Welcome

Assistant Professor
Native American Studies (University of Denver)

"Deterritorialization, Pure War, and the Consequences of Indian Captivity in Transnational Colonial Discourse"

Wednesday, June 26, 2013, 2-4 p.m. (c.t.) in P 101

Billy Stratton received his PhD from the University of Arizona. Specialized in contemporary Native American literature and poetics, he also has research interests in ecocriticism, Indigenous Studies, and critical theory. He has published articles on writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, and James Welch, and is editing a special issue of the journal Weber: The Contemporary West, on Native American writing and art. A book entitled Buried in Shades of Night is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in the fall of 2013. He is currently Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Würzburg.

Contact: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Birgit Däwes ()

Peterson’s talk is based on her recent book publication and will focus on a discussion of memory, trauma, archiving and mining of individual life stories in New York City and its neighborhoods as the locus of African American memory and history.

www.blackgothamarchive.org

 ... 

On Tuesday, June 25, 2013, at 10am, Prof. Frank Baron, Director of the Max Kade Center for German American Studies, will give a guest lecture on

"The Consequences of the 1848 Revolution for thePolitical Career of Abraham Lincoln"

The Refugees of the failed revolution of 1848 arrived in the United States in significant numbers. Although during the decades of the 1840s and 1850s they were only a relatively small part of the millions who arrived in the United States in the great wave of immigrations (primarily German and Irish), they represented a vocal and influential group. Numerous former revolutionaries became publishers of German newspapers, while others organized communication networks by means of the Turnvereine throughout the country. They were immediately confronted by powerful, hostile movement of the American Party (also called the Know Nothings) against immigrants and immigration. The revolutionary refugees challenged the anti-immigration initiatives and joined forces with the newly formed Republican Party in the struggle against the extension of slavery. Abraham Lincoln became acutely aware of the German-American potential to decide elections with their swing vote in Illinois and even in neighboring states. Lincoln actively courted the German vote. The talk will analyze the silent alliance between Lincoln and the German-Americans, who played a noteworthy role in helping Lincoln in his campaign of 1860 to win the nomination and the election for the presidency. 

You are welcome to join the sessions!

Professor of English and American Studies
(Temple University, Philadelphia)

"Sustaining Ruins: Space, Time, and the American City"

Friday, May 24th, 2-4pm, Fakultätssaal (Philosophicum) Flyer

Miles Orvell is Professor of English and American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is the author of such influential works as The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (1989), Flannery O'Connor: An Introduction (1991), American Photography (2003), and The Death and Life of Main Street: Small Towns in American Memory, Space, and Community (2012). Orvell’s essays and reviews on literature, photography, documentary film, technology and the arts have appeared in Afterimage, American Art, History of Photography, Film Quarterly, American Literary History, Prospects, Tikkun, Winterthur Portfolio and many other journals. He was Editor in Chief of the Encyclopedia of American Studies Online, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, from 2004 to 2011. Among his many awards, he received the Bode-Pearson Prize for lifetime achievement, awarded to him by the American Studies Association in 2009.

"Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans"

Monday, May 13th, 10-12am, P110 (Philosophicum) Flyer

Driven Out was named one of the 100 notable books of the year by the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Top Ten Books of the Year by Choice, and Prof. Pfaelzer was named Asian American Hero by Asian Librarians Assoc. She writes for Huffington Post, History News Network, and The Globalist and speaks frequently on NPR and Pacifica on issues of labor and immigration.
Prof. Pfaelzer is currently on the team curating the exhibit I Want the Wide American Earth: An Asian Pacific American Story for the Smithsonian Museum of American History which will open in May 2013. She is also working on two forthcoming books: Of Human Bondage: Slavery in California and Muted Mutinies: Slave Revolts on Chinese Coolie Ships (both University of California Press).

Die Gutenberg-Buchhandlung Dr. Kohl und die Abteilung Amerikanistik der JGU Mainz laden herzlich ein zu einem Vortragsabend mit Ira Wagler am Freitag, 10.05.2013 um 20:00 Uhr in der Gutenberg-Buchhandlung Dr. Kohl, Große Bleiche 29-31. Der Eintritt ist frei!
(Flyer)

Die Lesung ist in englischer Sprache. Alle Interessierten sind herzlich willkommen!

