David Bruce Centre for American Studies - Keele University
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Research Institute for the Humanities

David Bruce Centre for American Studies Research

Research in matters relating to the United States is supported by The David Bruce Centre for American Studies, founded in 1969. In American Literature and Culture, recent scholarly publications and projects include studies of the works of Henry James, Ezra Pound, William Burroughs, Paul Auster, and Jonathan Lethem.  They also explore the Beat movement, American film, Anglo-American Modernism, and literary geographies in Québécois and Canadian novels.  In U.S. History, recent monographs, edited volumes, and journal articles explore issues in the country's nineteenth and twentieth-century social, political, and intellectual life.  They include studies of plantation overseers in the antebellum South, religion and state-building during the Cold War, and U.S. foreign policy.  The newest research in U.S. Politics explores the relationship between presidential policy-making and political strategy. It also examines morality and “lifestyle" politics, and compares education policy in Europe and the United States.

American Studies faculty are involved in a wide range of academic advisory committees, editorial boards, research networks, and scholarly organizations.  These include the AHRC Peer Review College, the Organization of American History (OAH), the European Beat Studies Network, the American Politics Group, Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS), and British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH). 

The Bruce Centre also regularly organizes international symposia and colloquia that frequently result in edited volumes.  Among the newest books are America’s ‘Special Relationships’: Foreign and Domestic Aspects of the Politics of Alliance and Syndrome Syndrome: Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction.  Upcoming events include a symposium on "The Organiser and the Victim: Power Relationships in the Colonial World" and a colloquium on "American Evangelicalism and the 1960s".  In addition, the Centre promotes wider understanding of the United States through an established seminar programme, visiting fellowships, postgraduate research grants, and sponsorship of American Studies events.