June 27 – Sehen, Blättern, Lesen, Zählen: Wie sich Zeitschriftenordnungen erschließen lassen 🗓

June 27 – Sehen, Blättern, Lesen, Zählen: Wie sich Zeitschriftenordnungen erschließen lassen 🗓

Events, Lectures, News

Madleen Podewski (FU Berlin)

June 27, 2019
6-8 p.m. (c.t.)
Room 02.102 (Philosophicum II)

Zeitschriften sind aus verschiedenen Text-, Bild- und graphischen Elementen aufgebaut. Abhängig von Formatgröße und Seitenumfang und abhängig vom jeweiligen Formattypus werden damit unterschiedliche Mischungsordnungen ausgebildet – aus mehr oder weniger, aus größeren oder kleineren distinkten Elementen, die auf eine bestimmte Weise auf Seiten und Doppelseiten und innerhalb des Heftes angeordnet sind. Der Vortrag wird anhand von mehreren Heften des 1885er Jahrgangs der populären illustrierten Familienzeitschrift „Die Gartenlaube“ (1853-1944) Vorschläge unterbreiten, wie sich solche periodisch modifizierten Mischungsordnungen, auch unter Berücksichtigung digitaler Verfahren, erschließen und dabei in ihrer historischen Funktionalität einschätzen lassen.

PD Dr. Madleen Podewski arbeitet im DFG-Forschungsprojekt „Literatur im Zeitalter der Illustrierten: Stationen komplexer Text-Bild-Beziehungen im 19. Jahrhundert“ (Modul „Eigene Stelle“). Im WiSe 2018/19 vertritt sie eine Professur an der Philipps-Universität Marburg.
 

You can download the poster for the event here.

June 27 – Early America through the Lens of Science Fiction 🗓

June 27 – Early America through the Lens of Science Fiction 🗓

Events, Lectures, News

Early America through the Lens of Science Fiction

Laura M. Stevens (University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA)

Thursday, June 27, 2019
4 p.m.
P 15 – Philosophicum

This talk will consider some of the frameworks that science fiction has provided for depicting and understanding early America. Our focus will be on two main approaches: first, direct contemplation of early American history through the mechanism of time travel, and second, analogical treatments of Euro-American contact through episodes of alien contact with humans. We will also compare the perspectives offered by Native versus non-Native authors. In the first category, we will consider Orson Scott Card’s Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, “Custer on the Slipstream” by Gerald Vizenor, and Sherman Alexie’s Flight. In the second category we will consider Orson Wells’s, The War of the Worlds, Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, Celu Amberstone’s Refugees, and Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life. There will also be some brief consideration of Science Fiction films including Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Arrival, and District 9. Most of all, we will consider what science fiction or speculative fiction, through the mechanism of what Darko Survin famously termed “Cognitive Estrangement,” helps bring to the fore how shocking and difficult early encounters were between the peoples of Europe and the two continents that would come to be called the Americas. We will, in closing consider what potential science fiction offers for confronting the moral quandaries and horrors that early American history poses. Most of all, we will consider how we in the present day can bring our ethics to bear upon the cultural clashes, exploitations, and violence of the past. We will ask: How does science fiction serve to excuse or indict the sins of the past? Can imaginations of alien encounters or time travel help us understand the decisions that individual humans made over the preceding five centuries, as the peoples and cultures of lands previously separated by an ocean came into contact?

To visit Prof. Stevens website, please click here.

You can download the poster for the event here.