Ira Wagler wurde 1961 als neuntes von elf Kindern in eine Amish-Familie hineingeboren und wuchs in einer strengen religiösen Gemeinschaft auf. Im Alter von 17 Jahren entschloss er sich, heimlich und mitten in der Nacht, die Gemeinde zu verlassen, um ein neues Leben zu beginnen.
Growing Up Amish ist ein beeindruckendes Dokument einer Identitätssuche: Mit seinen Memoiren gibt Ira Wagler exklusive Eindrücke in das Leben der Old World Amish.

Weitere Infos und Kontakt:

The event is aimed at students in all courses of study (B.A./B.Ed., M.A.). For further information or preliminary information on studying abroad for those who cannot come, please contact .

READING CONTEMPORARY POETRY
Tuesday, May 21, 2013, 10 am - 12 pm, P 105 (Philosophicum)

WRITING LIVES: MEMOIR AND POETRY
Tuesday, May 21, 2013, 4 pm - 6 pm, P 7 (Philosophicum)

Richard Hoffman is the author of the celebrated memoir, Half the House, of the poetry collections, Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, and Emblem, as well as of the short story collection Interference & Other Stories. After earning a BA in English from Fordham University, he attained an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Hoffman teaches at Harvard and Emerson College and was awarded numerous prizes for his works.

"Satirizing Politics in Early America: Caricatures in New York, Philadelphia, and New England, 1790-1830."

In the summer of 1790, political caricatures depicting humorous scenes of the removal of the first capital city of the United States in New York to Philadelphia filled the streets and tormented politicians. In the absence of a national art academy and fine artists, caricaturists – many unskilled – created lasting images, visual documents of a new nation discovering itself.

The lecture will explore the artists that designed such vitriolic images, how they were distributed, and the audience for political caricatures between 1790 and 1830. We will look at caricatures of presidents, notably Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, in addition to considering newspaper advertisements, diaries, and letters from the period in order to provide context for these satirical images.

Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee. Unentscheidbar weiß. Italienische Figuren im Hollywoodfilm zwischen „Rasse“ und „Ethnizität“.

Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheiding. Pluralismus, Grenzziehung und Gemeinschaftsbildung in nordamerikanischen religiösen Zeitschriften (SCHE1616/6-1).

Für weitere Informationen siehe Pressemitteilung der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität.

Stacy L. Leeds
Dean and Professor of Law (University of Arkansas)

Tribal Courts and Native American Governance

Thursday, December 20, 4-6pm, Fakultätssaal (Philosophicum)

Stacy Leeds serves as Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She teaches, writes and consults in the areas American Indian law, property, energy and natural resources, economic development, judicial administration and higher education.
In November 2011, Dean Leeds was appointed to serve a two-year term on the National Commission on Indian Trust Administration and Reform within the U.S. Department of the Interior. The commission will undertake a forward-looking, comprehensive evaluation of Interior’s trust management of nearly $4 billion in Native American trust funds.
Leeds is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a former Justice on the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court. She divides her time between downtown Fayetteville and the Illinois River near Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

Lecture Announcement (pdf)

On Tuesday, December 11, 2012, at 10a.m. in P 3, PD Dr. Nassim Balestrini (University of Regensburg) will be giving the annual

Karl Dietz Memorial Lecture

Her talk is entitled

Surgical Selves: Medicine and Womanhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne's and Miranda July's "Birthmark[s]"

The talk will discuss why the early twenty-first-century story "Birthmark" by the California-based indie filmmaker and performance artist Miranda July may be considered a noteworthy appropriation of Hawthorne's mid-nineteenth-century tale "The Birth-mark." Medical discourse, especially on linkages among empirical science, healing, and individual character, underscores the appropriative entanglement between Hawthorne's and July's stories because the narratives address medical and social notions of what it means to diagnose a problem and offer a solution. In both cases, beauty and integration into society rather than illness are in the foreground, as is the volatility of visual perception. For either story, the medical discourse of the respective time period helps illuminate the depiction of the patient, the physician, the medical procedure and its outcome, and the effect of the patient‘s state on her self-perception and on her perception by others.

At the conclusion of the lecture, the annual Hans-Galinsky-Prize for excellent papers and theses written in Early American Studies will be awarded.

Lecture Announcement (PDF)

Förderungsdauer: ein oder zwei Semester an der Gasthochschule. 

Eine INFORMATIONSVERANSTALTUNG findet am Donnerstag, 22.11.2012, 18.00-18.30 Uhr in P6 statt.

