We invite proposals for 15-minute presentations from undergraduate and MA students whose research is relevant to the topic of the conference. PhD students are also welcome to submit proposals. Papers may come from the fields of literature, film, theater and performance arts, popular culture, visual culture and the media, history, politics, intercultural and interdisciplinary communication, transatlantic relations, as well as other academic areas that are relevant to the subject. You may consider papers on topics such as (but not limited to) media, identity, and representation; media and American politics; media and public discourse; media in the digital age; the globalization of American media; media activism (media and social movements); representations of gender and sexuality in American media; war, conflict, and media narratives; media and consumer culture; mainstream and independent media; Artificial Intelligence and the future of media consumption; media and cultural memory; media, law, and ethics.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit the following:
1) a 250-word abstract attached as an MS Word file. Your abstract must include the title of your paper and the name of the academic coordinator who has agreed to supervise your paper. Please note that, considering that each presentation will be 15 minutes long, final papers should be approximately 5-6 pages long (Times New Roman, font 12, double-spaced). However, we strongly encourage participants to present and not simply read their papers.
2) 3-5 keywords from your essay;
3) Contact information (name, affiliation, phone number, and email address).
4) Specify whether your presentation will be held in person or online.
Please email your submissions to sabina.draga.alexandru@lls.unibuc.ro.
We are happy to invite you to a guest lecture for our Work-in-Progress Lecture series on Friday, November 1 2024, at 6 PM Bucharest time. You can find all the details below.
November 1 2024, 6 to 8 pm (online via google meet) WiP#1 Guest Lecture:Atalie Gerhard (Lecturer at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, PhD candidate at SaarlandUniversity), Decolonial Feminist Futurity in Contemporary Novels by First Nations Women
Abstract: This talk presents decolonial feminist imaginations of futurity in selected contemporary novels by First Nations women from what is now Canada. Firstly, I show how the autobiographical novel Split Tooth (2018) by the throat singer Tanya Tagaq (Inuit) and the graphic novel series A Girl Called Echo (2017-2021) by the novelist Katherena Vermette (Métis) depict Indigenous girls reclaiming their self-images through intergenerational connectedness.1 In Split Tooth, the heroine transforms from a nameless teenage mother who is a victim of abuse to a gatekeeper of the afterlife with cosmic powers. Such decolonial futures are pursued through Tagaq’s deployment of magical realist aesthetics to interweave recollections of her Arctic childhood with her imagination of an ennobling posthumous reunification with ancestors to collectively shape her people’s future. Thereby, Tagaq’s landbased spirituality subverts the loss of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) as well as Eurochristian dichotomies of heaven and hell while re-incorporating the spirit world into pan-Indigenous cosmological balance. In A Girl Called Echo, the protagonist finds herself separated from her mother but called upon by her ancestors to join their resistance across space and time. Vermette’s illustrated time travels of a Métis teenager posit revitalized revolutionary thought as the consequence of her firsthand witnessing of the history of her people in what are now Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
Secondly, I discuss how in non-speculative fiction, pan-Indigenous beliefs in transtemporality both call for and are reflected in decolonial feminist healing practices, as represented in the novelsBirdie (2015) by Tracey Lindberg (Cree) and The Break (2016) by Katharena Vermette (Métis).2 Significantly, the plots are organized around Indigenous teenage girls who are bedridden while struggling to recover from sexual abuse that devastated them personally but is also cyclical within their communities, as the polyphonic flashbacks reveal.
However, both protagonists are supported by multiple generations of women under whose care their bodies remain weakened, but their political investment in Indigenous futurities increases. Yet, besides advocating interconnectedness, such decolonial feminist healing requires engaged listening practices among Indigenous women and girls whose trauma risks being pathologized to the point of legitimating paternalistic state interventions. Against this backdrop, readings of selected passages from Birdie and The Break will trace how aesthetics of wounding in the past and healing for the future visualize psychological decolonization as a personal and political response to intergenerational trauma in the wake of cultural genocide, residential schooling, and the ongoing epidemic of MMIWG.
1 The first section of my talk features ideas expressed in my upcoming book chapter “AlterNative Afterlives in Decolonial Feminist Dimensions in Split Tooth (2018) and A Girl Called Echo (2017- 2021)” set to appear in the volume Indigenous North American Futurities in Literature, Media, and Museums, edited by Birgit Däwes and Bethany Webster-Parmentier (University of Flensburg).
2 The second section of my talk includes ideas expressed in my book chapter “Transcending Trauma: Decolonial Feminist Healing in the Novels Birdie (2015) by Tracey Lindberg and The Break (2016) by Katharena Vermette” which has appeared in 2024 in the volume Narrating, Representing, Reflecting ‘Disability’: 21st Century ‘American’ Perspectives, edited by Wilfried Raussert and Sarah-Lena Essifi (Bielefeld University).
