Archive
The Myths That Made America: Teaching American Studies
October 9-10, 2024, Erlangen
organized by Katharina Gerund and Isabel Kalous
When The Myths That Made America came out ten years ago, it had a wide-ranging impact as a new and timely introduction to the field of American Studies. With its systematic analyses of core foundational myths that continue to shape US-American national identities today, Heike Paul’s book has become a staple in American Studies classes in Germany and beyond. The Myths That Made America has proven to be a reference book for anyone interested in understanding US culture, society, and politics and has found a broad readership beyond academia, too.
The chapters cover the myths of “discovery,” the “promised land,” and the West, the various appropriations of Pocahontas and the Founding Fathers, as well as the powerful narrations about the melting pot and the self-made man. With examples ranging from popular and memorial culture to literature, textbooks, and everyday life, The Myths That Made America offers profound analyses based on state-of-the-art research and presents them in a highly accessible and engaging manner.
Ten years after its publication, this workshop on The Myths That Made America reflects on the book’s uses in different classroom settings and assesses its ongoing relevance for teaching American Studies.
Reeducation Revisited: Strategies, Actors, Institutions in Transnational and Comparative Perspective
September 29-30, 2017, Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut, Nürnberg
organized by Katharina Gerund, Heike Paul, and Anne Schenderlein (GHI Washington)
The program of “reeducation” the United States pursued in the wake of World War II was both locally specific and global. Reeducation initiatives aimed at defeated/liberated populations were carried out on the national and subnational level. At the same time, U.S. reeducation policies, serving as site-specific laboratories for reform, contributed toward the creation of transatlantic and transpacific spheres of American influence. This conference seeks to bring a comparative perspective to reeducation studies. It will explore (1) how U.S. reeducation policies were designed and implemented with different target groups and societies in mind; (2) how those policies were received and reworked by those targeted; and (3) the repercussions of reeducation policy on American discourses of democracy, war, and militarism as well as on constructions of victimhood, cultural imaginaries, and long-term historical developments. We want to look beyond the dominant interpretation of the reeducation program as essentially a prelude to Cold War cultural diplomacy and invite proposals that consider reeducation as a project in its own right. With this conference, we want to lay the groundwork for cross-cultural and transnational comparisons and contributions will explore the connections between reeducation policies and concurrent American efforts at cultural diplomacy in other places (e.g., Italy, Korea, Latin America). Following the transnational turn in the field of American studies, we seek to address the phenomenon of reeducation, broadly conceived, in relation to international networks and interdependencies.
Public Feeling in Global Contexts
April 9-10, 2016, Alte Universitätsbibliothek, Erlangen
organized by Katharina Gerund and Heike Paul
Following a broader ‘turn to affect’ (Patricia Clough) in the humanities and the social sciences, this conference seeks to investigate public feeling – as articulation, representation, and cultural and institutional practice – and the various functions it has in every-day life, in political communication, in allegedly private realms as well as in constructions of “intimate public spheres” (Lauren Berlant). The conference brings together scholars from different disciplines (sociology, literary studies, political science, art history, and media studies) to discuss the changing cultural specificities and the global impact of “affective economies” (Sara Ahmed) and “feeling rules” (Arlie Hochschild) in a framework of transnational and comparative cultural studies. In the course of our two-day conference, we will address phenomena such as a post-9/11 political culture and its repertoire of affects; strategies/processes of (political) inclusion and exclusion via affective protocols; fear, anger, and (romantic) love as, purportedly, global “structures of feeling” (Raymond Williams); the (re)turn to/of aesthetics and affect in contemporary (popular) culture and art; and the role of affect for contemporary protest movements and political opposition. From the various cultural and disciplinary angles involved, we will shed light on the ways in which public feeling-scholarship extends – and still needs to be extended further – beyond its current US-centered, Euro-American framework. Topics include how affects and emotions impact individual and collective identity formation in the age of globalization; how affect and feeling are entangled with cultural difference and constructions of otherness, and what kind of political work they perform in every-day situations and in ‘states of exception’.
