The Promise and Peril of the U.S. in the World
Project lead: Dr Bevan Sewell
An Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded network featuring members from the UK, Europe, and the United States. This project is focused on critically engaging with the wider fields of U.S. history and U.S. in the World studies in light of major changes over the last few decades, which have seen a narrow focus on what one diplomat based in Washington D.C. said to another diplomat based in Washington D.C. give way to a far more expansive and exciting field - one that is as interested in the activities and travels of tourists, workers, artists, writers, teachers, schoolchildren, travelling sports teams, and missionaries as presidents and politicians, and which is as interested in the rest of the world and the impact that it has had on the United States as it is on the domestic influences shaping American history.
In addition to the network’s activities in engaging with the field, it has also focused on is the way that these subjects are taught in schools, at both GCSE and A-level, and to consider the extent to which wider intellectual and methodological shifts in the profession have translated into school-level teaching in order to engage more with what students know when they arrive at University. A second strand of the project, therefore, which is being developed in collaboration with the AQA Exam Board, is working with schools and teachers to think about the future of teaching U.S. history at GCSE and A-level, and considering whether the field’s transformation - in terms of focus, skills, sources, and reappraisals of power and causality - has affected the way it is taught in UK secondary education.
The Violence of Empire: Transmisogyny, Colonialism, and Anti-Trans Activism
Project lead: Dr. Anna Meier
Alongside partners at Tech Against Terrorism and with seed funding from the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, this project investigates the colonial logics underpinning contemporary transphobia and transmisogyny across the political spectrum, but particularly on the violent far right. Rather than viewing transphobia as one among many components of far-right ideology, we position transphobia as constitutive of far-right understandings of power and governance. Our early comparative work with online anti-trans rhetoric in the US and EU demonstrates the presence of colonial logics in far-right actors' discourse following attacks involving LGBTQIA+ communities. The project further seeks to develop actionable recommendations for tech companies and online platforms to respond to transphobic content online and keep trans users safe.
Caribbean Latinx artists in the world
Project lead: Dr. Stephanie Lewthwaite
My project is a monograph about the relational memory-work of Caribbean Latinx artists in New York City since the 1970s. Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican diaspora artists have entangled different forms of historical and contemporary trauma in their work from colonialism, enslavement, dictatorship, and environmental loss in the Hispanophone Caribbean to experiences of coloniality, violence, and exclusion in the United States. Drawing on Third-Worldism, Black diasporic and archipelagic thought, Caribbean Latinx artists have also imagined solidarities with others in different parts of the globe by, for example, reflecting on violence, conflict, and environmental crises in the Middle East, Central and South America, Asia, and Europe.
Examining how memories travel and become entangled with demands for justice elsewhere, the project demonstrates how artists deploy affiliations with others in productive ways—to think through difficult pasts and explore possibilities for reconciliation and new forms of belonging. By positioning Caribbean Latinx artists in relation to the world, the project contributes to the fields of global and archipelagic American Studies.
Remaking Fear City: Fear of Crime and the Transformation of New York City
Project lead: Dr. Joe Merton
This multidisciplinary project uses fear of crime to explore the late twentieth century transformation of New York City: changes which have become widely understood as the "neoliberalisation" of New York. Whereas scholars typically identify the city's 1975 fiscal crisis, near-bankruptcy and corporate "takeover" as the critical moment of rupture, this project looks elsewhere - specifically public and elite anxieties over rising crime rates across the 1960s and 1970s - for the origins of this process. It finds them in civilian patrols and municipal/police programmes which reoriented the relationship between the state and the individual; new public-private partnerships designed to combat crime which promoted corporate interests and provided new models of service delivery; urban design projects which responded to public anxieties by privatising space and services; cinema and lifestyle media which in their promotion of anticrime strategies enfranchised ideas of individual responsibility and risk and consumer citizenship. How did these diverse responses, located across politics and policy, culture and design, empower and entrench neoliberal ideas in a city once renowned as an exemplar of social democracy?
The project has received funding from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust and produced several publications in leading journals. It welcomes input and potential collaboration from colleagues working in related disciplines, including politics, criminology, architecture, film and media studies. I am also exploring potential impact/KE opportunities arising from the project, including a series of public film screenings and a collaborative exhibition organised in partnership with the Museum of the City of New York, NYC Municipal Archives and local historical societies.