American Literature Research Seminars 2025/26

List of American Literature Research Seminars at the RAI – academic year 2025/26

16 October 2025:

Delivery Drone Fictions: Conceiving Transportation and Logistics as Care Work

J.D. Schnepf (University of Groningen)

30 October 2025:

The Heat of Modernity: Race, Energy, and Violence in the 'Native Son' Manuscripts

Harry Stecopoulos (University of Iowa)

13 November 2025:

Epistolary Activism: Re-tracing Louise Michel’s US Radical Networks

J. Michelle Coghlan (University of Manchester)

27 November 2025:

On Not Wanting To Burn with a Hard Gem-Like Flame: Intensity in Contemporary U.S. Fiction

Nicholas Gaskill (University of Oxford), in conversation with Antoine Traisnel

22 January 2026:

Revolutionary Liberators: Remembering the Douglass Family 1813-1960

Celeste-Marie Bernier (University of Edinburgh) moderated by Nicole King (Oxford)

5 February 2026:

The Dissenting Atlantic: Archives and Unquiet Libraries, 1776-1865

Bridget Bennett (University of Leeds)

19 February 2026:

Beyond Stateless Literature? Practices of Democratic Power in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Regionalism

Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité)

5 March 2026:

ALRS Book Club: James (2024) by Percival Everett

30 April 2026:

Freedom, Control, and the Cultures of Circulation Gigwork

Annie J McClanahan (University of California, Irvine)

14 May 2026:

Futureproof: The Fiction of Climate Survival

Antoine Traisnel (Oxford)

28 May 2026:

Queer Extinctions; or, Learning How to Last

Sarah Ensor (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

11 June 2026:

ALRS Book Club: The Fire Next Time (1963) by James Baldwin