International Conference of the GRK “Presence and Tacit Knowledge”: (Extra-)Ordinary Presence – Social Configurations and Cultural Repertoires
November 7-9, 2013, Schlossplatz 4, Erlangen
Taking its cue from contemporary Western debates on presence in the social sciences and the humanities, this conference focuses on ‘presence’ both as everyday experience and as an experience of intense moments. It raises questions about diverse social configurations of presence as well as about the specific cultural repertoires which encode, articulate, and shape discourses of presence – implicitly and explicitly.
Recent debates about ‘presence’ are themselves symptomatic of a specific social configuration and cultural repertoire: Firstly, they seem to respond to the highly differentiated and culturally plural world society of media-driven interconnectivity and space-time-compression. A perceived ‘loss’ of actual presence, secondly, is often seen as propelling discussions of presence as an epistemological category. The contemporary discourse on ›presence‹ – along with the ‘practice turn’ – acknowledges an epistemic repertoire focusing on materiality, aspects of somatically mediated practices, the immediacy of emotions, pathos, affect, excess, and ecstasy as well as the ritualized and atmospheric character of the private and the public respectively in their functions for various social fields such as arts, religion, and politics.
The conference brings together different disciplinary perspectives on phenomena of presence and their discursive negotiations and manifestations in social and/or cultural practices, artifacts, and narratives, past and present. It accounts for both ordinary and extraordinary experiences of presence in their local, cultural, and social contexts. Therefore, it takes as a premise that phenomena of presence are connected to particular forms of knowledge – especially tacit knowledge (pre-)determines experiences of individual and collective presence and becomes tangible in moments of presence or presentification.
Keynotes: Kristin Surak (U Duisburg-Essen/SOAS, U of London), Bernhard Waldenfels (Ruhr-U Bochum), Hans Ulrich Reck (Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln), Willie Jennings (Duke U), Christopher Balme (LMU München), and Christina Sharpe (Tufts U).
60th Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS): “Rural America”
Mai 30 – June 2, 2013
organized by Antje Kley and Heike Paul
“The United States was born in the country,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, “and remained emotionally attached to it long after it had moved away,” David B. Danbom added in his History of Rural America. Thus, it may be argued that the study of American culture and civilization, first and foremost, needs to make sense of the rural. The multidisciplinary GAAS-Convention in Erlangen focuses on rural America, on areas seemingly apart from the political, economic, and cultural centers of the nation. Despite this apparent marginality, the rural may prove to be constitutive not only of regional but also of other subnational and even national American identities. Putting rurality at the center also requires a revision of well-established dichotomous models of city vs. country. The conference will address the rural as a mythic construction (e.g. the American “Heartland”), as a (socio-)economic sector, as an imaginary time-space within American culture, and as the site of specific political, social, and cultural practices. Next to established fields in rural studies (such as history and sociology), recent expertise on rural America has also been provided by environmental science, race/gender criticism as well as poverty studies. Workshops should closely examine rural politics, economics, religion, literature, popular culture, and the arts. Ideally, many of the disciplines and critical paradigms of the field will be represented in the workshop line-up.
Keynotes: Barbara Ching (Iowa State U) – David B. Danbom (North Dakota U) – Brigitte Georgi-Findlay (TU Dresden) – Mary L. Gray (Indiana U/MSR) – Jerry Hagstrom (National Journal) – Rogelio Saenz (U of Texas)
Sponsors: FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Embassy of the United States of America, Dr. Alfred-Vinzl-Stiftung, Dr. German Schweiger-Stiftung, Fritz- und Maria Hofmann-Stiftung, Luise Prell Stiftung, Bavarian American Akademy (BAA), German-American Institute Nuremberg, Universitätverlag Winter
International Conference of the GRK “Presence and Tacit Knowledge”: Implizites Wissen zwischen Verkörperung und Explikation
Dec. 6-7, 2012
Keynotes: Prof. Dr. Jens Loenhoff (U Duisburg-Essen), Prof. Dr. Simone Mahrenholz (U of Manitoba), Prof. Dr. Joachim Renn (WWU Münster), and Prof. Dr. Alexis Shotwell (Carleton U).
