News

2023 News in Digest

• In September 2023 James Lyons published the article “‘Are We Having Fun Yet?’: The Starz Television Network and Party Down as Indie TV” in the journal Critical Studies in Television. This article examines the sitcom Party Down (2009-10) one of the first shows commissioned by the US premium cable service Starz as it sought to compete with HBO and Showtime, but cancelled after two seasons due to low ratings. By analysing its original production contexts and its aesthetic attributes, James’s article argues that it is best understood as a proto-typical instance of ‘indie TV,’ aligned with Starz’ strategic positioning in relation to its indie-oriented subscriber base at that time.
• In May 2023, Jo Freer delivered the public talk “Gravity’s Rainbow at 50: Bananas, Hope, Anarchism” at “The Exploded Map” event in Berlin, held to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. The title is a reference to the banana breakfasts in the novel!
• In April 2023 Peter Riley discussed Walt Whitman on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, available here.
• In April 2023 Sinéad Moynihan co-edited (with Alison Garden, Queen’s University Belfast) a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies titled “New Perspectives on Brian Moore” (available here). A prolific novelist and screenwriter, Belfast-born Moore was a transnational subject who lived most of his adult life in Canada and the U.S. This special issue is the culmination of a programme of research and public engagement carried out in 2021 and 2022, which was generously funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant and a Research Fellowship awarded by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, home to some 35 boxes of Moore’s papers.
• A section of Paul Williams’s monograph Dreaming the Graphic Novel was reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of Will Eisner’s graphic novel A Contract with God and Other Stories of Dropsie Avenue (orig. 1978).
• New books published this year by members of NAARG: 

* James Lyons and Yannis Tzioumakis, eds, Indie TV: Industry, Aesthetics and Medium Specificity (Routledge, 2023)

* Ellen McWilliams, Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution (Beyond the Pale Books, 2023)

2022 News in Digest

• Sinéad Moynihan’s successful tenure as co-editor of the Journal of American Studies (with Nick Witham) came to an end on 31 December 2022. 
• In November 2022 Sinéad Moynihan gave a talk entitled “The ‘Returned Yank’ in the Cultural imagination, 1952 to the present” in the Heritage from Home series organised by LibrariesNI.  Sinéad discussed some of the material from her most recent book about cultural representations of return migration in the Irish imagination.
• In July/August 2022, Sinéad Moynihan spent a month at the University of Notre Dame researching U.S. Catholic magazines in the mid-twentieth century, supported by an award from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. This research forms part of her current book project, titled For Export Only: Irish Writers and U.S. Magazines, 1940-1975.
• Recent graduate Ruby Bones’s paper “‘Heaven — is what I cannot reach’: How Emily Dickinson’s Voice was Influenced by Spoken Worship in Amherst and the Book of Revelation” was published in the University of Maryland’s Paper Shell Review in July 2022.
• Paul Williams’s monograph Dreaming the Graphic Novel was awarded the 2020 Book Prize at the Comics History Awards presented by the Grand Comics Database.
• Helen Hanson won Best Journal Article in the 2022 Publication Awards presented by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies for the article “Looking for Lela Simone: Singin’ in the Rain and microhistories of women’s sound work behind the scenes and below-the-line in Classical Hollywood Cinema” (Women’s History Review, vol. 29, no. 5, 2020).
• In February 2022, Henry Knight Lozano undertook a long-awaited research fellowship funded by the Dave Abrams and Gene Banning Pan Am Research Grant at the University of Miami. Henry’s focus at the University of Miami’s Special Collections was on the Pan American World Airways, Inc. Records held there. Building off his research interests in U.S. transpacific expansion that shaped his monograph, California and Hawai‘i Bound: U.S. Settler Colonialism and the Pacific West, 1848-1959 (2021), the Miami research trip explored a rich collection of primary sources relating to the development and promotion of Pan Am’s California-to-Hawai‘i’s routes from their launch in the mid-1930s through to the movement for Hawaiian statehood in the post-war decades.
• Michael-Angelo Keramidas passed his PhD entitled “Reclaiming White Privilege: The Crisis of White Masculinity in Post-World War Two American Literature” in February 2022.
• New books published this year by members of NAARG:

* Paul Williams, The US Graphic Novel (Edinburgh UP, 2022)

