MS ISLA Workshop - Beyond the Mediterranean: Islands and Transmediterranity

The CITAS-funded Research Network MS ISLA - Mediterranean Studies on Island Areas - is holding a workshop next week. The events on 21 October 2022 are open to interested colleagues. The event takes place at Kaufmannsgewölbe, Hinter der Grieb 8 in Regensburg, starting at 9:00. There will be a keynote lecture at 18:45 by Edith Gonzalez (University at Buffalo, USA) on “Centering Barbudan Voices in the Past and Present”. Other talks will address themes including islands and bridges, Caribbean-Mediterranean connectoins, linguistic heritage, and questions of race and belonging in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Germany.

Mediterranean islandness is not necessarily geographically fixed and linked to the Mediterranean region, but can be seen as a bundle of characteristics that can also be found in other areas, such as the Caribbean, the Baltic, the Red and the Arabian Sea or the “Atlantic Mediterranean” (Braudel): the Canaries, Madeira and São Tomé. An analytical comparison of those areas to the Mediterranean opens up perspectives on empirical relations between different regions against the background of islandness and often in a post-colonial context.

The full programme is attached and is also available here.

Diversity, Migration and the City - Final Student Presentations with Prof. Dr. Anna Steigemann (DIMAS)

The students will present their collaborative work with local actors on spaces for the
encounter of difference and diversity. We will also discuss how we can achieve more social interaction and exchange between the different social and ethnic groups in Kasernenviertel and Regensburg.

Colloquium: Transregional History

Wednesdays, 1615-1845 - via Zoom and in Lecture Theatre H51

Prof. Dr. Timothy Nunan is organizing in winter semester 2022/23 a colloquium on transregional history featuring speakers from around the world as well as from Regensburg.

Please find the programme here for more details. Information about upcoming talks will be posted on Prof. Nunan's page.

Research Workshop | Prof. Dr. Anna Steigemann: Multiperspectivity and Multi-Scalarity in Writing Your Area Studies Thesis. Spatial and Social Science Theories and Methods

24-25 November 2022, SG.214

This hands-on PhD block seminar/workshop will introduce to different multi-scalar and multi-perspective approaches to writing an Area Studies dissertation. Based on the doctoral candidates’ projects, the seminar will bring together different disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives while introducing the participants to multi-scalar techniques for collecting, interpreting, and analyzing qualitative data. With this the doctoral candidates can reflect on and discuss their wider methodological approaches and data collection across the different Area Studies disciplines.

Register by 17 October 2022

20-22 OCTOBER 2022 

MS ISLA Workshop - Beyond the Mediterranean: Islands and Transmediterranity

The CITAS-funded Research Network MS ISLA - Mediterranean Studies on Island Areas - is holding a workshop next week. The events on 21 October 2022 are open to interested colleagues. The event takes place at Kaufmannsgewölbe, Hinter der Grieb 8 in Regensburg, starting at 9:00. There will be a keynote lecture at 18:45 by Edith Gonzalez (University at Buffalo, USA) on “Centering Barbudan Voices in the Past and Present”. Other talks will address themes including islands and bridges, Caribbean-Mediterranean connectoins, linguistic heritage, and questions of race and belonging in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Germany.

Mediterranean islandness is not necessarily geographically fixed and linked to the Mediterranean region, but can be seen as a bundle of characteristics that can also be found in other areas, such as the Caribbean, the Baltic, the Red and the Arabian Sea or the “Atlantic Mediterranean” (Braudel): the Canaries, Madeira and São Tomé. An analytical comparison of those areas to the Mediterranean opens up perspectives on empirical relations between different regions against the background of islandness and often in a post-colonial context.

The full programme is attached and is also available here.

CITAS is pleased to invite you to the first of a triple bill of Brownbag Lectures in June 2022. With the gradual lifting of COVID restrictions, we are pleased that we can again offer some drinks and snacks during these lunchtime lectures. You are also welcome to fulfil the idea behind the name of the series by bringing your own lunch (not necessarily in a brown bag) to enjoy during the talk with international guests. All the talks take place at CITAS, Room 214 in the Sammelgebäude tower.

On 11 July, 14:15 in H10 at UR, Gabriele Schwab - Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, with appointments in the departments of Comparative Literature, Anthropology, English and European Languages and Studies, will give a guest lecture on Transspecies Selves as part of the seminar of Leibniz ScienceCampus, UR and REAF Visiting Professor Claudia Sadowski-Smith. The event is open to all.

