BAAS Postgraduate Symposium 2026

In 1946, Winston Churchill declared the need for a “special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States” in order to maintain world diplomacy, citing our shared language and cultural values as connecting the two countries. Although this ‘special relationship’ has continually been called into question by scholars, there is undoubtedly a channel of cultural and political exchange between the US and the UK, as well as with other countries, which has become even more urgent for discussion in recent years.

The 2026 BAAS Postgraduate Symposium will be on the topic of Transatlantic Connections and the ‘Special Relationship[s]’. By using the term ‘Special Relationship[s]’, we intend to explore the relationship between not only the US and the UK, but also between the US and other countries. The day will include contributions from all realms of American Studies, including, but not limited to: literature and film studies, postcolonial and decolonial analysis, science and visual culture, and urban and environmental history.

This one-day symposium will involve not only academic panel discussions, but other activities such as a career development session, an introduction to the archives at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a keynote address by Professor Mark Ford. The intention is to foster a strong postgraduate community in American Studies and to learn from both our peers and from leaders in our field. The symposium will be catered, hosted primarily in-person at V&A East Storehouse, but with a digital attendance option for those only able to join online. There will be time in the day to explore V&A East Storehouse and the David Bowie Centre. V&A East Storehouse is a working museum store with a rich archive for students to use in their research. The building is designed to allow visitors to get closer to objects held in the V&A collections and to the work of the museum itself.

Papers:

Session 1: 10:30-11:30am

Queering Movement(s)

Jessica Corfield, ‘Frank O’Hara and James Dean: A Special (Poetic) Relationship’

Sam Houlberg, ‘Queering the ‘special relationship’: American and European Rivalry in Transnational LGBTQ Rights Organisations’

Shelby Neuhauser: ‘Million Dollar Clickbait: A Call for the Eradication of the Term ‘Dollar Princess’ in Historical Analysis’

Andrea Carboni, ‘The Franco-American Auto/Metafictional Turn: Queer Self-Writing from AIDS to the Climate Crisis’

Session 2: 11:45am-12:30pm

Moving Ideas

Audrey Chan, ‘Catalonia and Cuba in Hemingway’s Eyes: Transatlantic Archival Studies Beyond American Modernism’

Ellie McDougall, ‘Transatlantic Decadence: Aesthetic Despair in the Long Nineteenth-Century’

Núria Galluci, ‘Crime, Madness and Horror: Edgar Allen Poe’s Influence on Catalan Writer, Victor Català

Session 3: 13:30-14:30

Moving Bodies

Ruby Kwartz, ‘Generations, Gender, Nation: Troubling Literary Categories through Paul Marshall’s Early Fiction’

Elisha Wise, ‘Transatlantic Esther Greenwood?: Sylvia Plath, ‘Mothers’, and the Lost Sequel to The Bell Jar’

Gayle Kennedy, ‘A Network of Introductions: Simone de Beauvoir and the Transatlantic Making of America Day by Day’

Nana Prempeh, ‘Who’s Really in Paris? Blackness, Belonging, and the Transatlantic African Diaspora’

Session 4: 14:45-15:30

Moving Cultures

Johnny Hopkins, ‘Travelling with Baggage: The Transatlantic Journey of Mod Culture’s Union Jacks in the USA (1977–1985)’

Madeleine Edgar, ‘After the End: Legacies of Mining on Minnesota’s Iron Range and in Cornwall’

Tom Willett, ‘Tasting the Special Relationship: US-UK Foodways in the Post-War Period’.