The conference took place in cooperation with the Zentralinstitut “Anthropologie der Religion(en)” at the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and was supported by the Dr. Alfred-Vinzl-Stiftung and the Bavarian American Academy.
Cultural Encounters between Germans and Americans after World War II: New Perspectives on Reeducation, Reorientation, Americanization (1945-1965)
June 18-19, 2010
organized by Katharina Gerund and Heike Paul
On June 18, 1945, Erlangen was the site of a very special premiere: films distributed by the US-American military government to ‘re-educate’ the Germans after World War II were screened and presented to a German audience for the first time. Commemorating this anniversary, this international conference re-examined the post-war reeducation and reorientation periods and their aftermath. The ‘successful’ reeducation of (West)Germany is still frequently cited as a paradigmatic model for current American democratization efforts in occupied territories or contested global hot spots. Against such simplified public notions, we looked in detail at processes of reeducation, reorientation, and Americanization in Germany after World War II by analyzing films, literature, institutions, intellectual discussions and theoretical paradigms of and about this period. A host of German and US-American scholars presented their research on matters of post-war German intellectual, social and cultural history and re-examined the cultural work of reeducation and its repercussions.
Sponsors: German Association for American Studies, the U.S. Embassy, Bavarian America Academy, German-American Institute Nuremberg (DAI), Central Institute for Area Studies (FAU), Dr. German-Schweiger-Foundation Erlangen.
Imagining Alternative Mobilities? Pirates, Drifters, Fugitives in the U.S. and Beyond
International Cultural Studies Conference, June 18-20, 2009
organized by Heike Paul, Alexandra Ganser, and Katharina Gerund
Speakers: Stephen Best (Berkeley), Martin Butler (Duisburg-Essen), Tim Cresswell (London), Alexandra Ganser, Nina Gerassi-Navarro (Boston), Katharina Gerund (Düsseldorf), Rüdiger Kunow (Potsdam), Dorothea Löbbermann (Berlin), and Gesa Mackenthun (Rostock)
Sponsors: Fritz Thyssen Foundation, German Association for American Studies, Bavarian American Academy, German-American Institute Nuremberg.
American Studies in a Transatlantic Perspective: Critical Regionalism in Politics and Culture
May 31 – June 10, 2014, Texas State University, San Marcos
Regionalism, i.e. the study of regions and regional identities, has always been an important dimension of American Studies scholarship: regions have been examined, on the one hand, as symbolic spaces foundational for dominant national discourses (like the mythical conception of the American West) and, on the other hand, as sites of ‘authentic’ local cultures (like the ‘local color’ of the South). Both approaches are equally problematic, and the allegorical as well as the essentialist view have recently been deconstructed. Instead, questions of how regions are discursively fabricated and how they are (de)stabilized in the context of nation-building, empire, and globalization are foregrounded.
The summer academy addresses historical and current debates about American regions and regionalism from an interdisciplinary perspective. This focus on a “critical regionalism” highlights the connections between regional identities and global (power) structures, the construction of specific regions in and beyond the United States, micro- and macro-structures of space and place as well as processes of cultural contact and mobility at play in the formation of regions. Such an approach covers aspects of cultural identity, political participation, and economic developments that will be discussed with a specific focus on (but by no means limited to) the US Southwest and its history, literature, and art.
