Publications

The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter

This international and multidisciplinary volume focuses on the male body and constructions of gender in a variety of cultural productions and formats. Locating the subject matter in relevant theoretical fields, it looks at representations of male bodies in various contexts through paranoid and reparative lenses. Organized into four major sections, the contributions assembled in this book feature engaging readings of ‘non/conforming bodies’, ‘fashionable bodies’, ‘passing bodies’, and ‘pioneering bodies’ that to different degrees foreground their critical and creative potentials. In its full scope, the book acknowledges the plurality of gendered experiences and the diversity of male bodies. The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter adds to Cultural Studies scholarship interested in the body and gender in general and contributes to the fields of Masculinity and Body Studies in particular.

Beyond the Civil War Hospital The Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861–1882

Beyond the Civil War Hospital understands Reconstruction as a period of emotional turmoil that precipitated a struggle for form in cultural production. By treating selected texts from that era as multifaceted contributions to Reconstruction's »mental adaptation process« (Leslie Butler), Kirsten Twelbeck diagnoses individual conflicts between the »heart and the brain« only partly compensated for by a shared concern for national healing. By tracing each text's unique adaptation of the healing trope, she identifies surprising disagreement over racial equality, women's rights, and citizenship. The book pairs female and male white authors from the antislavery North, and brings together a broad range of genres.

German-American Encounters in Bavaria and Beyond, 1945-2015

Rooted in Transnational American Studies, this collection explores German-American Encounters in Bavaria since 1945. Spanning a trajectory from the end of World War II to the contemporary American presence in the region, the articles and visuals discuss the impact of the transnational contact zone on negotiations of democratization, historical guilt, cultural diplomacy, identity politics, Military cooperation, economic interaction, pop and folk culture, literature, memory, museums, and tourism. Articles on Rhineland-Palatinate, Austria, and the Netherlands signify the complexity of European-American relations. The volume complicates bipolar, solidifying comparative approaches in favor of multidirectional, fluid conceptualizations of intercultural transfer and transnational entanglements.

Approaching Transnational America in Performance

The volume is uniquely located at the interdisciplinary crossroads of Performance Studies and transnational American Studies. As both a method and an object of study, performance deepens our understanding of transnational phenomena and America's position in the world. The thirteen original contributions make use of the field's vast potential and critically explore a wide array of cultural, political, social, and aesthetic performances on and off the stage. They scrutinize transnational trajectories and address issues central to the American Studies agenda such as representation, power, (ethnic and gender) identities, social mobility, and national imaginaries. As an American Studies endeavor, the volume highlights the cultural, political, and (inter)disciplinary implications of performance.

New England Forefathers’ Day Orations, 1770-1865

The volume presents the first comprehensive documentation of New England Forefathers’ Day orations. Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, Forefathers’ Day orations were the cornerstone of anniversary performances dedicated to the commemoration of the arrival of the Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers in Plymouth in 1620 and the ensuing foundation of the first Puritan colony in New England. The Forefathers’ Day celebrations of December 22, and the oratory of these festivities in particular, contributed significantly to the construction of a national U.S.-American myth of origin and the invention of a national U.S.-America historical and political tradition. First established in Plymouth in the late 1760s and flowering in Massachusetts and other New England states well into the nineteenth century, Forefathers’ Day followed the expansion of the United States to the South, Midwest, and West until the Civil War. In the antebellum times, Forefathers’ Day was frequently seen to equal the Fourth of July in cultural and political significance. The annotated edition of thirty-one Forefathers’ Day orations from 1770 through 1865 collects representative examples from different historical periods and from different regions of the United States. The selection of anniversary addresses is accompanied by introductions to the respective celebrations, orators, and contexts and by reprints of historical paintings and popular prints of New England history. The volume documents the use of early colonial New England history for the purpose of national identity constructions in a crucial period of U.S.-American cultural history.

South Africa and the United States in Transnational American Studies

Framing Spaces in Motion: Tracing Visualizations of Earthquakes into Twentieth-Century San Francisco

Framing Spaces in Motion explores how communities come to terms with earthquakes as well as the risk of their recurrences and how these moments of physical and ideological rupture emerge as sites of negotiation for preexisting cultural, political, and economic conflicts. From an in-depth examination of the early modern European textual and visual repertoires of making sense of earthquakes, Framing Spaces in Motion traces the development of earthquake discourses and framing patterns into the nineteenth-century United States. A profound discussion of the historical protocols of disaster discourses in the San Francisco Bay Area paves the ground for an extensive analysis of the earthquake framings of one of the most prolifically visualized events at the turn of the century, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. Framing Spaces in Motion is the first comprehensive study to investigate the rhetorical and pictorial conventions of framing earthquakes from a transnational perspective and also one of the first to devote ample attention to the visual culture of natural disasters by assessing earthquake pictures in their interpictorial relationships, (in)visibilities, and strategic manipulations. In addition to its grounding in Transnational American Studies, the analysis  is located at the intersection of visual culture studies, disaster studies, ecocriticism, and memory studies.

Iconographies of the Calamitous in American Visual Culture (Spec. issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies)

Iconographies of the Calamitous contributes to current visual culture research by exploring the interdisciplinary crossroads between the visual and the calamitous with a particular focus on pictorial repertoires, the visuals’ agency in (competing) American narratives, invisibilities, and the cultural embeddedness of the gaze. The research of (mediated) spectacles of calamity is of great importance not only because the twenty-first century seems to supply the technologies required for the ever increasing production, archiving, and conservation of images, but also because pictures of calamities have carried a particularly high cultural and political capital in the course of American history. The articles by Astrid Böger, Katrin Dauenhauer, Ingrid Gessner, Susanne Leikam, Miles Orvell, and Andrea Zittlau collected in this special issue testify to the fundamental political nature of the production, function, and resignification of visual representations of death, ruin, disease, violence, and destruction and point towards the formation of a formation of an iconography of the calamitous, which may serve as a tool to further explore the field of visual disease and disaster studies.

Betwixt, between, or beyond?: Negotiating Transformations from the Liminal Sphere of Contemporary Black Performance Poetry

‘Betwixt, between, or beyond?’ is the first study of contemporary black performance poetry from the viewpoint of transnational American Studies. It investigates a vast array of performances ranging from online recordings to political rallies to the poetry slam and Broadway stage. Black poets discussed come from diverse personal and cultural backgrounds and include, e.g., Patricia Smith, Staceyann Chin, Taalam Acey, Bryonn Bain, and Tshaka Campbell. Developing an approach rooted in anthropological, ethnographic, and theatrical perceptions of performance, the study explores poetry as a liminal site of negotiation, scrutinizes its relationship to national and cultural formations, and addresses issues such as the black experience; memory; identity; and the construction of (imagined) communities. Fusing concepts of African American Studies and Performance Studies with critical questions triggered by the transnational paradigm, the study insists on the participation of black performance poetry in (trans)national processes and highlights its cultural implications and socio-political performativity.

Transnational American Studies (2012)

Adaptation and American Studies (2011)

As Linda Hutcheon writes in her afterword, this volume featuring contributions from scholars, teachers, and artists working in Canada, the US, and Germany demonstrates “the manifest popularity” and “the ubiquity of adaptation as a contemporary cultural phenomenon – albeit one with roots going deep into the past.” The opening theoretical essay shows how the interdisciplinary and global field of adaptation studies
intersects with the transnational cultural studies trajectory within American studies. The volume probes the depths of narratives that have shuttled between multiple genres, cultures, languages, and eras, and highlights concerns shared by research and teaching. It includes and, in several instances, combines the perspectives of artists who practice adaptation, of researchers who analyze and contextualize adaptation, and of instructors who teach adaptation processes or use adaptation as a didactic tool.

Pictorial Cultures and Political Iconographies (2011)

Udo J. Hebel; ed.The pictorial turn in the humanities and social sciences has foregrounded the political power of images and the extent to which historical, political, social, and cultural processes and practices are shaped visually. Political iconographies are taken to interpret norms of actions, support ideological formations, and enhance moral concepts. Visual rhetorics are understood as active players in the construction and contestation of the political realm and public space.  The twenty-one articles by scholars from Europe and the United States explore the political function and cultural impact of images from the perspectives of Art History, American Studies, Visual Culture Studies, History, and Political Science. The contributions in particular address the complex interplay between agent and addressee in the public space as well as issues of national identity, discourses of inclusion and exclusion, and the designation of political spaces within transnational contexts. The publication is part of the interdisciplinary research initiative “Perceiving and Understanding: Functions, Perception Processes, Forms of Visualizations, Cultural Strategies of Pictures and Texts” at the University of Regensburg.

Vladimir Nabokovs Erzählwerk: Eine Einführung (2009)

 In dieser Einführung in Vladimir Nabokovs narratives Werk werden seine im Original russischen und englischen Texte in textimmanentem Detail und vergleichend behandelt, so daß thematische Schwerpunkte und nicht reine Chronologie die Diskussion strukturieren. Zu diesen Themen gehören Nabokovs literarische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Phänomen Exil, mit Definitionen von Künstlertum, mit Kindheit, Elternsein, Verlust und Tod, mit den Grenzen zwischen Wirklichkeit und Vorstellung sowie zwischen dem eigenen Selbst und der Individualität anderer. Gerade der Vergleich von Werken der russischen Schaffensphase mit denjenigen, die er in englischer Sprache verfaßte, gewährt bei einer thematisch begründeten Struktur vielschichtige Einsichten. In die Analyse und Interpretation wird auch die internationale Nabokov-Forschung einbezogen.
Dem deutschsprachigen Lesepublikum wird somit ein Einblick in die Nuancen von teilweise zwar bereits bekannten, hier jedoch umfassend referierten Kontroversen über die Deutung verschiedener Werke gegeben. Während zahlreiche Analysen von Nabokovs Œuvre bis in die jüngste Zeit vornehmlich die Romane – und dabei oft nur die im Original englischen Texte – behandelten, ist in diesem Band den Erzählungen ein eigenes Kapitel gewidmet, das diese Werke an sich und im Zusammenhand mit Nabokovs Romanschaffen würdigt. Die abschließende Diskussion ergänzt diesen breit angelegten Überblick über Nabokovs narratives Gesamtwerk mit Hinweisen auf Adaptationen seiner Werke sowie auf Phänomene der Popkultur. Zu Beginn und in der Mitte der Studie fügen sich Ausführungen zu Nabokovs Biographie in die Abfolge der Werkanalysen ein.

Transnational American Memories (2009)

The volume gathers twenty original essays by experts of American memory studies from the United States and Europe. It extends discussions of U.S. American cultures of memory, commemorative identity construction, and the politics of remembrance into the topical field of transnational and comparative American studies. In the contexts of the theoretical turns since the 1990s, including prominently the pictorial and the spatial turns, and in the wake of multicultural and international conceptions of American history, the contributions to the collection explore the cultural productivity and political implications of both officially endorsed memories and practices of oppositional remembrance. Reading sites of memory situated in or related to the United States as crossroads of transnational and intercultural remembering and commemoration manifests their possibly controversial function as platforms and agents in the processes of cultural exchange and political negotiation across the spatial, temporal, and ideological trajectories that inform American Studies as Atlantic Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Pacific Studies. The interdisciplinary range of issues and materials engaged includes literary texts, personal accounts, and cultural performances from colonial times through the immediate present, the significance of war monuments and ethnic memorials in Europe, Asia, and the U.S., films about 9/11, public sculptures and the fine arts, American world’s fairs as transnational sites of memory.

Geschichte Nordamerikas (2008)

Der Band bietet eine Einführung in die Geschichte des nordamerikanischen Kontinents und stellt somit die Geschichte der Vereinigten Staaten und Kanadas im Zusammenhang dar. Hinzu kommen Seitenblicke auf Mexiko. Fachlich fundiert und in gut lesbarer Sprache werden die historischen Grunderfahrungen der Kontinents systematisch erschlossen: Umwelt, Bevölkerung, Wirtschaft, Religion sowie der kulturelle Austausch zwischen den ethnischen Gruppen.
Die politische Geschichte wird von der Zeit vor der europäischen Besiedlung bis zum Ende des Kalten Kriegs dargestellt. Dabei finden auch die Besonderheiten der Entwicklung – die Geschichte der Indianer, die Grundlegung des modernen Amerikas in der Kolonialzeit, die Staatsgründungsprozesse in Nordamerika sowie die Geschichte der USA und Kanadas im >kurzen 20. Jahrhundert< – Beachtung.

Einführung in die Amerikanistik/ American Studies (2008)

Von Pueblo Ruinen bis zur National Mall in Washington, von kolonialen Reiseberichten bis zur 9/11-Literatur, von den Pilgrim Fathers bis zu Desparate Housewives. – Diese Einführung gibt einen umfassenden und systematischen Überblick über das Studium der Amerikanistik / American Studies als interdisziplinäre Kulturwissenschaft.
Im Mittelpunkt steht die Kultur- und Literaturgeschichte im Gebiet der heutigen USA – von den präkolumbianischen Kulturen bis ins 21. Jahrhundert. Weitere Kapitel behandeln Regionen und demographische Entwicklung, Sprachen Nordamerikas, das politische System, Ideologien und Identitätskonstruktionen, Religionsgemeinschaften sowie Geschichte, Gegenstände und Theorien des Faches.
Mit zahlreichen Abbildungen, Zeittafeln, Tabellen und einer umfangreichen Bibliographie. Unentbehrlich für B.A.-Studiengänge.

Lebenswenden und Zeitenwenden: Deutsche Politiker und die Erfahrungen des 20. Jahrhunderts (2007)

14 Autobiographien von deutschen Politikerinnen und Politikern erschließen, wie Vorstellungen von Sinn und Kontinuität im 20. Jahrhundert konstruiert werden konnten. Ein völlig neuer Ansatz, der sich bewährt.

Politische Umbrüche sind mehr als bloße Systemwechsel; sie bestimmen massiv die Erfahrungen und das Leben der Zeitgenossen und ihre Orientierung in der eigenen (Lebens-)Geschichte. Die Alterskohorten und politischen Generationen des 20. Jahrhunderts erlebten innerhalb ihrer Lebensspanne gleich mehrere Geschichtsbrüche. Volker Depkat erschließt aus den Autobiographien von 14 um 1880 geborenen deutschen Politikerinnen und Politikern des sozialistischen und liberal-demokratischen Spektrums, wie diese angesichts der ganzen Abfolge von militärischen, sozialen und ökonomischen Katastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts Vorstellungen von Sinn und Kontinuität konstruierten.
Behandelte Personen: die Sozialisten Wilhelm Keil, Wilhelm Dittmann, Albert Grzesinski, Otto Buchwitz und Max Seydewitz, die bürgerlichen Politiker Konrad Adenauer, Arnold Brecht, Ferdinand Friedensburg und Hermann Pünder, und die bürgerlichen Politikerinnen Gertrud Bäumer, Marie Baum, Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, Toni Sender und Käte Frankenthal.

From Sites of Memory to Cybersights: (Re)Framing Japanese American Experiences (2007)

This interdisciplinary study explores the legacies of Japanese American World War II internment experiences and the factors influencing the construction and mediation of cultural memory and nation/ethnic identity in the United States. It discusses issues of contested memory and shows how once repressed historic events are selectively commemorated or even erased. By focusing on representations of Japanese American internment experiences recovered, reframed or created since the 1980s, the study acknowledges that these experiences continue to be reevaluated in a climate of ethnic politicization. Covering sites of memory ranging from historic places of Japanese American internment to memorials built both at centers of Japanese American cultural life as well as at centers of national cultural identity, the study also critically approaches sites – or rather sights – in cyberspace that may be visited only virtually, thus taking the scholarship of American memory studies into the digital realm.

Short Plays: Staging Women's Lives (2007)

Staging Separate Spheres: Theatrical Spaces as Sites of Antagonism in One-Act Plays by American Women, 1910-1930 (2006)

During the first half of the 20th century approximately 10,000 short plays were written in the United States. This book examines twenty one-act plays by authors such as Mary Shaw, Susan Glaspell, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote from such diverse backgrounds as women’s clubs, art theaters, of commercial theaters. This study argues that the plays share a structural organization along spatial dichotomies of theatrical space within and theatrical space without. While some writers use the underlying structure of separate spheres and organize place and space in order to promote a broader definition of “domesticity,” the spatial configurations in other plays are read as appropriations, affirmations, negotiations, subversions, or transgressions of the separate spheres dichotomy. Substantial bibliographies documenting the productivity of the one-act genre supplement this study.

From Fiction to Libretto: Irving, Hawthorne, and James as Opera (2005)

This study introduces the reader to the mostly unknown world of libretto adaptations of nineteenth-century American fiction. The analysis of stage works based on Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and Henry James’s Washington Square explores a largely unexamined area of the reception history of these authors and narratives. As opera and drama have been interlinked throughout American theater history, the discussion of adaptations will include multiple types of spoken and musical theater. Appendices documenting the existence of over 350 stage works based on nineteenth-century American fiction further illustrate how librettist, composers, and playwrights have participated in the endeavor to understand and contextualize literary texts within cultural history.

Visual Culture in the American Studies Classroom (2005)

Forefathers' Day Orations, 1769-1865 An Introduction and Checklist (2003)

Sites of Memory in American Literatures and Cultures (2003)

This volume brings together twenty original essays by scholars from the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Germany. It focuses on the centrality of memory and commemoration to the formation, affirmation, and revision of American histories and identities over the course of more than two centuries. Individual studies engage theoretical issues and perspectives of American memory studies (Michael Kammen, Aleida Assmann), discuss literary texts that position themselves at the intersection of personal and cultural memories and countermemories (Klaus Benesch, Joseph C. Schöpp, François Pitavy, Ulfried Reichardt, Nicolas Witschi, renate von Bardeleben), explore the potential of films, folk songs, and public buildings as commemorative media and memorial spaces (Winfried Fluck, James Olney, John Seelye, William Boelhower), and address the political and cultural implications of literary anthologies, national archives, and virtual libraries (Werner Sollors, Caroline Sloat, Christopher Mulvey, Hanjo Berressem). The collection offers a seminal contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on sites of memory in American literatures and cultures.

Von der „Civilisirung“ Rußlands und dem „Aufblühen“ Nordamerikas im 18. Jahrhundert: Leitmotive der Aufklärung am Beispiel deutscher Rußland- und Amerikabilder (2002)

Rußland und Amerika bildeten in der deutschen Presse des 18. Jahrhunderts zwei zentrale Punkte in einem weitverzweigten Netz von Debatten, das sich um die Kernideen aufklärerischen Denkens entspann. Deutsche Rußland- und Amerikabilder spiegeln die Ideenwelt der Aufklärung jedoch nicht nur, sie müssen gleichzeitig als bedeutende Faktoren ihrer Formierung angesehen werden.
Neben einer vergleichenden Analyse der deutschen publizistischen Auseinandersetzung präsentieren die Autoren in einem illustrierten zweiten Teil eine reichhaltige Auswahl an Lesefrüchten aus den deutschen Zeitungen und Zeitschriften. Der Band lädt so als Lesebuch auch dazu ein, eigene Beobachtungen zu machen und die entwickelten Gedanken fortzuspinnen.

Negotiating History and Culture: Transculturation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (2001)

Native American cultures have always succeeded to varying degrees in negotiating a balance between their tribal cultural heritage and the ‘dominant culture.’ In the present study, the meeting between these cultures is not interpreted as a clash, but as a cultural encounter in a contact zone. The concept of transculturation serves as a theoretical model to analyze how history and culture are fictionally constructed in contemporary American Indian literature. Developing a dynamic, dialogic, and reciprocal relationship between their native worldviews and literary techniques, on the one hand, and those of the larger society, on the other, the writers examined in this study – Anna Lee Walters, Diane Glancy, James Welch, Linda Hogan, Thomas King, and Gerald Vizenor – stress the processual nature of culture. These writers demonstrate that transculturation functions as a major strategy of survival for Native American in the past and in the present.

Kollektive Erinnerung als Katharsis? Das Vietnam Veterans Memorial in der öffentlichen Kontroverse (2000)

The controversy over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., is tied in to the major debate over public memory. Exploring the symbolic and political character of the Washington memorial as a site of cultural memory, the study presents the rhetorical struggle for the site and the design of the memorial as it was reflected in news reporting and congressional debates. A critical overview of the many replicas of the Vietnam and related war memorials complements the analysis. As a case in point the dispute about a German Holocaust Memorial is outlined in a brief excursus. The transformation of the Washington memorial into a holy shrine of American Civil Religion becomes apparent in the personal arti­facts that are left as offerings at the base of the Wall. Collective Memory as Catharsis shows that the discursive potential of the left objects generates a form of catharsis and leads to experiences of reconciliation.

The Construction and Contestation of American Cultures and Identities in the Early National Period (1999)

This volume collects twenty-four original essays on the formative period of United States literature and culture. Scholars from Germany, England, and the United States explore the emergence and exchange of diverse, at times openly contradictory constructions of the new nation in a variety of discursive fields and cultural practices. Individual contributions focus on the agendas of major writers and politicians (e.g. Wheatley, Franklin, Webster, Hamilton, J. Q. Adams, Brown, Irving, Poe, Paulding), the transformation of the domestic novel, the politics of anthologies, folk art, New England festive culture, economic nationalism, the controversy over the perpetuity of the constitution, the rights of women, the fear of mobocracy, the divisive force of slavery, Indian-white encounters, transatlantic interrelations, and the representation of the young republic in postmodern poetry. Taken together, the articles provide for a fresh reading of the ‘union bound by interest’ as a multivocal site of partisanship and debate.

Amerikabilder in politischen Diskursen. Deutsche Zeitschriften 1789-1830 (1998)

Das Ancien régime ist nach der Französischen Revolution von 1789, der napoleonischen Herrschaft und den Befreiungskriegen in seinen Grundfesten und Selbstverständlichkeiten erschüttert. Auch in Deutschland verliert die absolute Monarchie an Legitimität, aber noch haben sich die zukunftsträchtigen politischen Kräfte nicht hinreichend etabliert. Offensichtlich muß ein neuer Weg zwischen den überalterten monarchischen Formen und den revolutionären Utopien gefunden werden. Zum sozialen und politischen  Status quo in Deutschland stellt das demokratische Amerika die radikalste Alternative dar. Welche Funktionen übernahm Amerika zwischen den beiden französischen Revolutionen von 1789 und 1830 in den Selbstverständigungsprozessen der entstehenden politischen Strömungen in Deutschland? Wie beeinflußten und prägten die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika die Neuorientierung, Selbstkritik und Selbstvergewisserung? Die Diskussion um Amerika führte zu Bildern, die bis heute nachwirken.