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Conferences & Colloquia

The Bologna Conferences

The John Nicholas Brown Center is pleased to present selected papers from the first three in a series of international biannual conferences on American Studies conceived and executed by a consortium of American Studies programs in the United States and Europe. The partner departments—presently Bologna, University of Paris III, Yale, Brown and Berkeley—are all parts of universities that have exchange programs with each other.

The conferences are designed to allow faculty and graduate students to share recent work and consider new paradigms relating to American Studies as a scholarly field. A response to initiatives within the field of American Studies to imagine a transnational practice, these conferences allow for an in-depth examination of what an internationalized American Studies might look like.

To find paper titles, abstracts and sometimes full papers, click on the conference titles below. Please contact Susan_Smulyan@brown.edu with any questions about the Bologna Conferences.

Mobility and American Cultures
June 20-22, 2002

The corsortium’s first conference was held at the University of Bologna in June 2002. It explored mobility as a quintessential American ideology. Participants considered sociological, cultural (both popular and high), economic, technological, literary, historical and political approaches to the topic. They discussed how Americans received and resisted the ideology of mobility. They considered mobility in art and film, mobility in racial, ethnic, gender and class formations, and mobility in the 21st century’s context of globalization.

Public Spheres and American Cultures
June 4-6, 2004

The second conference was held at Brown University in June 2004 with participants from the University of Bologna, the Sorbonne, Yale, and Berkeley joining Brown faculty and graduate students to explore “Public Spheres and American Cultures” in connection with the new Public Humanities MA program in the Department of American Civilization. We see public spheres as contested terrains in which the whole range of social identities vie for position and voice in American culture. One central question was the relationship of the “people”; the “popular” and the “public” and this international group of scholars took a range of approaches to the subject, making use of popular culture, ethnic studies, material culture studies, visual studies, as well historical and literary studies.

The conference was cosponsored by the Department of American Civilization, the Provost's Office and the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization.

Reform and Revolution in American Culture and History
June 6-8, 2006

The third conference was held at the Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. We considered the status of the United States as a “revolutionary” country, and the contradictory meanings of “revolution” and “reform” in relation to change and history. Panelists considered American history and culture as attempts to reconcile these two contradictory forces: on the one hand, the United States’ image as the land of progress and reform in all fields (e.g., political, social, technical, economic, cultural, literary), and, on the other hand, its revolutionary heritage/myth, which carries with it the urge to appeal constantly to the core values of the American nation and to comment endlessly on its foundation.

The U.S.A. in the World, the World in the U.S.A
June 19–21, 2008

In 2008, we met at Berkeley to directly address the idea of transnationalism as part of American Studies scholarship. Ever since the first settlements in the New World, the land that became the United States has imported and exported basic ideas. The Puritans supposed that they could export the idea of the "City Upon a Hill," for instance, in 1630. In fact, the very idea of the New World was an import. Some historians have claimed that "scalping" was an imported idea. And this interchange of ideas and practices has been active ever since in every aspect of American culture. One can think of the Transcendentalists and 19th-century novel and art practices. Thinkers in the Progressive era, for instance, took many of the major reform ideas from Europe. The same is true of the Roosevelt "brain trust" during the Great Depression of the 1930s. And after World Wars I and II, American intellectuals emphasized nationalism, taking and giving ideas from everywhere. All of these points make up an old story. And even though the U.S. has always been global, there hasn't always been an acknowledgement of this international movement of ideas for the nation. Much has been made by previous generations of historians and cultural scholars of American exceptionalism. Especially in periods of nationalizing emphases, this idea seems to float to the top of American consciousness. But for our conference in Berkeley, we sought to think about the international trade in ideas. And so the theme of the conference was a very broad one, the transnationalism of the study of U.S. history, institutions, literary expression, poplar culture, music, consumerism, and the interplay of ideas between nations.