British Association for American Studies

Contents Welcome to the University of Birmingham Campus Map Sponsors and thanks Outline Programme Abstracts Session A Session B Session C Session D Session E Session F Session G Session H Session I Wi-Fi and computer access Our campus has full Wi-Fi facilities throughout. Usernames and passwords are available from the registration desk. These codes will also give you access to use the computers in the Mason Lounge (ground floor, Arts Building). Taxis TOA Taxis (black cabs) – 0121 427 8888 Castle Cars – 0121 472 2222 Taxis collect from the East Gate. Welcome to the University of Birmingham The University of Birmingham was established by Queen Victoria by Royal Charter in 1900 and was the UK’s first civic or 'redbrick' university. It is a member of the prestigious Russell Group of research universities and a founding member of Universitas 21. The University grew out of the radical vision of our first Chancellor, Joseph Chamberlain. Birmingham represented a new model for higher education, where students from all religions and backgrounds were accepted on an equal basis. Birmingham has continued to be a university unafraid to do things a little differently, and in response to the challenges of the day. It was a founder member of the National Union of Students and the first university in the country to: be built on a campus model establish a faculty of commerce incorporate a medical school offer degrees in dentistry create a women’s hall of residence have a purpose-built students’ union building The student population now includes around 16,500 undergraduate and 8,000 postgraduate students, making it the largest university in the West Midlands region, and the 11th largest in the UK. The University is home to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, housing works by Van Gogh, Picasso and Monet, the Lapworth Museum of Geology, and the Joseph Chamberlain Memorial Clock Tower, which is a prominent landmark visible from many parts of the city, and the tallest free-standing clock tower in the world. Alumni include former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and eight Nobel laureates. University of Birmingham Campus Map Further maps and directions to campus are available - click here Sponsors and thanks: U.S. Embassy London Outline Programme: Thursday 10 April 14.30 Conference Registration opens Arts Building (R16 on map) 15.00–16.15 BLARS Session Arts Main Lecture Theatre (R16) 16.15-16.45 Refreshments Noble Room, University Centre (R23) 17.00-18.30 Welcome and Plenary Noble Room, University Centre (R23) 18.30-19.45 Reception and Buffet Noble Room, University Centre (R23) Friday 11 April 08.30-09.00 Registration Arts Building (R16 on map) 09.00-10.30 Session A Arts Building (R16) 10.30-11.00 Refreshments Mason Lounge, Ground Floor, Arts (R16) 11.00-12.30 Session B Arts Building (R16) 12.30-13.30 Lunch Mason Lounge, Ground Floor, Arts (R16) 13.30-15.30 Session C Arts Building (R16) 15.30-16.00 Refreshments Mason Lounge, Ground Floor, Arts (R16) 16.00-17.30 BAAS AGM Arts Building (R16) 17.45-18.45 Plenary Barber Institute of Fine Arts (R14) 18.45-19.45 Reception Barber Institute of Fine Arts (R14) Saturday 12 April 08.30-09.00 Registration Arts Building (R16 on map) 09.00-10.00 Session D Arts Building (R16) 10.00-10.30 Refreshments Mason Lounge, Ground Floor, Arts (R16) 10.30-12.30 Session E Arts Building (R16) 12.30-13.30 Lunch Mason Lounge, Ground Floor, Arts (R16) 13.30-15.00 Session F Arts Building (R16) 15.00-15.30 Refreshments Mason Lounge, Ground Floor, Arts (R16) 15.15-17.15 PBS America Screening: 1964 Lecture Theatre 7, Arts Building (R16) 15.30-17.00 Session G Arts Building (R16) 17.15-18.30 Plenary Bramall Music Building (R12) 18.30-19.30 Reception Bramall Music Building (R12) 19.30-19.45 Coaches take delegates to Council House for the Gala Dinner 19.45 onwards Gala Dinner Banqueting Suite, Council House Sunday 13 April 09.15-09.30 Registration Arts Building (R16 on map) 09.30-11.00 Session H Arts Building (R16) 11.00-11.30 Refreshments Mason Lounge, Ground Floor, Arts (R16) 11.30-13.00 Session I Arts Building (R16) 13.00 Closing/lunch Arts Building (R16) The full detailed programme is available here http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/baas2014 Please note this programme may be subject to changes. Abstracts: SESSION A BrANCA Panel: Fin de siècle Radicalisms (Main Lecture Theatre): Michael Collins (University of Kent), "Creating a Common Ground: Print Culture, Anarchist Autobiography and 'US Literary Tradition'" This paper considers the autobiographies of the “Haymarket martyrs” (seven “anarchists” facing the death penalty for conspiracy to murder a policeman in Chicago on May 4th 1886) in the context of their first publication in the national newspaper Knights of Labor. In my reading of these works I draw attention to how the current transnational turn in scholarship, whilst offering rich ways of conceptualising