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Forthcoming events and conferences

The Eccles Centre for American Studies regularly organises and supports conferences, seminars, lectures and other events on North American and transatlantic themes, often in partnership with other institutions and organisations.

Friday 10 February 2012
Tracking the 2012 Elections: A half-day conference hosted at the US Embassy, London

Contributions by Dr Dean McSweeney (University of the West of England); Thomas E. Mann, the W. Averell Harriman Chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution; former US Congressmen Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) and Mike Oxley (R-Ohio), and former Times columnist Dr Tim Hames.

Programme

Entrance is free, but prior reservation is essential.
Reservations close at 12 noon, Wednesday 1st February.
Enquiries and requests for reservations to eccles-centre@bl.uk

This conference forms part of the Spring 2012 Congress to Campus UK programme, organised and sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, and the US Association of Former Members of Congress. Generous support comes also from the American Politics Group of the UK and our hosts, the US Embassy in London.

Wednesday 21 March 2012
Lecture: Liberties and Empires: Writing Constitutions in the Atlantic World, 1776-1848

Event time: 17.30 - 19.30
Location: Institute of Education, Room 728, level, 7
Tickets: Free of charge, rsvp chloe.pieters@sas.ac.uk

The outbreak of revolution in the Thirteen Colonies in 1776, in France in 1789, and in Haiti in 1791, famously gave rise to the creation of substantially new and highly influential written constitutions. Before 1786, no independent state possessed a single document which it termed a constitution. But in the wake of these and other revolutions, written constitutions proliferated. By 1812, there were fifty new constitutions in Europe alone. Over sixty more were drafted before 1850, many of them in Latin America.

Yet the degree to which the explosion of new constitutions after 1776 was a trans-national and a trans-continental phenomenon can easily be obscured by exceptionalist and purely national historical narratives. In this lecture, Professor Linda Colley (Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History, Princeton University) considers the evidence for a more complex and multi-lateral history of constitutions in the Atlantic World between 1776 and 1848, and discusses their profound connections with empire as well as nationalism.

Co-sponsored with the the Institute for the Study of the Americas, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and funded by the John Coffin Memorial Fund

Thursday 22 March 2012
Seminar: The Presidential Difference: White House Leadership in the Civil War Era from James Polk to Abraham Lincoln

Event time: 18.00 - 20.00
Location: The Chancellor's Hall (Senate House, First Floor)
Tickets: Free of charge, rsvp chloe.pieters@sas.ac.uk

The speaker, Fred I. Greenstein, is Professor of Politics Emeritus at Princeton University. His books include Children and Politics (1965), Personality and Politics (1969), The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (1982), How Presidents Test Reality (1989, with John P. Burke), The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Barack Obama (2009), and Inventing the Job of President: Leadership Style from George Washington to Andrew Jackson (2009). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and past president of the International Society for Political Psychology.

Co-sponsored with the the Institute for the Study of the Americas, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Monday 11 June 2012
CALL FOR PAPERS
Political Marketing and Consultancy in an Age of Global Crises

Proposals are invited for contributions to a one-day conference convened by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library in co-operation with the University of London’s Institute for the Study of the Americas and the International Association of Political Consultants.

The day’s programme is expected to include papers addressing political marketing and consultancy in North America, and discussions of the impact of North American styles of marketing and consultancy in other parts of the world. Proposals analysing themes political marketing and consultancy in the context of recent crises without a North American element will also be considered.

The conference panels will bring together academic researchers and leading members of the International Association of Political Consultants, enabling an unusual opportunity for productive debate involving scholars and practitioners.

The meeting will be hosted at the British Library Conference Centre, one of the most prestigious and attractive conference locations in London.

All presenters at the conference will be invited to submit their papers to be considered for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Political Marketing, an international, refereed journal.

Please send proposals (no more than 2 pages), accompanied by a brief cv (no more than 1 page), to Professor Philip Davies, Director of the Eccles Centre for American Studies, at Philip.Davies@bl.uk no later than 1st December 2011.

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