Studies Research Team Guest Professors Guest Lectures "The (Im-)Possible Families of Henry Bibb: Black Families between Slavery and Freedom" "Agency and Gendered Spaces in Uranium City, Canada: A Visual Journey into Environmental Trauma" "From Reconstruction to Charlottesville 2017: Legacies of the Civil War in the US South" "Ubiquitous Radioactivity: Environmental Justice and the Nuclear Weapons Industry in the US Southwest" "Rethinking How We Teach Literary Theory" "'When you're small, you gotta fix what you can': Overconsumption and Ecojustice in 'Beast of the Southern Wild'" "'Playing in the Dark': Whiteness in Videogames" "Anocriticism as Resistance: Narratives of Age/ing Against the Grain" "Heroines of the Flood: What Afrofuturist science can teach us about environmental injustice, disability politics, and sustainable leadership" "Southern Modernisms" "America's Sweetheart Charms European Royals: Annie Oakley, Gun Culture, and Western Myths" "'Essenz entsteht durch Quetschen': Emily Dickinsons Lyrik" "Is #MeToo sexy? Or: What Does it Mean for Women to Act Politically?" "A Sense of Social Justice? Photography and the Cold War Struggle against Poverty" "Edgework: German and American Feminism, Gender, and Race" "Engel in Amerika - Shop Talk mit dem Dramaturgen" "From Devilish Dancing and Wicked Waltzing to American Modern Dance" "Writing the Southwest" "The 'iness' of 'not numerable whom': The Poetry & Paintings of E. E. Cummings" "Negro Universities Press and the Archives of Abolitionism" "Emily Dickinson's Civil War" "The Allure of Diasporic Homecoming: Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and Ika Hügel-Marshall's Daheim Unterwegs" "American Election Night 2016" "Ghosts and Their Hosts: Spectrality in American Romantic Literature" "The Art of Plantation Management: Race, Risk, and Swamp Ecologies in Charles Sealsfield's Immigrant Nature Writing" "Nasty Women: Feminist Poetry in the Era of Trump" "The Cinema of Insanity: Madness and Normality in the Culture of the 1960s" "Contested Canons? Toni Morrison and the Nobel Prize in Germany" "The Homoerotics and Monstrous Otherness of 'Teen Wolf'" "Why America doesn't know what to do with its own government: Trump, Sanders, and frankly, everyone else" "The Poem as Meeting Place: Why You Shouldn't Be Scared of Poetry" Author Reading & Discussion: "Writing the Female Body: Poetry and More with Laura Passin" Kanada Woche: "Ein Sommer am See" – Gespräch mit der Autorin über das Entstehen der Graphic Novel Kanada Woche: "Flüchtige Seelen" – Lesung und Gespräch mit der Autorin Kanada Woche: "Der Löwensucher" – Lesung und Gespräch mit dem Autor Kanada Woche: "Der Geschmack der Sehnsucht" – Lesung und Gespräch mit der Autorin "Milblogs and the Tradition of Pop Culture in the US Military" "Queer Performance in Transnational Spaces: Lady Gaga's Monster Ball" "How Deep is Oil? Energy Regimes and American Culture" "Germany's Amerika-Häuser: Architecture in the Battle for Hearts and Minds" "Melville's Descent into the Maelstrom" "The Politics of Well-being: Countering Discrimination in Contemporary Disability Memoirs" "The End of Night? Searching for Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light" "Modernism, Totalitarianism, and Ezra Pound" "The Straw That Broke; Or, Science Fiction and Ontology in the Age of Post-Humanism" "Hund-Werden, Mensch-Werden. Kanidenhybriden in der Gegenwartskunst" "The Myths That Made America" "Intersections: One Household/Two Stories. Remembering an Arab and a Jewish Past" "'Red, White and Blue' oder 'Black, Brown and Beige' . Zum Verhältnis zwischen Jazz und Politik in den USA des 20sten Jahrhunderts" "Picturing Black Hawk: 'Indian' Portraits and Cultural Exchange" "Useful or Useless: Ruminations on Labeling Something 'Postmodern'" "And So the Password Is—?": Vladimir Nabokov and the Ethics of Rereading "Cold War, Warm Gun: Violence and Domesticity in "High Noon" (1952)" "Iago's Motives: Psychosexuality in the Destruction of Othello" "'Less Than Perfect': Negotiating Breast Cancer in Popular Romance" "New Stories about Old Age: Queer Aging in North American Fiction" "The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish" "Mark Twain: The Man in White and His Autobiographies" "Seasons of Blood: Humanity at the Crossroads. A Canadian Poet’s Perspective" "Deviant Behavior: Reading and Writing Critical Fiction" "Postmodern Laughter" "'The Land is Deep in Time': Stories, Places, Immigrants and Indigeneity in Canada" "American Election Night 2012" "Americanism, anti-Americanism and the 2012 Presidential Election" "The Freakshow. Representations of Extraordinary Bodies in the 19th Century" "Coming Face to Face with the Past: A Personal History of Civil War Reenacting in the United States" "From Sojourner Truth to Michelle Obama: Black Women’s Role in the African American Freedom Struggle" "Ecocriticism, Risk, and Climate Change Fiction" "Gendering the Civil War: Reimagination des Krieges in Hollywood" "The Languages of Expansion in America" "The Role of Race and Religion in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election" "Underground Environments and the Texas Oil Gothic" "'Leitkultur' oder 'Multikulturalismus' Nationale Identität in den USA und Frankreich im Vergleich" "Edgar Allan Poe" "America's Newest Voting Bloc: Who Are the 'New Evangelicals'?" "Amerika, im Hinterhof erklärt - Der Comic-Strip Gasoline Alley" "Climate Refugees" "Meat in the Middle: Converging Borderlands in the U.S. Midwest, 1865-1900" "The Selling of Soul: African American Radio, Record Stores and Consumer Culture" "Staring at the Amish: An American Mirror" "The Pennsylvania Germans: Over 300 Years of Secular Integration and Religious Separation." "American Culture and Trauma Since 9/11" "Making America - Editing a New Literary History of America" Bamberg Buddies Field Trips News Dr. Nicole K. Konopka Memberships GAAS: German Association for American Studies (since 2012) SSHA: Social Science History Association (since 2010)SGAS: Society for German-American Studies (since 2007)CDFG: Caspar-David-Friedrich Gesellschaft e.V. (since 2006) Academic Functions since 2017: Representative of the academic mid-level faculty of the University in the committee for the distribution of central funding since 2015: Representative of the academic mid-level faculty of the Humanities Faculty in a variety of university electoral committees since 2014: Advisory board member of the joint PhD Committee of the Humanities Faculty and the Faculty of Human Sciences and Education (Representative of the academic mid-level faculty of the Humanities Faculty) 2015-2017: Advisory board member (academic mid-level faculty) in the steering committee of the Institute of English and American Studies