Guest Lecture by Cliff “Ubba” Kodero (Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA)

The Political Economy of Black Masculinity and Fatherlessness: The Obama Biographies

July 13, 2026, 5 pm, room P 7 (Philosophicum)

In this developing project, Kodero utilizes life writing to investigate the political economy of Black masculinity through the intersecting biographies of Barack, Malik, Mark, and George Obama. Moving beyond conventional biography, the study examines how a fractured patriarchal legacy produced vastly different masculine identities across distinct global landscapes. Central to this analysis is how each brother navigates complex social spaces between Black and white, negotiating identity across continents. By evaluating primary-source memoirs, the research demonstrates how the brothers deploy their narrative capital to leverage their family lineage, contest institutional erasure, and resist predetermined structural roles while producing vastly different expressions of manhood and Blackness.

Guest Lecture by Ren Haiyan (Hunan Normal University, China)

Racialization as Script:
Narrative Permission and Differential Racial Time in Interior Chinatown

July 14, 2026, 5 pm, room P 7 (Philosophicum)

In Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu uses the screenplay form, role lists, and the conventions of the police procedural to expose racialization as a script that precedes the individual. Near the end of the novel, his reconstruction of the history of Chinese exclusion reveals the institutional foundations of this script while bringing into view the unequal temporalities produced by the U.S. racial order. Racialized groups may inhabit the same historical present, yet they inherit different relations to national memory, bear different burdens of recognition, and are granted unequal access to futurity. Through the novel, Yu challenges the power of any racial role to exhaust the person, defending instead the right to possess a history, sustain relationships, and imagine a future not predetermined by racial function.

Guest Lecture by Christianna Stavroudis (University of Wuppertal)

Indigenous Scholarship and Its Responses to ‘America250’

July 4, 2026, 09:00 a.m., P 110, Philosophicum

Events like the 1893 Columbian Exposition and the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial illustrate how Indigenous leaders, artists, and scholars have used the United States’ commemorative anniversaries across the centuries as occasions for truth telling, generating new knowledge, and networking with one another. The United States Semiquincentennial and its America250 initiatives offer a unique opportunity for scholars of Indigenous Studies to examine how Native Nations are choosing to (not) engage with this platform in expressing the history and culture of their People and the policies and goals of their Tribal governments. In this session, we will look at how Native people and Native Nations have and have not been involved in individual state and federal America250 initiatives, and at Native-led commemorations taking place this year, such as the 150th anniversary of the Battle of the Greasy Grass/Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Christianna Stavroudis is an instructor at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Wuppertal. Her article, “‘Let My People Have a Right’: The Native Activism of Arapaho Chief Paul Boynton,” was published in the Fall 2025 issue of The Chronicles of Oklahoma. She and Gordon Yellowman, Sr. (Cheyenne Peace Chief and Tribal Historian of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes) gave their presentation, “A Milestone for the Peyote Road: The 1918 Chartering of the Native American Church of Oklahoma and Its Impact on Native Nations Today,” at the 2026 Oklahoma History Symposium this May. Stavroudis and Yellowman’s latest project is entitled “Native Chroniclers and Journalists at the Turn of the 20th Century: A Case Study of Early Cheyenne and Arapaho Archival Activism,” which highlights anglophone writing published by Cheyenne and Arapaho writers in regional newspapers and boarding school press from 1875-1925.

You can download the poster for the event here.

Guest Lecture by Helga Lenart-Cheng (Saint Mary’s College of California, USA)

DNA, Family Secrets, and the Stories We Inherit

June 2, 2026, 16.15-17.45, 01-618 (kl. Bibl.), Philosophicum

This talk examines how genetic genealogy platforms and public media reshape the stories Americans tell about identity, family, and race. Focusing on the PBS series Finding Your Roots, it explores how DNA, archives, and television narrative turn biological data into autobiographical meaning.

Helga Lenart-Cheng (PhD, Harvard University) is Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her research focuses on life writing, genetic genealogy, algorithmic storytelling, critical media studies, memory, and digital archives. She is the author and editor of several books, most recently Story Revolutions (2022) and Life Writing as World Literature (2025).

You can download the poster for the event here.

Guest Lecture by Michael E. Huffmaster (University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez)

Amerika, Translation, and Kafka’s Life Writing

May 26, 2026, 4.15-5.45 pm, 00.212, Philo II (Jakob-Welder-Weg 20)

June 2, 2026, 9.40-11.10 am, N.106, Stufenhörsaal (Campus Germersheim)

Cognitive analysis of Kafka’s first novel, Amerika, reveals parallels at the microstructural level with his other two, more well-known novels, The Trial and The Castle. But a significant difference emerges between Amerika and the other two novels at the macrostructural level, which, I posit, may account for the first novel’s relative obscurity. Key passages from Kafka’s life writing can shed light on this discrepancy. Also, the text offers fascinating material for considering the role of translation in the translingual literary reading experience.

Michael Huffmaster is Professor of German at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. His current book project, Reading Kafka’s Mind, employs cognitive theory to explain the Kafkaesque. His articles on Kafka have appeared in Poetics Today. His work on using literary translation in foreign language education (coauthored with Claire Kramsch) has appeared in Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen, Multilingual Education: Between Language Learning and Translanguaging, and most recently The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education.

You can download the poster for the event here.

Guest Lecture by Ian Afflerbach (University of North Georgia, USA)

Artists “Selling Out” The Long History of an Idea (and the Short History of a Book)

May 19, 2026, 4.15-5.45 pm, 00.212, Philo II (Jakob-Welder-Weg 20)

For a hundred and fifty years, “selling out” has been a corrosive insult to monitor group betrayal. In this talk, Prof. Afflerbach will discuss the changing ideas that American artists have had about “selling out,” from the anxieties about working for Hollywood studios in the 1930s to the debates over identity and misrepresentation in the publishing industry today.

This talk will not just provide an overview of one chapter from a book, however: it will also think about what “selling out” might mean for literary scholars today. Prof. Afflerbach will discuss his own experience shifting from traditional scholarship to public scholarship—the changes in style, and structure, required to make a book project accessible to a general audience.

A Q+A will follow in which we can discuss not just the contents of the book, but also the process of forming a larger writing project, building a platform for it, and thinking about our audience.