Philip McGowan

I am President (2016-2020) of the European Association for American Studies (eaas.eu; @eaas_eu) and is the only non-US board member of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society (fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org; @FSFSociety). Formerly the Chair (2011-2016) of the Irish Association for American Studies (iaas.ie; @theIAAS) he is Senior Lecturer in American Literature with research and teaching interests in twentieth-century American poetry, contemporary American fiction, as well as in film (e.g. American Hitchcock). He also has wider interests in revolutionary America, the American nineteenth century, westerns, and American narratives of addiction and alcohol control. In the field of poetry, his teaching and research focuses on Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, the Middle Generation poets, and Mark Doty.

I currently serve as the EAAS representative for the Irish Association for American Studies and am a member of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS; baas.ac.uk). I am also a member of the MLA (Modern Languages Association) and the SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies).
In April 2016, I hosted a joint conference of BAAS and the IAAS at Queen's, the first time in twenty-five years that both associations met for an annual conference. For more details visit http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/baasiaas2016/ or visit the archived Twitter feed @IAAS2016BAAS.

I co-organised the 9th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society conference in London (2007), was programme co-ordinator for the 13th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference in Dublin and Waterford, 4-11 July 2015, and will serve in a similar capacity for the 14th Fitzgerald Conference in St Paul, Minnesota in June 2017.

My recently completed journal articles include a discussion of the limits of poetic language in Middle Generation American poetry for the journal English; an analysis of how Alcoholics Anonymous appropriated (almost unedited it would appear) swathes of nineteenth-century Temperance literature for (re)publication in its Big Book; separate pieces on two Alfred Hitchcock films, Strangers on a Train (in terms of the routines of American Carnival) and The Man Who Knew Too Much and its genesis in a remembered trip to Las Vegas (ijas.iaas.ie) and how that connects to a larger work I am undertaking on Vegas as a location of hyper tourism, continual self re-writing and arguably the endpoint of the American project.