the relationship between national events like the Haymarket Bombing and the transnational networks through which radicals and activists like the “martyrs” operated, often risks overlooking the juropolitical necessity of performing national identities in print for the under- •classes who were frequently subjected to the threat of state violence. More specifically, I demonstrate how the Haymarket defendants were forced in their autobiographies to write themselves into a national literary tradition (especially that of earlier nineteenth century slave narratives) and so construct what William Dean Howells referred to as a “common ground” of nationality that would assist their legal defence, which rested on identifying these transnational activists as citizens of the USA and so subject to its laws and protections. In this paper I combine close reading of the autobiographies with methodologies drawn from print culture studies, performance studies and labour history to argue for a more ethical version of transnationalism that in the rush to consider texts outside the confines of the nationstate pays due attention the continued power of the nation as a juropolitical force that was frequently evoked to suppress international labour radicalism in the late nineteenth century. J. Michelle Coghlan (University of Manchester), "Amazons in the Parlor: The Paris Commune and the Visual Culture of Post-bellum U.S. Gender Panic" The Nation opined in 1871 that “on the whole, the reign of the *Paris+ Commune must be pronounced the most extraordinary episode of modern times, and strikingly illustrates the truth of the observation that the barbarians whose ravages the modern world has to dread live not in the forests, but in the heart of our large cities.” This formulation of what “the modern world has to dread” concisely points to the post-bellum Red scare provoked by the Commune, and comments like it have led scholars to attend primarily to the transatlantic threat the uprising posed to the twin realms of labor and capital in the 1870s. But that narrative strikingly overlooks the aftershocks of images of Parisian females marching across the pages of Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s, unruly bodies who became an unsettling post-bellum emblem of at once an emergent form of radically anti-domestic womanhood and a threat to gender categorization. Throughout the 1870s and into the 1890s, these terrifying Parisian firebrands continued to surface in anti-suffragist U.S. sermons and editorials that depicted a woman on a platform as if she were on a barricade. My talk, and the larger chapter from which it is drawn, recovers the drama of that post-bellum specter and reexamines, in particular, Sarah M.B. Piatt’s remarkable response to the danger the “man-women” of the Commune were figured to pose to the American home in the 1872 periodical poem, “The Palace-Burner.” Reading Piatt’s poem alongside and against American periodical and pictorial coverage of the Commune and what I term the visual culture of post-bellum gender panic, I argue that Piatt both relies on and resists the ways that the women of the Commune were pictured in the newspaper, crucially re-figuring both the Parisian petroleum-thrower and the specter of domestic revolution she was so often used to portend. Tom F. Wright (University of Sussex), "How Silence Spoke for Lucy Parsons" The anarchist writer and orator Lucy Parsons possessed one of the late nineteenth century’s most problematic voices. The widow of Haymarket Riot ‘martyr’ Albert Parsons, half‐black and half- Mexican, this ‘windiest women in Windy City history’ was tireless in raising this voice to proclaim the cause of anarchism and labour reform. Her raucous rallies and speeches were provocative and fascinating exercises in street theatre that galvanised working class dissent and shook the Chicago establishment, and through her speaking tours of East Coast lecture halls and lyceums, she became a First Amendment cause celebre. Media response to these speech acts largely involved an oppositional remediation, neutering the bracing force of her rhetoric. Yet for Parsons such acts of censorship became part of her impact: ‘my silence shall speak.’ My paper reads and recovers the neglected myth of Parsons as a crisis of voice in the Gilded Age public sphere. Drawing upon copious newspaper coverage of her tours and appearances during the post‐Haymarket furore of the late 1880s, I consider the varied use made of the symbolism of her voice, and the creative use she herself made of ventriloquism and choreographing acts of refusal in an evolving media culture. Situating this media narrative within the context of the American performance, print and radical oral cultures, I explore how, with her socialist message, gender and race all cause for wild speculation and comment, Parsons became a resonant symbol of dangerous oral theatricality.

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