Conferences

2017 will mark the centennial of U.S. entry into World War I. The war had a profound impact on the United States and on its global role. Well before the country entered the war, the U.S. had become a key supporter of the Allies, shifting the global balance of power to set the stage for what has been called the “American century.” This conference provides an opportunity to reassess the war’s significance in U.S. history by focusing on the historical context of an emerging American commitment abroad. While we invite contributions that reflect current scholarship on any political, economic, military, social, and cultural aspect of American history during World War I, we would like to draw attention to three distinct perspectives.

The first perspective concerns a reassessment of the neutrality period between 1914 and 1917. While important work focuses on transatlantic diplomacy and American politics to characterize the American response to the war abroad, more recent work has also emphasized cultural and intellectual responses to the “European War” in all areas of American society. The range of issues that could be addressed here includes reassessments of policy decisions, economic issues, as well as cultural phenomena such as a contemporary celebration of France by urban elites or support efforts by immigrant communities such as German and Italian Americans. All these developments were discussed and reflected upon by an emerging and invigorated cast of public intellectuals.

A second perspective concerns a reassessment of periodization. While the canonized dates of 1914, 1917, and 1918 provide the traditional framework, Adam Tooze has recently pointed to 1916 as a key year during which the U.S. became both the world’s largest economy and its banker, putting the country in a position to help define the postwar world order. Taking this observation as a clue, what historical trajectories emerge from the war’s diverse economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions?

A third perspective is provided by a global view on the United States. As a “world war,” the conflict had implications for regions and countries around the globe - developments caused or felt by the United States. What new perspectives on the war can we open up by broadening the traditional narrative to include wartime diplomatic or cultural relations with, for example, South America and Asia? In what way do global developments such as the influenza epidemic expand the story? And what perspective on American military history may be gleaned from a global perspective?

Finally, important questions must be asked about the legacy of World War I in the twentieth century and beyond. What is the legacy of the war as advocated by former protagonists such as veterans? Why has the First World War received comparatively less attention in the general public than among historians? What cultural memory has been associated with World War I, and how does it deviate from memories associated with other American wars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, this interdisciplinary project is bringing together a group of theologians and historians from the universities of Heidelberg and Notre Dame, the leading Catholic university in North America. We will be meeting four times from 2016 to 2018 (in Rome, Heidelberg, Chicago und Jerusalem) to discuss the following questions: a) How do we interpret and assess the Reformation as a historical and theological event, as a historiographic category, and as a cultural myth from the perspective of different disciplines and confessional traditions? b) What are the long-term global legacies of the Reformation as manifest in the development of distinct Christian world religions and competing confessional cultures, producing different types of modernities? To compare different confessional modernities we will look at how Catholic and Protestant theologies and lived religions interacted with the development of modern empires and nation-states, with the emergence of the natural, historical and biblical sciences, as well as with divergent legal cultures and traditions in education and social welfare. c) Finally, the colloquia will also address the challenging question regarding how the Reformation should be commemorated (or can be celebrated) from an ecumenical perspective today.

The conditions of literary authorship in the English-speaking world have undergone a remarkable change in the last fifty years. It seems that conventional literary historiography has not yet adequately explored the socio-institutional factors underlying this change, especially the increasing academicization of the literary field during the expansion of higher education between 1950 and 1975. This conference seeks to encourage reflection on these developments and on possible methodologies to explain them. In which ways, for example, has the rising “culture of the school” (Guillory) impacted the production of literary authority, produced new taste-making formations or modes of literary professionalism? How do these developments relate to the social, how can we grasp their global/transcultural dimension? (How, for example, has the “program era” changed US author’s sense of their place in the world? How has it affected the literary experience of non-US authors who participate in the creative writing programs in US based-research universities?).

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is being promoted by the Obama administration as well as by some EU governments as the best tool to stimulate not only free trade but also investment across the shores of the Atlantic. Our conference is meant to critically assess this undertaking, gauge the prospects for its realization, and foster a broader transatlantic dialogue about the promises and possible pitfalls of creating a free trade zone that would encompass the world’s biggest regional economies.

The conference is organized in close cooperation with Professor Eckhard Janeba and the Economics Department at Mannheim University.

It will bring together economists, political scientists, as well as transatlantic experts and policymakers but will also include stakeholders in particular from the Rhine-Neckar metropolitan region, thus facilitating exchanges between academia, politics, and private enterprise, and inaugurating the Rhein-Neckar Forum on Transatlantic Economic Issues, which we hope to establish as a permanent fixture on the region’s cultural calendar.

