.sall.ex.ac.uk/conferences/





-- 
Iain Robert Smith
Institute of Film and Television
School of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham
University Park
NG7 2RD