Friday, June 27th / 16.00 - 18.00

Panel 1 - African American Identity (Villa)

Chair: Silke Hackenesch (Free University Berlin)

Martin Lüthe	University of Giessen	I’m Tied to Your Apron String”: Motown and Inclusive Black Men
Frank Wilker	Free University Berlin	Cultural Memory of the Middle Passage: Reconfiguration through Imagery
Carmen Mitchell	University of California Berkeley	African American Exceptionalism in Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic
Tony McGowan	US Military Academy Westpoint	‘Color-blindness’ and Insight into the Inclusion Debate within the US Military

 

Panel 2 - Literature and Identity (Room 203)

Chair: Claudio Cattaneo (University of Rome – La Sapienza)

Henrike Demuth	Technical University Dresden	Collective Memory in contemporary (Jewish) American Holocaust Drama: Contesting shared and divided Identities
Pia Masiero	University of Venice Ca' Foscari	Jewish-American Counterlives
Claire Gresle-Favier	University of Dortmund	Sexual abstinence education and the good American sexual citizen
Michael Boyden	Katholieke Universiteit Leuven	Pioneer of Pluralism: The Sequential Bilingualism of Carl Schurz

 

Panel 3 - Gender: Action, Representation and Performance (Room 319)

Chair: Laura Bieger (Free University Berlin)

Michaela Bank	University of Frankfurt/Main	Contesting Nativism in the 19th-century US Women’s Rights Movement
Barbara Antoniazzi	University of Venice Ca' Foscari	The Gender of Things: sexed machines and the segregation of female workers at the turn of the century.
Regis Mann	University of California Riverside	Racial and Gender Performativity in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep
Eva Rus	University of Birmingham	Mary Kelly: the looping space of Love Songs (2005, 2007)

 

Panel 4 - Militarism and Empire (Room 340)

Chair: Donald Pease (Dartmouth College)

Ryan O'Kane	University of Birmingham	Synthesising Liberty: The cybernetic reconstruction of American political culture, 1941-47
Kienscherf Markus	Free University Berlin	A (Permanent) State of Exception? Anti-globalization Protests, the State and the War Machine
Jennie Sutton	Washington University, St.Louis	Re-Zoning American Empire:  Forced Civilian Relocation and Inter-imperial Connections
Fabian Lindner	Free University Berlin	Financial Markets, National Debt and American Hegemony

 

Saturday, June 28th / 9.00 - 11.00

Panel 5 - Enforcing Consensus and Producing Dissent in American History (Room 201)

Chair: Juliane Graf (Free University Berlin)

Michael Lenz	University of Cologne	The Specter of Disunity: Enforcing Unity in Revolutionary and Early National America
Jasper Trautsch	Free University Berlin	Inclusionary and Exclusionary Practices of Early American Nationalism.
Simone Pelizza	University of Torino	From Secession to Loyalty: Edward A. Pollard and the Parable of Southern Exceptionalism in mid-19th Century America
Richard Wall	University of Birmingham	Woodrow Wilson and the Unified Nation

 

Panel 6 - Representation of and after 9/11 (Room 203)

Chair: Devin Zuber (University of Osnabrück)

Nausica Zaballos	University of Paris Sorbonne	Dramatization of 11/09 in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: blurring boundaries between image and reality, community and self.
Henrike Lehnguth	University of Maryland	Extraordinarily Unified, Exceptionally Heroic: American Resilience and Courage in Paul Greengrass’s United 93
Mahshid Mayar	University of Teheran	American Literary Turn at the Turn of the Century: How 9/11 creeps into US literature
Christiane Streubel	University of Münster	Intergenerational Armageddon? Pictures of the Elderly in US-Print Media and the Impact of 9/11

 

Panel 7 - Literature: Forms and Politics (Room 319)

Chair: Sebastian Horn (Free University Berlin)

Florian Sedlmeier	University of Konstanz	The How Is the What: Dave Eggers and Form as Politics
Hannes Schaser	Free University Berlin	From Reform to Resistance: Emerson’s Essays and the Problem of Critique
Anneka Esch-van Kan	University of Giessen	Who counts as an American? - Patriotism and Dissent
Hanna Bingel	University of Giessen	“A Nation Haunted and Wanted by God. (De)constructing National Identity and Religion in the Contemporary American Novel.”

 

Panel 8 - Corporate Media, Corporeal Movies (Room 340)

Chair: Julian Hanich and Tobias Scholz (Free University Berlin)

Alan Taylor	Free University Berlin	Your Space is our Space: U.S. Corporate Media’s Representation of Self
Malgorzata Gajda-Laszewska	University of Warsaw	UNITED AGAINST UNITY: Public Movement Opposing Media Consolidation in the USA
Mark Straw	University of Birmingham	Male fighting machines: Masochism, performance, and technology in contemporary Hollywood war films
Wendy Ward	University College Dublin	Photography as Public Works Project: Framing for Exclusion in Lars von Trier’s Dogville

 

Saturday, June 28th / 14.30 - 16.00

Panel 9 - Migration, Exile and Transnational Connections (Room 201)

Chair: Birte Adam (Humbolt Universtity Berlin)

Chris Emery	University of Birmingham	The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the Iranian-American Community 1979-2008
Jayson Sae-Saue	Stanford University	‘Southwest Asia’: Mapping Asia in the Borderlands

 