Keynotes:
Robert Brinkmeyer (U of South Carolina) – Krista Comer (Rice) – Doug Powell (Columbia College) – Robert Tally (TX State) – Jesus F. de la Teja (TX State) – Gary Hartman (TX State) – Mark Busby (TX State) – Steve Wilson (TX State) – Barrett Watten (Wayne State) – Heike Paul (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) – Katharina Gerund (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) – Ron Tyler (Fort Worth, Texas)
Supported by: FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, University of Augsburg, Wayne State University, Bavarian American Academy, and Texas State University, San Marcos
Transatlantic American Studies: Democratic Cultures, Past and Present
May 14-28, 2011, Munich and Nuremberg
Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Democratie en Amérique (1835/40) scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have addressed American democracy as both a specific manifestation of US-American historical and political developments and as a model for others. In this context, the program of our Summer Academy addressed both historical and current debates about American democracy and democratic cultures in various discourses across the academic disciplines. The plural used in the title of our event refers not only to semantic changes in a diachronic perspective, but also to the synchronic pluralism of perspectives on democracy in national, subnational and transnational contexts. Fields of interest include the role of the media and various forms of ‘representation’ (in the double sense of the term). Finally, we will discuss the contemporary rhetoric of a crisis of democracy in the U.S. against the background of domestic and foreign political and social developments. Along those lines our summer academy addressed related issues in American history, politics, culture, and literature.
Keynotes:
Chantal Mouffe (U of Westminster) – Walter Mignolo (Duke U) – Barrett Watten (Wayne State U, Detroit) – Tomasz Basiuk (U Warzaw, Poland) – Sabine Broeck (U Bremen) – Anne Koenen (U Leipzig) – Volker Depkat (U Regensburg) – Klaus Benesch (LMU Munich) – Roland Sturm (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) – Jürgen Gebhardt (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) – Heike Paul (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Supported by DAAD, BAA, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Wayne State University, Detroit, Universität Warschau
American Studies in a Transatlantic Perspective: Cultural Mobility and Intercultural Exchange
May 9-23, 2009, Munich
At this summer academy we discussed contemporary phenomena of cultural mobility and intercultural exchange in the context of a “transnational turn” in the field of American Studies and a “spatial turn” in literary and cultural studies. Space and mobility in US-American discourses are of highly symbolic value and play a central role in the foundational national mythology which circulates also in a global context. American myths of mobility have already begun to be analyzed by the so-called New Americanists who focus on moments and processes of intercultural exchange instead of unified, ‘exceptionalist’ narratives. Along those lines our summer academy addressed current issues in American history, culture and literature.
Keynotes:
Heike Paul (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg): “Cultural Mobility“ – Klaus Benesch (LMU Munich): “Mobility and Rootedness” – David Nye (U of Southern Denmark, Odense): “Mobility, Technology, and the Production of Difference” – Barrett Watten (Wayne State U, Detroit): “Mobility and Poetics” – Udo Hebel (U of Regensburg): “Transatlantic Cultures of Memory” – Rudolf Freiburg (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg): “Transatlantic Discourses on Religion and Atheism” – Werner Sollors (Harvard U): “Transatlantic Encounters” – Carla Harryman (Eastern Michigan U) reads from her new book of poems Adorno’s Noise
The summer academy also included a cultural program: a reception at the AmerikaHaus, excursions to Dachau and Neuschwanstein, and visits to museums and places of special interest in Munich.
Supporters and cooperation: German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Bavarian America-Academy (BAA), FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, LMU Munich, Wayne State University, Detroit, and the University of Southern Denmark, Odense.
