Cologne Media Lecture and Masterclass by Prof. Dr. Alexa Weik von Mossner (U of Freiburg)

Lecture: June 3, (Tue.), 6 p.m. (Seminargebäude,  Room S11)

Can eco-documentaries inspire people to take action to protect the climate and their multispecies environments? What is the role of emotions in such engagements and how do recent trends toward impact producing try to harness them?  What can interactive screenings, live discussions, accompanying events, and grassroots campaigns add in terms of social impact? In her talk, Alexa Weik von Mossner tackles these questions from the perspectives of cognitive ecocriticism and transdisciplinary sustainability research as she investigates the narrative strategies, affective appeal, and impact campaigns of eco-documentaries, highlighting both the challenges and the potential of environmental documentary filmmaking that aims to have a lasting impact. 

Alexa Weik von Mossner is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt and principal investigator on the transdisciplinary research project, “Visions of Sustainability: Documentary Films as Impulses for Societal Transformation” at the Sustainability Innovation Campus (University of Freiburg & Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). Her research explores contemporary environmental culture from cognitive and transdisciplinary ecocritical perspectives. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Minds (University of Texas Press, 2014) and Affective Ecologies (Ohio State University Press, 2017) and has (co-)edited several books, among them Moving Environments (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2014) and Empirical Ecocriticism (U of Minnesota P, 2023). Her most recent book publications include Fragile: A Novel (Elzwhere 2023) and Growing Hope: Narratives of Food Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Guest Lecture by Dr. Nathalie Aghoro (LMU München)

June 30, 2025, 6 p.m.  (Philosophikum, S67)

Contemporary poets Natasha Trethewey and Claudia Rankine both take experiences situated in place as points of departure for their poetic contemplations of the racialized and gendered biases that govern a U.S.-American national imaginary. In the 2018 poetry collection Monument, Trethewey blends individual and collective memories into architectural contemplations of (non-)belonging in the South and builds monuments in verse to those buried in its history. In the 2020 essayistic and lyrical assemblage Just Us: An American Conversation, Rankine explores how the deep structures of politics and social life find expression in the mundane places where pathways of people from all walks of life meet. 

This talk reads Trethewey’s and Rankine’s works as black feminist contemplations on the question whose experiences are privileged when marking U.S.-American space and what kind of connections are forged in the shared places people live in and pass through.

Nathalie Aghoro is a postdoctoral researcher at the Amerika-Institut of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. Her main research interests are nineteenth to twenty-first century American literature, social justice, solidarity, and public sphere studies, sound and media studies, African and Asian American literature, as well as video games studies and visual culture. Her dissertation examines the sonic mediality of voice in the works of Richard Powers, Karen Tei Yamashita, Jennifer Egan, and Jonathan Safran Foer and was published under the title Sounding the Novel: Voice in Twenty-First Century American Fiction (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2018). She is the editor of the edited collection The Acoustics of the Social on Page and Screen (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Video Game Ecologies and Culture (De Gruyter 2025) and her publications include essays on postmodern novels, contemporary literature and drama, and Afrofuturism. Her current DFG-funded book project deals with the ties between social justice and situated cultural practices such as the writing, building, and picturing of shared places.

Guest Lecture by Melisa Köroğlu (U of Cologne)

July 2, (Wed.), noon - 1:30pm (Philosophikum, S82)

The American Coming-of-Age film offers a visual depiction of American teenage-hood. Teenage-hood or adolescence marks the junction of childhood and adulthood. Adolescence is a fairly new concept (only discovered a mere century ago by G. Stanley Hall). As an ‘in-between’, this stage of being too old to be called a child, being too young to be called an adult, became a popular and favorite film genre of the teen demographic. Popularized by American film maker John Hughes in the 1980s with blockbuster hits like Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club, the teen film, and specifically the Coming-of-Age film, is a staple in film canon, contemporary cinema, and blockbuster releases today. This guest lecture will explore the beginnings of the genre as well as its current releases.

Melisa Köroğlu is a Predoctoral scholar of Film and North American Studies currently working as a research assistant of American Literature and Culture at the University of Cologne, Germany. She obtained her Master of Arts in North American Studies at the University of Cologne and since then is preparing for her PhD which will expand her research on Female Hunger in Contemporary Horror Films. During an exchange year at the University of Rochester, NY, Melisa earned an M.A. in Comparative Literature as well as a Graduate Certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. Her academic interests span from Film Studies (including colour in film, horror films and coming-of-age films), to Gender Studies, Food and Body Studies as well as American Gothic literature.