Program

12.00

Opening

(streamed and recorded)

RED Room

13.00

Keynotes become available as recordings

13.30-15.30

Transnational Expressions

of Identity

Chair: Emily Burns

RED Room

Emily Burns,

Auburn University

Performing Innocence:

US Culture and Race in Fin-de-siècle Paris

Johanna Rastas,

University of Turku

Displaying identity in American colonists’

correspondence to Britain 1765-1777

Mark Brandon, University of

Jan Evangelista (UJEP)

“The Last Great Biological Reserve of

the White Race”: An American Immigrant’s

Racial Understanding of the Soviet Union

Master Narratives and

Counter-Narratives in

North American Literature

and Popular Culture

Chair: Nana Arjopalo

WHITE Room

Bent Sørensen,

Aalborg University

Contesting Masculinities in Country and

Western Song Lyrics in 1965

Howard Sklar,

University of Helsinki

Rewriting the Narrative of the

Jewish Immigrant Experience

Mark Shackleton,

University of Helsinki

Re-Visioning the Bible:

Thomas King's Green Grass,

Running Water and Tomson Highway's

Kiss of the Fur Queen

Experiencing Blackness

Chair: Outi Hakola

BLUE Room

Matt Moran,

University of Oulu

“Tangled Limbs: The Transcultural Counterwitness

and Complex Implication in Claudia Rankine’s and

John Lucas’s ‘Situations’”

Irina Novikova,

University of Latvia

Confessions of living in ‘black skin’ – Crossing a

‘color border’ in John H. Griffin’s Black Like Me

Katharina King,

Albert-Ludwigs University

Mapping America – Narratives of Black Female

Subjectivity in the Federal Writers' Project

16.00-17.30

Borderland Developments

Finnish American Studies Association panel

Chair: Janne Lahti

RED Room

Michel Beaulieu,

Lakehead University

"But there is another source of Liberty and

Vitality in our country”: St-Laurent and Regional

Development

Michael Gunther,

Georgia Gwinnett College

“Bewildering North American Borderlands:

A Comparative Study of Pehr Kalm and Jean

Louis Berlandier”

Aleksi Huhta,

University of Helsinki

"Let the Grand Duchy be transferred to Canada”:

The Plan to Settle Canada’s Western Borderlands

with Finns in 1899

18.00-19.30

Indigenous Missions

Helsinki University Humanities panel

Chair: Rani-Henrik Andersson

BLUE Room

Susan Gray,

Arizona State University

“Through a Glass Darkly”: The Making and

Unmaking of Native Space in the Diaries of

George Nelson Smith, 1849-79

Josh Reid,

University of Washington

Native Hawaiian Missionaries: Indigenous

Explorers of the Nineteenth-Century Pacific

Jeffrey Utzinger,

Concordia University Texas

George Copway (Kahgegagahbowh) Playing

Indian in the United Kingdom

Culture and Myths

Chair: Patrick Miller

WHITE Room

John Gilkeson, Jr.,

Arizona State University

"Myth-and-Symbol" in Retrospect:

Thoughts toward a History of the American

Studies Movement

Barbara Mossberg,

University of Oregon

The “Genius” of American Kind-ness

Frida Stranne,

Halmstad University

The American Nightmare

THURSDAY,

December 10, 2020

13.30-15.30

Ethnic Representations

Chair: Thomas Cobb

BLUE Room

Nana Arjopalo,

University of Turku

The separate yet simultaneous lives of

the call-center survivalist: North American

neoimperialism in Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India

Kristina Aurylaite,

Vytautas Magnus University

Decolonial Gestures in a Contemporary

Settler State: Indigenous Canadian Writers’

Unsettling Poetic Experiments

Bo Pettersson,

University of Helsinki

Reflexive Identities: A Literary Ethnography

of the Postwar Bay Area

Forgotten bloodlines in diasporic fiction –

the representation of women in Chinese-Canadian

family narratives on the example of Disappearing Moon Café

Rights, Activism, and

Homeland Security

Chair: Outi Hakola

WHITE Room

Mia Pohtola,

University of Helsinki

"The Sickness Label" as a Form of Exclusion:

The Effectiveness of Different Activist Tactics in

the Removal of Homosexuality Diagnosis from

DSM-II in the Early 1970s

Mona Raeisian,

Philipps-Universität Marburg

Fat, Desperate and Dangerous:

A Critique of Overweight Female Bodies

in American Police Procedural Television

Mila Seppälä,

University of Turku

Catching the Narrative:

Youth Activism and Gun Policy

16.00-17.30

Immigrant Experiences

Panel Sponsored by the

Embassy of Canada in Finland

/Ambassade du Canada en Finlande

Chair: Aleksi Huhta

RED Room

Mátyas Bánhegyi/Judit Nagy,

Budapest Business School University

of Applied Sciences/Károli Gáspár University

Voluntary Inclusion and Exclusion

among Korean Canadians

Peter Krats,

University of Western Ontario

SISU, SAUNA AND SCHISMS ??:

A Historiographical Overview of

Kanadan Suomalaisten [Finnish Canadian] History

Henry Oinas-Kukkonen,

University of Oulu

Port Axel, AK - An Exceptional Finnish Settlement Plan

Memory Projects:

Lessons from the Long

Civil Rights Movement

Panel sponsored by the

Fulbright Finland Foundation

and the U. S. Embassy in Finland

Chair: Mikko Saikku

Memory Projects Special Room

Cheryl Greenberg,

Trinity College

Activism and Memory in a Small Place

Patrick Miller,

Northeastern Illinois University

Racism, Resistance, and

The Equal Justice Initiative

Elliott Gorn,

Loyola University

Thomas Pickens Brady and

the Memory of Segregation

Richard Schein,

University of Kentucky

Traces of the past: re-assembling

the national archive

18.00-19.30

Interplay of Politics and Culture

Chair: Scott Buchanan

RED Room

Mark Stoll,

Texas Tech University

Free Market Economics in Environmental History:

The American Experience

Olli Saukko,

University of Helsinki

Religious perspectives on the culture wars of the

Obama years

Vincent Boucher,

University of Quebec at Montreal

Fencing the Canada-US border? The Evolution of

Debates on Security at the Northern Border

Cultural Expressions

Chair: Nina Öhman

WHITE Room

Jeffrey Meikle,

University of Texas, Austin

"Underground": The Bizarro American Imaginary of

Tom Waits

Susan Lindholm,

Södertörn University

Conscious and Queer – the representations of Swedish

Hip-hop artist Silvana Imam in US media

Thomas Cobb,

Coventry University

Hollywood film and Walter Mead’s kaleidoscope:

cinematic allegories of the Trump years

20.00

Poetry evening with Barbara Mossberg

WHITE Room

FRIDAY,

December 11, 2020

13.30-15.00

American Studies

Lightning Round

Chair: Saara Kekki

RED Room

Christen Bryson,

Sorbonne Nouvelle

“The Viking and Les Bois: National History Writ

Small in Postwar University Yearbooks”

Susanna Mäkinen,

University of Turku

A negro man or "my servant Dick":

Referring to fugitives in runaway slave notices

Auli Saarsalmi-Paalasmaa,

University of Helsinki

Ellen White, Seventh-day Adventist “prophetess of health”,

and the question of the College of Medical Evangelists in 1900-1910

Viktor Pal,

University of Helsinki

Pour Me a Cold One:

A Cold War History of Beverage Containers

Aino Kirjonen,

University of Helsinki

Gendered Civilization – Construction of Gender

and Class through Education in Harvard University

and Radcliffe College in turn of the 20th Century

15.30-17.30

Landscapes of Mind and Memory

Chair: Inna Sukhenko

WHITE Room

Evelyn Burg,

LaGuardia Community College CUNY

“Many Men Have Many Minds”:

Reading identity in Melville’s Confidence Man

Roman Kushnir,

University of Jyväskylä

Landscape in Constructing Finnish Canadian

Identities in Two Female Immigrant Novels

Elizabeth Oakes,

University of Helsinki

The Absence of Madness: Altered States in

James Tiptree, Jr.’s Short Fiction

Marlene Broemer,

Finlandia University

Crime and Culture: Comparison of Canadian

and Nordic Crime Fiction

Gender Fragility

Chair: Jane Weiss

BLUE Room

Susana Maria Jiménez Placer,

University of Santiago de Compostela

Bodies in the Making:

Tomboys and their Mammies in the Jim Crow South

Tuula Kolehmainen,

University of Helsinki

(Re)constructing Male Vulnerability:

Gloria Naylor’s Brewster Novels

Nancy Berke,

LaGuardia College CUNY

Lola Ridge, Mina Loy, and the Poetics

of Anarchist-Feminism

Shapes of Violence

Chair: Anna Koivusalo

RED Room

Olli Siitonen,

University of Helsinki

Narratives of violence: American soldiers and

experiences of killing in the Vietnam War

Lawrence McDonnell,

Iowa State University

Bringing Battle Back In: Civil War Soldiers and

the Class Politics of Combat

Frederick Wasser,

Brooklyn College CUNY

Spielberg and Terrorism(s):

Munich and War of the Worlds

17.45-19.45

Colonial Connections

and Conventions

Chair: Janne Lahti

RED Room

Angela Hudson,

Texas A&M University

South by Southwest:

The Apache “Prisoners of War”

Robert Nelson,

University of Windsor

‘A Model for German Settler Colonialism:

Max Sering, Homesteading, and the North American Frontier in 1883’

Karl Hele,

Mount Allison University

“In accordance with a long established rule”:

Defining Indian Status Along the Canadian-United

States Borderlands at Bawating,c.1814-1951

East Meets West:

Transnational Encounters

Chair: Aleksi Huhta

BLUE Room

Alina Amvrosova,

Moscow State University

How did Teddy Roosevelt's understanding of

American identity shape US-Russian relations

Tomoko Tsuchiya,

Japan Women’s University

Multicultural/Multiracial Families with the Idea of

the Democratic Nation at the Beginning of the Cold War

20.00

Meet the Keynotes, Chair: Mikko Saikku

RED Room

Conference closing

RED Room

21.00

Musical Performance by Alan Winkler, Chair:

John Moe

RED Room