The next lecture series takes place in Winter Semester 2021/2022. The series will take place under the title: The Mediterranean and its Blind Spots: Transhistorical Perspectives on a Contested Area. . More details are available here.

The Brownbag Series started again in Winter Semester on 20 October with a talk by Brigitte Le Normand (Maastricht | Humboldt Fellow, IOS) on her most recent book, Citizens without Borders. The next session takes place on 12 January 2022 with a talk by Julia Faisst, who is acting professor for American Studies at UR.

Transnational Memory and Migration in the Graphic Novel Fußnoten (2017). The artist Nacha Vollenweider in conversation with the researcher Jasmin Wrobel.

27. Jan. 2022, 18:15

online via Zoom - more information (in German)

This event brings together art and literature with research to explore the themes of exile, migration and homeland (Heimat). The Argentinian author and illustrator Nacha Vollenweider will give a reading (in German) from her book, which connects Hamburg in the year 2015 with Argentina’s past as part of the search for traces of her family history. In the conversation with Jasmin Wrobel, whose research explores Latin American graphic novels, they will focus on questions of memory, both individual and collective.

LECTURE SERIES - Summer Semester 2021

Sprachliche Dynamiken im Raum: Sprachinseln zwischen Begegnung und Abschottung

CITAS is pleased to be collaborating with the Institute of Romance Studies and FoMuR in supporting this lecture series on linguistic dynamics and language islands.

The series takes place on Tuesdays, and exceptionally Thursdays, during the summer semester 2021.

The full programme is available here.

Globalization and Nationalisms: Historical Perspectives on a Complex Relationship - lecture series

Summer Semester 2021, Mondays, 18:00-20:00

This lecture series cooperation between the University of Regensburg (UR), the Center for International and Transnational Area Studies (CITAS) at UR, the University of Bayreuth (UB), the Institute for African Studies (IAS) at UB, the Cluster of Excellence "Africa Multiple: Reconfiguring African Studies" at UB, and the Leibniz ScienceCampus "Europe and America in the Modern World".

The full programme and more details are available here.

Research Colloquium of the Leibniz ScienceCampus "Europe and America in the Modern World" and the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies 

Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni - The Cognitive Empire and Coloniality of Knowledge in Africa

The KNOW-IN Network is pleased to be collaborating with the Research Colloquium of the Leibniz ScienceCampus "Europe and America in the Modern World" and the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies.

We invite all workshop participants to join the lecture by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni on "The Cognitive Empire and Coloniality of Knowledge in Africa" at 16:15 on 1 July. Prof. Ndlovu-Gatsheni holds the Chair for Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth. More information about the upcomming talk you can find here.

Guest Lecture | Augusto Paim (Porto Alegre) - Doing journalism with comics: news, interview, reportage, and other journalistic genres

12 july, 12:15

In the upcoming guest lecture CITAS proudly presents Augusto Paim from the Federal University of Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). Paim is a specialist for comics journalism, a journalistic side genre which has been gaining more and more attention since the 1990s.  Paim will introduce the main topics of his doctoral research, like the use of sketchbooks as a journalistic tool and the aesthetics of comics reportage. Several examples of journalistic comics will be showed, as well as discussions related to this field.

The guest lecture will be held online via zoom (Meeting-ID: 648 7413 2746). More information about the upcoming talk you can find here.

Guest Lecture | Aleksandra Wiktorowska (Warsaw / Nancy) - Ryszard Kapuściński in Latin America. Latin America in Kapuściński’s writing

Ryszard Kapuściński dedicated three of his book-length reportages to Latin America, Why Karl von Spreti Died? (1970) – a book about the assassination of the German ambassador in Guatemala, Christ With a Rifle on His Shoulder (1975) – which focuses on the partisan movements in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, and The Soccer War (1978). He is as well the translator of Ernesto Che Guevara’s diary, El Diario de Che en Bolivia from Spanish to Polish. Invited by Gabriel García Márquez he gave classes in FNPI (Fundación para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano) in Mexico City (2001) and in Buenos Aires (2002).  He spent five years in Latin America (1967-1972) as a correspondent for Polish Press Agency (PAP), first based in Santiago, then in Rio de Janeiro, and afterward in Mexico City. During that time, he traveled around the continent (visited Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Uruguay) writing his correspondences, the majority of which has never been published and still, can only be found in archives of PAP.

