Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

 

 

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Current lecture program

 

 

 

 

The W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture Series in American Culture Studies offers new contributions to the urgently needed intercultural dialogue by inviting scholars and intellectuals to give lectures open to a wider audience that address some of the crucial aspects and problems of public culture and the modes of cultural critique today.

The lectures are named in honor of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868 to 1963) an important and influential intellectual, scholar, public figure, and writer of 20th century America. After doing graduate work at Harvard University, he was a doctoral student at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now Humboldt-Universität) from 1892 to 1894. In Berlin he studied with Gustav von Schmöller, Adolf Wagner, Heinrich von Treitschke, and Max Weber. The first African American ever to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, he was subsequently professor of economics and history at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910 and became widely known for his numerous historical and analytical studies of the social, economic, political, and cultural status of black people in the United States. In his famous book The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which combined political essays, cultural critique, autobiographical sketches, and fiction, Du Bois elaborated his notion of the inescapable "double-consciousness" that characterizes the lives of black Americans and his vision of the crucial role racial conflicts were to play all over the world in the new century: "The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." He was a co-founder of the racially integrated civil rights organization National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and organized several Pan-African Congresses (from 1919 to 1945) which addressed the problems of imperialism and decolonization in a worldwide context. As editor of The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, from 1910 to 1934, and of Phylon, from 1940 to 1944, Du Bois created a forum for black American literature, cultural and political debate, and social thought that situated African Americans in the wider frame of a revised notion of a multicultural democratic society in the United States and its interrelations with other parts of a postcolonial world. In 1958/59, he received an honorary doctorate from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He emigrated to Ghana in 1961 where he edited the Encyclopedia Africana. Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963.

American Studies in Perspective

In the age of globalization, the gradual unification of Europe, and the increasing awareness of the crucial importance of the political organization of social heterogeneity and cultural differences, a critical engagement with U.S. American culture and society has become ever more urgent. The repercussions of American multiculturalism, the interplay of competing public cultures, the impact of the new media, and the transnational perspectives of American cultural production have fundamentally changed the direction, the academic organization, and the public role of the interdisciplinary project of American Studies in the United States. These new developments not only challenge our understanding of the role American Studies should play in German universities, but also demand a new, genuinely dialogical conception of American Studies that articulates different and conflicting experiences and visions of the future from both sides of the Atlantic in a globalizing context. American Studies in Germany, seen in the wider European frame, can provide a forum in which the most pressing issues of the powerful dynamics of cultural differences, of the reorganization of the production of cultural knowledge, and of the implications of a reconstitution of the public sphere, all of them critical issues for the new Berlin Republic, can be debated in a transnational, comparative perspective.

The American Studies Program at Humboldt-Universität defines its research objectives and curricula in this context. It therefore focuses on the literary and cultural representations of, and theoretical approaches to, categories such as 'race,' ethnicity, gender, class, region, and age, and their complex interrelations within and beyond American society. Literary studies are complemented by studies of other print media, film, television, the internet, and the arts. The American Studies Program is involved in the new interdisciplinary Gender Studies program and cooperates closely with Cultural Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and the Modern Literature and Language Departments at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Intercultural dialogues are pursued in collaborative research projects with scholars from the United States and European countries. These activities materialize in a number of student and faculty exchange programs with various American and European universities.

 

 

Summer Semester 2024:

 

W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture in cooperation the U.S. Embassy in Berlin

April 30, 2024
6:15-7:45 p.m.
Lecture Hall 1070, Unter den Linden 6 (main building)

 

Leigh Raiford (University of California, Berkeley):

“Photography and the Making and Unmaking of Black Citizenship”

 

This talk examines how photographs across two centuries and in a variety of forms and genres—including surveillance images, documentary photography, personal images, and public art—influences ideas of Black citizenship in the United States.

Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates and writes about race, gender, justice and visuality. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle and, with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas and Laura Wexler of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography, forthcoming from Thames and Hudson. This Spring, Raiford is the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin where she is completing a book entitled When Home is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (under contract with Duke UP).

