Tag Archive: ASCS

American Studies Colloquium Series

April 15: Film, AIDS, Activism: Culture Engagements that Move

April 15, 2024

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

American Studies Colloquium Series

March 14: The Invisible Designer: Meg Crane and the Invention of Home Pregnancy Testing in 1960s New York

March 12, 2024

We are pleased to invite you to a lecture in the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2023/2024 Spring semester. This time we’ll be joined by Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, who will talk about Predictor, the groundbreaking home pregnancy test developed in New York in the late 1960s by Margaret “Meg” Crane.

American Studies Colloquium Series

March 3: Field Notes toward American Studies as Relational Diversity Studies

March 3, 2022

In this talk, Carsten Junker will reflect on the study of demographic diversity in scenarios of inequality in the broader field of American Studies. The lecture seeks to address the issues of institutionalization, theoretical frameworks and the role of ethics.

American Studies Colloquium Series

January 20: Kelly Reichardt’s Gastro-Aesthetics

January 20, 2022

This talk examines cinematic figurations of food in Kelly Reichardt’s ‘First Cow’, where aesthetic and gastronomic consumption converges in the figure of the cow as an image and as a source of milk. How should we think about the visual consumption of images of dairy consumption?  

American Studies Colloquium Series

January 13: Why Write If You Can Paint? Thoughts on Thoughts and Feelings in American Artists’ Writings

January 5, 2022

The history of artists’ writings is long and rich; one thus has to pose the question: Why write at all (if you can paint)? In this talk Edyta Frelik will discuss texts of American artists to explore their motivations and goals as writers, and the relation between the plastic arts and literature in general.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 9: Sham Ruins, A User’s Guide

December 9, 2021

What is it that sham ruins ruin? This talk focuses on a number of American sham ruins, and new meaning they impose. The reevaluation of sham ruins helps in understanding what makes a freshly minted broken object attractive in any period.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 2: ‘Ain’t I a woman?’: Sojourner Truth, Feminist Theory, and the Unstable Category of ‘Woman’

December 2, 2021

Katrin Smiet’s lecture is devoted to the unstable category of ‘womanhood’ discussed from the perspective of power structures. This talk traces the feminist thinkers of the late 20th century to discover different answers to Sojourner Truth’s question: ‘Ain’t I a woman?’

American Studies Colloquium Series

November 18: Studying Authorial Fingerprints – On Stylometric Study of American Literature

November 18, 2021

In this talk, Michał Choiński will demonstrate how stylometric study of literature may help more traditional, qualitative approaches to American literature by regrouping texts based on their regional affiliation, tracing an editor in a text and solving the issue of problematic authorship.

American Studies Colloquium Series

May 28: An Erotic Toolkit: Asexual and Aromantic Critiques of Heteronormativity

May 28, 2020

This talk will explore the feminist, queer, and anti-racist tradition of the erotic, drawing on Audre Lorde’s work in particular. Ela Przybylo will discuss how the erotic provides a distinct model for theorizing relating that creates space for the inclusion of asexuality and challenges compulsory sexuality. 

American Studies Colloquium Series

May 12: Global Brooklyn

May 12, 2020

In his lecture, Mateusz Halawa will talk about transnational aesthetic regime of urban consumption. Global Brooklyn is not only the title of his soon-to-be-published book, but also a metaphor used to essentialize the unprecedented circulation of visual styles, flavors, practices and values – all carefully designed and masterfully instagrammed – that have been sweeping the world and shaping food cultures.

American Studies Colloquium Series

May 7: Archiving Pain: On Crip Queer Evidence

May 7, 2020

In her research Alyson Patsavas focuses on disability studies, feminist and queer theory and the cultural politics of pain. In this lecture, she will outline dominant pain epistemologies and juxtapose medical record on pain with its personal accounts, in order to theorize what constitutes crip and queer evidence of pain.

American Studies Colloquium Series

April 2: Networks of Holocaust Memory in Third Generation Graphic Narratives

March 25, 2020

During the online streamed lecture, Dana Mihăilescu will present the Amy Kurzweil’s debut graphic memoir, Flying Couch (2016), in order to consider how the Holocaust narrative at the core of this graphic narrative is negotiated by the three generations of Kurweil’s family. Hence, she will highlight an ethical, future-oriented use of mediating forms of Holocaust memories for third generation artists.

American Studies Colloquium Series

January 14: Food: A Systemic Approach

December 27, 2019

Knowing where our food comes from is important to us as consumers and as citizens, allowing us to make more careful choices. During the lecture, Fabio Parasecoli will explore different conceptualizations of the global food system, together with the structures, flows, and stakeholders that compose it.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 12: AHS: Cult, The Purge, and the End of Subtlety in the Age of Trump

December 2, 2019

Michael Fuchs, University of Graz: In his book New Television (2017), Martin Shuster suggests that contemporary American television depicts a “world […] emptied of normative authority” (6). According to Shuster […]

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 5: The Future of American Media and the Crisis of the Public Sphere

November 29, 2019

Curd Knüpfer, Freie Universität, Berlin: Digitalization and increased networkability of information sources have resulted in profound shifts in how news and political information reaches the American public […]