U.S. Intellectual History Blog

CFP: The Americas – From The Canadian Association For American Studies

CFP: The Americas: Drawing the Lines (4/2/07; CAAS, 11/8/07-11/11/07)

2007 Canadian Association for American Studies Conference

The Americas: Drawing the Lines

CAAS invites proposals for its annual conference to be held November 8-11, 2007 at the University of Quebec, Montreal.

Please send 500 word proposals by April 2 2007 to:

CAAS 2007 Committee, c/o Michael Epp .

The conference topic is intended to address the transformations of the geographic, political, literary, historical, and generally conceptual space of the “Americas.”

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

* Borderlines” (geographic and political, or in terms of identity, othering, and violence, among other topics)
* the shaping of “Americanness”
* legal lines: how the law creates divisions within the state (law and literature approaches also welcome)
* lines of identity (racial, gender, sexual, class, and so on) and their crossings
* aesthetic lines–between high and popular culture, etc.
* lines between secular and religious cultures (within the US and without)- the representation of North American spaces on maps and in artistic renditions
* the segmentation of metropolitan areas and the development of urban sprawl
* NAFTA policies and their effects
* literal or figurative borders
* tracing narratives across time or countries
* imagined genealogies
* the role of US visual culture in the world (this could include topics ranging from advertisements, to the images of television news, to film and visual art, and so on)

This is only a partial list, and CAAS invites proposals from all areas of American Studies

Please send 500 word proposals by April 2 2007 to:

CAAS 2007 Committee, c/o Michael Epp