My idea is to show how Latin America’s experience is essential in the life of Kapuściński and his style of writing. To ask questions such as: is Latin American Journalism essentially militant or how much distance did literary journalist put between himself and the object of his writing. First, I would like to discuss his three books, showing particular characteristics of each and examine visible changes that occurred in reporter’s perspective and his writing about Latin America. Secondly, I would like to address the issue of ideologically engaged literary journalism. Finally, I would like to briefly show similarities and mutual inspirations between Kapu and Gabo.

Aleksandra Wiktorowska holds a PhD in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities from the University of Barcelona and an MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Warsaw. Since 2020 she is a member of a research team in the Centre for French Culture and Francophone Studies at the University of Warsaw and a post-doc within the French-Chilean CRÓNICA project at the Université de Lorraine in France. Her research interests include literary journalism and reportage, cultural studies, Spanish and Latin American literatures and cultures, memory studies, postcolonialism and postmodernism. In addition to being a journalist, a researcher and an academic, she is a translator from Spanish to Polish with nine novels to her credit. She also co-edited (with Margarita Navarro Pérez and Mateus Yuri Passos) Literary Journalism and Latin American Wars (2020).

Joanna Moszczyńska, Postdoc at CITAS, presented part of her ongoing project on Transcultural chronicles and travel writing in the 20th century. She received insightful feedback from colleagues, professors and any other interested audience members. In this presentation she will focus on the transatlantic conviviality evident in the works of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Gabriel García Márquez.

Find out more here.

Goodbye Socialism, Hello Capitalism: The Revolutions of 1989 in Europe and what remains

From 6 Nov to 1 Dec, discussions, films and a concert by the legendary Czech band The Plastic People of the Universe will take place in Regensburg. The series of public events addresses the legacies of the Revolutions of 1989 across East-Central Europe.

The full programme can be found here.

6 Nov, 18:00, Haidplatz 8 - Discussion: Ostbayern: Vom Zonenrandgebiet zur Mitte Europas. Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Kultur von den 1980er Jahren bis heute

10 Nov, 16:00, Leerer Beutel - Discussion with Plastic People of the Universe, followed by a concert at 20:00

19 Nov, 19:00, EBW, Am Ölberg 2 - Discussion: 1989 – Eine verpasste Chance? Das Erbe der Revolutionen im ehemaligen Ostblock

24 Nov, 14:00, Kino am Ostentor - Film: 12:08 Bucharest East

1 Dec, 14:00, Kino am Ostentor - Film: The Lust for Power/ Meciar

The Federal "Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung" is the main funder of this series of public events. The programme is coordinated by IOS, GS-OSES and CITAS, with support from numerous partners across the university and city.

Prof. Dr. Joy Castro (U of Nebraska-Lincoln): reading and discussion of her novel with Prof. Dr. Ursula Regener

CITAS is pleased to be collaborating with the Regensburg European-American Forum (REAF), with Prof. Dr. Joy Castro discussing and reading from her work in the centre of Regensburg at Haus der Begegnung on 29 October. Prof. Dr. Ursula Regener (UR) will be chairing the discussion and reading from the German translation of Joy Castro's writing.

She will also be speaking at a REAF Roundtable on 30 October at 16:00 in room ZH6. There she will discuss Writing Memoir, Writing Crime: Creative Vision as Sociopolitical Intervention.

For more information, check out the REAF Facebook page.

Visiting author Prof. Dr. Joy Castro will read flash essays from her creative nonfiction collection Island of Bones; a selection from Hell or High Water, her literary crime novel set in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; and a new and forthcoming short story, "Betrayed." Prof. Dr. Ursula Regener (Universität Regensburg) will read from the German translation.

Castro's work probes the intersections of violence, power, sex, gender, race, and poverty. Also a critic of literature and film, she is the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Born in Miami, raised in England and West Virginia, and educated in Texas, Joy Castro is the award-winning author of the memoir The Truth Book, two literary thrillers set in post-Katrina New Orleans: Hell or High Water and Nearer Home, the essay collection Island of Bones, and the short fiction collection How Winter Began. Her work has appeared in venues including Ploughshares, Senses of Cinema, Brevity, Fourth Genre, North American Review, Salon, Afro-Hispanic Review, Gulf Coast, and the New York Times Magazine. Winner of the Nebraska Book Award and an International Latino Book Award, Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, an alternate for the Berlin Prize, editor of the anthology Family Trouble, and a former Writer in Residence at Vanderbilt University, she’s the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and Latinx studies.

