Guest Lecture by Judith Schreier (HU Berlin)

June 6, (Thur.), 2-3.30 p.m. (Sprachlabor 4)

Judith Schreier, scholar and activist, gives a lecture on "Fat Activism and Fat Life Writing." Schreier focuses on the fat-activist (online) community as well as the autobiography by the US-American activist Aubrey Gordon, "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat", which deals with diet culture, fat stigmatization, and calls for social justice for people in different body sizes. The lecture is organized as part of the seminar "Food and Body Politics in American Literature and Culture" taught by Verena Wurth, and as part of the Diversity Week at the University of Colgone.

Judith Schreier is a PhD candidate at the Department of English and American Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, working on the project Knowledgeable Fat: Fat Life Writing in American Literature and Culture.

Guest Lecture by Prof. Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson  (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)

June 17 (Mon.), noon-1:30 p.m. (Hauptgebäude/Room XIb)

This lecture is organized by Jun.-Prof. Dr. Judith Rauscher as part of the seminar "African and African American Literature," taught by Dr. Habil. Johanna Pitteti-Heil. 

Transatlantic Slavery was an institution that sought to turn human beings into chattel. This race-based slavery spanned four hundred years and was characterized by physical brutality, psychological torment, material deprivation, cultural prohibitions, and terror. However, the enslaved did not submit meekly to their racial debasement and institutionalized brutality. Despite all the dimensions of enslaver control, the enslaved sought actively to maintain their dignity and humanity, and to seize their liberty. Therefore, although slavery was a product of white brutality, it was also characterized by ongoing black resistance. Enslaved Africans and their descendants often resisted through work slow-downs, feigning illness, damaging, or burning the enslavers’ property, practising their cultures, preserving kinship bonds, and demanding the right to independently access economic markets. Working comparatively with examples from Canada, the USA, and tropical regions, this lecture explores the profound obstacles that the enslaved faced in securing their freedom and in resisting the everyday indignities and onslaughts of slavery.

Prof. Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson is a Provost Professor of Art History in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and Director of the Slavery North Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Black Maple Magazine, one of the only national platforms aimed at black Canadians. From 2020-2022, she was a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Halifax, Canada where she founded the first-ever institute focused on the study of Canadian Slavery. She also worked at McGill University (Montreal) for seventeen years (2003-2020). Nelson has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, Black Diaspora Studies, and Black Canadian Studies. She has published seven books including The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (2007), Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (2016), and Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (2018). She is actively engaged with lay audiences through her media work including ABC, CBC, CTV, and City TV News, The Boston Globe, BBC One’s “Fake or Fortune,” and PBS’ “Finding your Roots”. She has blogged for Huffington Post Canada and written for The Walrus. In 2017, she was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University and in 2021 a Fields of the Future Fellow at Bard Graduate Center (NYC). In 2022, she was inducted as a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada and elected as a Member of the American Antiquarian Society.

Guest Lecture by Dr. Alexandra Hartmann (Paderborn University)

June 25, (Tue.), 2-3.30 p.m. (Seminargebäude, Room S12)

James Baldwin and Jesmyn Ward frequently confront readers with conceptions of care that theorize kinship and African American masculinity in non-hegemonic ways. In their works, vulnerability and creativity go hand in hand in their attempts to secure sanity and futurity. In this talk, we will take a look at both their fictional and non-fictional writings.

Alexandra Hartmann holds a PhD in American Studies from Paderborn University where she teaches classes on US literature and culture. Her first book, The Black Humanist Tradition in Anti-Racist Literature: A Fragile Hope, came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2023. She has published articles on anti-racist theorizing, complicity, and humanism in the Black Lives Matter movement. Research stays have led her to Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard University. Her second-book project deals with Progressive Era reform cultures’ engagement of the sonic and its impact on early twentieth century US cultural practices and aesthetics.