ASANOR biannual conference 2026
June 4-6, Kristiansand, Norway
All presenters also need to be registered members of ASANOR. Click here for information on how to join us.
The 2026 American Studies Association of Norway Conference looks back to its early years for inspiration. The very first themed ASANOR seminar was titled “The Bicentennial of the US Constitution.” Many years later we return to this document, not only to revisit its cultural and historical significance but also to ask what it means to invoke the Constitution now, in a time of intensifying democratic crisis and rising illiberalism.
From the expansion of executive power to attacks on voting rights, judicial independence, and press freedoms, many of the traditional pillars of U.S. liberal democracy are under threat. However, illiberalism is not new to the American experience. Slavery, settler colonialism, voter suppression, censorship, and patriarchal legal structures all point to a long and uneven history of constitutional struggle.
This conference invites scholars of American literature, history, politics, culture, and the arts to reflect on how the United States has been—and continues to be—constituted: legally, politically, imaginatively, and culturally. How have people in and beyond the U.S. interpreted, challenged, reimagined, or resisted the idea of America as defined by its Constitution?
Keynote Speakers:
Sarah L. H. Gronningsater
Associate Professor of History
University of Pennsylvania
“The Many Constitutions of the American Founding”
Although the most well-known constitution of the American founding era is the 1787 document that created the federal union, there were dozens of constitutions written, enacted, revised, and even thrown out during the early years of the nation’s existence. A “constitution,” moreover, had meanings both familiar and unfamiliar to us now. In this keynote, Sarah Gronningsater will consider some of the more obscure—but nonetheless revealing—moments in early American constitutional history. How did the individual states conceive of and write their first constitutions? What do these moments of polity-making tell us about the most radical, the most conservative, and the most surprising impulses of the revolutionary era? What does a focus on writtendocuments conceal about the social history of these heady years of war, violence, disruption, territorial expansion and dispossession, and societal change? How did a wide range of Americans—including people nowhere near the rooms where constitutions were being drafted—understand these documents and take constitutional ideas into their own daily lives, for their own purposes? By the same token, how did the “people out of doors” and other dissenting voices shape and resist these insider frameworks of government? How did these new constitutions incorporate old and new ideas about individual and collective rights and liberty? About tyranny, coercion, and state power? Drawing on a burst of new secondary literature as well as fresh archival research, this keynote will consider what a history of early American constitutions tells us about democracy, the rule of law, and the fragility of republics, then and now.
Xine Yao
Associate Professor in American Literature to 1900
University College London
“Liberalism and Its Discontents: Dragging America in the Wake“
The aspirations of American liberalism appear to be collapsing in the face of illiberalism – making a mockery of the Constitution. Or is illiberalism a co-constitutive American tradition? Consider the tensions in the Constitution’s iconic opening calling for the formation of a ‘more perfect Union’ that requires actions to ‘establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.’ Consider the slippages in the 14th Amendment between ‘citizens of the United States’ who have ‘privileges and immunities’ versus ‘any person’ who should have ‘life, liberty, or property’ and ‘equal protection of the laws.’ In this keynote, I turn to Christina Sharpe’s figuration of the ‘wake’ in order to play with ‘woke’ as it arose from African American Vernacular English and has now become an umbrella euphemism for multiple epithets. Wake/woke as awakening, epiphany, and consciousness counters the Enlightenment both in its proper historical Lockean sense and in its present day co-optation. Dragging America in the wake, I suggest, is a queer of colour method that reworks the jeremiad, not to recuperate America, but to reorient us to insurgent pasts and possibilities. This talk will discuss organizing and abolition through the (re)constitution of the body politic informed by crip, feminist, and queer of colour critique.
Hotels in Kristiansand:
Here are some suggested hotels.
Thon Partner Hotel Parken
Scandic Kristiansand Bystranda
Comfort Hotel Kristiansand
Thon Partner Hotel Kristiansand
Citybox Hotels Kristiansand Lite
Thon Partner Hotel Norge
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