Amanda Stafford

Profile

I graduated with a BA in American Studies from Lancaster University back in 1998 and followed that with a Master’s in Visual Culture from the same institution in 2000. Following a couple of years in the real world, I went back to university to study post-compulsory education at the Institute of Education in London.

I returned to academia after many years away to study for an MSc in History from the University of Edinburgh which I completed in 2018. My MSc dissertation explored the role of regionalism in Georgia’s radical newspapers during the ‘long 1960s’ and argued that the radical press had a key role in the articulation of a regional, radical identity during that period. That project revealed a local New Left movement of a greater complexity than the student activism that preoccupied the literature and my PhD work will build upon and extend that research.

I am a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Production at an FE college in South Wales and am doing my PhD on a part time basis alongside that. My research is generously funded by Coleg y Cymoedd.

Research interests

• Post-war US radical publishing and print culture
• Social and political protest movements
• Post-war US political history – especially the relationship between mainstream politics and the radical media
• The South
• 1960s and 1970s

Current Research Project 

My PhD project explores the role of the radical press in New Left activism in the US state of Georgia between 1968 and 1976. Taking an expanded view of the movement which goes beyond campus activism to include feminist, gay liberation, GI and community Civil Rights activism, the project draws on a wide range of archival and oral history sources to reconceptualise underground newspapers as radical organisations and to place them at the centre of the Nixon-era New Left. The project examines how the radical press provided a forum for the development of radical ideas, incubated nascent organisations and forged links between local, national and transnational radical movements. In doing so, I hope that the project will help to reshape our understanding of the development and decline of the New Left in the South and re-orient the place of the radical press in the scholarship.

Awards

• 2023-24 –  British Association for American Studies Research Assistance Award
• 2020–21 – Stuart A. Rose Library Short Term Fellowship in Modern Political History, Emory University.
• 2020–21 – Harry H. Harkins T’73 Travel Grant for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.

Conference Papers

• ‘“Somebody is agitating the matter”: Provocation as Direct Action in The Great Speckled Bird’ – BAAS Conference, 2024

• Radical Print Culture and Radical Feminism in Georgia, 1968-1971 – Roosevelt Institute for American Studies International PhD Seminar, Middelburg, 11-13  May 2022

• ‘“We are indeed subversive”: Southern Identity and the New Left Radical Press in Georgia, 1968–1976’ – BAAS Conference, 7 April 2021

• ‘”C’mon and get it Mother-Fucker”: Provocation, Resistance and the uses of Censorship in The Great Speckled Bird’ – BAAS PG Conference, British Library, 7 December 2019

• ‘Exploding Contradictions: Regional Identity and the New Left Radical Press in Georgia, 1968–1976’ – Scottish Association for the Study of America Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh, 2 March 2019

• ‘Dissent in the Small Town South: The United Free Press and the New Left in Athens, GA 1970–1972’ – American Cultures of Dissent Graduate Conference, University of Leipzig, 29 April 2018

Conference Organisation

I co-organised the hybrid conference Radical Print Cultures in the US South which took place at the Universtiy of Leeds in February 2015 and which attracted an international group of scholars to Leeds. I am currently working with Dr Sian Round and Professor Sharon Monteith to develop an edited collection based on the conference theme.

As part of the conference, I led an engaged research project working with Footprint Workers’ Co-op and my colleagues at Coleg y Cymoedd which engaged Level 3 Art students to design a riso-printed poster for the conference. 

Widening Participation

I was the Access to Leeds tutor in the School of History between 2020-2023.

Undergraduate Teaching

Lecturer in American History – Aberystwyth University, Autumn Term, 2024.

Qualifications

• MSc History, University of Edinburgh
• PGCE (Post-Compulsory), Institute of Education, University of London
• MA Visual Culture, Lancaster University
• BA American Studies, Lancaster University