Info-Flyer (PDF)

Lara-Sophie Milagro, actress, director, and author will give a guest lecture in German on Wednesday, November 28, 2012, from 6-8pm in P 12 (Philosophicum):

Wer hat Angst vorm schwarzen Hamlet?

Zwischen Klischeerollen, Black-Facing, Widerstand und Aufbruch

Die Schauspielerin, Regisseurin und Autorin Lara-Sophie Milagro erläutert anhand der Geschichte des afro-deutschen Theater-Ensembles LABEL NOIR die Besetzungspolitik deutscher Theater sowie die Entstehung einer afro-deutschen Kultur- und Theaterszene. Dabei vergleicht Sie die hiesige Theaterszene mit dem aufkommenden afro-amerikanischen Theater der 60er und 70er Jahre und zieht Bilanz hinsichtlich der Situation schwarzer SchauspielerInnen in einem weitgehend weißen deutschen Theaterbetrieb.

See the Department's direct exchange website for additional information.

Please contact for any further questions.

Info Flyer (PDF)

Guest Lecture

Lakota Political Representation Traditionally and Today:
Wounded Knee 1973

Karen White Butterfly (Pine Ridge, South Dakota) and Dr. Sonja John (Berlin)

Thursday, July 12, 2012
4 p.m., Fakultätssaal, Philosophicum (Poster)

Karen White Butterly, full-blood Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation currently teaches Lakota language, culture as well as traditional herbs and plants classes at Oglala Lakota College. She has been with the college for sixteen years, the majority of which in the position of the director of the college center in Wounded Knee. She has strong ties to Wounded Knee district; that’s not only where she lives and works, but that is where her family comes from, where she owns land and where she is also engaged in political struggles and cultural conflicts since the Wounded Knee take-over in 1973.

Kindly supported by 

Michael Dopffel, American Studies / Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultät, Eberhard-Karls-University, Tübingen, will be giving a guest lecture at 10c.t. on Tuesday, July 10, 2012, in lecture hall 00-147, Welderweg 29 (Physiology Building)

Reading Transatlantic Narratives of Ghost Encounters as Transcendental Experiences

The talk will discuss how the fictionalization of 17th- and 18th-century empirical ghost narratives affected the originally didactic function of those texts. Ghost narratives cannot be conclusively determined in regard to their status (pragmatic or fictional) and intention (primarily didactic or entertaining). The talk will therefore discuss the detachment of the ghost story from its theological context and illuminate the functional changes that went along with it. Consequently, one question addressed in the talk will be whether the inclusion of fictional elements into these otherwise factual encounters not only alters their function in regard to author and audience, but whether they do not in fact enhance religious affectation in a way specific to literature. The talk will thus examine both theological and literary theories of the effect of the divine and of fiction upon the reader.

The lecture is sponsored by IANAS

Themenabend Contemporary Australia
mit Lesung in englischer Sprache von
Kim Scott

Dienstag, 3. Juli 2012, 20 Uhr (Poster)
Gutenberg-Buchhandlung Dr. Kohl (Große Bleiche 29-31)

Kim Scott ist ein mehrfach preisgekrönter australischer Aborigine-Schriftsteller und Professor für Literatur an der Curtin University in Perth. Kim Scott hat neben drei Romanen auch ein Kinderbuch, Kurzgeschichten und Lyrik verfasst. In seinem monumentalen Werk Kayang and Me (2005) erzählt er darüber hinaus zusammen mit Hazel Brown die Geschichte der Noongar. Sein wohl bekanntester Roman, Benang: From the Heart (1999) wurde mit zahlreichen Preisen ausgezeichnet, unter anderem mit dem bedeutendsten Literaturpreis Australiens, dem Miles Franklin Literary Award. Kim Scott war damit der erste Aborigine-Preisträger dieser Auszeichnung. In seinem neuesten Werk That Deadman Dance (2010) setzt er sich mit den frühen Kontakten zwischen Europäern und Aborigines an der australischen Westküste im frühen 19. Jahrhundert auseinander. Mit That Deadman Dance gewann Kim Scott bereits zum zweiten Mal den Miles Franklin Literary Award.  2012 wurde er zum Western Australian of the Year gewählt.

Alle Interessierten sind herzlich willkommen!
Der Eintritt ist frei.