2018
Prof. Dr. Jeannette Eileen Jones (U of Nebraska): “Fathering Blackness: U.S. Militarism and the Expansion of the Afro-German Diaspora” (Oct. 24)
Organizers: Dr. Katharina Gerund, Prof. Dr. Heike Paul, Dr. Tanja Roppelt (in cooperation with the City of Erlangen’s Black History Weeks)
2015
Dr. Sophie Woodward (U of Manchester): “Global Denim: Not Just a History of Americana? Personal Histories and Global Contexts of Wearing Jeans” (Nov. 12)
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Heike Paul, Dr. Tanja Roppelt
2014
Prof. Dr. Cindy Ott (Saint Louis U): “Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon” (Nov. 19)
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Heike Paul, Dr. Tanja Roppelt
2013
Ulrich Krüger (Senior Editor ProSiebenSat.1 TV Germany): “Die Mafia ist schuld: Warum US-Serien immer besser werden und sie trotzdem keiner anschaut” (Oct. 25)
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Heike Paul, Dr. Tanja Roppelt
2012
Prof. Dr. Andrei Markovits (U of Michigan): “Gaming the World: Sports’ Ever-Present Local Identity in Their (not at all newly) Globalized Context” (June 13)
Organizers: Dr. Alexandra Ganser, Prof. Dr. Heike Paul, Dr. Tanja Roppelt
2011
Prof. Dr. Anne Koenen (U of Leipzig): “Democratic Consumption? The History of Mail Order in the U.S. and Germany” (May 26)
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Heike Paul, Dr. Tanja Roppelt
2010
Prof. Dr. Reinhold Wagnleitner (Paris-Lodron U Salzburg, Austria): “Jazz – The Classical Music of Globalization”
Lecture with reception and jam session, with Günter Wagnleitner (piano), Reinhold Wagnleitner (bass), Fatim Boutros (drums) (April 28)
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Heike Paul, Dr. Alexandra Ganser, Dr. Tanja Roppelt
2009
Inaugural Lecture: Lynn Downey (San Francisco): “True Blue: The History and Global Culture of Levi’s Jeans” (April 29)
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Heike Paul, Dr. Tanja Roppelt
Clara Dawson (U of Manchester): “Sentimental Narratives: Taxidermy, Museums, and Poetry in the 19th Century” (May 29, 2024)
Manuel Vogelsang (U Zürich): “Revisiting the Archive, Excessively! Melodrama, Excess, and the Archive of the American Imaginary” (April 24, 2024)
Jonathan Flatley (Wayne State U): “‘Our Friend’ Angela Davis, the Black Communist Star” (Dec. 12, 2023)
Vanessa Vollmann (U Passau): “The Female Founder Narrative in Hamilton” (Dec. 5, 2023)
Alexander Dunst (U Paderborn): Fun Home, the Bechdel Test, and the Social Imagination of the Graphic Memoir (July 13, 2023)
Sakina Shakil Gröppmaier (LMU): “The Pamphletary and the Public” (July 20, 2022)
Matthias Klestil (Alpen-Adria-U Klagenfurt): “Underground Railroad Narratives before the Human” (July 13, 2022)
Samira Spatzek (FU Berlin): “Tracing the Archive(s) of the Slave Narrative in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy” (May 26, 2022)
Markus Heide (U Hildesheim): “Border Paradigms in American Studies” (Jan. 19, 2022)
Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez (U Leipzig): “The Imperial Archipelago” (Nov. 15, 2021)
Sabine Broeck (U Bremen): “Anti-Black Abjective Violence as White Pedagogy” (July 14, 2021)
Susanne Lachenicht (U Bayreuth): “Atlantic Revolutions: Nations and Their Master Narratives between the Modern and the Postmodern” (Dec. 2020)
Heike Bungert (U Münster): “Native Americans/American Indians” (Nov. 2020)
Stefanie Schäfer (Augsburg U): “Power and Sentiment: First Ladies and the Cult of Domesticity” (May 14, 2020)
