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.
This talk will build on my analysis, in the Wiley Handbook of Magazine Studies, of the commercial fan magazine as a type of publication marked by fan-journalistsâ âdouble-timeâ (Hills 2020). I also addressed the âintra-franchise fandomâ characterising the officially-licensed Doctor Who Magazineâs production team (ibid). DWM is unusually long-running, and can be traced back to Doctor Who Weekly (1979-80). The Magazine has variously been analysed as a space in which fan interpretations became more sophisticatedly auteurist (Booy 2012), and as the beginning of official, TV-production attempts to paratextually orient fan readings (Sandifer 2014). The tension between these two types of reading illustrates how the commercial fan magazine remains caught between priorities of branding and giving a voice to âgrassrootsâ fandom. This splitting has been widely testified to in fan studies, with its binaries of affirmational/transformational fandom (Hills 2014); of ânew industry-drivenâ and âtraditionalâ fans (Busse and Gray 2014); of âbrand fansâ versus âtraditional fansâ (Linden and Linden 2017: 37), and discussions of âcorporatized fandomâ (Booth 2019: 29).
However, the commercial fan magazine has to continually find ways of hybridising or combining these versions of âfandomâ and âbrandomâ (Guschwan 2012) in its address. Considering this duality, I will focus on the magazineâs 2022 rebranding after it was announced that Russell T Davies would be returning to show-run the TV programme for a second time, and that Disney would be Doctor Whoâs co-producer and global distributor outside the UK. Along with undergoing a re-brand, DWM also welcomed a new editor from issue 595 in 2023. Different editorial eras have been a focus of fanzine analysis (see e.g. Kilburn 2017 and Kibble-White 2017), though the current âeraâ has yet to receive sustained fan commentary. I will consider how the âDisney Doctor Whoâ or âRTD2â incarnation of DWM under Jason Quinnâs editorship has distinctively engaged with contemporary norms of branded, franchised cultural production.
Dr. Matt Hills is an honorary Professor at the University of Bristol, and formerly a Professor of Fandom Studies at the University of Huddersfield. He is the author of a number of monographs, beginning with Fan Cultures (Routledge 2002), and has co-edited collections such as Adventures Across Space and Time: A Doctor Who Reader (Bloomsbury 2023) and, most recently, Theatre Fandom (University of Iowa Press 2025). Recent publications include 2025 book chapters in the following edited collections: The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom: Second Edition, Entering the Multiverse (also Routledge) and Affect in Fandom (Amsterdam University Press), with work forthcoming in further collections such as Bridging Design and Fandom (Emerald) and Acquiring Fan Lifestyles (University of Michigan Press).
You can download the poster for the event here.
On Nov 13 the Obama Institute will hold an info session on its Direct Exchange programs. Please join us in room P 2 (Philosophicum) for more information about the exciting exchange opportunities!
Nov 13, 18:00-19:30
P 2 (Philosophicum)
Please find all details about the session on the flyer, which is available for download here and on the Exchange page, where you can also browse general information on the programs in order to get a headstart on what your options are and what an application would entail.
Looking forward to talking to you in person on Nov 13, when we will be happy to answer all your questions!
The Panoplist, later renamed to The Missionary Herald, was more than a magazine detailing the projects of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. In the early 1800s, countless Protestant Americans relied on the popular monthly periodical to stay informed about broader benevolence in the Early Republic, establish affective, evangelistic communities, and discuss the most anxiety-inducing responsibility of the time: raising the first generation of U.S. Americans. By discussing childraising discourses in The Missionary Herald, this talk will demonstrate how early U.S. magazines effectively tied together the concerns of their readership and their own specialized interests at the dawn of the nineteenth-century print revolution.
Layla Koch is a third-year PhD candidate in American studies at the University of Heidelberg under the supervision of Jan Stievermann. Her project explores U.S. children’s roles and shifting understandings of childhood in the U.S. foreign missionary movement, 1810-1866. Layla has studied abroad at Yale Divinity School and Uppsala University, Sweden. Currently, she serves as the editor of Digital Childhoods, the companion blog of the Society for the History of Children and Youth.
You can download the poster for the event here.
Drew Hayden Taylor liest aus seinem Roman COLD.
Aus dem Englischen von Leo Strohm
ca. 445 Seiten
Erscheinungstermin: 30. Oktober 2025
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Alles beginnt mit einem Flugzeugabsturz… Die einzigen Ăberlebenden – die Pilotin und eine Journalistin – hoffen in der eisigen WĂŒste Ontarios auf Rettung… WĂ€hrenddessen versucht Elmore Trent, Professor fĂŒr Indigene Literatur und Kultur, nach einer AffĂ€re mit seiner studentischen Hilfskraft, verzweifelt seine Ehe zu retten. Und Paul North, Eishockey-Spieler der IHL, sieht sich mit dem wenig glamourösen Ende seiner Karriere konfrontiert. Sehr schnell wird klar, dass jemand – oder etwas? – die vermeintlich isolierten Figuren verbindet. Etwas, das auf sie alle Jagd macht…
Drew Hayden Taylor, preisgekrönter kanadischer Schriftsteller und Theaterautor, verlagert in seinem Bestseller traditionelle indigene Geschichten in die modernen StraĂen Torontos und verwebt Unterhaltung, Krimi, Thriller und Horror zu einer temporeichen ErzĂ€hlung mit lebensnahen Charakteren. Nebenbei behandelt er dabei Themen wie Vertreibung und Trauma und liefert eine satirische Kritik an der aktuellen indigenen Literatur.
Drew Hayden Taylor (*1962 in Curve Lake First Nation, Kanada) ist ein preisgekrönter indigener Dramatiker, Romanautor, Filmemacher und Journalist.
Er hat alles gemacht, von Stand-up-Comedy im Kennedy Center in Washington D. C. bis hin zur kĂŒnstlerischen Leitung der ersten indigenen Theatergruppe Kanadas (Native Earth Performing Arts). Drew Hayden Taylor ist Autor von bislang 36 BĂŒchern – COLD ist der erste Roman, der ins Deutsche ĂŒbersetzt ist. In Deutschland ist er einem breiteren Publikum durch seine Dokumentation Searching for Winnetou (2018) bekannt.
www.drewhaydentaylor.com
Bilder + Texte: Merlin Verlag
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You can download the poster for the event 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.
