Welcome

Internationales Forschungskolloquium: Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies
Donnerstags 10-12, P 204 (Program)

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.

Christian Horn, exam candidate at the American Studies Department, has been awarded a three-week research scholarship at the Joseph Horner Memorial Library, Philadelphia, by the German Historical Institute (Washington D.C.) and the German Society of Pennsylvania. Mr. Horn's studies on German-American travel literature in the 19th century are the basis of his Master's Thesis, under the advisorship of Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheiding of the CEAS.

Michael Boyden, Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Ghent, Belgium, will be giving a guest lecture at 12c.t. on Thursday, February 9, 2012, in P 108:

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.

This year's Karl Dietz Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the American Studies Department and the Interdisciplinary Working Group North American Studies (IANAS), will be given on Thursday, December 15, 12-2pm, at Hörsaal 18, Biology Department, Johann-Joachim-Becher Weg 7.

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)

Rachel M. Wheeler, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Religious Studies, IUPUI, and Senior Fulbright Researcher, Mainz, will be giving a guest lecture at 6p.m., Senatssaal, Naturwissenschaftliches Fakultätsgebäude:

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

 Prof. Dennis Berthold, Texas A & M University, will be giving a lecture at 10am c.t. in P 15.

Transnational Iconography in Herman Melville‘s Moby-Dick

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

 ...  

Students of the American Studies Department will be undertaking a field trip to Virginia and Maryland, USA, from October 3 to October 14, 2011. The focus of the trip is on the history of German settlements in the area; fourteen students will participate in the trip organized by the Center of Early American Studies of the American Studies Department, which ties in with a Pennsylvania excursion undertaken in 2009. The German Academic Exchange Service is sponsoring the trip as part of its PROMOS program.

"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

From October 1, 2011, Prof. Rachel Wheeler (Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis, IUPUI) will be a Senior Fulbright Professor at the American Studies Department, engaged both in teaching and research. Prof. Wheeler is the author of To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast, published by Cornell UP in 2008. A historian and religion scholar, Prof. Wheeler's current focus is the study of autobiography in the 18th century. 

 Scholars from the American Studies Department have participated in a trinational summer school and a transnational symposium, organized by Peking University, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, and Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, in Beijing. The topic of the event was "World Culture, Global South, and Literature." Among the speakers were Alfred Hornung (JGU), Oliver Scheiding (JGU), Glenn T. Eskew (GSU), John Burrison (GSU), Xu Dejin (UIBE), Zhao Baisheng (PU), Gu Zhengkun (PU), Gayatri Spivak (Columbia), Femi Osofisan (University of Ibadan), Bhekiziziwe Petersen (University of Witwatersrand) and Robert Dixon (University of Sydney).

Fakultätssaal, Philosophicum

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

 Paula A. Trichler, Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, will offer a workshop on "Illness Narratives, HIV/AIDS, and Serial Drama" on Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 4pm, in room P 205, Philosophicum.

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 (Columbia),  Martin Puchner (Harvard), Djelal Kadir (Penn State)  

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 (Harvard), Roman Schmidt (Sciences-Po), Gerald Posselt (Vienna)

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"

Martin Brückner - Associate Professor - English Department, Center for Material Culture Studies at University of Delaware will be giving a guest lecture sponsored by SOCUM.

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

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

On Wednesday, June 8, all day, Prof. Martin Brückner will be holding a workshop on "The Object of Maps in America: Spatial Work and Material Culture" sponsored by SOCUM. The workshop will take place at the Fakultätssaal in the Philosophicum.

More Information:

Martin Brückner - Associate Professor - English Department, Center for Material Culture Studies at University of Delaware will be giving a guest lecture sponsored by SOCUM.

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.

Edward Cahill - Assistant Professor of English/Acting Director of American Studies at Fordham University, The Jesuit University of New York - will be giving a guest lecture sponsored by IANAS.

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

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

Further Information 

 

PD Dr. Jürgen Overhoff - Historic Education and Contemporary History at Universität Hamburg will be giving a guest lecture sponsored by IANAS.

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 

 

 

On May 3, 2011, from 4-6pm in P 1, the American Studies department and the International Office will inform students about study abroad possibilities in the United States for students of B.Ed. and Lehramt English, B.A., M.A., and older courses of study in American Studies. The lecture will address exchange programs offered by the DAAD, Fulbright, and the Department Direct Exchange. If you have any interest in going to the United States, this events offers you an opportunity to be informed about all the available programs and to ask any questions you may have about what you can do, how you should do it, and when you should be beginning to do it.

Professor Gerald Vizenor (University of New Mexico) and Professor Deborah Madsen (University of Geneva) will be holding a guest lecture and round table discussion organized by the Center for Comparative Indigenous Studies.

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

Make 'Em Shout a Crazy Jargon: The Metaphoric Dimension of Jazz Poetry.

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

On Thursday, December 16, Prof. Gesa Mackenthun, Professor of American Studies at the University of Rostock, will be holding a colloquium on the subject of "John Lloyd Stephens, Archaeologist, and the Art of Imperial Self-Fashioning". The colloquium will take place from 9-10.15am at the small library of the Department of English and Linguistics, 01-612, in classroom 01-618.

