Friday

Editor's Introduction to the JJAS #18


The latest issue (#18) of The Japanese Journal of American Studies (including Sheila's "Editor's Introduction") is now available online at the JJAS website.

Wednesday

Julia's latest publications

I'm posting this because neither of them will be online any time soon, I suspect. First, an essay in my department's in-house ("kiyo") journal, English Literature and Language, "Making Place in Gertrude Stein's 'Melanctha.'" Second, a review essay called "Geography for Americanists" in the Journal of American and Canadian Studies that covers Doreen Massey's For Space and Matthew Sparke's In the Space of Theory. There was also a book chapter on class in Faulkner but it's not exactly geographical, so never mind.

Thursday

Special issue on Katrina, free online access

Still awaiting the deluge of Americanist scholarship on Katrina, I was glad to see one piece in the last issue of American Quarterly. But now the Du Bois Review, a journal dedicated to social science research on race, is giving free online access to a massive 255-page issue on the topic. You can access the list of articles here. Not sure how long this will be free, so download now. Way to go social scientists!

Sunday

New paper out in 49th Parallel

The revised version of Sheila's paper from the conference "Engaging the 'New' American Studies" at the University of Birmingham, UK, May 11-13 is now out in the online journal 49th Parallel as "In the Event: Engaging with Space in American Studies." This issue also includes two papers from current PhD students in American Studies at the University of Tokyo: "Remaking Corporeality and Spatiality: US Adaptations of Japanese Horror Films" by Eimi Ozawa, and "Communities Created Through the Production of Scale: Controversy Over the Renaming of 'Jap Road' in Texas" by Yoko Tsukuda.

ASA 2006

Julia has organized a session at the 2006 ASA in Oakland "Do You Know What It Means?: Post-Katrina New Orleans," with papers by David Berriss, Helen A. Regis, and Julia, chaired by Jolie Preau, comments by Don Mitchell.

UPDATE: Well, the online format was a kind of a bust, as Julia was the only one to post. But for your reading pleasure, here is her paper in blog form. "Now I know I'm gonna get in trouble," she says.

Sheila is participating in the roundtable on "Transcultural American Studies and Transdisciplinarity: Paradigms and Case Studies" with Gesa Mackenthun (University of Rostock), Guenter H. Lenz (Humboldt University, Berlin), Antonis Balasopoulos (University of Cyprus), Markus Heide (Humboldt University, Berlin), Liam Kennedy (University College, Dublin) and Rob Wilson (University of California, Santa Cruz). UPDATE: Sheila's comment is now available here.

RIAS -- new journal from IASA

Sheila has an article in the September 2006 issue of RIAS (Review of International American Studies), the new online journal of the International American Studies Association, IASA: "All Together Now," 1,1 (September 2006) pp. 18-25.

Michael Boyden (editor-in-chief) and Paweł Jędrzejko (associate editor) write:

We are pleased to inform you that the inaugural issue of IASA is now available entirely free of charge. The issue contains interesting and provocative contributions by Djelal Kadir, Kousar J. Azam, Sonja Torres, Jane Desmond, Sheila Hones, Helmbrecht Breinig, Manju Jaidka, Giorgio Mariani, Tatsushi Narita, Gönül Pultar, Cyraina Johnson-Roullier, Stephen Shapiro, and Paulo Knauss.

European Journal of American Studies

Sheila has been drafted on to the editorial advisory board of the European Journal of American Studies (despite not being sure she has a "European view" on anything).

"EJAS is the official, peer-reviewed academic journal of the European Association for American Studies, a federation of national and joint-national associations of specialists of the United States European Association for American Studies gathering approximately 4,000 scholars from 26 European countries.

EJAS aims to foster European views on the society, culture, history, and politics of the United States, and how the US interacts with other countries in these fields. In doing so the journal places itself firmly within the continuing discussion amongst Europeans on the nature, history, importance, impact and problems of US civilization. As part of this task, EJAS wants to contribute to enriching the contents, broadening the scope, and documenting the critical examination of "American Studies" in and outside of the United States. EJAS welcomes contributions from Europe and elsewhere and endeavors to make available reliable information and state-of-the-art research on all topics within its broad field of interest. As a matter of policy, the journal will pay particular attention to objects, phenomena and issues less documented or less often debated in the United States, as well as to innovative cultural modes and the diversity of reception of United States culture abroad. Associated with this outlook, it welcomes submissions that elaborate and renew critical approaches, paradigms and methodologies, and that express varied and pluralist views.

While intended for the entire American Studies community, EJAS aims in particular to provide space for the rapid publication of quality scholarship by doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. The journal hopes to constitute a genuine forum for European Americanists of all generations, national origins and disciplinary affiliations."

