Dr. Aaron Shaheen (fourth from right) posing alongside several conference attendees next to the famous 1936 Time magazine cover featuring John Dos Passos. Photo courtesy of Dr. Aaron Shaheen.
The Fifth Biennial John Dos Passos Society Conference was held May 20-23 on the Portuguese island of Madeira, the ancestral home of one of America’s foremost novelists of the twentieth century. John Dos Passos’s grandfather Manoel immigrated to the United States in the mid-1800s. Manoel’s son John Randolph Dos Passos then rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century as a Wall Street lawyer.
His son, the famous author, was born in 1896 and visited Madeira on several occasions throughout his life. The site of the 2026 conference, the John Dos Passos Cultural Center in the village of Ponta do Sol, is located next to the Dos Passos ancestral home, which is now a research center and house museum. The conference hosted scholars from ten different countries and four continents.
Dr. Heather Palmer outside the Convent of Santa Clara in Funchal, Madeira.
Two UTC professors attended the conference and delivered papers. One of them, Dr. Aaron Shaheen, the George C. Connor Professor of American Literature, also participated in the conference as the Dos Passos Society’s president. Shaheen delivered a presentation titled “Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy and the Loss Great War Map-mindedness,” which is derived from his current book manuscript under contract with Cambridge University Press.
Dr. Heather Palmer, the Department of English’s director of graduate studies, made her Dos Passos Society Conference debut with a paper titled “Posthuman Subjectivity in the Rhetorical Assemblages of Dos Passos’s 1919.” Her presentation is scheduled to appear in the third volume of conference proceedings.
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga has been at the center of Dos Passos-related scholarship for fifteen years. Shaheen co-founded the Dos Passos Society in 2011 with Dr. Victoria Bryan, who at the time was a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Mississippi and is currently the director of UTC’s Walker Teaching and Learning Center. Prior to her study at Ole Miss, Bryan received her BA and MA in UTC’s English department.
The First Biennial Dos Passos Conference was held at UTC in October 2014 and organized by Bryan. The conference brought scholarly talent from over ten different countries. Subsequent conferences have been held in Madrid, Spain (2016); Lisbon, Portugal (2018); and Bassano de Grappa, Italy (2024). These past conferences have featured other UTC professors, such as Dr. Verbie Prevost (English), Dr. Lynn Purkey (Modern and Classical Languages and Literature) and Alexis Armour (English).
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The John Dos Passos Cultural Center in Ponta do Sol, Madeira, site of the 2026 conference.
The Dos Passos ancestral home adjacent to the Dos Passos Cultural Center in Ponta do Sol.
