“American Values:
Public Virtues, Private Vices?”
THE 24th BIENNIAL NAAS CONFERENCE ON AMERICAN STUDIES
University of Oulu, Finland, May 11-13, 2015
The conference is organized by the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS) and it will offer papers – by approximately 100 speakers from 10 different countries – on how America has defined its central values in politics, history, literature, architecture, film, the media, popular culture, and everyday living. Why does it matter so much to the American public today whether or not Thomas Jefferson had children with Sally Hemings at the end of the eighteenth century? Are there some particular American ways to deal with ethical issues? What has been the impact of such traditional American values as individualism, self-help, and egalitarianism on the rest of the world?
Our guest speakers from the United States will include:
● Annette Gordon-Reed (History Pulitzer for The Hemingses of Monticello, 2009)
● Daniel Walker Howe (History Pulitzer for What Hath God Wrought, 2008) ● Peter Onuf (Author of The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, 2007)
● Andrew O’Shaughnessy (American History Book Prize for Men Who Lost America, 2014)
● Alan Taylor (2 History Pulitzers: for William Cooper’s Town in 1996 and for The Internal Enemy in 2014)
● Gordon Wood (History Pulitzer for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 1993).
NAAS PLENARY SPEAKERS:
● ASANOR: Hans Skei, author of William Faulkner: The Novelist as a Short Story Writer
● DAAS: Camelia Elias, author of The Way of The Sign: Cultural Text Theory in Two Steps
● FASA: Bo Pettersson, author of The World According to Kurt Vonnegut: Moral Paradox and Narrative Form
● SAAS: Magnus Ullén, author of The Half-Vanished Structure: Hawthorne’s Allegorical Dialectics.
The conference is open to scholars and students from all over the world, but we offer lower registration fees to members of NAAS (Nordic Association for American Studies), EAAS (European Association for American Studies) and ASA (American Studies Association in the U.S). The regular conference registration fee will be 120,00 euro and for the members 100,00 euro.
For more information, contact the Conference President Ari Helo ([email protected])