2021 News in Digest

• In March 2021 Paul Williams received an Honourable Mention in the Book Prize category of the Research Society of American Periodicals awards for his monograph Dreaming the Graphic Novel.
• New books published this year by members of NAARG:

* Ellen McWilliams, Irishness in North American Women’s Writing: Transatlantic Affinities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

* Mark Steven, ed., Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2021)

* Henry Knight Lozano, California and Hawai‘i Bound: U.S. Settler Colonialism and the Pacific West, 1848-1959 (University of Nebraska Press, 2021)

2020 News in Digest

• Three evenings of talks relating to U.S. Presidential Election were held between 13 Oct.-3 Nov. 2020: Prof. Jason Reifler (Exeter) and Dr. Darren Schreiber (Exeter) explained the path to election day, from caucuses to the Electoral College; Dr Zalfa Feghali (Leicester), Prof. Ian Scott (Manchester), and Dr Rachel Sykes (Birmingham) spoke about Presidents on screen and what they read; and in the Election Day Roundtable, the following scholars and activists shared their thoughts on how the campaigns had gone and what the outcome might be: Dr Gregorio Bettiza (Exeter), Dr Sinead McEneaney (Open University), Dr Marc-William Palen (Exeter), Dr Cara Rodway (British Library & Chair of the British Association for American Studies), Ms Alicia Wang (Member of the Democratic National Committee, 1992–2008, and Vice Chair of the California Democratic Party, 1997–2009). Thanks to all our speakers and to our students for asking such thoughtful questions!
• Prof. Jo Gill’s article “Elizabeth Bishop’s Pink” was published in The Review of English Studies in October 2020.
• Prof. Sinéad Moynihan enjoyed grant success this year for her research into Belfast-born writer Brian Moore (1921-1999), who spent most of his adult life in Canada and the United States. Sinéad was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant for the project “Brian Moore at 100” in August 2020, as well as a Harry Ransom Center Visiting Fellowship to consult the Brian Moore Papers held at the HRC. You can read more about project and the public activities taking place here.
• Congratulations to our students for their success at this year’s British Association for American Studies Awards: PhD student Jessica Mehta won the Public Engagement and Impact Award for her project “’White Alliahs’: The Creation & Perpetuation of the Wise Indian Trope” and Siobhan Owen won the Undergraduate Essay Prize for “Delivering the Whale: Women’s Labour and the Production of Moby-Dick.
• In April 2020 Professor Sinéad Moynihan was awarded the 2019 Michael J. Durkan prize for her book, Ireland, Migration and Return Migration: The “Returned Yank” in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to the present.
• New books published this year by members of NAARG:

* Paul Williams, Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics (Rutgers UP, 2020)

2019 News in Digest

• On 10 April 2019 the Spanish Association for American Studies awarded Paul Williams the Javier Coy Biennial Research Award for Best Journal Article 2017-18 for his article “Jules Feiffer’s Tantrum at the End of Narcissism’s Decade,” published in the Fall 2018 issue of Studies in the Novel.
• In April 2019 first-year PhD student Shihoko Inoue won a Postgraduate Travel Award from the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) to travel to Smith College, MA and Indiana University to study the Sylvia Plath archives. Shihoko’s PhD is on Plath and medical technologies.
• Prof. Jo Gill published the article “Gwendolyn Brooks and the Legacies of Architectural Modernity” in the journal Humanities.
• Several members of NAARG published books in 2018-19:

2018 News in Digest

• Dr Sinéad Moynihan has been appointed co-editor of the Journal of American Studies, taking up this position in January 2019.
• The 2018 Gamini Salgado Prize, awarded to the undergraduate dissertation that best communicates the qualities of imagination and intellectual flair, was awarded to Rebecca Young for “‘See her Brain – go round’: Emily Dickinson, Neurodiversity and the Matter of the Brain.”
• Professor Jo Gill delivered a keynote address to the joint conference of BAAS and the European Association for American Studies, held 4-7 April 2018 at KCL / UCL / the British Library.
• In April 2018 third-year BA English and Visual Culture student Jac Lewis was awarded the BAAS Undergraduate Essay Prize for his essay “‘Language is, so We May Ms-Under-Stend Each Udda’: Modernism in the Comics Art of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat.”