Future Radio: The Roots of Jazz

This Sunday (August 26, 1-2pm), I'll be appearing on Norwich's Future Radio (96.9 FM) talking to Tony Cleary about early black American music and the roots of jazz. If you can't receive Future Radio, you can listen live via the internet.

Call For Papers - American Bestsellers

I'm co-editing a collection of essays on the history of American bestsellers, and the call for papers is not up on both H-Net and UPenn.

A snippet:

We invite chapter proposals for an edited volume dedicated to the history of American bestsellers.

We encourage a wide range of approaches, but chapters should be written in a style accessible to students and non-academic readers. In general we are soliciting chapters that focus on an individual bestselling title; as well as close readings, chapters might address questions of audience, reception, historicity, marketing, paratext, etc.

Chapters might also focus upon a bestselling author (author as brand or as celebrity), or serial fiction, although where an individual book is not the chapter's focus, a case should be made for its status as an American bestseller. We also encourage chapters that explore the historical and methodological problems in establishing and defining the "bestseller."

Please send a 1500 word proposal accompanied by a full CV to Sarah Churchwell (s.churchwell@uea.ac.uk ) and Thomas Ruys Smith (thomas.smith@uea.ac.uk) by 31st October 2007. Upon acceptance, final articles will run to c.6000 words long and will be due 31st April 2008.