Bio:Atalie Gerhard is a Lecturer at the University of Jena and Doctoral Candidate at Saarland University as an alumna of the International Research Training Group “Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces.” She taught at the University of Tübingen and Paderborn University and lectured at the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Potsdam. She joined the German Association for American Studies and the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries. Her publications appeared in Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (2022), Exploring the Fantastic: Genre, Ideology, and Popular Culture (2018), and American Multiculturalism in Context: Views from at Home and Abroad (2017) and the Journal of American Studies of Turkey, the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, [Inter]sections – The American Studies Journal at the University of Bucharest, American Studies in Scandinavia, and The International Review of African American Art. She holds a Master of Arts in North American Studies: Culture and Literature and a double Bachelor of Arts in English and American and French Studies from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg where she was a student research assistant and interim secretary. She speaks German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Arabic on various levels.
You are cordially invited to join the students, faculty, and staff of the American Studies Program for the opening of the 2024-2025 academic year, to be held in Martin Luther King Lecture Hall, the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, 7-13 Pitar Moş St., Bucharest, on Tuesday, October 1st, from 10:00 to 11:00.
This year our speakers are: Ms. Emily Zeeberg (Information Officer, U.S. Embassy in Romania) Professor Mircea Dumitru (executive director, The Romanian-U.S. Fulbright Commission) Professor emeritus Rodica Mihăilă (founder, American Studies in Romania) Ms. Talida Izdrăilă (American Studies Program alumna and MA student) Associate Professor Mihaela Precup (co-chair, American Studies Program)
The American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest
invites proposals for its annual student conference on the topic
Cultural Networks in the U.S.: Past and Present Challenges
to be held at the Romanian-U.S. Fulbright Commission
(2, Ing. Nicolae Costinescu St, Bucharest)
on Thursday, May 16, 2024.
We invite proposals for 15-minute presentations from undergraduate and graduate students whose research is relevant to the topic of the conference. Papers may come from the fields of literature, film, theater and performance arts, popular culture, visual culture and the media, history, politics, intercultural and interdisciplinary communication, transatlantic relations, as well as other academic areas that are relevant to the subject, and may address issues such as (but not necessarily limited to): cultural, economic and political networks in American history; the network as category of analysis in American studies and a model of conceptualizing America; media and popular culture as cultural networks in the U.S.; U.S. minorities, migration and the development of cultural networks of solidarity and empathy; American cultural networks as subversive discourses of the status quo; war, conflict, and network cultures in the U.S.; transnational relations and cultural networks; gender, sexuality, and the development of cultural networks in the U.S.; AI, deepfake and other network technologies and processes in American literary and cultural spaces.
Submission Guidelines. Please submit the following:
1) a 250-word abstract attached as an MS Word file. Your abstract must include the title of your paper and the name of the academic coordinator who has agreed to supervise your paper. Please note that, considering that each presentation will be 15 minutes long, final papers should be approximately 5-6 pages long (Times New Roman, font 12, double-spaced). However, we strongly encourage participants to present and not simply read their papers.
2) 3-5 keywords from your essay;
3) Contact information (name, affiliation, phone number, and email address).
The opening of the 2023-2024 academic year for the American Studies Program is to be held in Martin Luther King Lecture Hall, The Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, 7-13 Pitar Moş St., Bucharest, on Tuesday, October 3, from 10 to 11am.
Our speakers for the day include Peter Brown (Public Affairs Officer, U.S. Embassy in Romania), Michael Dickerson (Deputy Chief of Mission, U.S. Embassy in Romania), Professor Mircea Dumitru (Executive Director, Fulbright Commission in Romania), Maria-Talida Izdrăilă (American Studies MA Student), Professor Emeritus Rodica Mihăilă (founder, American Studies Program), and Professor Alina Tigău (vice-dean, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures).
We look forward to welcoming all of our speakers, students, and faculty and wish everyone a great academic year.
You are kindly invited to join us in welcoming Professor Thomas J. Cousineau on April 5, from 10am, in Sala de Consiliu (1st floor of our 7-13, Pitar Mos building). Professor Cousineau will be presenting his latest book, The Seance of Reading. Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing, whose second edition has recently come out from Editura Universitară.
