Guest Lecture by Ted Richthofen (University of Bonn)

October 31, (Thu.), 10-11:30 a.m. (Philosophikum, Room S65)

During the era of alcohol prohibition in the United States, certain stereotypes emerged that have endured through the years about how such a law effected the average American: the men were gangsters, bootleggers, and protested for alcohol, whereas women were dancing, busy being flappers, and drinking the alcohol. However, Prohibition actually created new avenues for many people from various walks of life to participate in new forms of liberation. For example, the Mafia owned and ran most of the speakeasies in New York where black and queer artists could finally express themselves, contributing to what we now call The Harlem Renaissance (and eventually, the Stonewall Riots). Additionally, many women joined in criminal activities at an unprecedented rate, so much so that American society had to entirely rewrite their very gendered notions on criminality. However, this took quite a while, so the vast majority of the highly proficient women bootleggers got away with their lucrative crimes, knowing that they would not be legally pursued and prosecuted like their male counterparts. In this lecture, Ted Richthofen will explore the various ways in which Americans benefitted from Prohibition, and how it ultimately helped reshape gender, queer, and race relations and the criminal justice system.

Ted Richthofen, originally from Denver, Colorado, is currently writing his PhD in American Studies under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Sabine Meyer in the North American Studies Program at the University of Bonn. In 2019, he received his Bachelors in History from Metropolitan State University of Denver, and was also awarded the Colorado Emerging Historians Award by the State Historian Council. Ted then moved to Germany and received his Masters in American Studies from the University of Tübingen in 2021. His research interests throughout his academic journey focus on the socio-cultural and legal impacts of psychoactive substance prohibitions in the United States, with a particular emphasis on gender and criminality. As he is nearly done with his PhD, Ted is soon moving back to Colorado, where he would like to attend law school to become a lawyer.

Guest Lecture by Prof. Catrin Gersdorf (University of Würzburg)

December 9, (Mo.), 6-7:30 p.m. (Seminargebäude, Room S23)

The Harlem of the 1920s is widely considered a site of African American cultural and social liberation. With Jazz (1992), Toni Morrison turns to that historical moment and location but tells a slightly different story, one in which the collective hope for freedom and self-determination in the Northern city is interlaced with individual experiences of betrayal, the inescapable power of desire, and violence. In order to tell that story, Morrison mobilizes a literary motif deeply rooted in American narrative traditions: the contrast between wildness and domestication. I will argue, that Jazz is not only a historical novel about the African American experience of the Great Migration and the importance of Harlem in the cultural history of Black America. In its approach to the city as a space inscribed by traces of the southern wild, Jazz also offers itself to be read as an allegory of modernity as a socially and ecologically precarious condition.

Catrin Gersdorf is Professor of American Studies at the University of Würzburg, and the speaker of the “Environmental Humanities” class at the Graduate School for the Humanities. She was an Executive and Advisory Board member of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment (EASLCE) as well as German American Studies Association (DGfA). The author of The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction of America (2009), her published work includes essays and edited volumes on ecocriticism, the intersection of ecology and (American) democracy, and on individual writers, thinkers, and artists such as Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Ana Mendieta, Toni Morrison, and Annie Proulx. Most recently, she co-edited (with Catriona Sandilands) a thematic issue on Gardening (Against) the Anthropocene with Ecozon@, the European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. Her current research focuses on the uses of utopia and utopian thinking in the literature of the Anthropocene.