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