Donatella Izzo (U of Naples, L’Orientale): “Pop(e)ulism: Populist Miracles and Neoliberal Theologies” (May 28, 2019)
Leopold Lippert (U of Vienna): “Humor and the American Revolution” (May 15, 2019)
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Dartmouth College): “ZombieBiopolitics” (May 8, 2019)
Alfred Hornung (Obama Institute, U of Mainz): “The Other Jack London” (Jan. 23, 2019)
Boris Vormann (Bard College Berlin): “The Crisis of Democracy: A Transatlantic Take” (Jan. 22, 2019)
Nele Sawallisch (Obama Institute, U of Mainz): “Issues in Contemporary Black Canadian Literature” (Jan. 15, 2019)
Birgit Däwes (Flensburg U): “Temporalities of Indigenous American Literatures” (Jan. 7, 2019)
Rebecca Wanzo (Washington U, St. Louis): “Civil Rights Sentimentality” (Dec. 13, 2018)
Mark Bould (U of West of England): “From Deep Time to Weird Time: Science Fiction and the Anthropocene” (June 7, 2018)
Caroline Rosenthal (U Jena): “Canon Formation and the American Renaissance” (May 29, 2018)
Jeroen Dewulf (UC Berkeley): “Slave King Elections and Celebrations in the Americas: The Case of the Pinkster King in New York” (May 16, 2018)
Hannah Spahn (U of Potsdam): “‘Wean yourselves from those narrow prejudices:’ Character Building and White Uplift in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature” (Jan. 17, 2018)
Alan Nadel (U of Kentucky): “The Fugitive (1993) and Rodney King: How Black Bodies Matter in American Urban Space” (Nov. 28, 2017)
Alexandra Ganser-Blumenau (U of Vienna): “Outer Space Mobilities: Colonizing Mars in Contemporary Hollywood” (Nov. 14, 2017)
Donald Pease (Dartmouth College): “Donald Trump, This President That Is Not One” (Oct. 17, 2017)
Silvia Schultermandl (U of Graz): “Aesthetic Experience, Readerly Affect and (Trans-)National Kinship in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Clarence (1830) and The Linwoods (1835)” (Nov. 9, 2016)
Klara-Stephanie Szlezák (Passau U): “Commemorating the Holocaust in the United States: Forms. Contexts, Contestations” (July 6, 2016)
Werner Sollors (Harvard U): “From Negro Literature to African American Studies: A Literary Overview” (June 29, 2016)
Juliane Schwarz-Bierschenk (Freiburg U): “What Stuff Are Heroes Made of? Re-Presenting a Borderlands Past in El Paso Public Art” (June 22, 2016)
Susanne Leikam (U of Regensburg): “Cli-Fi and the Bio-Politics of Climate Change” (June 14, 2016)
Alexandra Ganser (U of Vienna): “Cross-dressing and Piracy in Antebellum American Popular Literature” (May 10, 2016)
Miles Orvell (Temple U): “Atomic Photography: Domesticating the Violence of the Bomb for Public Consumption” (April 26, 2016)
Thomas Claviez (U of Bern): “The Road Not Taken: Environmental Criticism, Reciprocity, and the Problem of Agency”
(Jan. 27, 2016)
Ingrid Gessner (U of Regensburg): “From Memoir to Memorial: Vietnam, Women, and Heroic Agency” (Jan. 25, 2016)
Winfried Fluck (FU Berlin): “The Rejection of the Aesthetic in Literary Studies and Contemporary Artistic Practices” (Dec. 1, 2015)
Matthias S. Fifka (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg): “Lobbying in Washington D.C. – The Best Politics that Money Can Buy” (Nov. 23, 2015)
John Carlos Rowe (U of Southern California): “`Shades of Paradise`: Craig Santos Perez’s Transpacific Voyages” (July 15, 2015)
Colleen Boggs (Darthmouth College): “Serialized Violence: Harper’s Weekly and the Civil War Draft” (July 15, 2015)
Gesa Mackenthun (U of Rostock): “Traditional Indigenous Knowledge and Modern Science Between History and Myth” (July 07, 2015)
Christine Gerhardt (U of Bamberg): “‘We must travel abreast with Nature if we want to know her’: Unsettling Ecopoetics” (June 17, 2015)