Further Information
Primary Readings

Guest Lecture Gesa Mackenthun

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

Students applying in the Department's Direct Exchange Program can get their transcripts or Scheinaufstellungen certified:

Tu	We	Th	Fr
2pm-6pm International Office	10am-2pm American Studies R 02-571	10-12am International Office	9am-1pm International Office

Please make an appointment for these hours (except Thursdays) with Lukas Dausend, research assistant at the International Office and to Prof. Scheiding. If you don't make an appointment, certification will be contingent on other work demands.

The American Studies Department will be undertaking a field trip to Virginia, Maryland, and Washington D.C. from

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

Radicalizing the Moral Idealists: American Transcendentalists and Antislavery Reform

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

Aldo Leopold, Pragmatic  Personhood, and Environmental Ethics

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

On Friday, November 12, 2010, the American Studies Department's Prof. Mita Banerjee, in co-operation with the Frauenlob Gymnasium Mainz, will be hosting the School Meets University Day, offering students a unique chance to form closer connections to teachers and high school students and bridge the gap between their university education and their future profession as teachers.

Further Information

On Monday, November 8, 2010, from 2-4pm in the Fakultätssaal (above P 4), the American Studies Department will be informing about this year's direct exchange program with its American partner universities. The direct exchange program is aimed at Mainz American Studies students who are interested in a year-long stay at an American university. B.A. and B.Ed. students are especially invited to participate for fuller information on how to manage a stay abroad within their programs; the direct exchange program is open for students from the 3rd semester onwards, but 1st and 2nd semester students should also come for additional information on other exchange programs and as preparation for next year.

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has just announced that it is funding the research project "Life Writing in Early American Periodicals [Life Writing im Spiegel der amerikanischen Zeitschriftenliteratur] 1790-1830" with funds for both employees and material costs. The project, directed by Prof. Dr. Oliver Scheiding, is scheduled for two years, beginning November 1, 2010.

For further information, see Gepris.

From July 4 to July 16, the members of the American Studies Doctoral College "Life Writing" joined young scholars from Beijing and Atlanta at this year's Tri-national Summer School at Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, entitled "The South in the Age of Obama". They spent two weeks investigating the changing American South with noted Chinese, American and German scholars presenting their latest studies on the American South. One of the main focuses lay on the civil rights movement, for which Atlanta was one of the central points. Visits to the Martin Luther King Museum, the Carter Center, and antebellum plantation houses around Atlanta, guided by local experts, combined with intensive classroom work in an exceptional learning experience at this year's summer school.

Summer School Homepage

Summer School Short Film

Place and Perversion in Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

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

From June 21 to July 3, Prof. Deborah Madsen will be SOCUM Fellow at Mainz University. She will give the opening lecture on "Human Exceptionalism: Vizenor's Autogrammatological Critique of Ecologocentrism" at the Ecology and Life Writing Conference and participate in the Doctoral Colloquium classes on June 22nd, 24th and 29th on Gerald Vizenor and Native American life writing.

Further Information

"A Resilient Imprint"
P 110, Friday, June 18, 2010, 12p.m. - 2 p.m.

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

Life writing is one of the main research areas of American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. Recent research on texts from the colonial era to the present emphasizes transcultural and transnational aspects as central motifs and topics of life writing. The research group of our recently established doctoral college on “life writing” therefore looks at various technologies of the self within a global context and analyzes processes of transculturation within and beyond national borders. Current research projects of the department deal with the relations between life writing and democracy, migration, minorities, transculturality, and ecology, among others.

 

The program of the conference will consist of keynote lectures by established scholars in the field and workshop papers, arranged along the above topics. The conference will be open to the public and is coordinated with courses taught at Johannes Gutenberg University this academic year. It is also part of the doctoral college on life writing (a special program of support for the humanities, financed by Johannes Gutenberg University and the State of Rhineland Palatinate) and the trinational PhD-program of Johannes Gutenberg University, Georgia State University, and Peking University.  ...  

From the Frontline of Language Change in California

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

Professor Winfried Schleiner, Department of English at the University of California, Davis, will be giving a guest lecture sponsored by IANAS.

 further information

 

Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main, Campus Westend, IG Farben-Building, Room 411, 6 p.m.

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

Der Wilde Westen am Rhein - Buffalo Bill in Mainz

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.

Flyer (in German)

Narrative Identity and Depression Era Lives

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

Town Meetings of the Imagination: "Gilmore Girls" and "Northern Exposure"

P105, Thursday, May 6, 2010, 12a.m. - 2p.m.

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

Univ.-Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee has been appointed Research Professor of the Gutenberg Forschungskolleg. Prof. Banerjee is a Mainz graduate who received her PhD from Mainz University in American Studies in 2000 and her habilitation in 2003. She was Chair of American Studies at the University of Siegen from December 2004. Prof. Banerjee’s research into postcolonialism, ethnicity, and the extension of the field of American Studies into more distant and international topics have been at the forefront of American Studies for several years. Prof. Banerjee’s research group will focus on Indigenous Studies for a duration of five years. Prof. Banerjee’s publications include The Chutneyfication of History (2002), Race-ing the Century (2005), and most recently, Ethnic Ventriloquism (2008). The American Studies Department is happy to welcome back such a renowned scholar and wishes her the best of luck in her research endeavors.