Lecutre - in cooperation with IOS and GS-OSES

Dirk Wiese, Member of the Bundestag

Ostpolitik? Realpolitik? Deutsch-russische Beziehungen seit der Ukraine-Krise

On Thursday, 19 September 2019, Dirk Wiese, MdB, the German federal government's coordinator for intersocietal cooperation with Russia, Central Asia and the Eastern Partnership Countries, will give a public talk in Regensburg. Wiese will address the cooperation between Russia and Germany since the beginning of the crisis in Ukraine in 2014. Since then, relations between Russia and Germany (or indeed Europe) have worsened gravely. The event is jointly organized by CITAS, the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies and the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies (GS-OSES).

Wiese, a member of the Budenstag, will address different aspects of the problems in the relationship between Russia and Germany as well as the European Union since the emergence of the Ukraine crisis in 2014. He will also present possible approaches for their solution.

Dirk Wiese, MdB studied law and is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He has been a member of the Bundestag, the German Parliament, since 2013. In April 2018, he was appointed as coordinator of the German federal government for the intersocietal cooperation with Russia, Central Asia and the countries of the Eastern Partnership.

Cooperation: Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS), Center for International and GSOSES.

Where: Regensburg - WiOS Regensburg, Landshuter Str. 4, 93047 Regensburg, Room 017

When: Thursday, 19.09.2019, 6-8 p.m.

Nacht.Schafft.Wissen

Together with colleagues from IOS - the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies and the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies, CITAS contributed to the programme showcasing Regensburg's transnational area studies research. There has been a family-friendly block from 6-8 p.m., including short talks on communist-era cartoons, space exploration and cars followed by a discussion with academics and business figures discussing the potential and threats to business in light of tensions in Europe, economic populism and Brexit.

The night ended with a pub quiz. The pub quiz "prOST!" was sponsored by Bischofshof brewery.

DIMAS is also in the process of hosting this year's annual conference of CrossArea e.V., an organization uniting area studies institutes and intitiatives in Germany. This year's conference, titled "Doing Area Studies in the Polycentric Condition," will also serve as the kick-off event for DIMAS. The conference will take place on November 16-17, 2023 in Landshuter Strasse 4.

A central part of the conference will be a panel devoted to highlighting new and upcoming research in area studies, featuring the work of early career scholars. As such, we are soliciting applications from early career researchers (defined as PhD students or post-doctoral scholars who have received their PhD since 2020) who are interested in presenting their research at the conference. As CrossArea brings together leading scholars of area studies from throughout Germany, this is an excellent opportunity for scholars looking to make an impression and identify potential hosts for their next professional move.

For this year’s early career scholars panel, we hope to highlight outstanding work in area studies and adjacent fields like history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and literary studies. We particularly welcome contributions focusing on the following themes:

• The Russo-Ukrainian War and its impacts on global order
• Zones of contested sovereignty
• Transregional and/or comparative approaches to area studies
• Digital humanities, digital media and new methodological approaches to area studies
• Diasporas and their cultural production
• Urbanization and infrastructures of solidarity in cities
• Climate change and its impacts on domestic and international law as well as global governance
• Developments in higher education policy and their impact on research in area studies

Beyond these topics, we also welcome early career scholars working on transregional or comparative approaches to area studies.

We also hope to encourage creative formats for scientific communication. We encourage applicants to propose creative presentation formats, such as Turbo Talks, PechaKucha, Ignite, or Lightning Talks. We welcome presentations revolving around digital media like podcasts, YouTube videos, or TikTok. If you have an idea for a format that you would like to propose to us, whether it is related to your research, modes of research communication, or other transfer activities, we are open to creative proposals.

Those selected to present on their research will be provided with a contribution to their round-trip travel costs to Regensburg, as well as up to two nights’ accommodation in Regensburg. Participants of the CrossArea conference (including presenters) will also be provided with meals. We expect to award up to 5 grants for early career scholars, and we particularly welcome applications from qualified female scholars as well as applicants with a disability. We encourage applicants from both within Germany as well as internationally, especially those who do not have access to institutional funding; however, we may not be able to fund all travel costs for those hoping to come to Regensburg from further afield.

We look forward to receiving your application, which you should send as one PDF file by 31 July 2023 to dimas.office@ur.de. Applications should include the following documents:

• Your CV (maximum 2 pages)
• An abstract of your current research project (maximum 1 page)
• A short description of the presentation format you propose for your talk (maximum 300 words)

We expect to make a decision on applications no later than the beginning of September 2023.

For questions regarding this opportunity, please contact Prof. Dr. Timothy Nunan (e-mail: timothy.nunan@ur.de phone: +49 941 943-68511) or Dr. Paul Vickers (e-mail: paul.vickers@ur.de/ phone: 0941 943-5964). www.ur.de/dimas/english