Sixty years ago, Joachim-Ernst Berendt’s Das Jazzbuch came out for the first time, Stan Kenton and Ella Fitzgerald were featured in cover stories of Der Spiegel, and Die Zeit called Jazz “the most interesting phenomenon of recent music history.” The “world’s biggest jazz concert” also took place sixty years ago in Germany: In 1953, Norman Granz’ concert series “Jazz at the Philharmonic” toured the country. Six decades later, distinguished experts, artists, and journalists will meet for an international symposium in Heidelberg to explore how the image of jazz has changed on both sides of the Atlantic. Which formats of presentation in journalism and academics seem to be adequate for the genre today? How do artists deal with the changing forms of production and reception? And to what extent can they determine the discussion about and the reception of their works? This symposium at the HCA will continue the transatlantic jazz dialogue established there in 2012 and will once more be a venue where intellectual curiosity and musical zest feel equally at home.

The new social inequality in modern cities is the subject of this interdisciplinary symposium, co-hosted by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA), the Institute of Geography and the Institute for Sociology. It is part of an international pilot study on comparative research of urban inequality in the knowledge society that explores the relationship between the sometimes very optimistic promise of the cultural and creative economy with respect to urban prosperity and the development of new social inequalities.

The question of what constitutes good or bad reading has a longer history; yet it seems that the symbolic prestige of academic criticism in the second half of the twentieth century has helped to inscribe the distinction between “professional” and “lay” reading more deeply into the public mind than ever before. As a result, the varied uses of literature both within and without the academy tend to be differentiated along various scales of higher or lower readerly practice (academic/middlebrow, rigorous/sloppy, reflec­tive/consumptive, creative/schematic, suspicious/naive, ethico-political/ aesthetic-therapeutic, etc.). This conference inquires into how the diverse reading practices in the United States relate to twentieth-century shifts in third-level education and literary institutions – the spread of academic literary studies, the rising influence of literary theory and criticism, the growth of college-educated readerships, the institutionalization of university-based networks of patronage (“Planet MFA”), etc. We wish to encourage reflection on how the manifest differences between reading cultures today relate to specific fields of practices or social locations; and on how claims about what constitutes legitimate reading translate into claims about cultural authority (about what sort of embodied practice, affective economy, or taste is associated with society’s cultural center).

During the 2012 Enjoy Jazz Festival, distinguished experts, artists, and journalists will meet at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) to look at the diversity of jazz in Europe and the United States. They will discuss the social relevance of the genre on both sides of the Atlantic, similarities and differences of European and American jazz, and their effects on our societies. On the occasion of the initiation of the UNESCO World Jazz Day this year, the participants of the symposium will try to explore the political dimensions of a genre that was seen as the epitome of freedom in the 1960s and trace transatlantic reciprocities. With this symposium, the HCA, in cooperation with Enjoy Jazz, attempts to establish a venue where intellectual curiosity and musical zest will feel equally at home.

This symposium was conceptualized by Christian Broecking and is generously supported by BASF SE.

In 1822 James Madison wrote that “a popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both."  In Madison’s day, the challenge was publishing such information. Today it is far more access to such information. This conference will explore the multiple barriers to an informed citizenry and the ways in which first and foremost the press but also other activists have challenged those barriers.

Historical scholarship has long established the inextricable interrelationship between gender and the nation. Feminist scholars in particular have demonstrated how male nationalists incorporated women as symbolic, cultural, and biological reproducers of the nation into their “imagined communities.” Most studies on the subject tend to focus on the tensions between women’s inclusion in nationalist discourse and their exclusion from political decision-making. Others have explored women’s active role in nation-building projects. Despite scholars’ insistence on the relational character of gender, however, masculinity continues to be neglected by scholars of gender and the nation. If masculinity is addressed, historians either overstate the cohesion of interests among men or focus exclusively on hegemonic models of manhood and the corresponding perpetuation of the nation-state and patriarchy.

This conference seeks to provide a fresh perspective on the interrelationship between gender and the nation by focusing on the role of marginalized masculinities in nation-building processes between 1800 and 1945. During that period, the emergence of particular forms of masculinity coincided with the founding of modern-nation states. Scientific racism, Imperialism, eugenics, and other forms of exclusion and subjugation became part and parcel of these gendered nation-building processes. Seeking to detect similarities/dissimilarities and continuities/discontinuities across space and time, the conference includes papers on North- and South America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, all of which shed light on the history of the interrelationship between marginalized masculinities and the nation in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century.

