Crosstown Traffic:
Anglo-American Cultural Exchange since 1865

An interdisciplinary conference co-sponsored by The North American Conference on British Studies, The Royal Historical Society and The British Association for American Studies, University of Warwick
Sunday 4th July – Tuesday 6th July 2004

Call for Papers

Much has been written about the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States on the level of high politics and diplomacy. Rather less, however, has been written about the presumed existence of a shared, common culture—a culture that has, since the American Civil War, been actively cultivated and promoted as a way of cementing that ‘special relationship’. Still less, perhaps, has been written about the equally important cross-fertilization that has taken place in the realm of the popular cultures of the two nations. This conference proposes a wide-ranging inquiry into the cultural manifestations of the ‘special relationship’ and into the transatlantic traffic in cultural styles, attitudes and motifs between Britain and the United States since the late nineteenth century. Paper and panel proposals will be considered that address the multiplicity of exchanges that have developed between the two nations—both in the realm of specific media (fashion, film, literature and music, for example), and more generally in the cultures of consumption and popular politics. The conference will focus on the traffic in culture that has taken place in either direction across the Atlantic and in both directions. It will pay particular attention to the social differences which influenced the definition and purchase of ‘the popular’ in the two countries and to those differences in racial attitudes which at first divided and then, creatively, brought the two cultures closer together.

Conference organizers: Marybeth Hamilton (Birkbeck College, London), Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge) and Chris Waters (Williams College, Massachusetts).

Proposals are invited for individual thirty-minute presentations or full panels by 1st October 2003. Please send a 250-word synopsis, and a one-page cv to: