American & New England Studies

The Particulars of Place

Jane Brox's third book, Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm, was published in 2004. Her second book, Five Thousand Days Like This One, was a 1999 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction, and her first Here and Nowhere Else, won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Her essays have appeared in The Georgia Review and other journals and magazines, and have been selected for inclusion in many anthologies, including Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and in 2005 she won the New England Book Award for Non-Fiction. This past spring she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in support of her current writing project. She teaches nonfiction writing in the MFA program at Lesley College in Cambridge, MA, and lives in Brunswick, Maine.

 

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Such Devoted Sisters: Little Women and the Alcott Vision of Siblinghood

Jennifer Blanchard is an adjunct assistant professor of English and editorial associate for the office of the President at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Born in Millinocket, Maine, and raised in Gray, Blanchard is a 1998 graduate of the University of Southern Maine's American & New England Studies Program (M.A.). She also holds a B.A. from Carleton College and in May 2007 received her PH.D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary.

Her dissertation was titled "More or Less than Kind: Brothers and Sisters in Nineteenth-Century American Literature." A chapter of her USM master's thesis on early-nineteenth-century Portland writer and editor Ann Stephens was published in the collection Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals. 1830-1910 (2004)

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Can You See Me? Reading "Race" in the Jimi Hendrix Experience

Matthew Frye Jacobson is Professor of American Studies, African American Studies, and History. He received his Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University in 1992 and is the author of Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2006); What have They Built You to Do? The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonalez, 2006); Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (19950. he is currently at work on Odetta's Voice and Other Weapons: The Civil Rights Era as Cultural History. His teaching interests are clusted under the general rubic of race in the U.S. political culture, including U.S. imperialism, immigration and migration, popular culture, and the juridical structures of citizenship.

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Student Presentations

Benjamin DalPra's presentation titled "The Road" is about the "impact" of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road may be measured in the terms of identity and sense of place through the lens of travel writing. On the Road is one book which represents an "identity mitosis", the dividing of the narrative "self" into two parts, each of which retains the characteristics of the original, authorial self. Part existential, arguably pre-postmodern, genealogically Romantic and Transcendentalist in literary terms, identity mitosis is a litery construct which I propose Kerouac illuminates in On the Road. Such a narrative allows the author to explore place from two different perspectives through what is essentially the same voice. Such a division is essential because, unlike the Lowell of Maggie Cassidy, place in this novel is unfamiliar, raw, and so expansive that just one "sense" of place is inadequate; Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty are metaphorical sides of the same coin, presenting the reader respectively with an outsider and an insider perspective on place which evolves from their similar states of socio-cultural "difference".

Rebecca Lazure's presentation will look at how the use of advertising and specifically person/classified advertising was used by residents of York County to help them stake their place within the early twentieth century economy. She will talk about how she approached the research process and about how her research in Maine fits into the larger field of history of advertising and print culture.

Anne Leslie's presentation will explore the meaning of the dirt road along which she lives and the landscape one see from it. She will use first-person writing and photographs as well as an academic study of the history of roads and the rise of the preservation ethnic in planning, including "scenic road" designations. Anne is analyzing her road from different perspectives: first-person; historical; aesthetic; anthropologica; political; practical. Anne will discuss the various and sometimes conflicting meaning of the road to local people, planners, the road commissioner, perservationists, teenagers. Anne's dirst road symbolizes contested versions of American progress, place, and value.

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The View from Vermont: Tourism and the Making of an American Rural Landscape

Blake Harrison is a geographer and historian whose research and teaching explore the historical and cultural geography of North America, with a particular emphasis on New England, rural landscapes, tourism, amenity spaces, and the social contours of environmental debate. Harrison has written articles on historical and contemporary land use in New England for journals such as the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Cultural Geographies, Journal of Historical Geography, and Vermont History, among others. His first book, The View from Vermont: Tourism and the Making of an American Rural Landscape (University Press of New England, 2006), examines tourism's role in the production of rural landscapes and rural identity in American culture. In past years, Harrison has taught at Montana State University-Bozeman, and Quinnipiac University. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of History at Yale University.

Born in Rochester, New York in 1970, Harrison attended the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, where he graduated Suma Cum ALaude with a BA (1992) in History. Following that, he traveled and worked throughout New England and the American West as a chairlift mechanic, farm laborer, and hired man before leaving for graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. he earned an MS (1999) in geography from Madison, and a Ph.D. (2003) in geography from Madison with minors in history and landscape architecture.

He currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut with his wife and two daughters. There he divides his professional time between teaching and researching a book on the history of migrant farm work in New England.

 

 

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Homemaking and Snowbabies at the North Pole: The Peary Polar Quest Through a Woman's Lens

Patricia Pierce Erikson is a visiting assistant professor in the American and New England Studies graduate program at the University of Southern Maine-Portland. She has returned to Maine after serving as a curator at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma, Washington. Erikson is the author of "Voices of a Thousand People: The Makah Cultural and Research Center" (University of Nebraska Press, 2002), a book written collaboratively with Makah museum staff. Her scholarship has been published in several journals, such as Cultural Anthropology, Ethnohistory, American Anthropologist, Museum Anthropology, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and American Indian Quarterly. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Inter-American Foundation, and the Maine Women Writers Collection. Erikson is currently applying a feminist geography approach to the history of American Arctic exploration, specifically to the power relationships involving material culture on the Peary expeditions.

Flyer

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ANES 2007-08 Lecture Series Poster

ANES 2006-07 Lecture Series Poster

American Sign Language Interpreters can be provided at any lecture upon request.