Remembering Percy Walton: A Roundtable on the American Studies in Canada.

Organizers: Arthur Redding (aredding@yorku.ca), and Jennifer Andrews (jceandrews4@gmail.com)

Panel Proposal:

As we approach what looks to be a hotly contested and globally impactful presidential election in the US, many Canadians are considering with some dread the political, economic, and cultural implications of a second Trump term. As many commentators have noted, while American cultural production skews progressive, entrenched political sensibilities have lurched reactionary in recent decades, engendering a political landscape given over to right-wing populism, autocracy, Nativism, the cult of personality, misogyny, the systemic judicial rollbacks of civil rights, widespread conspiracy mongering, and the like—so much so that even a Harris victory may not signify fully resuscitated democratic norms. (And who knows how or when or whether election results will even be settled?). What might these deeply unsettling developments mean for Canadian scholars and students of American life, let alone ordinary Canadians? This roundtable on the past and future of American Studies is dedicated to the memory of the late Percy Walton (1957-2024). longtime editor of the Canadian Review of American Studies. We are indebted to Percy’s unstinting advocacy for the discipline, her generous and inspired pedagogy, her unflagging feminist commitments, and her wide-ranging scholarship across many aspects of American literary and popular culture.

To Submit:

Submit your paper proposal by November 22nd via the ACCUTE submission portal: https://accute.ca/conference-2025-cfp-submissions/

Make sure to check out and share our other CFPs as well! https://accute.ca/2025-call-for-papers/