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
Annual Fourth of July Obama Lecture & Summer Get-together (snacks and drinks)
with Keynote “World-losers elsewhere, conquerors here!”: The Fourth of July in American Poetry Thomas Austenfeld – Université de Fribourg and Red, White, and Blue—and Greenbacks: Money and American Identity since the Civil War Atiba Pertilla – German Historical Institute Washington plus Exhibition of Student Posters and Presentations
This workshop will bring together leading scholars in the fields of migration, political economy, and consumerism in United States history. Immigration debates and policies are an early domain in which both state administrative capacities and consumerist categories of human differentiation were generated, formalized, and institutionalized. Lizabeth Cohen (Harvard University) is an expert on postwar consumerism, and Rosanne Currarino (Queen’s University) has investigated labor questions and economic democracy during the Gilded Age. Katherine Benton-Cohen (Georgetown University) studied the Dillingham Commission’s role and legacy in categorizing and “inventing the immigrant problem,” while Joel Perlmann (Bard College) traced processes of classifying immigrants from Ellis Island to the 2020 Census. Jan Logemann (Georg-August-Universität) focused on the role of European émigrés in making consumer capitalism, while Atiba Perilla’s (German Historical Institute) new project asks how immigrants used money in the time period from 1870 to 1930. We invite workshop participants to engage these scholars in a critical discussion on their key texts.
Feb 1, 2024 – 14:00-16:00 Philosophicum II – room 02.102
Exhibition
“Current Social Problems in Children’s Literature and Film”
Can children’s literature address serious or controversial topics? Are such topics simply inappropriate for children? Or is it rather a matter of the narrative strategy that is being used? Based on the Advanced Research Seminar 532 “Current Social Problems Expressed in Children’s Literature and Film,” this exhibition shows how creative, diplomatic, and inspiring children’s books can be in addressing topics that are difficult to grasp or cope with, even for adults.
Everyone welcome!
14:00 Opening | Introduction Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee (Course Leader)
followed by Poster Presentations | Food & Drinks
Topics, among others:
Loneliness as a Universal Childhood Issue in the Anime series Naruto and Naruto Shippuden
Life and Death in “The Fall of Freddie the Leaf” by Leo Buscaglia
Spookley, the Square Pumpkin
“Superstars in History”: The Civil Rights Movement
The posters and presentations in this exhibition are the results of students’ projects from the American Studies Advanced Research Seminar 532 “Current Social Problems Expressed in Children’s Literature,” which was taught by Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee (mita.banerjee@uni-mainz.de) in the winter term of 2023/24.
You can download the poster for the exhibition here.
February 11 (Sun)
Philosophicum II (EG 00.212)
Jakob-Welder-Weg 20
55128 Mainz
We explore connections across national and regional borders in and along the Pacific. The event will serve as a space to discuss early stage-research and on-going projects in this field.
Topics include:
Film and television that culturally crosses the pacific ocean
Literary works (novels, memoirs, poems, etc.) from and about (Trans)pacific regions
Representations and/or performances of gender in (Trans)pacific regions
(Trans)pacific mobilities and migration, including policy
The Pacific and the blue humanities
Climate change and the environment in (Trans)pacific regions
(Trans-)Pacific issues of collective memory
Understandings of geography/space/territory in relation to (Trans)pacific regions
Negotiating cultural hybridity
Revitalizations of (Trans)pacific traditional ecological epistemologies
Reflections on practices and imaginations of borders/bordering in the Pacific
The conference is organized by Sandra Meerwein and the Transpacific Studies Network (TPSN). The TPSN was established in the fall of 2022 with the goal of exploring Pacific cultures, ecologies, histories, literatures, politics, and societies in an interdisciplinary, multi-lingual, and, importantly, transregional manner.
The organizers would like to thank the following organizations for their support:
Jan 26, 2024 – 17.00-19.00 – PhD/Postdoc Book Launch – Fakultätssaal (Philosophicum, 01-185)
Join us in celebrating… the most recent publications, dissertations, and more by young scholars from the Obama Institute:
Bassimir, Anja-Maria. Evangelical News. Politics, Gender, and Bioethics in Conservative Christian Magazines of the 1970s and 1980s (Religion and American Culture). Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2022.
Scott, Daniel. Atheism and Theism in Contemporary Fantasy Fiction. Heavens of Invention. Peter Lang Verlag, 2023 (Mainzer Studien zur Amerikanistik 77).
Velten, Julia. Extraordinary Forms of Aging. Life Narratives of Centenarians and Children with Progeria. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022.
Seibert, Johanna. Early African Caribbean Newspapers as Archipelagic Media in the Emancipation Age. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2023.
Evans, Vanessa and Mita Banerjee (eds). Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2023.
Scheiding, Oliver and Sabina Fazli (eds.). Handbuch Zeitschriftenforschung. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2023.
Corrigan, John, Melani McAlister and Axel R. Schäfer (eds.). Global Faith, Worldly Power. Evangelical Internationalism and U.S. Empire. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022.
Come and discuss… plans for publications and careers after graduation.
Meet and mingle… with current and former PhD students, postdocs, and professors as well as students, faculty, and friends.
