IAAS Postgraduate Symposium
Saturday, 25 November 2017 
“A more perfect Union” IAAS Postgraduate Symposium
In their 1789 Constitution, the founders of the United States aspired to “form a more perfect Union”. Over two hundred and twenty years later, what is the state of this “more perfect Union” today? Have modern exclusionary tactics led to an “America for Americans only” feeling immanent in Trump’s speeches? How has American literature, music, film and philosophy been used to enforce or challenge these feelings of “America for Americans only”? What can an examination of history and politics do to illuminate the United States’ relationship with the rest of the Americas and the wider world?
Register for tickets here
9:00-9:30 Registration
9:30 – 9:45 Opening remarks
IAAS Chair, and organising committee
9:45 – 10:10 Tea/Coffee
10:10 – 11:00 Panel 1: The Public Life of Post-Truth
Chair: Ciaran O’Rourke
“Naturalistic False Consciousness in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road” – Sarah McCreedy (University College Cork)
“Clive’s Song by Anne Carson: Pushing the Limits” – Annette Marie Skade (Dublin City University)
11:00 – 11:15 Tea/Coffee
11:15 – 12:15 Panel 2: State of Health in the Union
Chair:
“Revolutionary Survival; The Chicago Black Panther Party and Health Care” – Matthew O’Brien (University College Dublin)
“Understanding ‘a more perfect union’: Presidents, their Rhetoric, and Health Care Policy” – James Doran (UCD Clinton Institute)
12:15-12:30 Break
12:30-13:30 Panel 3 Imperfect Unions in Postmodern Society
Chair: Ciaran Leinster
“Rational Self-Interest and Individualism in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.” – Rebecca Murray (University College Cork)
“A Union that Shook America’s Core: The Columbine Perpetrators and Literary Constructions of Hypermasculine School Shooter Personae” – Anne Mahler (University College Cork)
“A deconstruction of the “survivor narrative” in Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places” – Eva Burke (Trinity College Dublin)
13:30-14:30 Lunch
14:30-15:30 Panels 4 and 5
International Alliances: America and the World
Chair: James Doran
“Imagining the New Deal: The visual rhetoric of the WPA posters” – Shane Morrissy (Trinity College Dublin)
“Unlikely Alliances and American Credibility in the World: US Foreign Policy and Crisis in South Asia, 1971” – Elizabeth Tanner (University College Cork)
“The Backyard Alliances: An examination of the US foreign policy relationship with El Salvador during the civil war of 1977-1992, and the impact of migration to the US” – William O’Neill (University of Limerick)
Trauma on Screen
Chair:
“‘You’re not alone’: Trauma, Communal Healing and America in Contemporary Science Fiction – Sean Travers (University College Cork)
“The Same Old Story? Shifts in Representations of African Americans in Slave Narratives, Neo-Slave Narratives and Cinematic Slave Narratives” – Caroline Schroeter (University College Cork)
“Welcome to your tape”: Union and Disunion in Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why – Jennifer Gouck (Queen’s University Belfast)
15:30-16:30 Panel 6 Man on Stage: Masculinity in Performance
Chair: Eoin O’Callaghan
““A man is a fourteen-room house”: the Postmodernist Adventurer in Arthur Miller’s The Ride Down Mount Morgan”— Ciaran Leinster (University of Seville)
“Scripting Blackness, Scraping off Stereotypes in Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight” – Natalia Kovalyova (UCD Clinton Institute)
“The Masculine Performance of President as a Patriarchal Political Authority and American Identity” – Catherine Casey (University College Dublin)
16:30 – 17:00
Closing remarks and WTM Riches Essay Prize announcement
17:00 – 18:00 Reception
19:00 Conference Dinner
Campus Location: Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute
Accessibility: Yes
Room: Neill Lecture Theatre
Event Category: Conferences, Lectures and Seminars, Public
Type of Event: One-time event
Audience: Undergrad, Postgrad, Alumni, Faculty & Staff, Public
Cost: €10 / €15
More info: iaas.ie…