Panel 10 - Representation of Blackness (Room 203)

Chair: Bärbel Tischleder (Free University Berlin)

Michael Basseler	University of Giessen	"Daddy issues": (African) American Identity and the Literature of the Post-Soul Generation
Silke Hackenesch	Free University Berlin	Constructing Blackness: Chocolate as a Racial Signifier in historical and Cultural Perspective
Kristina Graaff	Technical University Berlin	“Dope Dealer, Preacher Figure, 12th Floor Corporate Yes Man Wigger” – Strategies  of African-American Self-Construction in the Genre of Street Literature

 

Panel 11 - Antipastorals, Counternostalgias, and Intergenerational Control (Room 319)

Chair: Pia Masiero (University of Venice – Ca’ Foscari)

Mauro Carassai	Brown University	‘Why Are Things the Way They Are?’ The Limits of National Dissent in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and Henry Bean’s The Believer
James Dorson	Free University  Berlin	“Some Apparition Out of the vanished Past”: Counternostalgia in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy
Jörg Richter	Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung	Including/Excluding Inheritance: Generational Interfaces in Recent Family Novels

 

Panel 12 - Negotiations of (Middle) Class Identity (Room 340)

Chair: Johannes Schaser (Free University Berlin)

Konstantin Butz	University of Bremen	Divided We Skate - United We Fall”: Intersectional Privilege and the “Coolonial” Habits of Skateboarding
Daniel Geary	University of Nottingham	Debating Middle-Class Identity: The Lonely Crowd, White Collar, and Postwar American Culture
Michael Harley	Liverpool John Moores University	Navigating Exclusion in "Beggars of Life" by Jim Tully [1924]

 

Saturday, June 28th / 16.30 - 18.00

Panel 13 - Narratives of Hybridity (Room 201)

Chair: Barbara Antoniazzi (University of Venice – Ca’ Foscari)

Manlio Della Marca	University of Rome Sapienza	US in the Eyes of the Other(s): William Apess, Leslie Marmon Silko, and the Problem of  Belonging to America
Kuan-Hui Liao	National Taiwan University	Beyond the Inclusion/Exclusion Binarism? Mapping the Mixed Race Identity in Rebecca Walker
Sally Michael	University of Cairo	Arab American Nationalism as Perversion and Border Crossing in Naomi Shihab Nye´s 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East

 

Panel 14 - Native American and the Land(scape) (Room 203)

Chair: Johannes Völz (Free University Berlin)

Thomas Dikant	Free University Berlin	Emerson and the Politics of the Land
Philipp Kneis	Uni of Potsdam / Humboldt University Berlin	The Reservation Writes Back: Contemporary (Native) Americans in Sherman Alexie’s Writings
Devin Zuber	University of Osnabrück	“An Uncertainty of Image”: Native Americans and the (trans)national Landscape

 

Panel 15 - Living on the Border (Room 319)

Chair: Michael Duszat (Humbolt University Berlin)

Bidlingmaier & Kozicka	University of Bochum	(Ex)clusion/(In)clusion and the Third Space: Representing Chinatowns in the USA
Martina Benz	Free University Berlin	Illegalized immigration in the U.S.: beyond the dichotomy of inclusion and exclusion
Marc Rodriguez	University of Notre Dame	Inclusion and Mexican Americanism: High School Acculturation, Ethnic Politics, and Revolt in South Texas, 1955-1963

 

Panel 16 - Urban Spaces: Orders and Disorders (Room 340)

Chair: Mary Ann Snyder-Körber (Free University Berlin)

Paul Farber	University of Michigan	Rapping Ground Zero: Post-9/11 Hip Hop and the Racial-Spatial U.S. Urban Landscape
Cotner & Fitch	City University New York	Sweet Liberty: Shopping on the Margins
Madeleine Lyes	University College Dublin	Plurality as Chaos? Urban Disorder and the Lewis Mumford - Jane Jacobs Debate

 

Program (Preliminary)

Friday

11:00-13:00	Check-In Location: Graduate School of North American Studies, Villa
13:00-13:30 (Museum)	Welcome (GSNAS, Donald Pease) Location: Museum for Antropology and Asian Art, Cinema. (The museum is across the street from the Kennedy Institute)
13:30-15:30 (Museum)	Keynote Talk Hortense Spillers Location: Museum for Antropology and Asian Art, Cinema. (The museum is across the street from the Kennedy Institute)
15:30-16:00	Coffee Break
16:00-18:00	Panel 1	Panel 2	Panel 3	Panel 4
18:00-19:00	Light dinner
19:00-21:00	Talk Walter Benn Michaels Location: Room 340, John F. Kennedy Institute
After 21:00	Get Together

 

Saturday

9:00-11:00	Panel 5	Panel 6	Panel 7	Panel 8
11:00-11:30	Coffee Break
11:30-13:00	Talk Saskia Sassen Location: Room 340, John F. Kennedy Institute
13:00-14:30	Lunch
14:30-16:00	Panel 9	Panel 10	Panel 11	Panel 12
16:00-16:30	Coffee Break
16:30-18:00	Panel 13	Panel 14	Panel 15	Panel 16
18:00-18:30	Coffee Break
18:30-20:00	Summery and Conclusion by Donald Pease Roundtable discussion with Walter Benn Michaels, Donald Pease and Hortense Spillers Location: Room 340, John F. Kennedy Institute
After 20:00	Barbecue