Center for Comparative Native and Indigenous Studies

The Center for Comparative Native and Indigenous Studies (CCNIS) is meant as a platform to bring together scholars and students who work on indigenous issues in a global context. Each year, we host conferences and workshops on indigenous topics and offer courses on, for instance, Native American Literature and Film, Indigenous Rights, or Indigeneity and Ecocriticism.

Previous guest speakers and center affiliates include Gerald Vizenor (UC Berkeley/University of New Mexico), Kim Scott (Curtin University), Lindsay Robertson (University of Oklahoma), Stacy Leeds (University of Arkansas), and Mary Lawlor (Muhlenberg College).

The CCNIS seeks to foster interdisciplinary co-operations and to bring together disciplines such as American Studies, Canadian Studies, history, legal studies, cultural geography, economics, biology and medicine, in order to stress the vibrancy, contemporaneity and complexity of indigenous cultures in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Our institutional partners include the Center for the Study of American Indian Law and Policy at the University of Oklahoma.

In 2016, the new volume Comparative Indigenous Studies was published. Taking a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective, it highlights the ways in which indigenous cultures have resisted, time and again, the myth of their own disappearance.

Contact

Prof. Dr. Mita Banerjee (CCNIS director)
Philosophicum II
Jakob-Welder-Weg 20
Room 02.225
55128 Mainz

Phone: +49-6131-39-22711

Email

Research Projects and Programs

DFG Research Projects:

• Between Authenticity and the Market
• Biopolitics and Native American Life Writing
• Body and Metaphor in Medical Humanities
• Cultural Performance in Transnational American Studies
• Early American Short Narratives
• Life Writing in Early American Periodical
• Pedagogical Writing and Social Practice in the Age of American Romanticism
• Un/doing Differences. Praktiken der Humandifferenzierung

Further Projects:

• Early American Studies at Mainz
• Center for Comparative Native and Indigenous Studies
• DGF Research Training Group “Life Sciences – Life Writing”
• Political and Intellectual History
• Religion and American Culture
• Center for Social and Cultural Studies (SOCUM)
• Material Culture Studies at Mainz
• Historische Kulturwissenschaften Uni Mainz