The British Association for American Studies at fifty

Contemporary Review, April, 2004 by Philip John Davies

A generation later some of the subjects that I did not find until getting to university would be familiar to the UK secondary school student, but American Studies still does not appear on the curriculum. Some advanced school students may undertake optional courses in US history and US politics, and US writers are among those studied in English classes. The curriculum for some younger school students may include thematic work on civil rights, including US materials, and other individual topics sometimes pop up in the classroom in a rather scattered way, but there is rarely an opportunity to bring them together in a coherent and well-founded multi-disciplinary study of the United States. Young British citizens may have holidayed in the USA, and certainly they see a great many mediated images of America in the entertainment and news that they see broadcast. Their interest may have been fired by incidents as individual as those that happened to me, but their discovery of the possibility of investigating American Studies as an undergraduate programme at university still, more often than not, might be an surprise revelation while reading through college catalogues.

The British Association for American Studies has always recognised that a subject crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries faces structural difficulties making itself visible to potential recruits and replenishing the subject community. Its remit has gradually broadened from that of providing an opportunity to meet for small numbers of university-level researchers, to providing a measure of encouragement and support for American Studies at all educational levels. The Association co-operates with partners to sponsor events for school teachers and for pupils working on American topics. In a period when the national curriculum has stressed traditional subjects, BAAS has lobbied government departments to maintain opportunities for American Studies graduates to move into high school teaching. In recent years BAAS has raised funds to help high school teachers to attend the annual conference, and has ensured that school teaching is represented on the Association's executive committee.

The postgraduate community is also represented on the BAAS executive, and graduate students around the UK have helped the Association in its aim to encourage regular conferences to provide the opportunity for professional development, the presentation of research, and the discussion of work in progress. Contributions from BAAS members and from other sources have helped subsidise postgraduate student participation in Association events, and have provided annual grants to help a small number of postgraduates to travel to the USA for research purposes.

The subject's development is encouraged by the presentation of other prizes at the BAAS conference. For many years the University of East Anglia's Arthur Miller Centre's prize for the year's best American Studies article by a British scholar has been presented, as well as a BAAS prize for an essay submitted by a postgraduate. This year the US Embassy has sponsored essay competitions for undergraduates and postgraduates. The Universities of New Hampshire and Virginia joined forces with BAAS two years ago to provide an even greater incentive for British students of American Studies to progress in the profession, offering full graduate assistantships to one British student of American literature and one British student of American history.