The Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies regularly welcomes internationally renowned scholars who contribute to our courses and research program.
We invite you to join us in exploring current research trends and to meet leading people in American Studies and beyond.
You can find the poster for the event series here.
Periodicals have been unusually central to Scottish literary culture, and have often been a key conduit for connecting with the rest of the British cultural and political scene. This session will briefly introduce some key Scottish magazines since 1800, with a focus on the cultural politics of âprovincialâ versus ânationalâ publishing. The journals and magazines weâll consider frequently grapple with questions of audience, influence and peripherality on terms which bring publishing and literary criticism into direct and unavoidable contact with the national question in politics.
Dr Scott Hames is Senior Lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Stirling, where he writes mainly about Scottish literature and cultural politics. He has particular interests in the post-1960s movement for Scottish devolution, which led to the creation of a Scottish Parliament in 1999.
The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation was published in 2020. Itâs a cultural history and critique of devolution, focused on the role of writers, critics, magazines and intellectuals.
He also leads the Scottish Magazines Network, an AHRC research network partnered with the National Library of Scotland. His current book project is on the political essayist Tom Nairn (1932-2023), arguably the most influential Scottish intellectual of the past century, who made his entire career in magazines and forgotten newspapers.
You can download the poster for the event here.
2-4 p.m. I Keynote Lecture I P5
Speculative Plantations: Reimagining Past, Present, and Futures through Gothic Horror
Amy King, PhD
Tuskeegee University, AL, USA
What could be possible when we apply a âspeculativeâ framework to texts and contexts that may magnify, combine, bend, and/or even break audiencesâ expectations of genre and what, exactly, constitute plantation settings?
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4-6 p.m. I Student Project Exhibition I Foyer P2-P5
with Food and Drinks
Posters and presentations by students from Dr. Sonja Georgi’s CS III course.
How can we tell, preserve, and engage with stories of resistance in the U.S. of 2025?
Check out last year’s event in the video and find further information about this year’s event on the poster below or download it here.
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Professor Jill Doerfler will detail the various ways in which White Earth Anishinaabe/Ojibwe people described their identity and shrewdly resisted US racialization efforts in the 1910s. She will examine the concept of blood quantum including US legal definitions of âmixed-bloodâ and âfull-bloodâ and the economic motivation behind those definitions. She will also discuss both the historic and contemporary significance of identity.
Jill Doerfler is a professor and department head of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. She grew up on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota and is the daughter of an enrollee. Dr. Doerfler has lectured and published widely on the topics of citizenship, blood quantum, and constitutional reform. Her monograph, Those Who Belong: Identity, Family, Blood, and Citizenship Among the White Earth Anishinaabeg, examines staunch Anishinaabe resistance to racialization and the complex issues surrounding tribal citizenship and identity. She also co-authored The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution with Gerald Vizenor and co-edited Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World Through Stories with Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark. Recently, she co-edited a special guest issue of American Periodicals with Cristina Stanciu and Oliver Scheiding focused on cultural and political work of Indigenous periodicals.
You can download the poster for the event here.
Abstract
Ever since Annie Leibovitzâs photos of coders playing computer games made it into the December 7, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone, four years after Doug Engelbart staged âthe mother of all demosâ in San Francisco, digitality has been impressing itself on media, the fashion world, and other forms of popular culture, becoming ubiquitous in everyday life and a powerful source of imaginaries that reflect and reinforce lifestyle desires, aspirations, anxieties, and fears. In this paper we trace how the San Francisco Bay area came to be associated with computer culture, and we show how constitutive elements of its fashion and lifestyle paved the way for technology to become chic by bringing beatnik, dropout and countercultural rebellion to a space dominated by resource extraction, transport and higher education. Our focus is on Apple’s expertise in insinuating itself into personal lifeworlds. Its becoming synonymous with the increasingly personal use of computers took place at the level of technology as well as at the level of images of leadership, with Steve Jobs in his iconic Issey Miyake turtleneck a proto-influencer, paving the way for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huangâs black leather jackets. We will also be examining some of Apple TV+’s offerings to establish how technology and lifestyle complement each other in the imaginaries of boutique streaming television shows.
Bio Blurbs
Susan Ingram is Professor of Humanities at York University, Toronto, where she coordinates the Graduate Diploma in Comparative Literature. She is the general editor of Intellect Bookâs Urban Chic series and co-author of the volumes on Berlin, Vienna, and Los Angeles. A past president of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association and its current web systems administrator, her research interests revolve around the institutions of European cultural modernity and their legacies.
Markus Reisenleitner is also Professor of Humanities at York as well as the Director of the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture and the editor-in-chief of Imaginations: Revue dâĂ©tudes interculturelles de lâimage / Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies. Before joining Yorkâs Division of Humanities in 2006, he taught at the University of Vienna, the Vienna campus of the University of Oregonâs International Program, the University of Alberta, and Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where he was Head of the Department of Cultural Studies from 2004â2006. His research focusses on the intersections and socio-political implications of popular culture, digital humanities, the urban, and fashion.
You can download the poster for the event here.
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Since they first appeared in the early nineteenth century, periodicals published by and for Black Americans have been essential building blocks of Black American culture. They played unique and powerful roles as community forums, political pedestals, artistic and intellectual cultivators, and tools for both the celebration and advancement of Black American life. This lecture dives into the archives for a discussion of the profound affects that these media hadâand continue to haveâon Black American culture.
You can download the poster for the event here.
