July 4, 2024, 4-8 p.m., P4 & Foyer P2-P5 (Philosophicum)
What might the 4th of July mean to Americans and foreigners in general and especially in 2024?
From American Poetry to Money and American Identity to students’ takes on the meaning of the holiday: Join us in discussing the day’s importance and possible criticism but also in celebrating an informal Obama Institute summer get-together of students, faculty, and friends.
The OI will be hosting an informal first meet & greet for students and alumni of American Studies and cordially invites all students of the BA and MA programs to connect with each other and our alumni. This is your chance to talk about possible careers after finishing an American Studies program and ask any question you might have on how to make the most of your degree and ambitions.
Three alumnae of American Studies at JGU will speak about their jobs and their working experiences to students interested in finding out more about opportunities and perspectives for American Studies graduates.
The Indian Citizenship Act at 100:
Indigenous Rights, Indigenous Futures
Conference
June 19-22, 2024
University of Bordeaux-Montaigne, France
Together with the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne, the Virginia Commonwealth University, and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the Obama Institute is hosting an international conference on the centenary of the Indian Citizenship Act in Bordeaux, France.
Current and former members of the Obama Institute will chair panels and present papers amongst a large group of internationally renowned Indigenous Studies scholars. Check out and download the complete program here or visit the conference web page here.
Introduction by the Film’s Historical Adviser: Katherine Benton-Cohen (Georgetown University)
June 19, 2024, 6:00pm, N2, Muschel (Johann-Joachim-Becher-Weg 23)
FREE ADMISSION
The Obama Institute cordially invites everyone to a screening of Bisbee ’17 and its introduction by Katherine Benton-Cohen who served as the film’s historical adviser. Blending documentary and Western, the film explores the community reconciliation effort of the people of Bisbee, Arizona. With the event’s upcoming centennial, the town stages a reenactment of the 1917 deportation of striking Mexican and Eastern European migrant laborers to the New Mexican desert, awakening old resentments, shifting perspectives, and probing the relationship between truth, memory, and history. The film won the American Historical Association’s O’Connor 2019 prize for best documentary film.
Katherine Benton-Cohen is professor and director of doctoral studies in the department of history at Georgetown University. She is the author of Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Harvard, 2018) and Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Harvard, 2009). Benton-Cohen has held fellowships from Princeton Library, the New York Public Library, American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, amongst others. She has appeared in a variety of media outlets including the BBC, NPR, and PBS American Experience, and is currently writing a global history of the Phelps-Dodge copper-mining family, whose capitalist and philanthropic links between New York, the US-Mexico Borderlands, and the Middle East profoundly changed each region.
Beyond liberation or assimilation: LGBTQ rights, health care, and the limits of bodily autonomy in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s Jonathan Bell – University College London
Assessing our Relationship with Nature through the Environmental Humanities: A Bioethics Approach to Sarah Orne Jewett’s A White Heron (1886) Scott Pincikowksi – Hood College
Disappearing Landscapes/Disappearing Cultures: What happens to Language and Culture when Keystone Landscapes Disappear? Scott Pincikowksi – Hood College
Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission of 1907-1911 and the Origins of Modern Immigration Policy Katherine Benton-Cohen – Georgetown University
June 11 2.30–4pm, 01-618, kl. Bibl., Philosophicum
Migrants, Minorities, and Consumption (Colloquium: Transnational Approaches to American Studies) Katherine Benton-Cohen – Georgetown University
June 14 & 15 9am-5pm, 00.212, Philosophicum II
Creative Writing Workshop – OPEN TO EVERYONE Ian Afflerbach, University of North Georgia
Quiet Money: The Family Fortune that Transformed New York, the American Southwest, and the Modern Middle East Katherine Benton-Cohen – Georgetown University
Selective Anti-Imperialism, Settler Colonialism and the Lure of Racial Capitalist Progress in Spanish-Language Periodicals in Paris David Luis-Brown – Claremont Graduate University
Dos Hemisferios: Racial Capitalism and the Problem of Latinidad in Hispano-American Newspapers in Paris and New York City, 1852-1856 David Luis-Brown – Claremont Graduate University