Thomas J. Cousineau is Professor of English (Emeritus) at Washington College, former visiting professor at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, and Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bucharest. He edited the newsletter of the Samuel Beckett Society for several years and co-directed the Presence de Samuel Beckett conference at Le Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy. He is the author of After the Final No: Samuel Beckett s Trilogy, Waiting for Godot: Form in Movement, Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Fiction, Three-Part Inventions: The Novels of Thomas Bernhard and An Unwritten Novel: Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (recipient of an ”Outstanding Title” citation from the American Library Association).
We look forward to seeing many of you there!
You can order the book and find out more details about it by clicking on the link below:
The Seance of Reading is part of a three-book project titled The Manole Trilogy. Please find more information about each title (both published and projected) below.
Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Writing. University of Delaware Press 2004.
[René Girard, Violence and The Sacred. Michigan State University Press, 2021]
Introduction: The Oedipus Complex [aka The Manole Complex I – ritual scapegoating]
Ch. 1 Occulted Rivalry in The Turn of the Screw
Ch. 2 Heart of Darkness: The Outsider Demystified
Ch. 3 Borrowed Desire in The Good Soldier
Ch. 4 The Great Gatsby: Romance or Holocaust?
Ch. 5 Ending Rituals in To The Lighthouse
The Séance of Reading: Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing. Editura Universitara 2023.
[Mircea Eliade, Commentaires sur la légende de maître Manole. L’Herne 1994]
Introduction: The Manole Complex [aka The Manole Complex II – ritual building]
Ch. 1 Fixing Things in The Great Gatsby
Ch. 2 Being Scrupulous in “The Sisters”
Ch.3 Rebuilding Lisbon in The Book of Disquiet
Ch. 4 Doing It in Waiting for Godot
Ch. 5 The Eliot Way: Turning Back in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Ch. 6 Playing It in Endgame
Ch. 7 Crafting Transfigurations in A Short History of Decay
Ch. 8 Being Misfits in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
Ch. 9 Framing Things in Light in August
To Double-Business Bound: The Symmetrical Imperative of Writing (in progress)
[Cedric Whitman, Homer and The Heroic Tradition. W. W. Norton, 1965.]
Introduction: The Exekias Complex [aka The Manole Complex III – the doppelgänger effect]
Homer, The Iliad and Ezekias, Ajax and Achilles Playing a Board Game
Ch 1: Setting It Right in Oedipus and Hamlet
Ch 2: Fixing Maimed Rites in Waiting for Godot and Endgame
Ch 3: Being Hamlet in The Book of Disquiet and A Short History of Decay
Ch 4: Forging Bonds in “Heart of Darkness” and “The Secret Sharer”
Ch 5: Blending Opposites in Murphy and Molloy
Ch 6: Longing for Another Country in “Eveline” and “The Dead”
Ch 7: Obtaining Relief in “Krapp’s Last Tape” and “Ohio Impromptu”
Ch 8 Balancing All in “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” and “Sailing to Byzantium”
Ch 9: Vanquishing Them Again in “A Rose for Emily” and “Dry September”
Ch 10: Going Back and Forth in Woodcutters and Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Thomas J. Cousineau, a former Fulbright professor with the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest, has recently published the second edition of his book The Seance of Reading. Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing. This is the second of a planned three-part trilogy. You can order the book and find out more information about the Table of Contents by clicking on the link below: https://www.editurauniversitara.ro/filologie-12/the-s%C3%A9ance-of-reading-uncanny-designs-in-modernist-writing.html.
The Center for American Studies at the University of Bucharest
and the Romanian-U.S. Fulbright Commission
invite proposals for their annual student conference on the topic
America in the Global World
to be held online and in person
at the Romanian-U.S. Fulbright Commission (2, Ing. Nicolae Costinescu St, Bucharest)
on Wednesday, May 10, 2023
We invite proposals for 15-minute presentations from undergraduate and MA students whose research is relevant to the topic of the conference. Papers may come from the fields of literature, film, theater and performance arts, popular culture, visual culture and the media, history, politics, intercultural and interdisciplinary communication, and transatlantic relations and may address issues such as (but not necessarily limited to): the impact of U.S. culture, economy and politics on the rest of the world; American contributions to globalization; American perceptions of the post-pandemic global world; America, globalization and the environment; American democracy, U.S. minorities and global migration; America, gender roles and globalization; America, LGBTQ+ struggles for rights and globalization; the United States and global crises. The best presentation will be awarded the “Dan Grigorescu” prize (US$ 200). Doctoral students are welcome to present outside the competition for the “Dan Grigorescu” prize.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit the following:
1. a 250-word abstract attached as an MS Word file. Your abstract must include the paper title and the name of the academic coordinator who has agreed to supervise your paper. Please note that, considering that each presentation will be 15 minutes long, final papers should be approximately 5-6 pages long/in length (Times New Roman, font 12, double-spaced). However, we strongly encourage participants to present and not simply read their papers. Please make sure you specify whether you will deliver your paper in person or online.
