We are pleased to introduce prof. Richard Reitsma from Canisius College — a visiting professor at the American Studies Center in the Spring 2022 within the Visiting Professor Exchange Program with Canisius and Daemen Colleges in Buffalo, NY.

Since after the May break, prof. Reitsma will start his elective for BA students: LatinX in the US. The course aims to explore the complex identities and the sense of (not)belonging of the Latin American & Caribbean Diaspora in the US, through the analysis of film and literature.

Prof. Richard Reitsma is a Chair of the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Canisius College, Buffalo, NY. His current research concentrates on gender and minority representation in literature and film of the American South, U.S. Latinos, and Latin America.

American Studies Colloquium Series

January 16: Painting in Total Darkness: Blindness as the Medium for Vision

January 4, 2025

We are delighted to invite you to the last lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! Touching on various processes, materials, histories, and methodologies of making, Stephen Proski’s lecture will show how blindness can function as a unique lens of perception, particularly as it relates to the expanded field of painting.

Year 2024/2025

January 9: It’s a True Story – It Happened to a Friend of a Friend (online)’: Urban Legends and Television in the Contemporary Era

December 31, 2024

Join us for the first Weird TV lecture in 2025! Whether centering talk programming, news television, or fictionalised accounts, urban legends nest themselves in the minds of viewers, propagating, and ultimately regressively metamorphosing & returning to oral tradition, shared from viewer to non-viewer to non-viewer, so on and so forth. The oral links which are core to the Urban Legend are recreated anew. While found near universally across televisual programming, our interest rests in the anthology format television has adopted. The stories told are familiar, but not entirely static. The narrative transaction shifts and subsumes itself to the socio-cultural changes. Each technological revolution in communication ripples and renders the narrativization of urban legends transposed onto television. It is in this vein that we will discuss the conceptualisation of the Urban Legend, the televisual forms it has taken, and its existence within the internet era.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 19: Between The Mundane and the Heroic: Vietnamese Presence in State Socialist Poland

December 19, 2024

We are delighted to invite you to the fifth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! This talk will examine the depictions of the (North) Vietnamese as freedom fighters within the context of the state socialist public sphere and the everyday life of Vietnamese students in Poland across generations. From idealized wartime reportages to mixed-race couples, the Vietnamese presence was marked by a multifaceted experience of adaptation, challenges, opportunities, and dynamic, interactive bonds with Polish society. This history continues to exert a profound influence on the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora and Polish-Vietnamese relationships.

Year 2024/2025

December 18: The Trump Transition – What is New and What is Not

December 18, 2024

Leadership Research Groupis inviting all those who would like to put the Trump transition to a presidential scholarship context and better understand the Trump transition decisions, the prospects for the future in domestic and foreign policy areas they bring, and the impact that Trump leadership may have on the political scene in Washington to a talk followed by a Q&A session by Professor Stephen Farnsworth.

Year 2024/2025

December 17: We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice

December 17, 2024

During the workshop “We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice”, Aleksandra Julia Malinowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw,will delve into the history of feminist manifestos and their pivotal role in the women’s movement in the United States. We’ll explore how activists of the second wave of feminism used grassroots publications to raise awareness, voice the demands of emerging women’s groups, and build communication networks between organizations spread across the country. Together, we’ll analyze the literary techniques that make the manifesto genre a powerful tool for inspiring activist mobilization beyond the pages of the text.