The mythology surrounding F. Scott Fitzgerald tends to eclipse his fierce devotion to his craft, a commitment animated by many sources, including music. The centennial of what many consider his greatest work, The Great Gatsby, provides ripe opportunity to reconsider our assumptions about it, along with Fitzgerald’s musical sources that are often obscured by the misleading designation of him as “America’s patron saint of the Jazz Age.” Fitzgerald knew very little about Jazz, but readers nevertheless want to read Gatsby as the author’s prose incarnation of it. This talk considers the connections, both viable and far-fetched, between the novel and the musical tropes that inspired it.

Nicole J. Camastra holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and serves as Director of the Signature Scholars Research Program at The O’Neal School in North Carolina. She is currently living in Oslo, Norway as a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies and is the author of several essays on American literature. Her recent monograph, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Muse of Romantic Music, was published by McFarland Press in 2023.

You can download the poster for the event here.

Ernest Hemingway avoided being a political writer. He wrote to the Russian critic Ivan Kashkin in 1935 that an author “owes no allegiance to any government” and that, if any good, “he will never like” the one “he lives under.” Limiting one’s artistic eye to class consciousness, for example, demonstrates a limited talent because “all classes are [the writer’s] province” (Selected Letters 419). Nevertheless, his 1933 story “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” is arguably one of his most implicitly political, for Hemingway was conscious of the difficulties faced by many Americans in the early 1930s, especially Mexican immigrants. In particular, this talk focuses on what Hemingway referred to as the “sugar beet racket” in Montana and the West and on the author’s oft-overlooked sympathy towards the immigrants who powered it.

Nicole J. Camastra holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and serves as Director of the Signature Scholars Research Program at The O’Neal School in North Carolina. She is currently living in Oslo, Norway as a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies and is the author of several essays on American literature. Her recent monograph, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Muse of Romantic Music, was published by McFarland Press in 2023.

You can download the poster for the event here.

In this presentation I seek to investigate Cold War 2.0 within the framework of transnational American Studies, with special attention to the geopolitics of the transpacific.
On the one hand, I examine the role that technology has played in the American national imaginary and proliferation of what Donald Pease powerfully critiques as American exceptionalism. Specifically, I explore why and how artificial intelligence and other four critical technologies may serve as hardware and infrastructure of Cold War 2.0.
On the other hand, I examine Cold War 2.0 as a possible turning point in the rise of the Global South and interrogate it in terms of a global power shift within the longue durée of the US-centered global order. As a concluding gesture, I perform a reading of the speculative fiction, Ghost Fleet, and discuss a possible scenario that critics refer to as “the post-American world.”

Dr. Yuan Shu is Professor of English, American Studies and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Texas Tech University.
Dr. Shu earned his Ph.D. in English and American Studies from Indiana University at Bloomington. He has co-edited several influential volumes, including American Studies as Transnational Practice (Dartmouth College Press, 2015) and Oceanic Archives and Transpacific American Studies (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). His current book project, Empire and Cosmo-politics: Technology, Race, Transpacific Chinese American Writing, is under revision with the Univ. of Massachusetts Press. He is a 2025 fellow of the Obama Institute.

You can download the poster for the event here.

Presentation in the seminar “Chinese American Relations” – Session open to everyone.

The presentation traces the main features of the Westward Movement and the engagement of the United States in the Pacific as well as in Asia, especially the Korean and Vietnam wars. They are the background to the rise of transpacific literatures.

Dr. Yuan Shu is Professor of English, American Studies and Director of the Asian Studies Program at Texas Tech University.
Dr. Shu earned his Ph.D. in English and American Studies from Indiana University at Bloomington. He has co-edited several influential volumes, including American Studies as Transnational Practice (Dartmouth College Press, 2015) and Oceanic Archives and Transpacific American Studies (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). His current book project, Empire and Cosmo-politics: Technology, Race, Transpacific Chinese American Writing, is under revision with the Univ. of Massachusetts Press. He is a 2025 fellow of the Obama Institute.

You can download the poster for the event here.