Jannis Buschky’s research focuses on oil in American fiction from the beginning of the twentieth century. He examines the ways in which early imaginaries of oil render extraction zones at the periphery of an emerging fossil fuel-based economy. In his dissertation, The Regional Imaginations of the Early American Oil Extraction Novel, 1900-1945, he inspects how novels register the environmental and social changes around extraction sites in distinct regions. He is part of the ERC-funded research project “Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility.”

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During the magazine revolution of the 1890s, in which new business and marketing strategies triggered an explosion in the American print-marketplace, several magazine entrepreneurs tested out new forms and formats for literary writing that led to unique inter-institutional constellations. At Cosmopolitan magazine, editor John Brisben Walker hatched a plan to turn the magazine itself into a new type of American university—a democratic-minded institution that would facilitate modern education with a pragmatic view of literature’s place in it. Elsewhere in the booming magazine market, Frank Munsey and S. S. McClure offered up the pages of their periodicals to novel forms of literary discourse, expressed in recurring columns such as “Literary Chat” and “Human Documents.” Surveying roughly a decade worth of “Literary Chat” installments from Munsey’s Magazine (1893-1903), I aim to show how such formats produced proto-sociological knowledge about the actors and institutions that dominated the US literary scene. The talk also develops the notion of “epistemic style” to reframe the years around 1900 as an experimental phase regarding the place of literary culture within a capitalist knowledge economy.

This talk presents preliminary results of the DFG-funded project “From Patronage to the Mass Market: Institutionalizing Literary Knowledge Cultures in the 19th-Century United States,” collaboratively undertaken by the John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (FU Berlin) and the English Department at the University of Heidelberg.

Alexander Starre is assistant professor (wiss. Mitarbeiter) of North American culture at the John F. Kennedy Institute at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is a former Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellow and has previously taught at the Universities of Göttingen, Münster, and Duisburg-Essen, as well as at Brown University. His research interests include American cultural history, knowledge production, media theory, literary institutions, and print culture. He is the author of Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization (2015) and co-editor of several essay collections and special issues, among them The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture: Medium, Object, Metaphor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Culture²: Theorizing Theory for the Twenty-First Century (transcript, 2022), and American Literary Institutions around 1900 (special issue of College Literature, 2025). He is currently finishing a book on knowledge institutions and epistemic styles in the United States around 1900.

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Deemed the “disciples of Gutenberg” by school administrators, the Native student printers at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School were trained to be highly skilled in reproducing the assimilationist rhetoric of the U.S. government. In fact, Native student printers were innovators on their own terms, using the school press as a platform for recording and disseminating their thoughts, experiences, knowledge, and acts of resistance, as well as those of their classmates. In this class session, we will explore some of the strategies that Carlisle student printers and other Carlisle students used to advance their perspectives in the face of heavy administrative censorship. Moreover, we will link these strategies to those used by these students’ predecessors (such as in ledger drawings) and by their descendants (such as in Native code talking employed in WWI and WWII). Finally, we will discuss Indigenous methodologies for pursuing further research on the school press of Indian boarding schools in the United States and Indian residential schools in Canada.

Christianna Stavroudis is an independent researcher based in Bonn. Her latest article, “’Let My People Have a Right’: The Native Activism of Arapaho Chief Paul Boynton” will appear in the Fall issue of The Chronicles of Oklahoma.

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This talk explores the dynamic intersection of Indigenous presence, humor, and survivance within contemporary social media platforms. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance, the presentation examines how Indigenous content creators utilize humor as a powerful tool for cultural continuity and self-determination. The presentation will outline key concepts of survivance, including manifest manners and the post-Indian, before exploring how humor can serve as a practice of survivance. Focusing on case studies of the comedy group The 1491s and content creators Eagle Blackbird and Che Jim, we will discuss specific examples of Indigenous humor on social media that challenge stereotypes, educate non-Native audiences, and reclaim control over cultural representation.

Teresa Fischler is a doctoral student at the University of Passau. Her research interests include indigenous survivance, autobiography, and social media. Alongside her studies, she is working at the University of Passau, where she is involved with internationalisation and teacher education.

You can download the poster for the event here.

You can download the poster for the event here.