July 4 Event 2025 – Lecture, Exhibition, Get-together, Food and Drinks 🗓

July 4 Event 2025 – Lecture, Exhibition, Get-together, Food and Drinks 🗓

Fourth of July Event at the Obama Institute

July 4, 2025, 2-6 p.m., P5 & Foyer P2-P5 (Philosophicum)

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 “speculative” framework to texts and contexts that may magnify, combine, bend, and/or even break audiences’ expectations of genre and what, exactly, constitute plantation settings?

 

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?

 

Please find further information on the poster below or download it here.

July 3 – Guest Lecture “‘You can go dig him out of his grave’: Anishinaabe Resistance to Racialization in the 1910s” 🗓

July 3 – Guest Lecture “‘You can go dig him out of his grave’: Anishinaabe Resistance to Racialization in the 1910s” 🗓

Jill Doerfler
(University of Minnesota, Duluth)

“You can go dig him out of his grave”: Anishinaabe Resistance to Racialization in the 1910s

July 3, 2025, 18:15-19:45, P 15, Philosophicum

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 “mixed-blood” and “full-blood” 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.

 
July 1 – Guest Lecture “From Geeks to Tech Titans: Apple and the Making of Silicon Chic” 🗓

July 1 – Guest Lecture “From Geeks to Tech Titans: Apple and the Making of Silicon Chic” 🗓

Susan Ingram & Markus Reisenleitner
(York University, Toronto, Canada)

From Geeks to Tech Titans: Apple and the Making of Silicon Chic

July 1, 2025, 09:40-11:10, Campus Germersheim, N.106 (Stufenhörsaal)

Abstract
Ever since Annie Leibovitz’s photos of coders playing computer games made it into the December 7, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone, four years after Doug Engelbart staged “the mother of all demos” 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 Huang’s 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 Book’s 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 d’études interculturelles de l’image / Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies. Before joining York’s Division of Humanities in 2006, he taught at the University of Vienna, the Vienna campus of the University of Oregon’s International Program, the University of Alberta, and Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where he was Head of the Department of Cultural Studies from 2004–2006. 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.

 
June 24 – Info Session: New American Studies M.A. Curriculum 🗓

June 24 – Info Session: New American Studies M.A. Curriculum 🗓

Join us for an info session about the new American Studies M.A. curriculum!

Starting in the winter semester of 2025/26, the American Studies M.A. program at JGU will launch a newly accredited curriculum.

The updated program offers greater flexibility:
You can now choose to complete all 120 credits within American Studies, combine your studies with two modules from another discipline, or earn additional credits through certified programs.

Who can apply?
Current Bachelor students majoring or minoring in American Studies, students enrolled in the Bachelor of Education program, as well as first-semester American Studies Master students who are considering switching to the new curriculum.

Want to learn more?
Join our info session to get all the details.

INFO SESSION
Tuesday, June 24, 2025, 18:00
P13 (Philosophicum)

Download the flyer for the info session here.

June 25 – Guest Lecture “Periodicals as Foundations of Black American Culture” 🗓

June 25 – Guest Lecture “Periodicals as Foundations of Black American Culture” 🗓

Scott Zukowski
(Universität Graz)

Periodicals as Foundations of Black American Culture

June 25, 2025, 10:15-11:45, P 2, Philosophicum (Jakob-Welder-Weg 18)

 

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 had—and continue to have—on Black American culture.

You can download the poster for the event here.