We are pleased to invite you to a lecture in the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2023/2024 Spring semester!

Todd Sekuler
(University of Zürich)

Film, AIDS, Activism: Culture Engagements that Move

Monday, April 15, 2024
at 4:45 p.m.

You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.

Where?

Dobra 55, room 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)

Who?

Todd Sekuler is Oberassistent in Popular Cultures at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies of the University of Zürich. He has a Master in Public Health (MPH) – with a focus on sexuality, gender and health – from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City and a PhD in European Ethnology from Institut für Europäische Ethnologie at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU). Sekuler was previously a post-doctoral researcher at the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in the Disentangling European HIV/AIDS Policies: Activism, Citizenship and Health (EUROPACH) and, subsequently, the “CrimScapes: Navigating citizenship through European landscapes of criminalisation” research teams. He has co-organized various events on the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS, including, most recently, the “arcHIV. A Search for Traces” and “HIVstories. Living Politics” exhibitions at the Schwules Museum in Berlin. Additional earlier engagements include a film and video series accompanying the exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe at C/O Berlin, an event on ACT UP groups in Germany at the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), a discussion and screening on AIDS, activism and video art at Bochum University, a sound installation on religiosity and AIDS activism at the international queer audio festival ECHOS+NETZE, and a discussion on HIV/AIDS in cinema at the XPosed International Queer Film Festival.

What?

This presentation will look at the structures of feeling that guide notions of kinship in AIDS activist video works from the earliest years of the AIDS epidemic of the United States. In these videos, notions of family, lineage and inheritance are variably mobilized, negotiated and deconstructed through a range of emotions including alienation, intimacy, humor, longing and desire. Together with attendees and a special guest, filmmaker Jim Hubbard, we will view clips and discuss collectively what selected works do with us, and how such modes of feeling relate to the contemporary political moment.

Year 2024/2025

March 13: Anachronistic Retrofuturism and the Cosmic Indifference of the Workplace

March 5, 2025

This talk centers the anachronistic office work setting and technologies of the tv series Severance (2022–) to argue that the series exemplifies the aesthetic techniques of the Weird even as it reorients the site of horror from the indifference of the universe to the sociopathy of neoliberal capitalism. If the original concept of Weird Fiction stressed the impotence of human beings within a universe ruled by forces that greatly exceed our power and that are, at best, indifferent to our fate, Severance confirms that these forces are, worse, malign as it locates them in the corporate priorities of the tech company Lumon Industries and its reduction of humans to human capital.

News

Extending the ELS

March 3, 2025

Extending the ELS (electronic student ID) validity will take place on March 17 – 20, 2025 from 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.

American Studies Colloquium Series

March 6: Bending Reality to Economics

March 1, 2025

We are delighted to invite you to the first lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2025 Spring semester! This talk examines the nested narrative of Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust as a motif by which the novel engages with the form of the financialized economy, in parallel with how its plot reflects on the lives of New York’s financial elite. By reframing the story of the 1929 crash through several mediations from the ‘reality’—a novel-with-the-novel, notes for a biography, reflections on this process by the ghost writer of said biography, and finally a personal journal—Trust draws our attention to the financialized economy as an exercise of substituting models for the thing itself, with inevitable distortions and lost data.

Year 2024/2025

February 25: Immortality in Televised Media – The Negative Sides of Being a (Super?)human

February 25, 2025

Join us for the second Weird TV lecture in 2025! Immortality as a concept has existed since ancient times, but unlike then, the term nowadays is rarely connected to chasing eternal youth or extending one’s life indefinitely. The concept of immortality in contemporary popular culture, propagated often through TV shows for children and adolescents alike, is usually connected with superheroes and the supernatural in general. Portrayed mostly as invincibility or ability to sustain damage that would otherwise kill a regular human, the focus is put on the physical sides of this concept, rarely on the mental side of being immortal. Death, after all, awaits everyone in the end, it is ingrained into human culture. As a species, we are drawn as much to creating, as we are to destroying, including ourselves.

Year 2024/2025

February 18: Solidarity in Struggle – A Conversation with Sarah Schulman

February 18, 2025

We invite you to a meeting with the author of “The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity,” Sarah Schulman, hosted by MA student at the ASC Julia Wajdziak. Together, we will look at the role of solidarity in contemporary activism, the challenges it faces, and the opportunities it creates for transnational alliances.