Monday (31 March) evening, the department is hosting a cross-disciplinary seminar entitled “The Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century.” We will be welcoming Dr. David Brown, a historian at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Manchester. Dave is coming to campus for a four-day visit during which he is looking to establish research and other link-ups in American studies between the U of Mississippi and the U of Manchester, partly by way of Manchester’s recently established link-up with the Center for Transnational American Studies at the University of Copenhagen.
Dave will present from his current research on British responses to emancipation during the Civil War. I’m pleased to say that Dave will be joined for a conference-style panel session by our own Peter Reed and Katie McKee: Peter and Katie will be presenting from their own current work on other aspects of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Naturally, I/we hope you can join us for this event: I know that Dave would be glad to meet as many U of Mississippi colleagues as possible, both in and beyond the English department.
“The Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives”
Monday 31 March, 6-7.30pm
Bondurant Hall, Hannah-Ford Room
Organized by the Department of English and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi, with the Center for Transnational American Studies, University of Copenhagen
Dr. David Brown (Department of English and American Studies, University of Manchester)
David Brown is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester. He is the author of _Southern Outcast: Hinton Rowan Helper and the Impending Crisis of the South_ (Louisiana State University Press, 2006), and the coeditor of two volumes: _Race in the American South: From Slavery to Civil Rights_, with Clive Webb (Edinburgh University Press, 2007); and _Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South_, with William Link, Brian Ward, and Martyn Bone (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013).
“‘Where are the voices of our former friends in England?’: British Responses to American Emancipation”
Harriet Beecher Stowe, incredulous at reports of British support for the Confederacy as the American Civil War began, famously asked how a nation dedicated to abolition could turn its back on the United States. “Where are the voices of our former friends in England?” Stowe complained. This paper takes up Stowe’s question in considering British reactions to emancipation during the American Civil War.
Dr. Kathryn McKee (Department of English and Director of Graduate Studies, Southern Studies, University of Mississippi)
“Whatever comes in sight or ken, that amuses or interests”: Sherwood Bonner and Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Travel
Mississippian Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849-1883), who wrote as “Sherwood Bonner,” published regular travel columns between 1874 and 1876 in both the Boston Times and the Memphis Daily Avalanche. This paper concentrates on Bonner’s final letter, “Reminiscences of a Visit to Bohemia,” in order to suggest that what the author ultimately claims in her transatlantic narratives is a desire to live life for herself and on her own terms. In that most renegade—because culturally masculine—of emotions, she maps the outposts of gendered behavior for audiences accustomed to more conventionally linear accounts of how to get from place to plac
Dr. Peter Reed (Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English, University of Mississippi)
“Symbolism and Sovereignty after the Haitian Revolution”
In nineteenth-century American culture, Haiti became a contested signifier, a fraught symbol of freedom poised between representation and self-representation. This paper considers the ways in which Haiti’s political and cultural sovereignty played out in popular cultural forms such as blackface minstrelsy.
Chair: Dr. Martyn Bone (Coordinator, Center for Transnational American Studies, University of Copenhagen; visiting professor, Department of English, University of Mississippi)