June 25 – Heinrich the Shoemaker and the S/Cistrunks that Followed: A Narrative of Black and White in the U.S. South 🗓

June 25 – Heinrich the Shoemaker and the S/Cistrunks that Followed: A Narrative of Black and White in the U.S. South 🗓

Events, Lectures, News

Elizabeth J. West
(Georgia State University)

June 25, 2019
4 p.m.-6 p.m., Philosophicum I, P207

From 1739–1748 the centuries long dispute between Britain and Spain over contested territories in present day Florida and Georgia heightened into the conflict that became known as The War of Jenkins’s Ear. This land based dispute spilled over into the high seas as both sides seized one another’s ships across the Atlantic. While the captors seized and claimed all goods and merchandise, what fate awaited the passengers of these unfortunate ambushes at sea? In the case of one Heinrich Süsstrunck (later Sistrunk), emigrating from his Swiss-German home in 1743, it meant a two year stopover in Cuba before he and the other captives would be rescued and delivered to South Carolina in 1746.

There is a glaring irony in the story of Heinrich. Captured at sea, taken to a foreign destination and held captive for two years, he arrived in Charleston a free man with an apprentice at his side. This point of arrival would begin a legacy of generations of white Sistrunks who would claim and enslave generations of blacks in the U.S. South. While Spanish adversaries may have held Heinrich captive in Cuba for two years, he left there indoctrinated into the new world plantation system and the reality that his whiteness was capital in this hemisphere. Though Spain and Britain were at odds over territories in the new world, Heinrich’s experience in Cuba and his acclimation by the time he arrived in Charleston speaks to the borderless trans-Atlantic world that was connected through slavery.

From the trajectory of Heinrich Sistrunk’s Cuban detainment and deliverance to South Carolina and the territorial expansion of his heirs, this lecture examines the borderlessness of the plantocracy of the Americas, and how this inter-colonial system laid pathways of contrasting generational fortunes for Heinrich’s heirs and the descendants of Shadrick and Francis, two of the many blacks recorded in nineteenth century Sistrunk slave ledgers.

Elizabeth J. West received her Ph.D. in English with a certificate in Women’s Studies from Emory University. Her teaching and scholarship focuses on spirituality and gender in early African American and Women’s Literature, and African Diasporic Literatures of the Atlantic World. She co-edits the Roman & Littlefield book series, Black Diasporic Worlds: Origins and Evolutions from New World Slaving. She is the author of African Spirituality in Black Women’s Fiction: (Lexington Books 2011), coeditor of Literary Expressions of African Spirituality (Lexington Books 2013). Her works can be found in critical anthologies and in journals such as MELUS, Amerikastudien, CLAJ, PALARA, JCCH, Womanist, Black Magnolias, and South Central Review. Her 2012 article, “From David Walker to President Obama: Tropes of the Founding Fathers in African American Discourses of Democracy, or the Legacy of Ishmael” was recognized among “Featured Articles” in American Studies Journals: A Directory of Worldwide Resources.

You can download the poster for the event here.

July 15-19 – Interdisciplinary Workshop: U.S. Indian Law and Policy 🗓

July 15-19 – Interdisciplinary Workshop: U.S. Indian Law and Policy 🗓

Events, News, Workshops

Interdisciplinary Workshop

“History of United States Indian Law and Policy”

Prof. Lindsay G. Robertson (University of Oklahoma)

Faculty Director, Center for the Study of American Indian Law and Policy
Chickasaw Nation Endowed Chair in Native American Law

July 15-19, P 109a (Philosophicum)

This course will trace the development and political and cultural impact of British colonial and United States policy towards indigenous peoples in North America from the Seventeenth Century through the present day. Among other topics, we will explore Treaty-making, Indian Removal, the Reservation System, late-Nineteenth Century Assimilation and Allotment, mid-Twentieth Century Indian Reorganization, and modern Tribal Self-Determination.

For course registration and further information, please contact Dr. Sonja Georgi.

You can find the workshop poster here.

