Mar 07 2008
About
America adrift, formerly The Atlantic Community, is a collaborative weblog and community for research, analysis and commentary on American society and culture. Our aim is to provide a public voice for European scholarship in American Studies, forging stronger communication between the academy and the public on both sides of the Atlantic.
Our weblog is community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. We encourage our readers and our writers to participate in setting the agenda for developing America adrift’s full potential.
Who’s adrift
Editors
Bent Sørensen has been adrift exactly one half century and does not anticipate to come out of transit anytime soon. He teaches and does research within the broad field of cultural text studies. That covers literature, film, photography, music and architecture to name but a few textual modes… He most often, but not exclusively, works with topics related to American texts, and mostly contemporary ones, but as soon as someone tries to pigeonhole him he will quite childishly strike out for new and uncharted territories, such as math and philosophy. He digs theory, but cannot live without analysis. Currently Aalborg U. pays him to do most of these things…
Stuart Noble, who drifted here from somewhere along the Gulf of Mexico, is a graduate candidate at the University of Southern Denmark’s Center for American Studies. He feels extremely fortunate to have drifted into such good company by way of this little blog which he began a few years ago. His main academic interests are intellectual history, populist and progressive movement histories, social and political theory, postmodern culture, semiotics and visual politics. His special passion is the relationship between technology, civil society and democracy and how those relationships are manifested through visual culture. His master’s thesis examines narratives of former Vice President Al Gore through various media as representations of contested political property. 
Home page
Writers
Camelia Elias likes to think of herself as flexible. Although she teaches American Studies in the English program at Roskilde University, she does all sorts of other things too. Differently put, she often finds that she uses the field of American Studies as an excuse for doing philosophy, hard core theory, theology and art history, all peppered with popular math and science. Her academic writings are also given quite a good dose of poetry. In everything she does she always strives diligently to follow Einstein’s injunction: “one should make things as simple as possible, but not any simpler.” In terms of personality, she is a bit arrogant and eccentric – but this is all in retaliation to her acknowledgement that she is as mediocre as most, when it actually comes down to it. So what the heck, she tells herself, thus saying: I’ll follow Golda Meir too, for good measure: “don’t be so modest, you’re not that great”.
Steen Christiansen I have a PhD in English from Aalborg University, Denmark. My dissertation, titled New Mappings: The Cultural Dissemination of Science Fiction in Postmodern Culture, focussed on how the convergence between science fiction, experimental literature and culture, and how these cultural flows represent a symptom of a distinct time-space compression. Working within a cultural materialist framework, I develop a critical tool which distinguishes between oppositional counter-texts and dominant, mainstream texts along the lines of detourning or recuperative strategies; a vocabulary based on the Situationists and the work of Dick Hebdige. Read More
Anne Dvinge I’m a word freak – one of those teachers that can get excited about a single paragraph in Pym, or get tangled up in runon sentences when talking about the rhythm of Ralph Ellisons prose. And I will inflict spoken word versions of Whitman (or Kenneth Burke for that matter) to who ever gets in the firing line. All this because from the deeply personal level to the interpersonal and collective, the narratives we produce are all inter-connected and reproduced in an attempt to close the gap between experience and meaning – or to quote Burke, who put it more elegantly: Literature is equipment for living. I’m also a jazz freak – if you’ve ever met one, you’ll know what that means… I will try to refrain from endless lists of personal favorites and jazz anecdotes. But I do use jazz as a way in to those narratives. As a model of epistemology, creating and disseminating knowledge through dialogue and appropriation. In my work I’m currently focusing on the way narratives are formed around jazz in the US and elsewhere, constructing national as well as transnational identities. More will follow from me on this. As for Spaces, I am intrigued by those in between – between the words, the notes, between the notes and the words, and just those between…
Rune Reimer Christensen is a PhD Candidate at the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. His interests include American immigration history and politics, the history of race and racism, legal history, the history of medicine, and the historical construal of the body. He enjoys American literature. He is a historiography nut. He suffers from an addiction to the philosophy of history (but not the history of philosophy). And he likes cats.