 

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11 June 2024
6:15–7.45 p.m.
Unter den Linden 6, 2070a

 

Karolina Krasuska (University of Warsaw):

“Soviet-Born: Or How Immigrant Writers from the Former USSR Shaped Recent Fiction in the US and Remade Jewish American Writing”

 

Jewish American literature? The term conjures up images of Philip Roth and maybe Jonathan Safran Foer or Nicole Krauss. These are U.S.-born writers for whom whiteness is a given, migration is a thing of the past, as is Eastern Europe. But what happens to these dominant themes when they are approached from the perspective of immigrants from the former USSR? Their 21^st-century writing often stages strikingly fresh variations on key older themes, including cultural geography, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, communism, gender and sexuality, and finally, migration. The novels by writers such as Gary Shteyngart, Sana Krasikov, Boris Fishman, and Yelena Akhtiorskaya demonstrate how these diasporic writers, with their critical stance toward identity categories, open up the field of what is canonically Jewish American to broader contemporary debates.

 

Karolina Krasuska is Associate Professor at the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw, Poland and the founding director of the research group Gender/Sexuality at the ASC. Her interests include 20^th- and 21^st-century transnational literature, including Jewish American writing, memory studies, gender/queer theory. Recipient of multiple scholarships and grants, she is currently a part of the Polish-German grant team “QueerIt: Queer Theory in Transit” and the PI on the grant “Affective Poetics: Manifestos and Women's Rhetorical Strategies, 1970-2020.” She is the author of a Polish-language monograph, Płeć i naród: Trans/lokacje (Gender and Nation: Trans/locations) (2012), which examines modernist texts from a transnational, gender-oriented perspective, and a co-editor of Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges (2015). She also translates gender/queer theory into Polish, including Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (2008). Her book Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in July 2024 (available open access). Twitter/X: @karolinakrasusk

 

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25 June 2024
6:15–7:45 p.m.
Unter den Linden 6, 2249a

 

Thomas Heise (Pennsylvania State University, Abington):

“Reading Space: Literature, Capital, Geography”

 

Thomas Heise will reflect on the spatial imagination of U.S. literature in relation to changing modes of production, histories of uneven urban development and practices of segregation, ghettoization, zoning, redlining, and gentrification. His talk will read U.S. fiction for its narratives of place and its depictions of urban life, but also for how novels respond formally to the representational challenges that the urban environment poses as its spatiality changes and its social complexity multiplies in the wake of capital’s shifting needs and technologies. In what ways are gender, sexual, and racial identities spatially constituted in a work of literature? What is a novel’s geographical imaginary at the neighborhood, urban, national, or global level? His talk will attempt to address questions such as how human sociospatial practices are interwoven through time to create the geographies of the built environment as well as the geographies of memory, culture, and everyday life.

Thomas Heise is an Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at Pennsylvania State University, Abington. His books include The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel (Columbia 2022), published in the Literature Now series, and Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (Rutgers 2011), which was part of the American Literatures Initiative. He is also the author of the lyrical narrative Moth (Sarabande 2013) and Horror Vacui: Poems (Sarabande 2006). His new book-project, Memory’s Fictions: Sites, Literature, and the Urban Imaginary, is concerned with urban redevelopment, personal and collective memory, and contemporary literature. His scholarly essays have appeared in, among other places, American Literary History, African American Review, Modern Fiction Studies, and Twentieth-Century Literature. His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in SAND: Literature & Art, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of American Literature at McGill University.

 

Winter Semester 2023/24:

 

 

24 October 2023
6:30–8:00 p.m.
Unter den Linden 6, Raum 2070a

Mabel O. Wilson (Columbia University)

"Can We Forget? A Memorial to Enslaved Laborers"

The degradation, violence, and dehumanization of racialization threads through modernity—its subjectivities, social relations, politics, culture, capitalism, and built environment, especially within institutions like universities that order all of these formations. Mabel O. Wilson will explore how the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia engages the university's hidden history of slavery. She shares how the memorial's complicated design process and public dialogues wrestled with the legacy of anti-black racism in its remembrance of the pain of bondage and the dignity of this enslaved community. Her talk asks if commemoration can serve as a means of repair and care for those living in the slavery's wake? Can one make spaces to remember those who were enslaved without, as Saidiya Hartman poignantly reminds us, recasting the violence of archival erasure?

