Croatian Association for American Studies (HUAmS) and American Studies Program at the University of Zagreb are pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the 2nd annual American Studies Workshop, which will take place in Zagreb, Saturday, May 24th, 2014.
The motivation for this conference comes from the realization that within different national cultures the discipline of American Studies has regularly produced archives of how the United States has been mapped into the practices and discourses of those national spaces. Although the United States is not a terra incognita in Croatia nor, for that matter, in the broader regional context, we hold that a lacuna exists which we hope this workshop will attend to and remedy. The organizers believe that a discussion of how the United States was represented and experienced in Croatia and in the other countries who are members of the AASSEE as well as in neighboring sites will unearth a history of images, stories, practices that will be a worthwhile contribution to the Americanist archive in Europe. The conference welcomes all scholars who are interested in addressing the question of how the United States, its culture and policies, its political and economic influence impacted not only on disciplinary protocols but on the everyday life of their respective settings. In addition to contributing to the extant readings of the American presence in Europe, these cross-cultural mappings will, it is hoped, help us not only to better map each particular site where these are conducted but also to problematize our object of study, the United States, which is all too frequently conceptualized without the necessary attention to specificity.
Possible topics:
Changing perceptions of the United States
American popular culture and everyday life
Impact of United States technology and artefacts
Diasporic experience and the United States
United States political ideology, its evaluation and implementation
United States events and figures and their echo abroad
Key-note speakers:
Dr. Moira Baker, Radford University; Fulbright Guest Professor, University of Osijek (topic tba)
Dr. Walter Hölbling, University of Graz, Austria (topic tba)
Proposals, not exceeding 300 words and accompanied by a short, one-paragraph bio, should be sent to the symposium organizers: jsesnic@ffzg.hr and scvek@ffzg.hr , no later than January 31, 2014. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by February 7, 2014.
The symposium is partly supported by the funds provided by the University of Zagreb grant for research activity in the project Cultural Mapping of the United States from the Perspective of Croatian and Regional American Studies.
