2025-26 seminars
Andrew Hook Centre Seminar Series, Spring 2026
Thursday, 5 February, 5:15pm (Humanities Research Hub, 1 University Gardens, Room 102) (joint event with War Studies)
Dr David Fitzgerald (Cork), “Uncertain Warriors: the United States Army between the Cold War and the War on Terror”.
Wednesday 11th, 2026, 4pm (the McKechnie Room, 10 University Gardens)
Dr. Oli Charbonneau (Glasgow) "The Militarized Origins of American Ethnography" (NB. This is a work in progress seminar. If you would like to attend please write to me so that I can pre-circulate the paper.)
Wednesday 4th March, 2026, 4pm (CTT ADAM SMITH:588AB) (joint event with War Studies)
Dr. Shaul Mitelpunkt (York University), “'At Ease: Americans and the Dilemma of Military Service.”
Wednesday 11th March, 2026, 4pm (CTT WOLFSON MED:248 GANNOCHY)
Dr. Jason Lee (DeMontfort University), “Extremism, Democracy and Media: Tackling Conspiracy Theories in America and Beyond.” CANCELLED
Tuesday, 7th April, 2026, 4pm (COM G SCOTT:251 COMMITTEE RM)
Dr. Aaron Nyerges (US Studies Centre, Sydney), launching his new monograph, American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination.
Autobiography and the Counter-Mapping of United States
American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination is a new book that examines the cartographic literature of the United States and places it in context of the state's overseas expansion. Dr Nyerges stretches the map of US literature across an imperial archipelago of territories and outlines a method of comparative reading that brings canonical American authors into dialogue with under-represented writers from across the contested dominions of US empire. He argues that literary artists from across US dominion responded to space-dominating technologies of empire and retooled them to imagine counter-cartographies, designs that challenged the official geographies of the United States.
This talk takes Gertrude Stein’s visit to the recently incorporated “Indian Territory” of Oklahoma as an opportunity to reread her geographical histories of the United States from a point in Native space. It contrasts Stein's love for state lines with the writings of Yankton Dakota writer Zitkála-Šá. Her autobiographical essays of the early twentieth century contain shadow maps of Očhéthi Šakówin, or The Great Sioux Nation. They complicate Stein’s excitement over how the airplane makes patchwork earth look like an official US map. By reading contrapuntally between Stein and Zitkála-Šá, I seek to position autobiography as a contested genre of cartographic literature, and demonstrate how, in response to the technics of machine transport, the form was refigured to make the overlap between US and Native American territories visible in their disjunction.
Aaron Nyerges is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Centre. His work focuses on the relationship between literature, media and geography. His first book, American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.
Thursday 19th March, 2026, 4pm (CTT WOLFSON MED:248 GANNOCHY)
Dr. Diana Lemberg (St. Andrews), “United States Investments in Foreign Language Learning.”
Thursday 8 to Saturday 11: BAAS ANNUAL CONFERENCE
Full programme to follow
Saturday 11 April, 2026, 10:45-11:45: GORDON LECTURE (Boyd Orr A)
Professor Simon Newman (Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin, Madison), “Fighting for freedom, 1776-2026.”
Andrew Hook Centre Seminar Series, Autumn 2025
Wednesday 8 October 2025, 4.30pm-6pm
In the Humanities Hub, 1 University Gardens
Welcome Event
All are welcome, and we particularly encourage you to invite your PGT and PGR students so that we have a chance to connect with everyone working on an aspect of the United States at the University.
Wednesday 22 October 2025, 4.30pm-6pm
in Room 331, Wolfson Medical School
Dr. Rowena Azada-Palacios (Edinburgh): "US Empire and the American Research University"
Paper abstract: US Empire and the American Research University
The emergence and eventual ascendancy of the American research university has been studied primarily through national and international lens, often overlooking its connection to US imperialism. This paper addresses this gap by asking how the acquisition of overseas colonies at the end of the 19th century influenced the development of the university in the US. It focuses on two university leaders, David Prescott Barrows and Elmer Drew Merrill, who both served the Philippine Insular Government early in their careers before assuming leadership roles at the University of California during the interwar period. By analysing their work in both locations, this paper shows how they each came to consider different ways that the university could contribute to sustaining US’ global power even after its formal empire shrank. For Barrows, this was through a globalised understanding of the educational function of the state university. For Merrill, this was through the cultivation of inter-imperial networks of knowledge production.
Biography
Rowena Azada-Palacios is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Edinburgh's School of Law and an assistant professor of philosophy at Ateneo de Manila University. Her work lies at the intersection of critical political thought and education. She is the author of Postcolonial Education and National Identity (Bloomsbury, 2021) and is the founding chair of the Philippine Society of Education and Philosophy (PhilSEP).
Wednesday 12 November 2025, 4.30pm-6pm
in the Gilbert Scott Building, Room 355
Dr. Nathan Cardon, The World Awheel: Americans in the First Global Bicycle Age - Book Talk
Abstract: Most histories of the bicycle and cycling in the United States render it as an almost completely domestic phenomenon soon overwhelmed by Americans’ mass enthusiasm for the automobile. Between 1885 and 1925, however, a key generation of Americans saw the world through the lens of the bicycle and were keenly aware that they were just one spoke in a global culture of cycling. Across periodicals, magazines, and newspapers, American cyclists and non-cyclists alike read breathlessly about the expansion of cycling culture from England to Europe to Africa and Asia. The nation’s experience of the bicycle was never far from the world’s. In this talk, I use the advent of the safety bicycle and the social and cultural worlds of cycling to think through the ways the United States was embedded within the imperial world and how Americans experienced this world at the end of the nineteenth century.