Kategorie: Allgemein

January 23-25, 2020

In recent years, the field of human-animal studies has experienced an unprecedented growth. Indeed, the animal turn, as Harriet Ritvo called this paradigm shift, has promoted “new understandings of the role of animals in the past and at present.” Among other aspects, scholars have begun to explore the agency of animals and to discuss their influence on storytelling and the construction of knowledge. Given these developments and the emergence of human-animal studies as a distinct institutionalized discourse, it is somewhat surprising that the questions of how we teach human-animal studies and how this field may change didactics have received little attention.

Therefore, the symposium “Teaching Human-Animal Studies” aims to explore different ways of teaching human-animal studies in school and university classrooms. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the connections between teaching human-animal studies and

• animal auto/biographies
• interspecies communication 
• literary, cinematic, and comic animal studies
• historical human-animal studies and animal historicity
• practices of human-animal relations
• animal spaces, animal places, and animal geographies
• the material turn in human-animal studies

We welcome papers addressing these issues from inter- and transdisciplinary angles as well as from across human-animal studies disciplines, including geography, anthropology, literary studies, art history, history, cultural studies, and philosophy.

The symposium, which is organized by Micha Edlich, Andreas Hübner, and Maria Moss under the auspices of the Institute of English Studies, will be held at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg from January 23 to 25, 2020. Please send your abstract (in English or German) of no more than 300 words and a brief biography to teaching.has@leuphana.de by August 1, 2019. Presentations will be 25 minutes followed by a discussion.

Select papers will be published. 

Dear friends and colleagues,

we cordially invite you to join us for our international workshop “Indigenous North American Futurities: Archives, Source Codes, Beginnings” at the Europa-Universität Flensburg (EUF):

where: HEL 064, EUF (Auf dem Campus 1, 24943 Flensburg)
when: June 17, 9:00 a.m. – 2:15 p.m.

Framing Indigenous people as members of bygone civilizations is, unfortunately, not a thing of the past. From James Earle Fraser’s famous sculpture End of the Trail to Hollywood blockbusters like Dances with Wolves, Indigenous cultures have long been displaced into nostalgic obsolescence. These images, while widespread, do not go unchallenged, and Indigenous cultural expressions abound with imaginaries of the future in textual narratives, digital media, visual arts, and public spaces, such as museums or websites. As part of our DFG-funded research project on Indigenous North American engagements of temporality and the future in museums and digital environments, this workshop sets out to revise hegemonic historiography and literary canons, seeking to map broader understandings of temporality and futurity within American studies at large. Speakers include: Grace Dillon (Portland State University), Sarah Henzi (University of Montreal), Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne (Portland State University), Geneviève Susemihl (CAU Kiel), Kristina Baudemann (EUF), and Birgit Däwes (EUF). For more information, please refer to the program (attached) and to our website at www.uni-flensburg.de/nativefutures.

Please join us to learn, listen, and discuss! We welcome students, teachers, members of the EUF and of other universities – and cordially extend our invitation to anyone interested in the Indigenous future. The workshop is kindly supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and by Europa-Universität Flensburg. There is no conference fee, but e-mail registration is requested by June 7, 2019 at native.futures@uni-flensburg.de.

We look forward to meeting you there,
Birgit Däwes and Kristina Baudemann

Festakt to celebrate Prof. Dr. Susanne Rohr (Hamburg)

Organized by Marius Henderson, Julia Lange and Jolene Mathieson

This symposium explores current trends in contemporary American literature and examines American literature’s continued importance as a global cultural mediator. At a time when nationalist tendencies in the United States as well as in Europe intensify, fictional texts and their critical potential for reflection acquire considerable social significance, particularly as promoters of transnational exchange. A relevant question in this context is to what extent this millennia-old cultural technique can reflect profound social upheavals in light of changed media conditions. Nineteen renowned scholars in the field of American Studies and related disciplines address this question through readings of the following topics:

1) the legacy of postmodernism and its contemporary revisions,
2) new practices of adaptation and appropriation,
3) neorealism and its revisions of old realist conventions,
4) the new gender, class and race politics of reading and writing fiction,
5) new American environmental fiction, and
6) the relationship between philosophy and poetics.

For more information, please see the symposium website.

Lecture by

Prof. Dr. Susanne Rohr

„Have Representations of the Holocaust Become Boring After All? An Attempt at Inventory-Taking“

The lecture will be given in the context of the doctoral colloquium of the Institute of English and American Studies.

Universität Hamburg, Institute of English and American Studies, Überseering 35 (room 02019), 22297 Hamburg

Guest lecture by

Prof. Dr. Herwig Friedl (Berlin)

Guest lecture by

Prof. Dr. Bettina Friedl (Berlin)

„The Munkacsi Effect: Fashion Photography as Performance, 1930-1960″

— coming soon —