International Symposium
Bridging the Health Divide: Aboriginal Communities and Cultural Respect

Program/Flyer

Tuesday, July 3
9:00-17:00, Senatssaal (NatFak)

Revolution and the Historical Novel: Paradigm and Recent Transformations

Why have so many of the great historical novels concerned revolution? From the time of Walter Scott to the near present, what fictional conventions proved effective in describing both the promise and the threat of continuing revolution? The talk will end with reflections on recent developments in the historical novel, particularly Gore Vidal‘s seven volume "Narratives of Empire."

The lecture is sponsored by IANAS

Julia Straub, Oberassistentin of Literatures in English at the University of Berne, Switzerland, will be giving a guest lecture at 10c.t. on Tuesday, June 5, 2012, in lecture hall 00-147, Welderweg 29 (Physiology Building).

Reading the First American Anthologies as Cultural Texts

Anthologies tend to be seen as handy devices for the classroom. Most students of English are familiar with the Norton and Heath Anthology series; for many students what goes into these major anthologies constitutes English respectively American literature. In this paper I will approach the genre of the anthology by asking the question whether it makes sense to think of them as cultural texts. Focusing on early American anthologies from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I will trace the interplay of processes of selection and preservation that are essential to anthologies. They are, after all, important tools for the formation of canons. I will then broaden my discussion by showing that apart from shaping curricula and the canon, anthologies exert another important function: they act as media of cultural memory.

The lecture is sponsored by IANAS

.

Varieties of Cultural Difference:
Exploring Otherness at the Crossroads of Language, Culture and Literature

Am Freitag, den 25.05.2012, findet im Fakultätssaal des Philosophicums eine Tagung der Junior-Professoren Birgit Däwes und Marcus Callies unter dem Titel Varieties of Cultural Difference: Exploring Otherness at the Crossroads of Language, Culture and Literature statt.

Programmübersicht

Monday, May 14, 2012
from
4 p.m. - 6 p.m.
in
Fakultätssaal (above P 4)

the American Studies Department and the Abteilung Internationales (International Office) of JGU will inform students about opportunities for studying abroad. If you are interested in spending a semester or a year in the United States, you are strongly encouraged to visit!

Kindly supported by 

Ecocriticism—most generally defined as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (Glotfelty)—has become an increasingly popular methodological paradigm for literary studies. In Native American and First Nations Studies, however, the coordinates for a fruitful critical investment in environmentalist issues are still being mapped. Common stereotypes, such as the wilderness topos, the “ecological Indian,” or the keeper of a planetary spirituality, are difficult to overcome. In lectures by internationally renowned guest speakers as well as in discussions of their talks, we will systematically explore the relationship between indigenous cultures (in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Asia, and New Zealand) and the “environment” in the widest sense—as place, land, nature, wilderness, and “alterNative” space.

Our guests include Joni Adamson, Graham Huggan, Hsinya Huang, Hubert Zapf, Alfred Hornung, Catrin Gersdorf, Kylie Crane, and Micha Edlich.

The program can be found here.

Contact: Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee or Jun.-Prof. Dr. Birgit Däwes

Drew Hayden Taylor - Ongoing Adventures of a Blue-Eyed Ojibway
Monday, April 23
16:00-18:00, Fakultätssaal (Poster)

An Ojibway from the Curve Lake First Nations, Drew Hayden Taylor has worn many hats in his literary career, from performing stand-up comedy at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. to lecturing at the British Museum on the films of Sherman Alexie. Over the last two decades, he has been an award-winning playwright (with over 70 productions of his work), a journalist/columnist (with a column in five newspapers across the country), short-story writer, novelist, scriptwriter (The Beachcombers, North of Sixty etc.), and librettist. Self-described as a contemporary storyteller, he has worked on over 17 documentaries exploring the Native experience. After the success of his first novel, The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel, his second novel, Motorcycles and Sweetgrass, was published in 2010, followed by his newest play, Dead White Writer on the Floor in 2011.

Drew Hayden Taylor will read from The Berlin Blues, a comedy about German-Aboriginal relations, and from his latest novel, Motorcycles and Sweetgrass.