2. 3-5 keywords from your essay;
3. Contact information (name, affiliation, phone number, and email address).
We are deeply saddened by the loss of our colleague and former head of the American Studies Program, Associate Professor Octavian Roske, who passed away earlier today, at the age of 67. A graduate of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, where he majored in English and Romanian (1977-1981), Professor Roske started teaching in the English Department in 1993. He was an immensely popular teacher, rigorous but also encouraging and patient, with impressive knowledge of American history, the American political system, and the American constitution. Professor Roske’s research interests were vast and diverse, and they went beyond the scope of American studies. His work for the National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism resulted in an impressive number of books and collections of documents that made an important contribution to the memory of the repressive totalitarian regime from Romania before 1989. During the communist regime, he co-wrote (with Daniel Barbu and Radu Ciuceanu) two clandestine studies that were sent to and broadcast by Radio Free Europe in 1981 and 1985, respectively. From 2000 to 2004, he was vice-dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and from 2008 to his retirement in 2021, he was head of the English Department of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures. From 2012 to 2021 he was also head of the American Studies Program. We miss his leadership and generosity, his resourcefulness and ingenuity. May he rest in peace.
Professor Roske is survived by his wife, daughter, and grandson. Our thoughts are with them at this very difficult time.
It is our great pleasure to announce Dr. Dragoș Manea’s new book, Reframing the Perpetrator in Contemporary Comics: On the Importance of the Strange.
“This book foregrounds the figure of the perpetrator in a selection of British, American, and Canadian comics and explores questions related to remembrance, justice, and historical debt. Its primary focus is on works that deliberately estrange the figure of the perpetrator—through fantasy, absurdism, formal ambiguity, or provocative rewriting—and thus allow readers to engage anew with the history of genocide, mass murder, and sexual violence. This book is particularly interested in the ethical space such an engagement calls into being: in its ability to allow us to ponder the privilege many of us now enjoy, the gross historical injustices that have secured it, and the debt we owe to people long dead” (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-03853-2).
It is our great pleasure to announce Dr. Anca Peiu’s new book, Sophisticated Ladies in Life and Literature: Selective Portraits. The press presentation is available below.
Anca Peiu: Sophisticated Ladies in Life and Literature: Selective Portraits
To a certain extent, Dr. Anca Peiu’s newly published volume, Sophisticated Ladies in Life and Literature: Selective Portraits (C. H. Beck, Bucharest, 2022), is a continuation of her book, Romantic Renderings of Selfhood in Classic American Literature (C. H. Beck, 2017). Each one of the chapters originally dedicated to Emily Dickinson, (with eighteen of her poems analyzed at that time), and Kate Chopin, (the bold American pioneer of literary naturalism, also carefully analyzed in Peiu’s same former volume) are now dutifully completed by the corresponding four essays, added in the present volume, each one of these essays deepening and nuancing the first approach of the two 19th century American women writers. On the other hand, this new volume could bridge the gap between Romantic Renderings and a further book (as just a work in progress for now) about Old and NewSouthern feminine literature. The beginning is already accomplished in Sophisticated Ladies, by quite a number of Peiu’s academic essays focusing on such Southern lady writers as: Kate Chopin, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Margaret Mitchell.
All in all, there are twenty-seven literary and cultural feminine personalities commented upon in this new book. Fifteen of them are American women writers and distinguished scholars, such as: Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Gertrude Stein, Zelda Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Margaret Mitchell, Toni Morrison, Katherine Verdery, Anne F. Hyde, Therese Anne Fowler, Katie Henninger, Yaa Gyasi. Also here discussed then are two prominent Canadian feminine personalities of international prestige: writer Alice Munro, and literary theorist Linda Hutcheon. These are followed by three major women writers from the UK: Victorian novelist Anne Bronte; Virginia Woolf, the emblematic writer of British high modernism; and Angela Carter, a fine representative of British postmodernism, unfortunately also dead before her time now. Last but not least, no less than seven Romanian feminine cultural and literary personalities are presented within these pages, such as: Ana Blandiana, Lidia Vianu, Rodica Marian, Michaela Mudure, Luiza Pârvu, Olimpia Melinte, Amalia Precup.
As anyone can see, two thirds of these authors are our contemporaries or at least were born during the 20th century. They are quite distinct from each other as creative personalities. What they share though is – beside the divine gift of a unique individual talent – an exceptional intellectual capacity, plus resilience, plus devoted hard work. This book is paying tribute to some exemplary women workaholics, therefore as such it is bound to remain inexhaustible.
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