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Past Events

Here you will find a selected record of our past events.

Spring Reading Group 2026

Literary Theory on Acid: A Psychedelic Humanities Toolkit

This year's Spring Reading Group took place at the University of Lausanne in hybrid form on Friday, April 17th. We were pleased to welcome Ramzi Fawaz as our speaker.

Ramzi Fawaz is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and host of the podcast Nerd from the Future. He is the author of two books, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016) and Queer Forms (2022), both published by NYU Press. Since Fall 2024, Fawaz has been a contributing editor to the journal Film Quarterly, where he authors 'Imagination Unbound,' a column about the radical democratic spirit of contemporary popular culture. He is currently writing a book titled How to Think Like a Multiverse: Psychedelic Pathways to Embracing a Diverse World. In it, he argues for an understanding of humanities education as a form of psychedelic therapy, which uses art, literature, and media, instead of psychoactive drugs, to induce positive transformational effects on the wellbeing of multiple generations of students. Last April he edited a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on 'Psychedelic Imaginaries.'

Symposium 2025

America, Europe, and the World: Re-mapping 'The International Theme'

We welcomed two invited speakers: Dennis Tredy from the Sorbonne Nouvelle and Matthew Wilkins from Cornell University. We also held our annual SANAS Assembly General Meeting at the symposium, and this meeting addressed several important discussion points, including the future of the SANAS Board.

Spring Reading Group 2025

Poetry and Memoir

This year's Spring Reading Group took place at the University of Fribourg on Saturday, May 10th. We were very pleased to welcome Beth Ann Fennelly.

For this year's Spring Reading Group, we were pleased to welcome Beth Ann Fennelly to the University of Fribourg. Fennelly was Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and currently teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she has won multiple awards for her teaching. She’s received grants from the N.E.A., the United States Artists, the Academy of American Poets, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize and three times been included in The Best American Poetry Series. Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, and a book of nonfiction, Great with Child, all published with W. W. Norton. A novel she co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin, called The Tilted World, was published by HarperCollins. Her sixth book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton), was named an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book, a Goodreaders Favorite for 2017, and the winner of the Housatonic Book Prize. Fennelly and Franklin live in Oxford with their three children.

SANAS Conference 2024

American Futurisms

This biennial conference, 'American Futurisms,' was held at the University of Geneva on November 7-8, 2024. Our keynote speakers were Prof. Dana Medoro (University of Manitoba) and Prof. Sherryl Vint (University of California Riverside).

Just over a century ago, in the seemingly post-apocalyptic world of 1918, Van Wyck Brooks famously called for the creation of a new American cultural history that would furnish the nation, and the post-war world, with a usable past. In the context of current predictions of climate catastrophe and the mass extinction of life on our planet, Brooks' call for a new past provokes reflection on the possibilities for usable (and also unusable) futures. A century later, how might we interrogate the utility of our cultural moment? How are artists – now and in the past – responding to the pressures of a future that is imaginable but seemingly unachievable? Equally, how has the past generated the futures that are now our present? How does the past reverberate in the decolonized imaginings of artists working in the Afro- and Indigenous Futurist movements? How is a linear, chronological model of time, which offers the cognitive frame for much future thinking, challenged by alternative understandings of the structure of historical time?

The conference featured diverse explorations of the futurist configurations of the contemporary North American Studies landscape: digital and technological futures, economic futurism, post-humanist futures, Indigenous and Afro-Futurisms, climate and environmental futures, even the nuclear futures that have come once again to prominence in the contexts of the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza conflicts.

Spring Reading Group 2024

Sex, Drugs, and Country Music: Loretta Lynn, Gender Politics, and the Health Environment in Mid-Twentieth Century Kentucky

This year's Spring Reading Group took place at the University of St. Gallen on May 18th. We were very pleased to welcome Brian Ward to share his work with us.

Brian Ward is a professor of American Studies at the University of Northumbria and the former president of the British Association for American Studies. He has published several books on cultures of the US South, with a focus on race and music. At the SRG, Brian will circulate work from his forthcoming project on the intersections between southern music and medical history. Brian will share a piece-in-progress from this project, titled 'Sex, Drugs, and Country Music: Loretta Lynn, Gender Politics, and the Health Environment in Mid-Twentieth Century Kentucky,' to consider how music might offer valuable insight into lived experience of sickness, medicine, folk-healing, and professional healthcare in the modern US South. It brings together perspectives from the health humanities and cultural, political, and social history, so we hope this should be of interest to many of you.