[ Call for Papers ]

The workshop Transatlantic Dialogues. Eastern Europe, The U.S., and Post-Cold War Cultural Spaces is organized within the framework of the Fifth International Conference of the Romanian Association for American Studies, "The Sense of America. Histories into Text".

Time and place: May 24, 2008, The University of Bucharest.

Deadline for submissions: January 31, 2008.

The workshop focuses on the topical issue of transatlantic relations in the post-Cold War period, and specifically addresses the question of transatlantic exchanges, representations and misrepresentations that characterize this age of transition and upheaval.

Post-communism, itself a highly volatile term, has come to signify a cluster of historical, social, cultural, economic discourses about change in Eastern Europe. While Cold War mythology was largely responsible for drawing up a vision of a highly polarized world, the post-Cold War configuration is still undergoing a process of negotiation to account for new structures of organization that cut across fields as diverse as culture, literature, education, politics, social life, economics.

The organisers welcome approaches dealing with the multiple binds of post-Cold War configurations from a variety of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives including literature, history, political science, sociology, economy, visual arts, media and film studies, popular culture. Papers may address themes such as those below:

- converging discourses: post-communism, post-colonialism, post-modernism
 - the post-communist transition and the renegotiation of Eastern European identity
 - the postmodern ethos and post-Cold War cultural/social dynamics
 - Eastern European predicaments and models for the future
 - the "end of history" in transatlantic perspective
 - transatlantic relations in the age of globalization
 - U.S. cultures in Eastern European contexts
 - exporting Eastern Europe to the USA: techniques of representation and dissemination
 - post-Cold War U.S. literary and media discourses about Eastern Europe.

The organizers are inviting proposals for 20 minute papers on these and other themes related to the topic of the workshop.

Please submit 300-word abstracts by January 31st 2008 to the following address:
transatlanticdialogues@gmail.com

A selection of papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

For further questions, please contact prof. dr. Rodica Mihaila, Dr. Roxana Oltean or Ioana Luca at transatlanticdialogues@gmail.com