The British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA) is a UK-based organisation of researchers, teachers, writers, and cultural critics engaged in progressive, interdisciplinary scholarship concerning American writing in the long nineteenth century. We aim to provide a forum for regular meetings, lectures, reading groups, host an online discussion forum, and will hold a biennial conference in the UK with invited speakers from the US and around the world.  Our mission is to foster a network of scholars interested in drawing on the vast potential of nineteenth-century American texts to intervene in a variety of discourses and pressing issues. 

Some of these include, but are by no means limited to:   

Animal studies and Posthumanism
Capitalism, the Market, and Finance
Citizenship and Democracy
Class, Work, and Labor Studies
Cultures of Empire and Imperialism
Digital Humanities
Gender, Sexuality, and Queer Studies
Geography, Cartography, and Travel
Nationalism, Regionalism, Localism
New Formalisms, Poetics, Genre Studies
Orality, Sound, and Performance
Philosophy and Intellectual History
Print and Book History
Race and Ethnicity
Religion and Faith
Temporality and Time
Transatlantic, Transpacific, Transnational
Visual Culture

The rich archive of nineteenth-century American literature not only continues to unsettle past configurations of American identity, but also actively shapes new understandings of America in the twenty-first century.  Join the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists at the forefront of these emerging discourses and debates.


Founding Committee:
Hilary Emmett (University of East Anglia)
Michael Jonik (University of Sussex)
Peter Riley (University of Oxford)
Mark Storey (University of Warwick)
Tom F. Wright (University of Sussex)