The conference organizers believe that the constructed character and function of manhood in people’s attempts to create “imagined communities” during that period cannot be fully comprehended if the exclusive focus of analysis is the subjugation of women or their resistance to and complicity in that subjugation. Concentrating exclusively on hegemonic masculinity in these processes seems similarly narrow. To understand hegemonic notions of masculinity and the nation, we need to explore the tensions and interrelationships between these dominant concepts and their margins. Studying the history of gender and the nation from the perspective of marginalized masculinities means focusing on the conflicts among competing concepts of manhood as well as on the differences between them. Far from being one ideologically monolithic bloc, men’s access to and interest in nation-building power varies considerably according to race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, etc. The conference focuses on these various fragmentations and their role in the creation, expansion, consolidation, and decline of nations around the globe.

As decided at the 2010 meeting of the European Association of American Studies in Dublin, the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA), in cooperation with the American Studies Network (ASN), will host a conference entitled “Religion and the Marketplace: New Perspectives and New Findings.” The HCA will host the conference on October 6-8, 2011, as part of Heidelberg University’s 625 anniversary celebration.

This international and interdisciplinary conference aims to investigate and explain how the conditions of the marketplace have determined, influenced, and limited American religion in the past and present. Given the prominence of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses in the American constitution, a broad-based ‘competition for souls and purses’ has historically helped define the contours of religion in America. This conference will build upon previous insights while probing further into the complex relationship between religion and the marketplace along the lines described below.

We invite scholars in American Studies and related fields (geography, history, law, literature, media studies, political science, religious studies, theology, etc.) to submit paper abstracts for this conference. Individual paper abstracts (200-250 words) should be specifically directed at one (or more) of the panel topics included in the CFP. Abstracts must be received by March 31, 2011. Participants will be notified by May 1, 2011. All questions and submissions should be sent electronically to: djunker@hca.uni-heidelberg.de.

We especially desire participation from European scholars working in these fields, but welcome submissions from all around the world. The HCA will cover travel expenses (economy), lodging and meals for conference participants.

The Heidelberg Center for American Studies, with the generous support of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, will host a workshop on Energy Policy and Energy Security - Transatlantic Perspectives. You are cordially invited to attend.

The workshop will address the following questions and issues: What are the likely future approaches of the US/Canada and of Germany/Europe to energy policy in general and to energy security in particular? As both the US and Europe are currently confronting similar energy and environmental dilemmas, such as increasing demand; decreasing indigenous production; fewer worldwide resources, 75% of which are owned by foreign governments; and climate change, which is caused by the burning of fossil fuels for energy, they would benefit from converging strategies and transatlantic cooperation. But, despite some efforts to strengthen cooperation, such as the creation of the EU-US Energy Council in November 2009, the differing priorities and interests of the two parties may pose challenges. It is these challenges that the workshop intends to explore.

Think tanks and foundations can be important non-state players in global and national politics. Next to governments, parliaments and representatives of corporate interests, non-governmental study and discussion groups, think tanks and foundations have become important players in the transatlantic world. Think tanks and foundations organize transatlantic dialogues and try to contribute to the preparation of the decision-making process of national governments as well as of trans- and supranational bodies in the Atlantic world. Our conference will scan these actors and their activities on both sides of the Atlantic as wells as in different policy areas, analyze their role in transatlantic relations and evaluate some of their more recent contributions to transatlantic dialogue.

The conference has three objectives: Our first objective is to provide a thorough analysis of the role of think tanks and foundations on both sides of the Atlantic. Second, we would like to examine the role of think tanks, foundations and related non-state actors in transatlantic relations past, present and future. Third, we will discuss and evaluate actual contributions (policy statements, position papers etc.) of selected think tanks and foundations on transatlantic issues. In addition, we will ask two keynote speakers with extensive experience in transatlantic relations to reflect on the role of civil society organisations like the media and non-state actors in transatlantic relations.

To achieve our objectives, we have to chosen two formats for the conference: on day one and in the morning of day two we will assemble panels with experts on think tanks and foundations from both sides of the Atlantic. On the afternoon of the second day, we will conduct an open expert think tank on the past and future of transatlantic relations based on an assessment of recent inputs from think tanks and foundations on transatlantic issues.

The conference is part of an HCA-UWM-led international research project that explores the Transcultural Atlantic as a realm of crosscultural interaction throughout the period of the Cold War and beyond. More precisely, it investigates various processes of transatlantic networking and community-building in the realms of business, academia, the media, popular culture, government, the military, and elsewhere. The project is neither limited to diplomatic history and political science studies dealing with alliance politics nor to cultural studies that have long focused on the construction of national identities. Instead, it aims at synthesizing both research areas, thus trying to arrive at a fuller understanding of processes of transatlantic community-formation since 1945. By covering a broad period of time, it will be possible to trace changes in the culture of different, sometimes competing communities in the Atlantic realm – to highlight continuities and ruptures; to show the effects of increased flows of goods, services, information, ideas, and identities; and to reassess the impact of major historical developments throughout the era of the Cold War, not least its unexpected end.