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:
Leslie Marmon Silko's 1991 novel Almanac of the Dead is a profound and challenging analysis of late capitalist society in America and more widely, and the ways in which powerful minority elites ensure that their power is never challenged nor shared, through the complicit discourses of imperialism, patriarchy, religion, medicine, science and technology. Almanac's exploration of multiple forms of dispossession and resistance is most fully embodied in the two Armies of Justice, who are devoted to overturning oppression in all forms and to the restoration of social and economic justice. Reading Almanac in the light of the global economic recession of 2008, this study assesses the ways in which Almanac's vision of oppressive capitalism continues to have absolute relevance. Perhaps most importantly, this study provides a groundbreaking reading of Almanac for the 21st century, comparing Silko's activist armies with recent international popular social justice activism such as the Arab Spring, the international Occupy movement, and the Indigenous Idle No More movement. Edited by Rebecca Tillett.
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