Andrew Jackson, Donald Trump, and the populist reshaping of reference
29/03/2017
‘Jackson was an American hero, first as a brilliant general … and later as the seventh President of the United States, when he fought to defend the forgotten men and women from the arrogant elite of his day, does it sound familiar?’ – President Donald J. Trump, Weekly Address 18/03/2017 Since Donald Trump announced he was …
People often think they know Martin Luther King Jr, but do they?
17/10/2014
Look at the new statue in Washington, featured on the poster below. Its design was controversial because some felt it made King look too stern and forbidding a figure, but maybe it corrected a false perception of him and his non-violent philosophy as simply conciliatory and passive. The monument also casts an African American in …
Imagining silence: experiencing history as fiction
15/10/2014
By Katie Hamilton, PhD student in the Department of American & Canadian Studies On first consideration, a reading and conversation with a novelist seems an incongruous way to celebrate Black History Month. It begs the question of what a contemporary novel can tell us about the history of the African diaspora that we don’t already …
Visiting the Valley of the Fallen
16/05/2014
I have recently returned from a visit to one of Spain’s most (in)famous monuments, El Valle de los Caídos (The Valley of the Fallen), where I was doing an interview with some journalists from the BBC. I first visited the monument in 2009, and having spent the best part of five years researching and writing …
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