The newly established Monroe Group is an interdisciplinary research network for the study of politics in the Americas.

The network is designed to encourage dialogue between scholars in the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences working on all aspects of politics in the American continent. It has been developed in response to recent expansion of staff and student recruitment working in the field of US and Latin American politics at the University of Reading.

The Monroe Group will be home to existing UoR researchers and PhD students working in this area and will facilitate new collaborative projects, research grants applications and teaching development across all disciplines. In particular:

•  US foreign policy
• Climate Change Diplomacy
• Gender, Diversity and Inclusion
• Representations, Rhetoric and Media
• Policy

You can discover more about this new research network via their blog and thier Twitter page.

Check out what the Monroe Group are up to via their blog.

The Monroe Group’s will be officially inaugerated on 2nd May by the Vice-Chancellor, Sir David Bell, who will launch the new research network and introduce the keynote speaker, Professor Andrew Rudalevige (Bowdoin College).  This will be followed by the one-day conference ‘Trump’s First 100 Days‘ (conference programme below).  Registration for the conference can be made via the University of Reading’s events pages.

The conference is followed by the workshop ‘Engaging with Politics in the Americas‘ 27th June.

This is a half-day, multidisciplinary event for UoR-based staff already working on politics in the Americas related topics, or those who are interested in developing new research in this area (or just learning more).  All academic disciplines are welcome and you don’t need prior experience of politics in the Americas research to participate.

The objectives for the afternoon are for participants to:

• Learn more about the themes of the Monroe Group, and how they interlink.
• Get to know one-another, what our research interests are, and how they potentially relate to the Monroe Group.
• Start to think about major politics in the Americas research questions, and how these might be developed into project ideas/proposals.

As part of the workshop, we would like to invite participants to make short, 5-10 minute presentations about an area of their research related to politics in the Americas.

If you would like to do this, please contact Dr Mara Oliva (m.oliva@reading.ac.uk), Dr Mark Shanahan (m.j.shanahan@reading.ac.uk) and Dr Madeleine Davies (m.k.davies@reading.ac.uk) with a provisional title for your presentation.

What is  more, the Monroe Group already have plans in place for at least one event per term!  Events already scheduled for the next acadmeic year are:

• Autumn term 2017 – High Commission of Barbados (led by Department of Politics and International Relations)
• Spring term 2018 –   Gender, Diversity & Inclusion (led by Department of English)
• Summer term 2018 – Climate Change Diplomacy – (led by the Department of History)