Radical Revisionism and the Self-Substitutive Logic of the New American Studies

The lecture addresses what Winfried Fluck has called the “cultural radicalism” inherent in the revisionist program of the New Americanists (a loose group of scholars including Donald Pease, John Carlos Rowe, David Reynolds, Myra Jehlen, and others). For Fluck, this “radicalism” entails that professional advancement is only possible by negating the research positions of other scholars, resulting in a hopeless fragmentation of meaning.The aim of this lecture is two-fold. First, it intends to arrive at a better understanding of the institutional logic underlying this “cultural radicalism.” Second, drawing on these insights, it seeks to historicize what Donald Pease calls the “paradigm dramas” involved in the conflict between the “Old” and the “New” Americanists by pointing out a number of continuities (as well as differences) between the two generations.

On the first day of 2012, the American Studies Department of Mainz University wishes a Happy New Year to all students, friends, and colleagues!

We will be celebrating our 60-year anniversary this year and be the host of the annual conference of the German Association of American Studies.

We hope you will continue to enjoy your time here as a student, your work with us as our colleagues, and be successful in whatever endeavors you have set yourself for 2012.

Eva Boesenberg
(Professor of American Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Crisis? What's Crisis? Money and Gender in Naturalism.

After the lecture, this year's Hans Galinsky Award for excellent students' seminar papers and theses will be granted out.

Announcement Flyer (PDF)

Whose Story is American Religion?

The Parallel Lives of Daniel Boone and Joshua, the Mohican

The lecture will explore the parallels between the lives of Daniel Boone, the famed American pioneer (1734-1820) and Joshua (1742-1806), a Mohican Indian, whose parents were among the first Indians to be baptized by Moravian missionaries.Both men were born in the East, and moved steadily westward during their lifetimes, on roughly parallel routes. Both men lived much of their lives in the context of war, but while Boone was an active participant, Joshua and his community continued to move west seeking escape from war. Boone died of old age, while Joshua went to a fiery death as an accused witch at the hands of the Shawnee Prophet. Boone became a legend during his own life, while Joshua has remained consigned to a few footnotes. The parallels and the discrepancies of these two lives prompt further reflection on how we tell the story of migration and the story of American religion.

Announcement Flyer (PDF)

On

Tuesday, November, 29, 2011

from

2.00-2.30 pm

in P 201

we would like to welcome all students interested in participating the ERASMUS exchange program: both B.A. and M.A. students in American Studies, LA English and B.Ed. students of English. 

Announcement_Flyer.pdf

Moby-Dick is often considered the “Great American Novel,“ and rightly so. Quakers, Native Americans, and die-hard Calvinists stalk its pages, and capitalism, imperialism, and industrialism motivate its characters. It is also a highly visual novel, and has frequently appeared in illustrated form from comic books to expensive limited editions. Although some of Melville‘s visual allusions are nationalistic, their predominant sources are international and historical, crossing boundaries of space and time through artistic allusions that expand the book‘s significance to a global scale. Identifying, understanding, and most important graphically representing the novel‘s iconography is one of the primary aims of the Melville Electronic Library, a website under development at Hofstra University that will provide readers with a more complete range of visual understanding and an appreciation of the book‘s transnational scope.

Announcement Flyer (PDF)

 On

Wednesday, November 16, 2011,

from

6-8pm,

in

P 7,

the American Studies department will host an information event on this year's direct exchange program with its American partner universities. We would like to welcome all students interested in participating in the program, both B.A. and M.A. students in American Studies and B.Ed. students of English.

Please note the change of rooms!

Announcement flyer

This is the first life sign of the excursion going to Virginia from Oct. 3 to 15. Currently, we are located in Winchester, Virginia, where we visited the Shenandoah University (approx. 3,000 students, ranging from health care to liberal arts) on Oct. 4. With Prof. Warren Hofstra, who is the expert on local history, we also had a short run through the city of Winchester where we saw historic buildings in the downtown area. He also gave us a fascinating introduction into Shenandoah Valley, a region known for its beauty all over the world. The next day, we also had a tour of the Belle Grove Plantation established by Isaac Hite Jr. in the early 18th century. Moreover, we took a short hike in the Shenandoah National Park. Also, the fun aspect is not to be disregarded. While having the perfect sunshine weather, we also enjoyed a pub crawl in Winchester.  

Anna Katharina Sinn, Miriam Strieder

Further updates of the Virginia Excursion are now available at the excursion team's web diary:

Virginia Excursion Diary

 ... 

