American Literatures and Cultures

Recent research projects funded by the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and ESRC/University of Essex Impact Acceleration Fund include:

• 2021-2022 - Kodachrome Travels: Colour Film, Realism, and the American Pacific Imagination (Jeffrey Geiger) (also funded through a British Association for American Studies Founders’ Research Award)
• 2016-2019 - Derek Walcott’s Painters: an interdisciplinary project which fills a substantial gap in the scholarship on the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, namely the lack of a serious study of his ongoing engagement with the visual arts. (Maria Cristina Fumagalli)
• 2016-2018 - Reconceptualizing troubled border relations: promoting cross-border collaboration, cooperation and solidarity between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the wake of the denationalization crisis in Hispaniola (Maria Cristina Fumagalli)
• 2014-2015 - Caribbean Contacts: New York Networks, 1900-1945 (Jak Peake) awarded by Elon University and Fulbright 2014-15, $20,000. 

• On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Maria Cristina Fumagalli’s book On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2015) was reissued as a paperback by Liverpool University Press in 2018.

• Morning, Paramin Derek Walcott, Peter Doig, and an Ekphrasis of Relation

Maria Cristina Fumagalli’s article entitled Morning, Paramin Derek Walcott, Peter Doig, and an Ekphrasis of Relation was published in the New West Indian Guide in 2018.

• ‘Exquisite Wonder’: Colour Film, Realism, and the Yankee Voyage, 1936-38

Jeffrey Geiger’s article “‘Exquisite Wonder’: Colour Film, Realism, and the Yankee Voyage, 1936-38” is out now in Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies 8.1 (2020).

• Intimate Media: New Queer Documentary and the Sensory Turn

Jeffrey Geiger’s article ‘Intimate Media: New Queer Documentary and the Sensory Turn’ has appeared online in Studies in Documentary Film.

• Between the Bocas: A Literary Geography of Western Trinidad

Jak Peake's book Between the Bocas: A Literary Geography of Western Trinidad (Liverpool University Press, 2017) was part of the “American Tropics” research project based at Essex and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.

• ‘Watching the Waters’: Tropic flows in the Harlem Renaissance, Black Internationalism and other currents

Jak Peake’s article ‘Watching the Waters’: Tropic flows in the Harlem Renaissance, Black Internationalism and other currents’ has appeared in Radical Americas in 2018

• Nonlinear Temporality in Joyce and Walcott: History Repeating Itself with a Difference

Sean Seeger's book Nonlinear Temporality in Joyce and Walcott: History Repeating Itself with a Difference, published by Routledge in 2017, is the first dedicated comparative study of James Joyce and Derek Walcott.

• ‘Don't anyone tell me that New Orleans is a filthy swamp-hole’: Fate, Fever, and the City as Nexus in Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein's The Mysteries of New Orleans

Owen Robinson’s book chapter ‘Don't anyone tell me that New Orleans is a filthy swamp-hole": Fate, Fever, and the City as Nexus in Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein's The Mysteries of New Orleans was published in: New Orleans and the Global South: Caribbean, Creolization, Carnival in 2017.

• Proffered for Your Perusal in Ring by Concentric Ring

Owen Robinson’s book chapter “Proffered for Your Perusal in Ring by Concentric Ring” was published in The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U. S. South in 2016.

• True Grit: Dirt, Subjectivity and the Female Body in Contemporary Westerns

Jordan Savage’s article “True Grit: Dirt, Subjectivity and the Female Body in Contemporary Westerns” was published in 2020 in Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Americanistik.

• ‘There Was a Veil Upon You, Pocahontas’: The Pocahontas Story as a Myth of American Heterogeneity in the Liberal Western

Jordan Savage’s article 'There Was a Veil Upon You, Pocahontas": The Pocahontas Story as a Myth of American Heterogeneity in the Liberal Western’ was published in 2018 in Papers on Language and Literature.

• Jak Peake hosted an international conference ‘American Networks: Radicals Under the Radar (1868-1968), 11-13 July 2016, University of Notre Dame, London, keynotes from Professors Winston James and Rhonda Y. Williams, resulting in special issue of Comparative American Studies (2019; co-ed. Peake).

• In response to the University of Essex Art Exchange exhibition, ‘Open Your Eyes’ 21 Nov 2019, Jak Peake gave a ‘Colonialism Contested’ talk with Professor Jeremy Krikler from the Department of History on the issues of race, representation and the legacies of colonialism and slavery notably the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago involving Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells.

• Essex PhD students Maria-Irina Popescu and Jessica Houlihan organised the BAAS/CHASE Postgraduate Conference, ‘We Hold These Truths to be Self-Evidence’: Post Truth & American Myths’ at the University of Essex, 25-26 November 2017.