Dr Merve Emre
Thursday, April 21st
16.30 -18.00
"Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities"
Keynote Address by Dr Merve Emre (University of Oxford)
Sponsored by the Journal of American Studies
Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of The Personality Brokers (Doubleday: New York, 2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and which has been adapted for CNN/HBO Max as the documentary feature film Persona. She is also the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), and The Ferrante Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), and the editor of Once and Future Feminist (Cambridge: MIT, 2018), and more recently, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Liveright, 2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Norton, 2021). Her criticism and essays have appeared in a range of publications from The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books to American Literature, American Literary History, and Modernism/modernity. Emre was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2019 and the work she has produced has been celebrated by the Whiting Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Leverhulme Trust, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Quebec. Her work has also been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, where she was a fellow from 2020-2021. Currently she is finishing work on a book titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities (under contract with the University of Chicago Press). Emre is also commencing work on two new books: Woman: The History of an Idea (under contract with Doubleday US / Harper Collins UK) and an essay collection called Weird Love.
Professor Susan-Mary Grant
Friday, April 22nd
17:15-18:30
“Anger Nation: Two Moments in American Emotional Time”
Keynote Address by Professor Susan-Mary Grant (University of Newcastle)
Sponsored by the Eccles Centre, British Library
Susan-Mary Grant is Professor of American History at Newcastle University. She holds a PhD from the University of London, and in 1993 co-founded the British Association of American Nineteenth-Century Historians (BrANCH) later serving as Treasurer, Secretary, and finally as Chair until 2021. She is the author of North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (2000), The War for a Nation: The American Civil War (2006) and editor of Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War (2003) and Themes of the American Civil War: The War Between the States (2010). She has served on the editorial boards of Nations and Nationalism and American Nineteenth Century History.
Dr Claire Wardle
Online Keynote
"Elections in an Age of Information Disorder: Preparing for the Mid-terms 2022"
See online conference space for on-demand link
Claire Wardle is considered one of the world’s leading experts on misinformation. She is a Professor at the School of Public Health at Brown University. She also leads First Draft, a non-profit she co-founded in 2015. In 2009 she left her academic position at Cardiff University to develop an organization wide training program for the BBC on social media, verification and misinformation and has been obsessed with the topic ever since. In 2017 she co-authored the foundational report, Information Disorder: An Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policy for the Council of Europe. Over the past decade she has been a Fellow at TED, the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School, the Research Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and head of social media for the United Nations Refugee Agency. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania.