We are a vibrant centre for promoting and disseminating world-leading research into the life and culture of the United States and beyond.
Powerfully underpinned by a tradition of, and commitment to, interdisciplinary research, our areas of expertise range from the Revolutionary period to the present day. We encompass literature and drama, history, politics, and foreign relations. Staff specialisms include American urban history, the international history of the Cold War, civil rights, ecocriticism, American popular culture, comics and graphic novels, and contemporary multi-ethnic American literature and film.
Our research strategy is driven by a desire to enhance understandings of human cultures and communities, their linguistic, historic and literary transformations, and by the questions of power and identity that issue from such investigations.
The research we undertake has demonstrated significant impact, benefiting a wide variety of groups from practitioners and professionals (film-makers, interpreters, lawyers, police, and teachers), to communities facing particular intercultural challenges (whether Native communities or immigrants to Norfolk), and the general public (from local children to visitors to special events).
Recent books and research projects by our faculty members include:
More than twenty years after its publication in 1991, Leslie Marmon Silko’s monumental novel Almanac of the Dead continues to disconcert, move, provoke, and outrage readers. In a work that is overtly and often uncomfortably political, Silko’s overflowing cast of characters includes representatives from a range of cultures and communities who are united by common experiences of dispossession, disenfranchisement, exploitation, and poverty. Clearly, Silko’s depiction of a social uprising that draws together the indigenous People’s Army of the Americas and the American Army of the Homeless triggered—and was designed to trigger—a range of reactions among readers and critics alike.
Howling for Justice actively engages with both the literary achievements and the politics of Silko’s text. It brings together essays by international scholars reacting to the novel while keeping in mind its larger concern with issues of social justice, both local and transnational. Aiming both to refocus critical attention and open the book to a broader array of readers, this collection offers fresh perspectives on its transnational vision, on its sociocultural, historical, and political ambitions, and on its continued relevance in the twenty-first century. The essays examine and explain some of the key points that readers and critics have identified as confusing, problematic, and divisive. Together, they offer new ways to approach and appreciate the text.
The book, edited by Rebecca Tillett, concludes with a new, never-before-published interview in which Silko reflects on the twenty years since the novel’s publication and relates the concerns of Almanac to her current work.
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