Erik Mortenson (Koç Üniversitesi): “Translating Counterculture: The Reception of the American Beat Generation in West German and Turkish Underground Journals” (Dec. 3, 2014)
Elisabeth Bronfen (U of Zurich): “Ein eigener Blick auf den Krieg: Lee Miller, Martha Gellhorn und Margaret Bourke-White” (Nov. 18, 2014)
John Carlos Rowe (UC Irvine): “The Ends of Transnationalism” (May 20, 2014, together with a workshop on the subject on May 21, 2014)
Ann Cvetkovich (U of Texas, Austin): “The Sovereignty of the Senses” (May 19, 2014; as part of the doctoral program “Presence and Tacit Knowledge”)
Susan Eckelmann (Indiana U, Bloomington): “‘It’s People Like You We Need in the White House’: The Worldview of Teenagers and the Coming of Age of the Silent Majority” (Dec. 4, 2013)
Benjamin Fagan (U of Arkansas): “The Black Newspaper and the Black Atlantic” (July 10, 2013)
Katja Kanzler (TU Dresden): “Popular Domesticity: Tacit Dimensions of Gender, Class, and Nationhood in Mid-19th-Century American Cookbooks” (July 4, 2013)
Sebastian Hermann (U of Leipzig): “The Cultural Work of ‘Presidential Unreality'” (July 3, 2013)
Donald Pease (Dartmouth College): “Obama’s Orphic Mysteries” (May 27, 2013)
Birgit M. Bauridl (U of Regensburg): “Gut getarnt in der Oberpfalz”? Performative Negotiations of the American Military and Cultural Presence in Germany” (Jan. 9, 2013)
Caroline Rosenthal (FSU Jena): “Food, Ethnicity, and the Making of Urban Space in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Tessa McWatt’s This Body (Nov. 28, 2012)
Kerry Haynie (Duke U): “US Presidential Election 2012” (Nov. 7, 2012)
Barry Shank (Ohio State U): “The ‘Tea Party Movement’ and the ‘Occupy Movement’: Current Perspectives” (July 11, 2012)
Barrett Watten (Wayne State U): “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Writing” (June 12, 2012)
Leigh Raiford (UC Berkeley): “Ida B. Wells’s Use of Photography” (June 4, 2012)
—. “Marcus Garvey and the Photographer James Vanderzee” (June 5, 2012)
Sherrie Tucker (U of Kansas): “Jitterbug Memory and National Nostalgia: Dancers at the Hollywood Canteen” (May 30, 2012)
Christian Cwik (U Cologne/U de Cartagena de Indias, Colombia/KonaK Vienna): “Die Karibik als interamerikanische Schnittstelle” (Feb. 7, 2012)
Tricia Rose (Brown U): “Diversity in the United States: Translating Hip Hop Culture” (Nov. 14, 2011)
Klaus Benesch (LMU Munich): “Mobile Authorship” (July 19, 2011)
Katja Kanzler (TU Dresden): “‘Mind Amongst the Spindles’: New England Factory Girls as Cultural and Literary Phenomenon” (July 13, 2011)
Carmen Birkle (PU Marburg): “Visualizing the American Medical Profession” (July 5, 2011)
Barry Shank (Ohio State U): “Consumer Culture and the Greeting Card Business” (June 22, 2011)
Jeanne Cortiel (U Bayreuth): “Technologizing the Body: Contemporary Film and the Science of the Gene” (June 21, 2011)
Zoe Kusmierz (BAA Munich): “Scenes from a Mall: The Shopping Mall and American Culture” (June 15, 2011)
Bruce Michelson (U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign): “Mark Twain as Cultural Icon” (June 8, 2011)
Kathleen Loock (GAU Göttingen): “‘Pomp, Pageantry and Patriotism’: The U.S. Columbian Celebration 1892/1893 and Ethnic Transformations of Christopher Columbus” (May 31, 2011)
Mita Banerjee (JGU Mainz): “Italian Americans in 19th-Century Transnational America” (May 10, 2011)
Chantal Mouffe (Center for the Study of Democracy, London): “An Agonistic Model of Democracy” (May 23, 2011, DAI Nuremberg)
(Organized by the BAA Summer Academy “Transatlantic American Studies: Democratic Cultures, Past and Present”)
