News and Events

Reading Across the Pacific: Australian-United States Intellectual Histories

A Symposium hosted by Australian literature at the University of Sydney
January 2010

On 14-15 January 2010, Australian Literature at the University of Sydney in association with the American Association for Australian Literary Studies (AAALS) will host a symposium on Reading Across the Pacific: Australian-United Sates Intellectual Histories.

Plenary speaker: Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature, Harvard University.

Limited funding to assist early career researchers may be available on application to the convenors.

The United States-Australia cultural relationship has often simply been assumed rather than theorized or empirically grounded. This symposium will examine the concrete interaction of the two nations, shifting the emphasis from the broad cultural patterns often compared to the specific networks, interactions, and crossings that have characterized Australian literature in the US, American literature in Australia, and the many mediations and adjacencies that have accompanied this interaction. This entails shifting the characteristic perspective from two monadic nations facing each another across the Pacific to understanding the Pacific as a thread across which the two cultures have read each other, and focusing away from matters of direct literary influence to a broader range of responses, provocations, and dialogues.

Taking advantage of new interdisciplinary and theoretical possibilities, the symposium will nonetheless emphasise reading as a practice, whether done individually or collectively; as a consumer, reviewer, or editor; whether performed in a private or public context. Principal questions to be considered are: why has the relationship, though always close and in some ways very obvious, always seemed under-scrutinized? Why has Australia received so little attention in US literary circles? What cultural factors (assumptions, fears, and inhibitions) are in play here? How have they changed over time, as affected by political changes or stylistic or genre transformations?

Proposals for papers on the following topics applied to Australian-United States intellectual histories are particularly welcome:

• Memory
• US-Australian prosopography
• Economies of ecocriticism
• Popular culture
• Australasia and regional identities
• Theorising settlement and comparative nationalisms
• English department cultures: the state(s) of the discipline
• Travel writing

Convenors:

Associate Professor Nicholas Birns
Eugene Lang College of the New School, New York
65 West 11th St
New York, New York
10011
United States
Email:

Professor Robert Dixon
Professor of Australian Literature
English Department
University of Sydney
Sydney 2006
Australia
Email:

The University of Sydney has been selected as the home of the United States Studies Centre, a collaboration of the Federal government and the American Australian Association. The Centre will offer Masters, Graduate Diploma and Graduate Certificate courses in American Studies through the Faculty of Arts from March 2008.

The American Studies Program is not part of the United States Studies Centre; for information on the Centre see its web site.