Events, Lectures, News
Bertrand van Ruymbeke (Université Paris 8)
May 15, 2019
10 a.m.-12 noon, N3 (Muschel)
How did the image of the New World evolve in France from the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 to the French Revolution in 1789? What was the intellectual and constitutional impact of the American revolution on pre-revolutionary French society? An original way to answer these two related questions is to look at prize-winning contests (concours) offered by the Académies. These contests were immensely popular in eighteenth-century France as several hundreds were organized, drawing thousands of memoirs over the course of the century. These essay contests bore on a wide range of topics in science, agriculture, history, law, medicine, commerce, gambling, fashion, and geography, as well as a myriad of regional issues, but also on the Atlantic World, slavery, the European «discovery» of the New World, the American revolution, colonization, and trade, particularly in the Académies of Pau, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, and Paris. Eloges competitions on major figures, historical or contemporaneous, related to New Worlds, such as Columbus, Franklin, Vergennes or Cook, were also held in the Académies of Marseille, Amiens, Cap François (on the island of Saint-Domingue), and Paris. Memoirs submitted to these contests, along with pamphlets, press articles, travel accounts, compilations of translated State Constitutions, and history books published on the American Revolution, offer a privileged view into a French—and to some extent European—collective reflection on the colonization of the New World and the birth of the American republic.
Bertrand van Ruymbeke is Professeur de Civilisation et d’Histoire Américaines at the Département d’Études des Pays Anglophones at Université Paris 8.
You can download the poster for the event here.
Events, Lectures, News
Denise Uyehara (Performance Artist)
February 8, 2019
10 a.m.-12 noon, P 103 (Philosophicum)
Denise Uyehara was supposed to be a “good girl” from the suburbs, but instead she turned out “bad.” What went wrong — or right — depends on who you ask. In her talk, she describes work at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, exploring her Okinawan and Japanese heritage and U.S. military occupation, performance as 1/4 of the Sacred Naked Nature Girls, Shooting Columbus, and forthcoming adventures.
Denise Uyehara is an interdisciplinary performance artist, interested in telling a story by any means necessary.
www.deniseuyehara.com
You can download the poster for the event here.
Events, Lectures, News
Denise Uyehara (Performance Artist)
February 7, 2019
6-8 p.m., P 203 (Philosophicum)
This evening, Denise Uyehara discusses her work as part of the Fifth World Collective, a group of Indigenous and non-indigenous artists from the Southwest, U.S., as they developed Shooting Columbus. She will also describe previous projects in which she explored her Okinawan and Japanese heritage in the context of the U.S. military occupation of the Okinawan islands, solo endeavors, and her work as part of the Sacred Naked Nature Girls.
Denise Uyehara is an award-winning performance artist who investigates memory, body and intersections of identity.
www.deniseuyehara.com
You can download the poster for the event here.
Events, News
The panel, “Fake News! The Media Debate in the United States,” will take place on January 17, at 6 pm, in the conference room (135) of the Helmholtz Institute, Staudingerweg 19, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.
Since “fake news” is an oft-used term in contemporary debate, used to both criticize shortcomings of the information age and employed as an accusation that discredits some media outlets, we want to engage the issue from several perspectives.
The panel will include Mark Galli, the editor in chief of the evangelical Christianity Today (who will be in Mainz for the workshop on religious magazines), who will speak to the question what challenges the “fake news” debate brings to religious journalism and how he and his staff address it. The panel will also include Dr. Philipp Reisner from the University of Düsseldorf – who will provide historical context on the debate, Dr. Torsten Kathke from the University of Mainz – who will discuss the role of social media, and Dr. Damien Schlarb – who will focus on “fake news” as a cultural phenomenon helped along by economic and technological factors. Students Sandra Meerwein, Benedikt Schneider, and Sophia Martin are ready to lead the discussion with questions and examples from today and from history.
You can find the poster for the event
here.
Conferences, Events, Lectures, News
Aging Cultures – Cultures of Aging
Interdisciplinary Symposium
Nov 22, 2018, 6-8 p.m.
Nov 23, 2018, 10.30 a.m.-4.30 p.m.
Philosophicum II, room 00.212
Keynotes by Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Kunow (Potsdam) and
Dr. Scott King (Winchester, VA, USA)
Everybody welcome!
Download the full program here.
We are all, as Margaret Morganroth Gulotte has famously written, “aged by culture.” What this implies is that the meaning ascribed to age is not so much biological, as it is cultural. What does this mean, however, for specific communities within a given culture? What does it mean to speak, for instance, of concepts such as “black aging,” “queer aging,” or “female aging”? And what does all this mean in a transnational context? This workshop seeks to link aging studies on the one hand and fields such as Black Studies, Queer Studies, Diaspora Studies, and Gender Studies on the other.
At the same time, it asks whether culturalist notions of aging have jettisoned the biological, material dimension of aging altogether or whether there is after all a way in which “culture” and “biology” can be fruitfully linked. Moreover, recent research, both in the life sciences and in forms of life writing (such as the boom of centenarians’ autobiographies) may have given rise to a celebration, perhaps even fetishization, of extreme longevity. To what extent has the emphasis on both longevity and “successful aging” tended to pit aging studies against, for instance, disability studies? What other narratives of old age need to be told, which may serve to sabotage mainstream representations of what it means to be old?
The symposium is organized by Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee and Julia Velten, M.A. for the DFG-funded research project “Die Fabrikation der Hundertjährigen,” which is part of the DFG Research Group 1939 “Un/Doing Differences – Praktiken der Humandifferenzierung.”
Events, Lectures, News
Gabriele Rippl (University of Bern, Switzerland)
“Picture This! Transcultural American Literature in the Digital Age”
Nov 22, 2018, 12 noon-2 p.m.
Senatssaal (7th floor, Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät)
On Nov 22, Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl will give the annual Obama Lecture and the Obama Institute’s Executive Board members will award the Obama Dissertation Prize to Argelia Segovia Liga from Missouri State U, USA, who will also give a short talk on her thesis.
Furthermore, the Obama Institute will award the Galinsky Prize to outstanding student papers in the field of Early American Studies.
For further informaton and the full program, please download the flyer here.