"We want to study the history of the so-called German Settlements in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and the ethnic and religious developments in the history of settlement in the South," says Prof. Oliver Scheiding, co-organizer of the trip together with Dr. Karl Ortseifen. Apart from settlement history, the 150 year anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War in Virginia and Maryland is a focus of the trip. American Studies partner universities, such as Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia, and Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, are closely cooperating with Mainz in this excursion, as is the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The field trip offers Mainz students the unmatched opportunity to close engage with the cultural interpretation of landscapes and spaces such as national parks, symbolic places and museums, with architecture and the materiality of settlements, memorials, of reenactments of colonial life, and Indian and African-American culture.

German Press Release

Rather than privileging a specific perspective (race, gender, nation, etc.), this conference wants to pursue holistic approaches to cultural and social issues in contemporary American literature. The conference will trace collective social imaginaries in contemporary American literature, including, among others, the post-9/11 novels of Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, and Khaled Hosseini, works by Chris Bachelder, Maxine Hong Kingston, Thomas Pynchon, and Susan Sontag, as well as contemporary American poetry and ethnic drama.

Program

Abstracts

Conference Homepage

For more details, click below.

 ... 

Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheiding has been named general editor of the society's journal Amerikastudien/American Studies by the Board of the  German Society for American Studies (DGfA) at this year's annual conference at Regensburg. The largest-circulation journal of a European American Studies society will be published in Mainz starting with Volume 56/2011.

 ... 

Bruce Robbins is the Old Dominion Professor in the Humanities, and the author of numerous books, including "Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress" (NYU, 1999), "The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below" (Columbia, 1986; Duke pb 1993), "Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture" (Verso, 1993), and "Upward Mobility and the Common Good" (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007). He has edited "Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics" (Minnesota, 1990) and "The Phantom Public Sphere" (Minnesota, 1993) and co-edited "Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation" (Minnesota, 1998). He was co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 to 2000. His talk will discuss the link between liberalism and the politics of literature.  

Martin Puchner is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. After studying philosophy, history, and literature at the University of Konstanz, the Università di Bologna, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Irvine, he earned a Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1998. Puchner approaches philosophy and literature primarily through its relation to drama and theater, leading him to a new understanding of such figures as Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Burke, Deleuze, and Badiou. This work is articulated in his most recent book "The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy" (Oxford UP, 2010). Puchner also serves as the new general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature and the Norton Anthology of Western Literature. He also writes for The London Review of Books, Bookforum, Raritan Review, and N+1. His lecture will address the ways in which literature builds worlds.    

Djelal Kadir is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. Besides "Memos from the Besieged City", he has authored, among other books, "Questing Fictions" (1986), "Columbus and the Ends of the Earth" (1992), "The Other Writing" (1993), and co-edited the Longman Anthology of World Literature (2003; 2009) and the Comparative History of Latin American Literary Cultures (2004). Djelal Kadir is the Founding President of the International American Studies Association, a member of the Advisory Board of the American Comparative Literature Association, a Fellow and Board member of the Stockholm Collegium of World Literary History, of Synapsis: The European School of Comparative Studies, and of the Institute for World Literature. His lecture will discuss literary works as performatives, or "acts" of literature.  

Flyer

Fakultätssaal, Philosophicum, Friday, June 24, 2-6pm

Further information on the workshop Mapping the World, Mapping Literature

David Damrosch taught for three decades at Columbia before moving in 2009 to Harvard, where he chairs the Department of Comparative Literature. A past president of the American Comparative Literature Association, he has written widely on comparative and world literature. He is credited for having reintroduced the world literature discourse into our contemporary academia. His work has been translated into an eclectic variety of languages, including Chinese, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Vietnamese. His talk will address the impossible possibility of worldly imaginary in the nation state.  

Roman Schmidt is an editor at Courrier international in Paris. He teaches at Sciences Po, works on and with cultural journals across Europe, and researches transnational publishing networks. He will present a genealogical history of European literary journalism, with a focus on the transnational aspect of this genealogy.  

Gerald Posselt teaches at Vienna University, and has published extensively on deconstruction, gender issues, and recently post-colonial discourse from a Europeanist perspective. His paper reads Kafka's Penal Colony from a post-colonial point of view.

Fakultätssaal, Philosophicum, Friday, June 17, 2-6 p.m.

Further Information on the workshop "Mapping the World, Mapping Literature"

The Revision of America: Memory, Power, and the Plurality of Early American Cartographies.

P 2, Tuesday, June 7, 6 p.m.

More Information:

The Object of Maps in circa 1776: Spectacle and Spatial Work on the Eve of the American Revolution.  

