Research
The Sussex Centre for American Studies excels in histories of resistance and liberation, international and global history, gender and sexuality studies, and race studies. See below for recent work.
Recent publications
Andersson, Johan, and Lawrence Webb, eds. The City in American Cinema: Film and Postindustrial Culture. International Library of the Moving Image. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
Angelo, Anne-Marie. “George Peabody and Slavery.” Peabody Institute. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2023. https://peabody.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/George-Peabody-Research.pdf
Austin, Thomas. “Horse-People and White Voices: Neoliberalism and Race in Sorry to Bother You.” Senses of Cinema, no. 105 (May 2023). https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2023/feature-articles/horse-people-and-white-voices-neoliberalism-and-race-in-sorry-to-bother-you/.
Barr, Ashley. “Re-Scripting in the Shower: A Theory of the Shower and Creative Practice,” January 13, 2023. https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Re-scripting_in_the_shower_a_theory_of_the_shower_and_creative_practice/23494247/1. Winner of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) Postgraduate Essay Prize 2023.
———. “Scripting in the Shower: Locating the Politics of Procedural and Conceptual Anglo-American Poetry 1990-2021.” Thesis, University of Sussex, 2022. https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/thesis/Scripting_in_the_shower_locating_the_politics_of_procedural_and_conceptual_Anglo-American_poetry_1990-2021/23493842/1.
———. “To Be Real for You: Acousmatic Cyborgs, Asexuality, and Becoming Human.” Excursions Journal 9, no. 1 (2019): 45–60.
Black, Lynsey, Lizzie Seal, and Florence Seemungal. “Public Opinion on Crime, Punishment and the Death Penalty in Barbados.” Punishment & Society 22, no. 3 (July 1, 2020): 302–20.
Black, Lynsey, Lizzie Seal, Florence Seemungal, Bharat Malkani, and Roger Ball. “Introduction: Legacies of Empire.” Punishment & Society 23, no. 5 (December 1, 2021): 609–12.
———. “The Death Penalty in Barbados: Reforming a Colonial Legacy.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 12, no. 3 (September 1, 2023): 27–36. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.2676.
Burdsey, Daniel, and John Doyle. “Football and the Sounds of the Black Atlantic.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 25, no. 2 (April 1, 2022): 533–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494211015332.
Cecire, Natalia. Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2019.
———. “Experimental Realisms.” In American Literature in Transition, 1876-1910, edited by Lindsay Vail Reckson, 4:131–60. Nineteenth Century American Literature in Transition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Cecire, Natalia, and Samuel Solomon. “Mycoaesthetics.” Critical Inquiry 50, no. 4 (Summer 2024).
Crook, Sarah, and Charlie Jeffries, eds. Resist, Organize, Build: Feminist and Queer Activism in Britain and the United States during the Long 1980s. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2023.
Haddon, Mimi. “Matrices of ‘Love and Theft’: Joan Baez Imitates Bob Dylan.” Twentieth-Century Music 18, no. 2 (June 2021): 249–79. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572221000013.
———. “Nico, Captain of Her Own Ship: Cultural Accreditation and Mid-1960s Experimental Rock.” edited by Sean Albiez and David Pattie. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
———. “Not Playing Properly: Amateurism as Generic Choice in Three Postpunk Case Studies:” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 23, no. 1 (2019): 159–83.
———. What Is Post-Punk?: Genre and Identity in Avant-Garde Popular Music, 1977-82. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020.
Haddon, Mimi, and Bethany Klein. “Introduction: Gender and Popular Music Knowledge.” Popular Music and Society (2024): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2024.2320552.
Haynes, Doug. “‘Falling into the Sky’: Gravity and Levity in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.” Space and Culture 23, no. 4 (November 1, 2020): 357–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331219877141.
———. “Humor.” In Thomas Pynchon in Context, edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, 130–37. Literature in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108683784.017.
Huber, Valeska, Tamson Pietsch, and Katharina Rietzler. “Women’s International Thought and the New Professions, 1900–1940.” Modern Intellectual History 18, no. 1 (March 2021): 121–45. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244319000131.
Jeffries, Charlie. “Life Lessons: Experiences of Gender Studies in Zines in the 1990s and 2000s.” Comparative American Studies An International Journal (2024): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2278371.
———. Teenage Dreams: Girlhood Sexualities in the U.S. Culture Wars. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022.
Jonik, Michael. “Clarel the Saracen.” Leviathan 23, no. 1 (2021): 24–46.
———. “‘Infinite Subdued Vexation’: Love, Agency, and Frustration in Melville’s Pierre; or the Ambiguities.” Revue française d’études américaines 175, no. 2 (2023): 13–24. https://doi.org/10.3917/rfea.175.0013.
———. “Literature and/as Philosophy.” In American Literature in Transition, 1851-1877, edited by Cody Marrs, 3:207–29. Nineteenth Century American Literature in Transition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
———. “Melville and Philosophy: Will, Agency, and ‘Natural Justice.’” In A New Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge, 422–35. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119668565.ch34.
———. “Melville, Mardi, and Materialism.” In The New Melville Studies, edited by Cody Marrs, 169–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108646383.012.
———. “Olson’s Dérive, near-Far Boulez.” In Staying Open: Charles Olson’s Sources and Influences, edited by Joshua Hoeynck. Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2019.
