This workshop will bring together leading scholars in the fields of migration, political economy, and consumerism in United States history. Immigration debates and policies are an early domain in which both state administrative capacities and consumerist categories of human differentiation were generated, formalized, and institutionalized. Lizabeth Cohen (Harvard University) is an expert on postwar consumerism, and Rosanne Currarino (Queen’s University) has investigated labor questions and economic democracy during the Gilded Age. Katherine Benton-Cohen (Georgetown University) studied the Dillingham Commission’s role and legacy in categorizing and “inventing the immigrant problem,” while Joel Perlmann (Bard College) traced processes of classifying immigrants from Ellis Island to the 2020 Census. Jan Logemann (Georg-August-Universität) focused on the role of European émigrés in making consumer capitalism, while Atiba Perilla’s (German Historical Institute) new project asks how immigrants used money in the time period from 1870 to 1930. We invite workshop participants to engage these scholars in a critical discussion on their key texts.
Nov 29, 2023 & Jan 17, 2024 – 16.15-17.45 – Student Conference Workshops – P6 (Philosophicum)
To all advanced Bachelor’s and Master’s students who are interested in learning how to write and present a conference paper: Please join us for one or both of the student conference paper workshops on Nov 29 and Jan 17. The workshops are part of a seminar by Dr. Julia Velten but are open to any students who are interested.
Please see the flyer below for details or download it here.
February 14, 2023: Screening of Yehuda Sharim’s film Letters2Maybe (2021)
February 15, 2023: Workshop with Yehuda Sharim (“A Map of Light: Creativity & Inspiration during Dark Times”)
On behalf of The Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee cordially invites everyone to two events with filmmaker Professor Yehuda Sharim (UC Merced, California):
Yehuda Sharim is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and poet. As the son of Persian immigrants to Israel, his work focuses on the relationship between the quotidian and poetic. Sharim’s films have appeared in film festivals, artistic venues, and universities across the world. Oscillating between fiction and documentary filmmaking, his work offers an intimate portrayal of those who refuse to surrender amidst daily devastation and culminating strife, offering a vision for equality and a renewed solidarity in a divisive world. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the Program of Global Art Studies, University of California, Merced.
Letters2Maybe is an intimate portrayal of those who refuse to surrender amidst daily devastation and culminating strife, offering a vision for equality and a renewed sense of solidarity in a divisive country. Letters2Maybe offers a fluid and eclectic tapestry of physical and emotional movement of different immigrant communities as they encounter impossible challenges in a country of compounded catastrophes. By embracing a kaleidoscopic style of storytelling to highlight the poetics and precarity that follow the craving for freedom, Letters2Maybe is an unfinished letter, articulating the ever-growing yet unflinching demand for justice and tenderness in our world today. (2021; 92 min.)
A Map of Light: Creativity & Inspiration during Dark Times (workshop) – The camera is obsessed with light. Darkness is never considered aesthetically pleasing. We are told that we need to see: we need to see as a way to learn, and make sense. And light is the most critical ingredient in shaping that illusion of “seeing” as “being.” We are like our cameras, chasing lights, forgetting that darkness and the uncertainty that accompanies darkness are inseparable from any source of light. In this talk, we will interrogate what it means to follow a creative vision (start a film, book, and more), exploring this desire to create, shape, and enter a space of experimentation. We will examine different aspects of community-cinema and take into consideration the various personal/collective challenges and doubts that keep us away from the work that we know we are meant to do. This talk is about that thirst to film and create new visions during calamitous times.
The journal Early American Literature (UNC Press) has published a conference review of the Obama Institute’s 2018 conference “Transatlantic Conversations: New and Emerging Approaches to Early American Studies”.
Research Group “Transnational Periodical Cultures”
Beefcake: Male Bodies, Masculinity, and Community-Building in Pre-Stonewall Gay Magazines (Workshop X)
Jan 20, 2021, 4 – 6 p.m., Online (Zoom)
Please find below the invitation and Zoom link to access workshop X, “Beefcake: Male Bodies, Masculinity, and Community-Building in Pre-Stonewall Gay Magazines,” organized by Prof. Dr. Florian Freitag (University Duisburg-Essen).
Speakers will be:
Filippo Carlà-Uhink (U Potsdam), Florian Freitag (UDE) and David K. Johnson (U of South Florida), author of Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement (2019).
We look forward to continuing our conversations on magazines with you. Best wishes, Jutta Ernst, Sabina Fazli, Oliver Scheiding
