“Assessing our Relationship with Nature through the Environmental Humanities: A Bioethics Approach to Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘A White Heron’ (1886)”
May 21, 2024, 16:15-17:45, Fakultätssaal, 01-185 (Philosophicum)
In this class we will analyze Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron” through the lens of the environmental humanities. We will treat this text as a prototypical example of eco-literature, experimenting with different ecological readings based upon varying bioethical modes of thinking. In doing so, we will discuss the possibilities and limitations of opening a fictional text to multiple interpretations of environmental worldviews, evaluating what role literature, and the humanities for that matter, can have helping people assess their own relationship with nature, and helping shape their attitudes about the environment. As part of this discussion, we will also attempt to “rewild” “A White Heron,” reimagining the story through traditional ecological knowledge and indigenous American bioethics as found in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s groundbreaking book Braiding Sweetgrass.
Dr. Pincikowski is environmental humanist, professor of German, chair of the Department of Global Languages and Cultures, and student of Environmental Biology at Hood College. His research focus has been on medieval German culture and literature, and now explores how different cultures perceive nature and the environment. He is the author of Bodies of Pain: Suffering in the Works of Hartmann von Aue and co-editor of End-Times in Medieval German Literature: Sin, Evil, and the Apocalypse. He is currently working on a chapter on tree nationalism in German culture for his book project on memory and the German Middle Ages. He was Fulbright Visiting Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences in at the University of Innsbruck, Austria in 2014 and Visiting Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012.
“Moses Biofictions as Critiques of Nazism: Zora Neale Hurston and Thomas Mann”
May 13, 2024, 10:15-11:45am, P5 (Philosophicum)
This lecture presents an interpretation of Thomas Mann’s and Zora Neale Hurston’s criticism of Nazis’ deadly political propaganda by using the Biblical figure of Moses in their biofictions: Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain; Mann “Das Gesetz” (English, 1943; German, 1944). The comparison of the different analyses of the African American writer and Thomas Mann in the American exile will be based on current research about anti-Nazi biofictions from the 1930s and 1940s.
Prof. Michael Lackey is the Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He is an internationally renowned expert on all forms of life writing, with a special area of concentration on biofictions. He spent a year of graduate studies at the Univ. of Heidelberg and was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Siegen. Major publications include: Biofiction: An Introduction. New York and London: Routledge, 2022; Ireland, the Irish, and the Rise of Biofiction. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2021; African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Faith. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
May 14, 2024, 4:15pm, Fakultätssaal (01-185, Philosophicum)
In the North American context, fascism has taken a distinctive look and rhetorical pattern. Trump’s brand of fascism can be traced to deeply embedded racial and economic disparities which became key elements of his presidential campaigns. Tapping into the culture wars concerning racial, gender, and sexual minorities simmering in American political discourse, Trump’s brilliant abuse of social media and demagogic rhetoric elevated him into a Jesus-like figure, the only one who really understood underprivileged and uneducated white people in fly-over country. In this lecture, Dr Fuchs traces the historical roots of the peculiar brand of fascism surrounding the figure of Donald Trump and how, as a cult leader of the alt-right, Trump has gained complete totalitarian control of the Republican Party and transformed it into a classic fascist “Führer” party, exemplified by the violence not only advocated but implemented by Trump on January 6, 2021.
Thomas Fuchs is an independent researcher. He has taught English at a number of Colleges and Universities in Germany and the United States. He obtained his PhD in philosophy at the University of Oregon with a dissertation about financier Henry Villard.
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
Induction ceremony for new Junior Fellows to JGU’s Gutenberg Academy Honors Program on April 22, 2024 includes Obama Institute PhD student Carolin Jesussek, M.Ed.
The Obama Institute proudly congratulates Carolin Jesussek, M.Ed. to her new roles as Junior Fellow of the Gutenberg Academy Honors Program and speaker of the group of newly inducted junior fellows. Her PhD project “Uncanny Environments: Material World-Making in Contemporary North American Gothic Literature” is supervised by Professor Dr. Oliver Scheiding, who also attended the ceremony last Monday.
You can read more about Monday’s event, the new junior fellows and their projects, and the Gutenberg Academy Honors Program in JGU’s press release (in German).
Carolin Jesussek, M.Ed. on April 22 next to the poster describing her dissertation project; photo provided by Oliver Scheiding.
Photo credit header image: Stefan F. Sämmer Source: JGU Press Release
“Beyond Liberation or Assimilation: LGBTQ Rights, Health Care, and the Limits of Bodily Autonomy in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s”
May 7, 2024, 4:15pm, Fakultätssaal (01-185, Philosophicum)
For many at the heart of the rights revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, these were times of revolutionary possibility in which the shackles of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and patriarchy could be thrown off. For others seeking to embed legal rights for LGBTQ people, women, and people of color, integration into social institutions and efforts to win political respectability became core concerns. In this lecture, I argue that the structure of American capitalism, especially in the realm of health care, has always rendered distinctions between liberation and assimilation artificial and oversimplified. The question of exchanging money for a commodity – health care – forms a vitally important topic in the multiple histories of movements for bodily autonomy in the United States since the emergence of second-wave feminism and the sexual revolutions of the 1960s. The struggles to provide care in a mostly privatized system did more than simply expose the economic and social disparities within gender rights movements: debates over money, access, and consumer rights shaped the terms of identity politics in ways unique to the United States.
Jonathan Bell is Professor of US History at the UCL Institute of the Americas in London. He is the author or editor of several books on American political history, and is currently working on a history of the relationship between sexual rights and health care in the modern United States.