———. “‘Wild Thinking’ and Vegetal Intelligence in Thoreau’s Later Writings.” In Dispersion: Thoreau and Vegetal Thought, edited by Branka Arsić and Vesna Kuiken, 85–104. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
Ladkin, Sam. Frank O’Hara’s New York School & Mid-Century Mannerism: Perfectly Disgraceful. Oxford Mid-Century Studies Series. Oxford: University Press, 2024.
Millanzi, Riziki. “Kimoyo Beads, Multiverses and Crossovers: Establishing (Re)Connection in the World of Marvel’s Black Panther.” Excursions Journal 11, no. 1 (July 1, 2021): 47–76. https://doi.org/10.20919/exs.11.2021.274.
———. “‘One Train!’: Race, Gender and Class in Snowpiercer.” Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture (blog), May 2, 2022. https://www.flowjournal.org/2022/05/race-gender-and-class-in-snowpiercer/.
Owens, Patricia, and Katharina Rietzler, eds. Women’s International Thought: A New History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108859684. Winner of the Joseph Fletcher Prize, 2022; winner of the International Studies Association Theory Section Best Edited Volume Award, 2022.
Owens, Patricia, Katharina Rietzler, Kimberly Hutchings, and Sarah C. Dunstan, eds. Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009004978. Winner of the International Studies Association Theory Section Best Edited Volume Award, 2023; Susan Strange Best Book Prize, 2023; honorable mention, International Studies Association Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section, 2023.
Pawlik, Joanna. Remade in America: Surrealist Art, Activism, and Politics, 1940-1978. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2021. Winner of the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize, 2021.
———. “Ted Joans, Overseas Surrealism.” In Surrealism Beyond Borders, edited by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, 160–68. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021.
Rietzler, Katharina. “‘Mrs. Sovereign Citizen’: Women’s International Thought and American Public Culture, 1920-1950.” In Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories, edited by Christopher McKnight Nichols and David Milne, 92–112. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.7312/nich20180.
———. “U.S. Foreign Policy Think Tanks and Women’s Intellectual Labor, 1920–1950*.” Diplomatic History 46, no. 3 (June 1, 2022): 575–601. https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhac015. Winner of the Arthur Miller Institute Article Prize 2023, awarded by the British Association for American Studies; honourable mention, HOTCUS article prize 2023.
Seal, Lizzie. Gender, Crime and Justice. London: Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2021. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-87488-9.
———. “Haunted by Ghost Criminology.” Crime, Media, Culture 19, no. 3 (August 1, 2023): 402–4. https://doi.org/10.1177/17416590231156653.
Seal, Lizzie, and Maggie O’Neill. Imaginative Criminology: Of Spaces Past, Present and Future. Bristol University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvkjb2hf.
Solomon, Samuel. Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism: Social Reproduction and the Institutions of Poetry. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/book/Lyric_pedagogy_and_marxist-feminism_social_reproduction_and_the_institutions_of_poetry/23457884/1.
Tal, David. “Israel and the United States 1948–1973.” In Routledge Handbook on Israel’s Foreign Relations. Routledge, 2024.
———. “Kissinger’s Wrath: The Reassessment of the US-Israel Relationship (March 1975).” Middle Eastern Studies (2023): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2023.2270430.
———. “Ronald Reagan and Menachem Begin: Bridge across Stormy Waters.” The International History Review 45, no. 4 (July 4, 2023): 681–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2023.2187430.
———. “The Judeo-Christian Tradition and the US-Israel Special Relationship.” Diplomacy & Statecraft 34, no. 4 (October 2, 2023): 755–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2023.2270324.
Thurschwell, Pamela. “Henry James’s Temporalities.” In American Literature in Transition, 1876-1910, edited by Lindsay Vail Reckson, 4:324–44. Nineteenth Century American Literature in Transition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
———. “‘Here’s a Man and Woman Sitting on a Rock’: Joni Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, and Irritable Feminism.” In Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings, edited by Ruth Charnock. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/joni-mitchell-9781501332098/.
Webb, Lawrence. “Global Hollywood and the London Set Piece.” In Global London on Screen: Visitors, Cosmopolitans and Migratory Cinematic Visions of a Superdiverse City, edited by Keith B. Wagner and Roland-François Lack. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023.
———. “Made in New York: Film Production, the City Government, and Public Protest in the Koch Era.” In The City in American Cinema: Film and Postindustrial Culture, edited by Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb. International Library of the Moving Image. London, UK ; New York, NY, USA: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
———. “Sofia Coppola: The Auteur as Creator.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sofia Coppola, edited by Suzanne Ferriss. Bloomsbury Handbooks. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.
———. “Studio Urbanism.” In The Routledge Companion to Media and the City. Routledge, 2022.
———. “The Auteur Renaissance, 1968-1979.” In Hollywood on Location: An Industry History, edited by Lawrence Webb and Joshua Gleich. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019. https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/book/Hollywood_on_location_an_industry_history/23453828/1.
———. “The Woman in the Yellow Dress: Medium Cool and the Gendered Historiography of New Hollywood,” no. 45 (December 2020). http://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-45-medium-cool-dossier/the-woman-in-the-yellow-dress-medium-cool-and-the-gendered-historiography-of-new-hollywood/.
Webb, Lawrence, and Joshua Gleich, eds. Hollywood on Location: An Industry History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019. https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/book/Hollywood_on_location_an_industry_history/23453828/1.
Wright, Tom F. Transatlantic Rhetoric: Speeches from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes. Edinburgh: University Press, 2020.
Wright, Tom F. The Charismologist newsletter. https://charismologist.substack.com.
Image credit: Carol Highsmith, interior of Thomas Jefferson Building dome, 2007, Library of Congress