Saturday

American Studies Journals: A Directory of Worldwide Resources

The International Initiative of the ASA has a new website up with links to American Studies journals published worldwide: "This website provides scholars with a one-stop shop for the latest research published in American studies journals throughout the world. Organized by the International Initiative of the American Studies Association and funded by the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation, this site is the outcome of a collaboration between 31 journal editors in 17 countries." Julia is an associate editor and Sheila currently editor-in-chief of the Japanese Journal of American Studies.

upcoming presentations

We are both presenting at the Japanese Association for American Studies annual meeting June 9-11 in Nagoya. Julia is giving a paper as commentator for the session on New Orleans (Sunday 2:10-4:40) and Sheila is giving a paper ("Disrupting Location") in the Sunday morning workshop "Relocating 'America' in American Studies" (Sunday 9:00-11:30).

Sheila is also giving a plenary paper at the conference "Engaging the 'New' American Studies" at the University of Birmingham, UK, May 11-13: "Scrunch and stretch: mapping academic space" (May 12, 3:45-5:30). Paul Giles (Oxford University) will be the discussant.

Tuesday

article in american quarterly

After much revision, our article "Geographies of American Studies" is now out in the December 2005 issue of AQ. Phew!

Saturday

iasa roundtable and workshop: networking global american studies

Sheila and I will be chairing linked 90-minute sessions at this year's International American Studies Association meeting in Ottawa in a couple of weeks, on Thursday August 18. Sheila is chair of the roundtable from 16:00-17:30 and Julia is chair of the workshop directly afterwards, from 17:30-19:00.

Our plan is for the four participants of the roundtable to give short position papers (12 minutes or so); after each paper, the other three participants will comment, then move to the next paper. At the end of the session the four presenters will discuss all four papers together. At this point we imagine the order of speakers will be:

1. Lawrence Berg, Okanagan University College (Director, Centre for Human Rights, Diversity and Identity; editor of Canadian Geographer/Le Geographe Canadien; co-editor of ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies)
2. Sheila Hones, University of Tokyo
3. Julia Leyda, Sophia University
4. Paul Giles, University of Oxford (Director, Rothermere American Institute; Associate Editor of Comparative American Studies; Vice President of IASA)

The workshop will then feed off those discussions, opening the floor to the audience at large.

UPDATE: What a great session! We had a good audience and most stayed for the workshop, which had a lively discussion and participants with all kinds of observations and contributions. Once again, our experience of IASA was almost entirely positive: sessions, events, and informal socializing were all very energizing. We had a chance to meet some new people and revisit some past acquaintances. Looking forward to the next IASA very much, which is said to be slated for Lisbon in September 2007.

Thursday

forthcoming article by manuel aalbers and ugo rossi

Sheila has been corresponding with Manuel and Ugo in connection with their article, "Beyond the Anglo-American Hegemony." Manuel's home page at the University of Amsterdam is here, and he has a link to the paper here. Their article is really useful for Americanists as well as geographers because it discusses the uneven distribution of power in an academic discipline across boundaries of language and national and institutional context.

Some earlier articles that dealt with this topic in geography are by Lawrence Berg--one is in the special issue of Geoforum (35.5, pages 553-58) that Sheila's in as well, which grew out of the critical geography conference in Hungary. The article is available if you have online access to Geoforum, but they annoyingly don't seem to allow linking to their journal pages directly. The other is: Berg, L.D. and R.A. Kearns. 1998. America Unlimited. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space. 16 (2): 128-132. I would link to it but my university doesn't have access anymore (!). See also Rob Kitchin's latest in the new issue of Social & Cultural Geography (oops! I don't have access to this one either--maybe Hokkaido University is canceling geography journals. Some nice person post the link as a comment?). People with good online journal access, don't take it for granted!

Why is it that the dominance of native English speakers is so naturalized and unchallenged in so many academic fields, not only in American studies? As somebody once said, of course American studies is dominated by Americans--it's their country after all. Hmm... Ergo, of course geography is dominated by British and American scholars--it's their planet after all???

IASA program now online

The second conference of the International American Studies Association will be this coming August in Ottawa. The program is posted as a Word document that you can download by clicking a link on the official conference web site, and here's the link to the official visitors' web site for the city of Ottawa (French site also available). I'm looking forward to visiting that part of the world and seeing some familiar faces from Leiden, Oxford, and of course Hartford and Atlanta.

On Thursday afternoon, we're doing a linked session (too ambitious?) combining a round table discussion and a workshop for brainstorming new ideas and solutions for networking American studies around the world. We are hoping to make (and also hear) some concrete, practical suggestions for how to foster networking across boundaries of language, location, and even discipline. Any ideas or suggestions before the conference are extremely welcome! Please just click the comments button or send one of us an e-mail. If you don't know our e-mails, please request them as a comment; we are a little protective of them because of spambots, etc.

free articles!