P 3, Thursday, June 9, 6 p.m.

The Beautiful and Sublime Objects of Early U.S.Expansion

P 205, Tuesday, May 31, 6 p.m.

Further Information 

American Federalism and the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire: Why James Madison took a genuine interest in the "confederate republic of Germany"

P 205, Tuesday, May 17, 18 p.m.

Further Information 

P 1, Wednesday, March 16, 6-8 p.m.

Erik Redling, Visiting Professor at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg will be giving a guest lecture sponsored by IANAS.
P 105, Thursday, February 3, 12 p.m.

Further Information

Further Information
Primary Readings

The Conquest of Antiquity. Territorial Expansion and Romantic Scientific Discourse in America.

Gesa Mackenthun, Professor of North American Litature and Culture at Rostock University will be giving a guest lecture sponsored by IANAS.

P 1, Thursday, December 16, 12 p.m.

Further Information

August 9-19, 2011

with a special interest in the early settlement history and colonial government of Virginia and Maryland.

The field trip is co-organized by Shenandoah University, Winchester, VA, and Hood College, Frederick, MD.

An information session will be held on Thursday, November 25, at 6pm in P1 07

Sandra Petrulionis, Professor of English and American Studies at Penn State University, Altoona, will be giving a guest lecture sponsored by IANAS.

P 12, Monday, November 22, 10 a.m. c.t.

Further Information

Jason Bell, Ph.d., currrently Fulbright Junior Researcher at Universität Göttingen
will be giving a guest lecture sponsored by IANAS.

P 11, Tuesday, November 23, 4 p.m.

Further information

Further Information

For further information, see Gepris.

Summer School Homepage

Alfred Bendixen, Professor of English at Texas A&M University and founder of the American Literature Association, will be giving a guest lecture sponsored by IANAS.

P 109 a, Tuesday, June 22, 12 p.m. - 2 p. m.

further information

Further Information

Kim Scott (UT Curtin/Perth), Australian writer, will be giving a lecture and reading from his most recent novel.

P 2, Monday, June 21, 2010, 6 p. m. - 8 p. m.

 further information

Panel Discussion with Professor Oliver Scheiding (Mainz), Professor Werner Sollors (Harvard), and Professor Michael Boyden (Ghent).

Further Information

P 108, Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 6 - 8 p.m.

Shani Mootoo, Canadian novelist and instructor at the School of Continuing Studies - Creative Writing - at the University of Toronto, will be giving a guest lecture in which she reads from her latest novel Valmiki's Daughter (2008).

Further information

Stadthistorisches Museum, Zitadelle, Bau D, May 16 to October 31, 2010

 In May 1891, the Mainz Schlossplatz was filled with people. Buffalo Bill was in town: 175 Indians, cowboys, and scouts, forty horses, and twenty buffalo presented astonished Mainz inhabitants with life in the "Wild West". The exhibition and accompanying book present Buffalo Bills 1890/91 tour through Germany and offers glimpses at the real situation of Native Americans. It also address the Native American imagery in Germany, created by writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Karl May, and letters from immigrants.

P 110, Tuesday, June 15, 2010, 4 p. m. - 6 p. m.

Martin Klepper, Professor for American Literature and Culture at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, will be giving a guest lecture sponsored by IANAS.

further information

Jane Feuer, Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, and Fulbright Distinguished Professor in American Studies at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, will be giving a guest lecture sponsored by IANAS.

Further Information on the Guest Lecture

Der Kampf um die Bürgerrechte, afroamerikanische GIs und Deutschland

Mainz City Hall, April 8-21 2010

The Struggle for Civil Rights, African-American GIs, and Germany -- an exihibition  curated by Prof. Dr. Maria Höhn of Vassar College and Dr. Martin Klimke of the German Historical Institute, Washington D.C. -- is part of cooperative research initiative between Vassar College, the GHI, and the Heidelberg Center of American Studies of Heidelberg University. It explores the connection between the basing of American forces in Germany and the growth of the civil rights movement in the United States. In 2009, the project was awarded the Julius E. Williams Distinguished Community Service Award by the NAACP.

Rhineland-Palatinate  was home to the largest U.S. bases in Germany after World War II.

Using photographs and historical artifacts, the exhibition tells the largely unknown history of African-American GIs in Germany, expresses their experiences and throws lights on the actors fighting against discrimination and racisms with the Germany-based soldiers.

Exhibition Flyer Download