Markus Heide (HU Berlin): “American Studies as Border Studies” (Jan. 11, 2011)
Leigh Raiford (UC Berkeley): “Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle” (July 20, 2010)
Katja Sarkowsky (U of Augsburg): “Democratic Iterations: Articulations of ‘Citizenship’ in Contemporary Canadian and American Literatures” (July 13, 2010)
Birgit Spengler (Goethe-U Frankfurt/M.): “Literary Spinoffs: Rewriting the Canon, Revisiting the Nineteenth Century” (June 29, 2010)
Barrett Watten (Wayne State U, Detroit): “The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography” (June 23, 2010)
Winfried Fluck (John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, FU Berlin): “Tocqueville’s Legacy: Towards A Cultural History of Recognition” (May 11, 2010)
Birgit Däwes (JMU Würzburg): “‘Waiting for the Injured City to Heal’: Literature, Crisis and Change after September 11, 2001” (Feb. 11, 2010)
Berndt Ostendorf (LMU Munich): “Jazz and the Beat Generation” (Dec. 10, 2009)
Leslie Sanders (York U, Toronto): “Contemporary Afro-Canadian Literature” (July 16, 2009)
“Take It Easy, but Take It”: Woody Guthrie
Lecture, Reading, and Concert with Nora Guthrie, Hans Eckardt Wenzel and Michael Kleff (June 18, 2009)
Opening event of the conference ‘Imagining Alternative Mobilities: Pirates, Drifters, Fugitives in the U.S. and Beyond’ organized by the Chair for American Studies and the German-American Institute (GAI) Nuremberg and supported by the City of Erlangen
Udo Hebel (U of Regensburg), book presentation Einführung in die Amerikanistik/American Studies (April 2009)
Birgit Däwes (U of Würzburg), ” ‘Close Neighbors to the Unimaginable’: Literary Projections of Terrorists’ Perspectives” (Dec. 2008)
Christian Hawkey, Poetry Reading (Dec. 2008)
Werner Sollors (Harvard U), “‘Are You Occupied Territory?’ Black GIs in Fiction of the American Occupation” (Nov. 2008)
Joe Kunkel (Minnesota State U, Mankato), “And the Winner Is… The U.S. Presidential Elections 2008” (Nov. 2008)
Judith Misrahi-Barak (U Paul Valéry, Montpellier), “Re-presenting and Re-creating the World of the Plantation” (Nov. 2008)
Gesa Mackenthun (U of Rostock), “Restless Billows: Piracy, Slavery, and Higher Justice in Antebellum Literary Discourse” (June 2008)
Sünne Juterczenka (U of Rostock), “Spoiling Clear-Cut Conclusions: Recent Trends in the Historiography of Piracy” (June 2008)
Jean Paul Görgen, “Zur Rolle des Dokumentarfilms in der amerikanischen Reeducation-Politik im Nachkriegsdeutschland” (Jan. 2008)
John David Smith (UC North Carolina, Charlotte), “Transatlantic Anthropology at the Turn of the Century: Felix von Luschans Trip to America 1914-1915 (July 2007)
Richard Pells (U of Texas, Austin), “Transatlantic Misunderstandings: Anti-Americanism in Europe and Anti-Europeanism in America (May 2007)
Negator (Hamburg), “Transnationalität und Spektakel. Der situationistische Cosmopolitismus” (Jan. 2007)
Astrid M. Fellner (U Wien), “Singing the Border: Ballads and other Folkloric Tales” (Jan. 2007)
Carlos Morton (UC Santa Barbara), “Chicano/Latino Theater in the U.S.” (Jan. 2007)
Carter Revard, Poetry Reading (Nov. 2006)
Sabine Broeck (U Bremen), “Slavery and the Subject of Modernity” (July 2006)
Moira Roth, “The Cold War and the Aesthetic of Indifference” (May 2006)
Janet Sternberg, “The Writer on Her Work” (Dec. 2005)
Mark Kelly Smith, “Poetry Performance” (June 2005)
Viola Shafik, “Filmbilder: Amerika und die arabische Welt” (Jan. 2005)
Markus Heide (HU Berlin), Inter-American Studies: José Martí in the USA (2005)