Hey everybody, you can go to the web site of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and download the free stuff on globalization: just go to the Blackwell journals home here, then go to the journal home which I can't link to directly because they use servlets. You can select the journal title from the alphabetical pulldown "Quick Link" menu on the right. These papers were originally presentations delivered at the International Geographical Union 2004 meeting, now in a special issue called "Geography: Making a Difference in a Globalizing World." Although the authors are all geographers, I think Americanists can find some interesting ideas in there, especially regarding power relations that exist in processes and moments of globalization. Clearly, those of us looking to theorize international or global American studies have a lot in common with geographers hammering out theories of globalization, so check out these articles while they are still free at Blackwell.

Saturday

ASA Atlanta

ASA Workshop: Geographies of American Studies
Friday November 12, 2004 at 12:00 noon
The plan for the workshop next Friday is here. . . . Looking forward to Atlanta!

Monday

Sage free ride--October only

FREE FREE FREE! Apparently Sage journals are available free online this month only. Run, don't walk, to download the controversial issue 2.2 of Comparative American Studies featuring Djelal Kadir, Amy Kaplan, and other important authors (us). You can open the PDF files and click the save button or just print them right out. Of course maybe some people will be more excited about some other Sage journals, but this discovery made my day.
UPDATE: Rats! It really was just for a month. Now you need a subscription. So get your library to get one.

Sunday

JJAS free online!

Free, online journal! The Japanese Journal of American Studies is now available online. We are both on the editorial board and the journal publishes an issue each year. Share this link widely in the interest of promoting open access Americanist scholarship online.

Oxford colloquium

Now recovering from summer break, which included our exciting weekend colloquium at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford (with excellent hospitality courtesy of Paul Giles). We got a chance to speak about our take on translation and language in American studies, which was fun. But more fun was the opportunity to get to know more Americanists interested in international practice and subject matter. We were our usual gadfly selves, asking questions about geography and hemispheres and the power relations that exist in the discipline. Are we closet Platonists? Stay tuned!

Thursday

ANZASA

Well, visiting New Zealand for the first time was really spectacular. Pretty much all the Kiwis we met were friendly, down-to-earth, and glad to help jet-lagged visitors. The ANZASA conference organizers were incredibly welcoming and our fellow attendees were super-engaged and interested in discussing American studies both in terms of loads of interesting research topics and also in terms of located academic practice!

We had a great audience for our talk and our workshop the next day. The text of talk will be part of a longer essay that we will be revising in the next couple of weeks, but we want to make our workshop materials available here for participants to see in advance or afterwards if you want another look. This is the workshop description and set of quotations we used in the ANZASA workshop, a similar version of which we are planning to use at ASA in Atlanta for scheduled for November 12, 2004.

our essay in CAS

We have a piece in the June 2004 issue of Comparative American Studies. We wanted to post a draft of the essay in case some of you don't have access to that journal, so follow this link to read an earlier, pre-galleys draft.

Tuesday

workshops around the world

This year we'll be running workshops at the Australia & New Zealand American Studies Association in Auckland and at the US American Studies Association in Atlanta, in July and November respectively. The basic plan for the workshop will be the same for both, though of course we expect to have different groups of participants and different results. Our plan is here. We also have proposed a linked round table and workshop at the next IASA in Ottawa (fingers crossed). We want to add materials for the workshops and allow for comments here too, so watch this space!

In Auckland next month, we are also giving a paper about location and identity in American studies reading and writing practices. The abstract for that paper is available here.

Monday

Sheila's paper now online

Sheila's paper "Sharing Academic Space" is now in press and available on-line, details at the Geoforum website. This is the revised version of a paper that was part of a plenary panel on "The Spaces of Critical Geography" at the 3rd Biennial International Conference of Critical Geography, Békéscaba, Hungary, in 2002.

Sunday

our paper on geographical theory and AS

Another essay came out of our panel at the first conference of the International American Studies Association in Leiden, the Netherlands in 2002 (now in press in the proceedings). The aim of this group of presentations was to give examples of how geographical theory could be useful to Americanists who work with literature and cinema. The three papers were authored by Sheila, Julia, and Khadija. We'll link to the publication when we get the info; meanwhile here is the draft that combines the three papers.

Massey's latest article

Here is the latest issue of Geografiska Annaler, a Blackwell journal. It's free right now, so hurry up and download the essays while you can. The Doreen Massey piece "Geographies of Responsibility" is especially recommended!

Wednesday


budapest Posted by Hello