Guest Lecture by Prof. Dr. Katharina Gerund (University of Zurich)

December 8, 4pm, Building 103 (Philosophikum)/Room S65

Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s work on sentimentality and Sarah Banet-Weiser’s notion of popular feminism, my guest lecture will examine Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster film Barbie (2023) with a focus on its intergenerational feminist nostalgia and its use of sentimentality. The depiction of Barbie’s journey from doll to human not only celebrates a woman’s ability to feel but also reinforces biologistic notions of womanhood as well as patriarchal structures and heteronormativity. I argue that the film perpetuates the cruel optimism of the Barbie doll as a symbol of white female empowerment and that it relies on sentimental strategies and tropes to promote individualized solutions to gender inequality. 

Katharina Gerund is professor of American literature and culture at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She completed her PhD at the University of Bremen with a study on Transatlantic Cultural Exchange: African American Women’s Art and Activism in West Germany (published with transcript in 2013). In 2025, she received FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg’s Habilitation award for her second book manuscript. It is currently in preparation for publication and tentatively entitled “Happy Home Front Heroines? Military Spouses in the Cultural Imaginary of the US post-9/11.”

Guest Lecture by Prof. Dr. Heike Paul (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)

November 13, 6pm, Building 106/Room S11

In her talk “The Myths That Made America – Revisited,” Heike Paul (re-)examines popular and powerful narratives of US-American national beginnings which have turned out to be anchors and key references in discourses of ‘Americanness,’ past and present. These myths include the myth of Columbus and the ‘discovery’ of America, the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the myth of the melting pot, the myth of the American West, and the myth of the self-made man. Each of these foundational myths allows us to access American culture(s) from a specific angle; each of them provides and contains a particular narrative of meaningful and foundational ‘new world’ beginnings and developments in the history of the United States of America as well as iconic visual images and ritualistic cultural practices that accompany and enhance their impact and effect. Yet, these myths are not fixtures in the American national cultural imaginary: The explanation for their longevity and endurance lies in their adaptability, flexibility, and considerable narrative variation over time and across a broad social and cultural spectrum. Paul’s discussion of these myths traces their complex histories, revisiting their semiotic/semantic changes and discursive shifts with attention to current U.S. politics.

Heike Paul is chair of American Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg and member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2018, she was recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation. She held fellowships at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, and the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. She currently leads the “Global Sentimentality Project” and the Research Training Group “The Sentimental in Literature, Culture, and Politics” at FAU. Among her publications are The Myths That Made America (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014); Understanding Stewart O’Nan (Chapel Hill: University of South Carolina Press, 2020); Amerikanischer Staatsbürgersentimentalismus: Zur Lage der politischen Kultur der USA (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021); Lexicon of Global Melodrama (ed. with Sarah Marak, Katharina Gerund, and Marius Henderson, 2022) and Sentimental State(s): Affective Politics of Order and Belonging (ed. with Sarah Pritz, 2025).