American Soundcheck - The JAS Podcast

As delivered at the British Association of American Studies conference held in Manchester in April of this year, Professor Joyce Chaplin's plenary lecture sheds powerful and provocative light on her current scholarly endeavour - an epic work tracing global circumnavigation from the sixteenth century exploits of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan to contemporary global and digital GPS technologies as we embrace a planetary world increasingly experienced at our fingertips.  Powerfully mapping the death and glory struggles of early circumnavigators, Chaplin interrogates a wealth of debates integral to cutting edge developments in American Studies and which include competing and shifting definitions of transatlanticism and transnationalism as well as of globalisation and globalised studies more generally. An original tour de force, Chaplin's interrogative interweaving of political, social, philosophical, geographical, cultural, scientific, and religious materials makes for a dramatic odyssey richly illuminati