Judith Moon, Counselor for Public Affairs, US Embassy in Bucharest, hosts BBQ PARTY to celebrate the start of the academic year      

 

 

 

Saturday October 13 - BARBECUE PARTY!    Judy Moon, Counselor for Public Affairs with the US Embassy in Bucharest, is kindly hosting a barbecue party at her residence  

See you there!

Francis Ford Coppola meets the Film Studies class of the American Studies Department, Bucharest 2007

THE AMERICAN CULTURAL CENTER and the AMERICAN STUDIES CENTER at the University of Bucharest are pleased to announce

THE STUDENT CONFERENCE

“BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND THE PARADIGM OF THE AMERICAN DREAM”

MAY 15-16, 2006

THE AMERICAN CULTURAL CENTER and the AMERICAN STUDIES CENTER at the University of Bucharest are pleased to invite you to participate in a conference celebrating 300 years from the birth of Benjamin Franklin, whose influence on a multitude of areas of American life and consciousness cannot be underestimated.

All proposals should be submitted in English. Due to the limited number of sections, only high-quality proposals will be accepted. Originality and a clear solid critical apparatus will be appreciated. The organizers intend to treat plagiarism with the utmost seriousness, and all students are greatly encouraged to name all their sources.

Please fill in the following registration form BY APRIL 30TH, and e-mail it to franklin_student_conference@yahoo.com. Applications can also be left with the American Studies librarian in Room 4, 7-13, Pitar Mos St., the building of the Foreign Languages Faculty. The participants do not need to be American Studies/English major students, as long as their proposals meet the necessary standards. No late submissions will be accepted.

Below are some guidelines for paper proposals, which are also possible titles for some of the sections of the conference. The title of your paper should not be the same as the title of any of the guidelines. The guidelines are there to give you an idea of a larger topic several papers could be included in.

REGISTRATION FORM (please fill in all the fields)

NAME…

SURNAME…

TITLE OF PROPOSAL…

ABSTRACT OF PROPOSAL (NOT MORE THAN 150 WORDS)…

E-MAIL ADDRESS…

PHONE NUMBER…

PAPER PROPOSAL GUIDELINES

- Benjamin Franklin’s influence on “the American self”

- Reverberations of the Franklinian model in American literature

- Benjamin Franklin’s influence on the construction of American nationalism

- Franklin's Almanacs and Their Impact on 18th Century American Society

- Benjamin Franklin as an Enlightenment Figure

- Benjamin Franklin and the rise of middle-class consciousness/capitalism

- Benjamin Franklin's contribution to the myth/trope of the common man

- The Puritan vein in Benjamin Franklin’s work

- Benjamin Franklin and the Great Awakening

- Benjamin Franklin as a Founding Father of American democracy

- Franklin and other American self-mythologizers

- Visual representations of Benjamin Franklin

Francis Ford Coppola speaks to the American Studies undergrads, April 2006

THE ROMANIAN ASSOCIATION FOR AMERICAN STUDIES
Str. Pitar Mos 7-11, Bucharest 70151


Call for Papers

The 2006 RAAS Conference


NEW/OLD WORLDS. SPACES OF TRANSITION
Bucharest, 2nd - 3rd of February 2006


Organizers:
The Romanian Association for American Studies
The Romanian - U.S. Fulbright Commission


The concept of the New World, operative from the period of Renaissance explorations, contains a particularly rich cluster of concepts which still shape Euro-American perceptions today. The New World - and, by implication, an Old World opposing it - comprehends multiple registers in both theory and practice: conquest, frontier, innocence, margin, center, exceptionalism, imperialism, transnationalism, globalization. Contoured between utopia and reality, the New/Old World, both constructed in memory and experienced in anticipation still constitutes a dominant cultural topos. Our conference seeks to investigate, from literary, cultural studies, historical, sociological, psychological, economical and political perspectives modes of approaching and disseminating New/Old World structures, from the period of colonization to contemporary phenomena such as globalization.

We invite proposals for papers and panels from interdisicplinary perspectives on themes suggested above and on all correlative aspects of the issue of New/Old Worlds.

Please send 100-word proposals for papers by 15th of September to the following addresses:

Roxana Oltean: roxana_oltean@txmail.ro
Mihaela Precup: mihaela_precup@yahoo.com

20th of May: Andrei Gheorghe at the Center for American Studies. An informal
discussion on Popular Culture:

The Department of American Studies at the University of Bucharest invites you to attend a screening of award-winning Joel Katz’s Strange Fruit - a documentary about the famed anti-lynching protest song of the same title, written in the mid-1930's by Bronx high school teacher Abel Meeropol and made famous by Billie Holiday

MONDAY, 23 FEBRUARY, 10 a.m.
Room EMINESCU
7-13 Pitar Mos St., Bucharest


Director's statement

STRANGE FRUIT was first inspired by a letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review in late 1995. In this letter Robby and Michael Meeropol (the sons of Strange Fruit's composer, Abel Meeropol) write in response to some of the questions about "Strange Fruit" raised by Ned Rorem in his review of a Stuart Nicholson biography of Billie Holiday.

It struck me that this brief, four paragraph letter read quite like the script for a film, including plot twists and dramatic turns that sounded almost too unimaginable to be actual history. I began further researching the subject matter shortly after reading this letter, and filmed the first interviews during the summer of 1998.

The story of "Strange Fruit" also resonates with parts of my own background. In 1968, when I was ten years old, my father (a Jewish man from Brooklyn) began teaching at Howard University, where he continued as a Professor in Chemical Engineering until his retirement in 1986. As a Jew starting work at the pre-eminent African American university during the height of the Black Power movement, he was in a unique and sometimes difficult position. Over the years there he went through a wide range of experiences and emotions about this. Black/Jewish relations was thus a frequent subject of discussion at the dinner table I grew up at. Six years ago I began teach myself, at a public university which has a highly diverse student body (New Jersey City University). Thus I sometimes feel that I am carrying on the mantle of my father's work.

It has been a unique pleasure for me to produce STRANGE FRUIT. I have tried to see it as an opportunity to try to heal some of the wounds around race which my father suffered and which all Americans suffer.

Joel Katz

RAAS Biennial Conference 2004

OUR AMERICA: PEOPLE, PLACES, TIMES

Organizers:
The Romanian Association for American Studies
The Romanian – U.S. Fulbright Commission
6-8 February 2004


The Romanian Association for American Studies and the Romanian – U.S. Fulbright Commission organized the third biennial conference tat Bucharest on February 6-8, 2004. The theme was “Our America: People, Places, Times”.

Photos> The 3rd RAAS/Fulbright Conference, February 2004, University of Bucharest. Opening speeches: