American Studies Research Group, Northumbria

Description

The American Studies Research Group brings together scholars with expertise in American history, literature, politics and culture. The group’s members share a multi-disciplinary approach that offers a rounded understanding of the United States in national, regional and global contexts.

Northumbria University has one of the largest teams in Europe dedicated to the study of the Americas. The members of this group have particular research strengths in the study of race, diplomacy, presidential and congressional politics, civil rights, music, periodical culture, American and transatlantic modernist literature, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the transnational significance of the US South, feminist and queer literary theory, the development of California, urban history, environmental history, and the history of gender, body, and sexuality.

Members of the group have published major studies on American cultural conservatism, the early US recording industry, the British diaspora in North America, the evolution of Democratic party politics, the environmental history of California’s beaches, and evangelicals and rock music.

The group hosted the 2015 conference of the British Association of American Studies (BAAS), as well as the annual postgraduate conferences of BAAS and HOTCUS (Historians of the Twentieth Century United States), and externally-funded symposia, for example on ‘Music and Social Movements’ (2018). Group postgraduate students are leading projects and networks on Irish Americans in the Civil War and American youth. The Group welcomes students to work with its members and contribute to a growing North East community interested in American Studies.

The Group’s strength in American Studies is also reflected in the substantial research holdings available for students and staff. Central sources include:

• Records of the Antebellum Southern Plantations
• Despatches from US Consuls in Ireland
• American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
• Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Papers
• Huey Newton Foundation Papers (Black Panther Party Files)
• Civil Rights during the Johnson Administration, 1963-1969 (Parts I-V)
• FBI Files on Black Extremist Organizations
• The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives
• Popular Culture in Britain and America, 1950-1975
• 19th and 20th Century US Newspapers
• African American Newspapers

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Northumbria University
London