America First and the 4th of July đź—“

Events

The Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies invites you to an original Fourth of July celebration in the spirit of Independence and the legacy of President Barack Obama. Two eminent speakers, Dr. David Sirakov, Director of the Atlantic Academy, and Prof. Philipp Gassert, President of the German Association of American Studies, will focus in their keynotes on transnational aspects of populism and global transformations, including an American note of optimism. Sandwiched in between these lectures are poster presentations by students and faculty of the Obama Institute. Their research projects amply document the multi-ethnic constitution of the United States and the transnational orientation of the American society, paradigmatically embodied in the Obama family. A reception will round off this celebration with toasts to America’s First ideas.

Invitation & Program (PDF)

June 29 – Retrieving the Extinguished: Poems from an Assimilated Jewish American Connecting to her Jewish German Past 🗓

June 29 – Retrieving the Extinguished: Poems from an Assimilated Jewish American Connecting to her Jewish German Past 🗓

Events, News

Renée Ruderman (Metropolitan State University of Denver)

June 29, 2017, 6 p.m., Fakultätssaal (Philosophicum)

This reading will feature poems from my new collection, “Where She Was Going” as well as poems from my earlier books. These poems are based on sketches and fragments, found in photographs, art, and faint memories.
Renée Ruderman, an Associate Professor of English at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Colorado, has two published books, Poems from the Rooms Below (Permanence Press, San Diego, CA, 1995) and Certain Losses, a chapbook (Main Street Rag, Charlotte, NC, 2004). She has won prizes for her poems, and some of them have appeared in The Bellingham Review, I-70 Review, Borderlands, and the Raleigh Review. Renée taught at Universität Siegen, Germany during a sabbatical in 2009, and she taught a poetry workshop at Palacky University (2013) in the Czech Republic.
June 29 – Krautrock and Transnationalism

June 29 – Krautrock and Transnationalism

News

Ulrich Adelt (University of Wyoming)

June 29, 2017, 6 p.m.,  P 106

This talk will engage discourses of popular music and transnationalism to discuss Krautrock, West German electronic music and rock from the 1970s. Groups such as Can, Neu!, Faust and Kraftwerk blended Influences of African American and Anglo-American music with the experimental and electronic music of European composers. The talk situates the music within its particular context of (trans)national identity and globalization. Krautrock and its offshoots have had a tremendous impact on musical production and reception in Britain and the U.S. since the 1970s. Genres such as indie, post-rock, techno and hip hop have drawn heavily on krautrock and have – ironically – connected a music that initially disavowed its European American and African American origins with the lived experience of whites and blacks in the U.S. and Europe. At the same time, while reaching for an imagined cosmic community, Krautrock, not only by its name, remains tied to essentialist notions of national identity and citizenship.
Ulrich Adelt is Associate Professor for American Studies at the University of Wyoming. His publications include Krautrock: German Music in the Seventies (University of Michigan Press 2016) and Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black and White (Rutgers University Press 2010).

 

June 27 – Collapse or Triumph? A Sixty-Year Assessment of the Modern American Conservative Movement.

June 27 – Collapse or Triumph? A Sixty-Year Assessment of the Modern American Conservative Movement.

News

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (Loyola University)

June 27, 2017, 4 p.m., SB II 01-531

What is the state of US conservatism? Arguably, the conservative movement has been one of the most powerful and successful uprisings in twentieth-century American history and perhaps the whole of US history. However, reassessing its sixty year trajectory raises serious questions about how powerful and unified it was but also suggests this supposed juggernaut may also be so fractured that both the movement and the Republican Party cannot govern now or in the foreseeable future.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer is an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. She has written extensively on US politics and economics for academic and popular audiences. She is currently finishing a new book on the history of the student loan industry titled Indentured Students.

June 26 – The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint Domingue and British Jamaica, 1748-1788

June 26 – The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint Domingue and British Jamaica, 1748-1788

Lectures, News

Trevor Burnard (The University of Melbourne, Australia)

June 26, 2017, 6 p.m., Fakultätssaal (Philosophicum)

Jamaica and Saint Domingue were two wildly successful but socially monstrous slave societies. In the years between 1748 and 1788 these societies—based upon a plantation complex in which African labourers were brought to the Caribbean to produce luxury commodities originally developed in Asia for a European market—reached an apogee of sorts in the Greater Antilles. Jamaica and Saint Domingue came close to perfecting a form of economic organisation that operated on a global scale that provided the owners of capital (human and otherwise) with vast amounts of money and considerable geopolitical clout. These were regions that exempli ed the complex forces of early modern imperialism, forces that helped make colonialism a truly global phenomenon.

This talk explores these two socities at the height of their powers. It looks at how their plantation systems developed and at the social and cultural forms that the plantation complex in its most developed and modern form spawned. In particular, it looks at how these societies created new forms of belonging based on race and on shared values in their elites of “whiteness.” White colonial residents of Jamaica and Saint Domingue established individualistic behaviours that might be considered egalitarian if these societies had not been so dependent upon enslaved labourers for their wealth.

Trevor Burnard is Head of School and Professor of History at the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies (SHAPS) at The University of Melbourne, Australia.