June 11 – Transnational Indigenous Histories in the North American Borderlands 🗓

June 11 – Transnational Indigenous Histories in the North American Borderlands 🗓

Events, Lectures, News

Brenden Rensink (Brigham Young University)

June 11, 2019
4-6 p.m., P 207 (Philosophicum)

Drawing from his recent award-winning book, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands, historian Brenden W. Rensink will compare the histories of indigenous peoples who traversed North American borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Crees who crossed the border from Canada into Montana and Yaquis who migrated across the border into Arizona from Mexico provide unique examples of Native peoples crossing into the United States as laborers, immigrants, and refugees. These histories question how opposing national borders affect and react differently to Native identity, offer new insights into what it has meant to be “indigenous” or an “immigrant,” and complicate familiar narratives in Native American, American West, and Borderlands histories. Rensink’s presentation will hopefully generate as many questions as it answers and urge scholars to reexamine their own research from new angles.

Brenden W. Rensink (Ph.D., 2010) is the Associate Director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and an Associate Professor of History at Brigham Young University. His most recent book, Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands won the 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book. He is also the co-editor and co-author of four additional books, and author multiple articles, book chapters, and reviews. Rensink is the Project Manager and General Editor of the Intermountain Histories digital public history project and as the Host and Producer of the Writing Westward Podcast.

 

You can download the poster for the event here.

June 7 – WORKSHOP: From Confucius to Mickey Mouse 🗓

June 7 – WORKSHOP: From Confucius to Mickey Mouse 🗓

Events, News, Workshops

“From Confucius to Mickey Mouse”

June 7
11.30 a.m. – 5 p.m.
02.102 (Philosophicum II)

Alfred Hornung (OI), Florian Freitag (OI), and Chang Liu (U of Heidelberg) invite you to a workshop on U.S.-Chinese Transcultural Dynamics.

Please see below for the program and further info or download the flyer here.

PROGRAM

11:30 MAOdonna: On Madonna’s Star Image in China
Chang Liu (Heidelberg)

12:15 Decoding Female Elites: Commodities and Commodified Women in Contemporary Asian TV Dramas
Ruxin Jia (Heidelberg)

14:00 Middle Magic Kingdoms: The Theme Park in China
Florian Freitag (OI)

14:45 The Belt and Road Initiative and Transcultural Communication
Alfred Hornung (OI)

15:30 Survivors or Returnees? Writer Identity Developed in Li-Young Lee
Mohan Ding (Göttingen)

16:15 The Lost Utopia – Photographs of Mount Huang in 1920s and 1930s China
Qiuzi Guo (Heidelberg)

U.S.-CHINESE TRANSCULTURAL DYNAMICS

During the late eighteenth century, the Founding Fathers’ adaptation of Confucian ethics of conduct played a pivotal role in the formation of the American democracy and its public life, as taken up in Ezra Pound’s embracement of Confucius’ ideas and in his Cantos. In the twentieth century, the reception of the aesthetics, politics, and economic strategies of Disney theme parks had a similar impact on the “Disneyfication” of public space in China. These examples illustrate the longevity, the variety, but also the multi-directionality of U.S.-Chinese cultural relations. Within the various transnational networks spanning the Pacific Rim, relations between the U.S. and China have always played a special role, inspiring such concepts as “Chimerica” (Ferguson/Schularick; with an emphasis on economic and political aspects) and “ChinAmerica” (Hornung; with a focus on intercultural relations). The two cannot be easily separated, however, as politics and the economy have provided the legal framework and the material resources for cultural interactions and culture has profoundly determined the protocols of political and economic encounters. “From Confucius to Mickey Mouse: U.S.-Chinese Transcultural Dynamics” therefore inquires not only into particular instances of cultural exchanges between China and the United States, but also into their legal, economic, logistical and infrastructural, as well as medial underpinnings and consequences.Issues addressed during the workshop thus include: Who were the actors and interpersonal networks behind these transcultural dynamics and what motivated and drove, but also hindered their various ventures? Which media sustained U.S.-Chinese transcultural relations and how did their specific (im)materiality, media logics, and regulation impact these cultural exchanges? What was the reception and the impact of transcultural dynamics between China and the U.S. in China, America, and elsewhere? And finally, what is the role of the Confucius Institutes and how does the Trump administration promote Chinese leadership in the 21st century?