Upcoming Guest Lectures

Guest Lecture by Dr. Anthony Obst (FU Berlin)

To register for the event, please contact american-studies[at]uni-koeln.de.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, large parts of Los Angeles County were transformed into carceral city space. From the proliferation of new security systems and electronic surveillance technologies to the construction of new prisons and the escalation of police budgets and tactics, Los Angeles and its neighboring cities increasingly resembled what the historian and urban theorist Mike Davis has described as a "fortress city," "brutally divided between 'fortified cells' of affluent society and 'places of terror' where the police battle the criminalized poor" (City of Quartz, 200). In the midst of this literal battleground, a cultural form flourished that registered, documented, and critiqued this development as it happened. The height of Compton- and LA-based gangsta rap coincided not coincidentally with one of the most intense periods of mass criminalization in US history. Artists such as N.W.A., South Central Cartel, and B.W.P. developed their own vernacular theories of carceral city space, mapping the spatial logics of policing, surveillance, confinement, and unequal mobility from the perspective of those living within Fortress L.A. This talk places these musical theorizations in conversation with the work of anti-carceral scholars and activists such as Mike Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, exploring gangsta rap as a form of urban theory from below.

Dr. Anthony Obst earned his PhD in English and American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin in 2025. His dissertation, Outlines of Abolition Democracy: Black Leftist Writings in 1930s America, was published by De Gruyter in March this year. He has been a visiting researcher at Yale University and the CUNY Graduate Center, and a fellow of the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg’s Global Sentimentality Project as well as the Ernst-Bloch-Zentrum. He currently works as a Research Associate for the Berlin-based NGO Justice Collective, and as adjunct lecturer at the TU Dresden, where he is teaching a course on policing and race in the United States. Before starting his PhD, he worked for several years as a music journalist in Berlin and New York City.

Guest Lecture by Prof. Michael Sawyer (U of Pittsburgh) on the 250th Anniversary of the U.S.-American Declaration of Independence

This lecture is organized by PD Dr. Johanna Pitetti-Heil (U of Cologne), the AmerikaHaus NRW e.V., col.lit.ive, and the Theodor Wonja Michael Bibliothek.

If you want to attend the event, please register here. Registration is free.

In 1776, a declaration was made in the name of freedom that did not include those who would become known as the philosophical and political problem of the next two and a half centuries. This public lecture takes the 250th anniversary of American independence as its occasion—and its target. Rooted in African American studies, critical race theory, and Africana political thought and philosophy, the lecture asks: What does Black independence sound like? What does it demand?

Prof. Michael Sawyer will introduce his "Black Event Theory," which proposes that Blackness is not a lack of freedom but a different way of being (a different ontological address). He will demonstrate this by the performance of the sound installation "CALL ME I 124: A Polyvocal Composition," which deconstructs and recombines opening lines from the literary works of Melville, Ellison, and Morrison. His discussion will outline what he calls the "Event of being-as-Black"—and we all become part of the living archive.

Michael Sawyer is Professor of African American Literature and Culture in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of An Africana Philosophy of Temporality: Homo Liminalis (Palgrave, 2018); Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X (Pluto, 2020); Sir Lewis (Legacy Lit/Hachette, 2024); and The Door of No Return: Being-as-Black (Temple University Press, 2026), and he is an artist in residence at ONX Studios in New York City and Athens, Greece. For more information, see here.

The public lecture is a cooperation of PD Dr. Johanna Pitetti-Heil (U of Cologne), the AmerikaHaus NRW e.V., col.lit.ive, the Theodor Wonja Michael Bibliothek, the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, and Prof. Julia Faisst (TU Dortmund). The event is supported by the Diversity-Projekt Fonds 2026, the State Government of North Rhine-Westphalia, JProf. Judith Rauscher (U of Cologne), and Prof. Anke Ortlepp (U of Cologne).