Research at the Centre for Global American Studies
Our centre is one of the most dynamic in Britain. Our staff are at the forefront of research in Global American Studies. Our multi-disciplinary approach links history, literature, politics and cultural studies to produce innovative and challenging work. The projects below are just some of the recent projects our members have been involved in.
A Movement on the Move
The Big Ride for Palestine and the Politics of Convergence
This post from John Munro on the Movements & Mobility website looks at how international solidarity with Palestine and local mobility justice activism can converge to address the overlapping threats to freedom that define our times. "A Movement on the Move" also represents a turn toward mobility studies in Dr Munro's research.
A Movement on the Move
Imperialism: a syllabus
John Munro and Radhika Natarajan (Reed College) published this Public Books syllabus in 2021. A resource for students, teachers, activists, and academics, this project is now being prepared as a book manuscript under contract with Columbia University Press.
Imperialism: a syllabus
Make your own Brainard
Celebrating the collages of artist and writer Joe Brainard, and the collaborative, experimental ethos of the New York School of poets more broadly, this project created a website where you can create your own unique collages using materials selected and cut out by Brainard himself.
Make your own Brainard
Network for New York School Studies
In 2020, Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma were awarded an AHRC Research Networking Grant to create and curate the Network for New York School Studies. The website that they built serves as a virtual meeting point for New York School poets, scholars, artists, and enthusiasts from across the world.
Network for New York School Studies
Industrialisation, Standardisation, and the Rise of US Industrial Music
Chelsey Dykes' doctoral research looks at whether there is more to the relationship between the Industrial music genre, particularly the mainstream 1990s US scene and industrialisation.
Drawing from the likes of Marx, Adorno, Nietzsche and Foucault, this research looks at the themes of alienation, cohesion, disillusion, violence and depression/self-destruction. It looks at the representation of industrialisation in popular culture, industrial power/process, the Industrial music genre, standardisation in popular music, affect theory/affective labour, muzak, and a case study which analyses the 1990s musical output of Nine Inch Nails.
Selected publications
Selected publications
- Steve Hewitt, 2019, '"Happy-go-lucky Fellow": lone-actor terrorism, masculinity, and the 1966 bombing on Parliament Hill in Ottawa', The Canadian Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 1, pp. 46-68.
- Courtney Campbell, 2022, Region Out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World (1924-1968). Latin American Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh.
- John Munro, 2022, A Tale of Two Periodicities: Indigenous and Settler Continuities amid Neoliberal Transformation at the St. Alice Hotel. in K Freeman & J Munro (eds), Reading the New Global Order: Textual Transformations of 1989. 1 edn, Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp. 203-226.
- John Munro, 2022, Black Reconstruction and Black Power: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Radical Roots of 1968. in W Raussert & M Steinitz (eds), Black Power in Hemispheric Perspective: Movements and Cultures of Resistance in the Black Americas. 1 edn, Inter-American Studies, University of New Orleans Press, New Orleans, pp. 71-85.
- Jimmy Packham, 2021, Gothic Utterance: Voice, Speech and Death in the American Gothic. Gothic Literary Studies, University of Wales Press.
- John Fagg, Re-envisioning the Everyday: American Genre Scenes, 1905-1945. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania. 2023.
- La Shonda Mims, 2023, 'Gay Pride in the Urban New South: Politics, Neighborhood, and Community in Atlanta and Charlotte', Journal of Urban History, vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 1130-1151.
- Rachel Sykes, 2023, '“Never enough, never enough”: institutional autobiography and gendered labour in contemporary North American women’s writing', European Journal of American Culture, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 7-27.
- Rona Cran, 2024, '“Somewhere listening for my name”: Black Queer Kinship and the Poetry of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic', American Literary History, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 161-186.
- Tom Cutterham, 2024, '“A Wife and a Mother Has No Business to Be So Well Dressed”: Gender, Class, and Dynasty in the Revolutionary Republic', Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 44, no. 2, Summer 2024, pp. 189-216.
- Tom Cutterham, 2024, 'The Age of Reconstitution: Negotiating Statehood and Citizenship in the 1780s', Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 44, no. 4, pp. 581-605.
- Nathan Cardon, Brown, M & Hurcombe, M 2024, 'At the Bicycle Races: Global Sporting Culture and National Belonging at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, 1899-1913', Journal of Sport History, vol. 51, no. 1, pp. 72-89.
- Rona Cran and Yasmine Shamma, (eds) 2025, Conversations with New York School Poets. Edinburgh University Press.