BIO: Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and a Professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. She is currently the Berthold Leibinger Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin completing work on her book manuscript Building Race and Nation: Slavery, Dispossession, and U.S. Civic Architecture. With her practice Studio&, she was a member of the design team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Wilson has authored of Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016), Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). She is the co-host of the podcast Black Lives in the Era of COVID 19, a close look at the impact of the virus on New York City communities. For the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she was co-curator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021).

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7 November 2023
6:30–8:00 p.m.
Unter den Linden 6, Raum 2070a

Japhet Aryiku (W.E.B. Du Bois Museum Foundation)

"The Mission to Rebuild the Burial Place of W.E.B. Du Bois"

Japhet Aryiku will discuss the W.E.B. Du Bois Museum Foundation’s plans to restore the dilapidated W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture in Accra, Ghana. The site holds significance as the former residence of W.E.B. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, where they lived in a bungalow and entertained friends and visitors. Currently, it is a complex that comprises their burial grounds, the Marcus Garvey guest house, an administrative center, and Du Bois’ personal library of approximately 1500 books, papers, manuscripts, magazines, and journals. Over the next decade, the refurbished center will house a museum, library, conference center, outdoor auditorium, offices, guest house for visiting scholars, and conservation lab for the paper and textile collections.

BIO: Japhet Aryiku serves as the Executive Director of the New York-based non-profit W.E.B. Du Bois Museum Foundation and the Executive Director of the Helping Africa Foundation, a public charity organization dedicated to improving health, education, and social welfare conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa. Aryiku is a Ghanaian American with over 40 years of corporate and philanthropic experience. He is also the Founder of the non-profit organization, Adakum Educational Foundation (AEF), which provides basic educational and healthcare opportunities for disadvantaged children, and their parents, in Ghana and other parts of Africa. Japhet is a graduate of Bernard Baruch College of the City University of New York (CUNY), New York, USA.

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13 December 2023
4:00–8:00 p.m.
Unter den Linden 6, Hörsaal 1072

Screening and Artist Talk: Sister Aimee

Special screening of the film Sister Aimee (2019) followed by an artist talk with writers and directors Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann.

 

“Part 1920s radioplay, part western, part musical, and an all-around screwball comedy, Sister Aimee embraces one woman’s legend to validate the power of spectacle and the magic of a good storyteller.” —Sundance Film Festival

 

A sensational evangelist fakes her own disappearance and escapes to Mexico with her new beau and their guide in a partly true, partly made-up tale of fame and flight. In their playful feature debut, cowriter/directors Samantha Buck and Marie Schlingmann conjure a true retro-spectacular anchored by Anna Margaret Hollyman’s dazzling virtuosic performance in their feminist musical comedy.

 

Samantha Buck & Marie Schlingmann are an LA-based, queer writing and directing duo. Their feature debut Sister Aimee premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, played SXSW, and streamed on Hulu. Their short films The Mink Catcher and Canary played at Telluride, SXSW, Palm Springs, Provincetown, Indie Memphis, and others. They are recipients of the Sundance Film Two and the Sundance Universal Fellowships for their upcoming second feature film. On the TV side, they are in development on multiple projects, including a queer series at Sony Television and a limited thriller series based on a Karin Slaughter novel.

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9 January 2024
6:30-8:00 p.m.
Unter den Linden 6, Raum 2070A

 

Feng-Mei Heberer (New York University)

"Documentation, Racialized State Surveillance, and the Undocument"

 

This talk examines visual documentation and the documentary form in their intimate connection with racialized state surveillance and border control in the United States. It discusses the ways that visual documents such as the photograph have been wielded on behalf of U.S. immigration policy to contain border crossings since the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), and highlights the underexamined linkage between official documentation and historical processes of Asian racialization. Against this backdrop, I turn to the ongoing work of Miko Revereza, a Philippine-born artist and self-ascribed "undocumented-documentary filmmaker." I explore how Revereza advances an aesthetic of the undocument, or fugitive, errant, and ephemeral visual forms that both attune us to documentation's violent history and mobilize self-documentary practices beyond the demand to capture and report.

 

Feng-Mei Heberer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, and the author of Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). Her research interests lie at the junctures of gendered racialization, labor, and transnational migration with a focus on queer-feminist Asian diasporic media cultures. In addition, she researches and works in film curation and cultural organizing.

 

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