American Youth

aspeers is the first and currently only peer-reviewed print journal for MA-level American studies scholars in Europe. It is a platform for the best work done by American studies graduate students below the PhD level. It aims to foster academic exchange among young Americanists across Europe, and to thereby advance the field as well as its genuine European perspective on ‘America’ and its presences and effects around the world.

aspeers features a general section in addition to a topical one that brings academic works into a dialogue on one common theme. For the upcoming issue, this topical section will be organized around different notions of "American Youth." Please feel free to send in work to have it considered for publication in aspeers if

• you are an American studies student at a European university and are looking to publish a paper without a topical restriction.
• or you are an American studies student at a European university and are looking to publish a paper on "American Youth."

Please see the following Calls for Papers for details. Please also note our style guide at www.aspeers.com/style that will give you many helpful instructions on how to prepare your submission for maximum success.

Please see our submission guidelines and FAQ section. Submissions should be directed to submit@aspeers.com.

1) General Call for Papers

For the general section of its ninth issue, aspeers seeks outstanding academic writing demonstrating the excellence of graduate scholarship, the range of concerns scrutinized in the field, and the diversity of perspectives employed. We thus explicitly invite revised versions of term papers or chapters from theses written by students of European Master (and equivalent) programs. For this section, there are no topical limitations. Contributions should be up to 10,000 words (including abstract and list of works cited). The submission deadline is 18 October 2015.

2) Topical Call for Papers on "American Youth"

When Theodore Roosevelt spoke of America as a “young giant of the West,” a “nation glorious in youth and strength,” at the Republican National Convention in 1900, he inserted himself into a long rhetorical tradition: Whether in promise or in criticism, identifying ‘youth’ with America and calling the US a nation that is yet to grow up constitutes a well-established trope in discussions of ‘Americanness.’ At the same time, adolescence and youth are core concepts at the heart of American literature and culture, and they are at the center of many contemporary debates. From the ‘American Dream,’ a coming-of-age story of sorts, to debates about the education sector, from moral panics about ‘juvenile delinquency’ to stories about America’s youngest entrepreneurs, and from Huckleberry Finn to the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, childhood and adolescence are focal lenses in thinking about ‘America,’ inviting at least two complementary perspectives: one in which youth is a trope frequently tied to ‘America’ and one in which youth is a concern with deep cultural resonance in American culture.

For its ninth issue, aspeers thus dedicates the topical section to “American Youth” and invites European graduate students to critically and analytically explore the particular relationship between notions of youth and American culture. With a host of disciplines—ranging from political science and history to medicine, legal studies, literary and cultural studies, economy, and beyond—devoting scholarship to this topic, we welcome papers from the various fields, methodologies, and approaches that comprise American studies as well as inter- and transdisciplinary submissions. Potential paper topics could cover (but are not limited to):

• explorations of the role of youth, childhood, or adolescence in American literature, broadly conceived, including movies, novels, video games, TV shows, graphic novels, or other texts that talk about coming of age

• discussions of the cultural history of childhood, of notions of youth, or of growing up as they intersect with categories of difference such as race, class, or gender

• analyses of the politics of childhood, be they contemporary or historical, and on how these speak of social dynamics within American society

• papers that approach youth via its complementary ‘other,’ (old) age

aspeers, the first and currently only graduate-level peer-reviewed journal of European American studies, encourages fellow MA students from all fields to reflect on the diverse aspects and implications of youth in American culture. We welcome term papers, excerpts from theses, or papers specifically written for the ninth issue of aspeers by 18 October 2015. If you are seeking to publish work beyond this topic, please refer to our general call for papers. At www.aspeers.com/2016 you can find additional information as well as our submission guidelines.

cfp_2016_general.pdf

cfp_2016_topical.pdf