OI | Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies

June 20 – California’s Counterculture Turns 180 Degrees South: Obsessively Documenting Drop-Outs While Saving the Planet 🗓

Prof. Marcus Reisenleitner (York U)

June 20, 2018, 4 p.m.–6 p.m. (c.t.), Philosophicum II, 00-212

When President Trump announced a reduction of protected federal land in two of Utah’s national monuments, clothing outfitter Patagonia, protested, changing their homepage to a black-and-white motto “This Land is Your Land?” and joining a lawsuit against the president. The move continues the privately held company’s tradition of fighting for environmental causes. Its founder, Yvon Chouinard, distinguished himself as a documentary filmmaker with Mountain of Storms (1968) in a way similar to Bruce Brown’s father of surfing documentaries, The Endless Summer (1966). Both documentaries feature young male Californian drop-outs travelling to remote locations of natural beauty with little regard for the geopolitics of the time, setting the tone for a tradition of documenting the often politically naïve, individualistic and rebellious reactions to suburban America’s mainstream and pursuing a vague countercultural notion of escaping consumer culture while piggybacking on American imperialism’s opening up routes to remote locations.

The talk discusses the reverberations of these documentaries’ environmental and geopolitical imaginaries in two recent engagements with the tradition: Chouinard‘s 180º South: Conquerors of the Useless (2010) and William Finnegan‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (2015).

May 23 – Town Hall Meeting with U.S. Consul General James Herman 🗓

Events, Lectures, News

The Future of Transatlantic Relations: A Town Hall Meeting

James W. Herman (U.S. Consul General, Frankfurt)

May 23, 2018, 4-6 p.m., P 5 (Philosophicum)

The Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies invites all students and faculty to a open-mike hall meeting with U.S. Consul General James W. Herman (U.S. Consulate, Frankfurt), centered on the question of what the future of transatlantic relations are. With a format geared towards open discussion and a question and answer approach, this town hall meeting gives everyone an opportunity to get an idea of where U.S.-German relations, and the transatlantic exchange in general, stand today, and where they may end up in the future, from one of the most important U.S. representatives in Europe.

Jim Herman assumed charge of the U.S. Consulate General in Frankfurt on August 14, 2015. A career Foreign Service Officer, he is the Ambassador’s representative to the German states of Hessen, Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Württemberg, and Saarland. As such, he leads the largest U.S. consulate in the world.

Interns Wanted!

Lectures, News

Studentische Unterstützung amerikanischer und kanadischer Austauschlektor*innen

Sie studieren BA AMERICAN STUDIES im Kernfach und möchten sich im Wintersemester 2018/19 ein Praktikum am Obama Institute als „Independent Studies“ anrechnen lassen?

Ihre Aufgaben:
Sie unterstützen die Austauschlektor*innen bei:

Behördengängen (z.B. Gang zu Einwohnmeldeamt, Krankenversicherung, Eröffnung eines Bankkontos)
der Einfindung in das soziale und akademische Leben in Mainz
der Orientierung auf dem Campus (UB, Campusführung, Jogustine, etc.) und
der Vorbereitung der Lehrveranstaltungen (Recherchearbeiten, Zusammenstellung und Organisation des Readers, etc.)

Ihre Voraussetzungen:

Sie haben Interesse an interkulturellem Austausch
Sie sind organisiert und zuverlässig
Sie sind kommunikativ und kontaktfreudig
Sie sind ortskundig und zeitlich flexibel
Sie sprechen Deutsch auf muttersprachlichem Niveau und haben sehr gute Englischkenntnisse
Sie sind sicher in Wort und Schrift im Umgang mit Behörden

Wir bieten:

ein Praktikum äquivalent zu einem Betriebspraktikum von 4 Wochen (Selbststudium 160 Stunden, 5LP = „Independent Studies“, Modul GMK4: Cultural Studies and Professional Orientation)
Einblicke in die Arbeitsabläufe wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens und akademischer Professionalisierung
die Möglichkeit Ihre interkulturelle (Übersetzungs-)Kompetenz zu trainieren

Interesse? Dann senden Sie bitte (1) ein kurzes Motivationsanschreiben (inkl. Kontaktdaten; max. 1 Seite) und (2) einen tabellarischen Lebenslauf per Email an Herrn Dr. Damien Schlarb (schlarbd@uni-mainz.de). Einsendeschluss ist der 15. Juni 2018. Wir werden Sie dann zu einem persönlichen Auswahlgespräch Ende Juni einladen.

May 3 – Beautiful Deceptions: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Early American Novel

Lectures, News

Philipp Schweighauser (University of Basel)

May 2, 2018, 10-12 a.m., P 10

This talk starts with a brief overview of the three main subgenres of the early American novel—the picaresque, the gothic, and the sentimental—before zooming in on deception. The stories these novels tell abound in con men, seducers, and deceivers that consistently dupe their victims. Yet deception happens not only within these texts; deception is also what fictions do as they hoodwink readers into taking fictional worlds as the real thing. When the first American novels were published, no one noticed this more clearly than the detractors of the anti-fiction movement, who denounced fictions as lies. I take these attacks seriously as I read deception both as a subject matter and a literary function. I aim to supplement dominant political readings of these novels with aesthetic readings. Understanding aesthetics both as a theory of art and beauty and „the science of sensuous cognition,“ I argue that these novels‘ negotiations of deception respond as much to shifts in the social order as they do to reconsiderations of the place of literature, art, and sensory perception in the early republic.

Philipp Schweighauser is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Basel, CH.

April 24 – Re-Mapping the Canon: Early American Newspaper Printers and Their Transnational Routes

News

Mark Noonan (New York City College of Technology)

April 24, 2018, 6-8 p.m., P 103

In her recent book Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time, Wai Chee Dimock writes: “For too long, American literature has been seen as a world apart, sufficient unto itself, not burdened by the chronology and geography outside the nation … what we call ‘American’ literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for a much more complex tangle of relations.” In part a response to Dimock’s claim, this talk addresses the transnational routes and roots of colonial era literature with a focus on three extraordinary printers: the English Quaker William Bradford, his German apprentice John Peter Zenger, and “liberty” printer John Holt. The talk incorporates the work of transnational scholars while adding theoretical concerns advocated by periodical scholars to further “thicken” and “lengthen“ our understanding of the American literary canon.