Latest Research Projects
The Cultural Politics of Reconciliation
(Dr. Nathalie Aghoro & Dr. Katharina Fackler)
The research network "The Cultural Politics of Reconciliation," funded by the German Research Foundation, investigates literary and artistic engagements with reconciliation in the USA and Canada. It proceeds from the observation that “reconciliation” has become a frequently used key term in North American public discourse. The network’s goal is a first stocktaking of the ways in which reconciliation is imagined and critiqued in cultural representations in Canada and the United States. While reconciliation efforts have traditionally been aimed at so-called transitional countries, whose political, legal, and social institutions are fundamentally transformed, this network focuses on nontransitional societies in North America where institutional structures persist as social and political actors are trying to find ways to overcome the legacies of historical injustice and institutionalized inequality. The network’s aim is to break new ground for American Studies by exploring the aesthetics and poetics of reconciliation and its discontents with respect to slavery, abolition, imperialism, settler colonialism, and decolonization. The network examines how literary and cultural interventions complement institutional, economic, and legal approaches to reconciliation and seeks out critical debates about the meaning of and possibility for reconciliation as a comprehensive project for civil society. Members place these representations and debates in conversation with theories from critical ethnic studies, Black-Indigenous studies, and decolonial studies to gauge the depth and meaning of their engagement with the structural production of social inequality.
“Here in Berlin: Transatlantic Convergence in the Work of Cristina García and Werner Sollors.”
Joint Research Project with John Wharton Lowe, Barbara Methvin Professor, Department of English, University of Georgia.
Selected for LMU Munich-University of Georgia Faculty Research Exchange, 2022.
Professor John Lowe visited the Amerika-Institut, LMU Munich, 5-8 July 2022.
Exchange research visit to UGA, 19-24 September 2022.
Trade and Taste: French Things and the Making of the American Nation, 1780s-1830s
In 1788, George Washington insisted on acquiring a gold watch in Paris, a plain, yet elegant watch of the best quality. He also ordered fancy table decoration from France and bought Parisian chairs second hand from the French ambassador. James Monroe raised a public outcry when furnishing the White House with expensive furniture from Paris in 1817. In the Early Republic, many wealthy Americans refurbished their homes with French interior decoration. From wallpaper, lamps, and porcelain to paintings, sofas, and curtains, whole interiors were imported from Paris. Private collections, as well as public exhibition spaces, were stocked with French acquisitions. At the same time, business with things originating outside of France, yet perceived as French, flourished, establishing a culture of ‘faux-French’. The Early Republic has often been referred to as a time period of cultural insecurity. In an age following political independence, questions of culture, of manners, style, and taste, were invariably tied to debates on national identity. Great Britain especially occupied a prominent position in the process of American cultural self-definition in a transatlantic context. But what was the meaning of French things in these processes? In my book project, I hope to tell a story of identity formation and social distinction in the post-revolutionary United States, while also exploring how French-American entangledness shaped an emerging sense of American cultural identity, and investigating the key role of material culture in the young American nation.
The Arts of Autonomy
Why do some literary texts become the object of intense public discussion? How does the public identify the polemical content of literary statements, and how does the public rationalize and discuss these texts? What can the humanities contribute to our understanding of such discursive events in the public sphere? The project The Arts of Autonomy: Pamphleteering, Popular Philology, and the Public Sphere, 1988-2018 is funded by an ERC Starting Grant. Its overall objective is to gain a better understanding of the role of polemical literature in the contemporary public sphere in Europe and the United States. In the last three decades, the spectacular resurgence of polemical writing as a mode of political address has been correlated with the resurgence of assertions of autonomy in public discourse. Since the Dreyfus Affair and Émile Zola’s “J’accuse…!” (1898), short, massively ideological, and incitative texts have been a vital medium of modern public intellectuality. The Arts of Autonomy argues that pamphleteering is one of the crucial discursive forms in contemporary Western public discourse and that its systematic study as a literary and rhetorical form is essential in order to gain an understanding of the formation of opinion and policy in Europe and the United States. By integrating philological, philosophical, polititological and empirical research perspectives, The Arts of Autonomy will produce a first systematic, large-scale account of contemporary pamphleteering and shed new light on the perceived radicalization of political, cultural, and social ideals and discourses in Western societies.
„Privacy, Self-Observation, and Social Monitoring in U.S. Culture, 1945 to the Present“
Dr. Bärbel Harju is a principal investigator in the Collaborative Research Center „Cultures of Vigilance.“ She works on her project, „Privacy, Self-Observation, and Social Monitoring in U.S. Culture, 1945 to the Present,“ with a doctoral student, Loredana Filip.
For further information on the project and upcoming events, please visit the CRC’s homepage.
Door into the future? Debates about the transformation of Porto Maravilha (Rio de Janeiro)
Having been historically important and shaped by slavery and colonialism, Porto Maravilha’s waterfront in Rio de Janeiro, has, since 2011, been fully revitalized through public-private partnerships. In a town, which is associated with easy exoticism, with delinquency and drug economy, the port zone should in the context of the mega sport events of 2014 (the FIFA World Coup) and 2016 (the Olympic Summer Games) create an internationally respected display window for responsible urban ethics with green spaces, affordable housing and clean water. For the first time, the harbor zone aims at being a space for responsible history policy, that manifests itself in cultural historical projects such as museums, Afro-Brazilian memorials, cultural centers, and events in the public space, and discusses the crimes of a slave economy. The processes of transformation in Porto Maravilha strive for the social inclusion of still marginalized groups of inhabitants, as it was formulated and partially enforced on a national level by the former governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff (2003-16). This project analyzes, which politics in the architectonic-symbolical and economic transformation of this greater area were enforced in a top-down fashion and which politics resulted from negotiation processes between civil and governmental players, what kind of governance, which measures of social creativity can be identified, which ethical actors and subjects will develop within the transformation processes, and finally, whether a new critical consciousness about the history of slavery can be created. The project is part of the Interdisciplinary DFG Research Group “Urban Ethics” at the LMU Munich.
SFB 1369: Cultures of Vigilance. Transformations—Spaces—Practices. A02 Vigilance and Self-Empowerment in the American Enlightenment
Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Klaus Benesch
Research Associate: Dr. Patrick Geiger
Research assistant: Julius Zimmer
The historical transformation of established practices of vigilance and self-scrutiny is an indelible aspect of the SFB’s overall research agenda. This project looks at how, in the American colonies, religiously inflected forms of vigilance (the Puritan “ideology of control”) are being increasingly secularized during the eighteenth century. By analyzing a wide variety of written documents, such as diaries, memoirs, personal correspondences, early almanacs etc., it strives to elucidate how new secular regimes of social and individual attentiveness have emerged to eventually provide a cultural template with repercussions well into our own time.
DFG-Forschergruppe 593 "Anfänge (in) der Moderne: Theoretische Konzepte, literarische Figurationen, historische Konstruktionen"
Teilprojekt "Anfangsorte: Topographien der Erneuerung in der amerikanischen Romantik, 1820 – 1870"
(Prof. Dr. Klaus Benesch, Sascha Pöhlmann)
Das Teilprojekt Anfangsorte hat zum Ziel, den Zusammenhang zwischen Anfängen und den Orten, an die diese Anfänge imaginativ gebunden bzw. zu denen sie in Beziehung gesetzt werden, in der formativen Periode der amerikanischen Literatur, der sogenannten „American Renaissance“, zu analysieren. Es verbindet damit zwei den Kategorien von Raum und Zeit untergeordnete und zumeist isoliert betrachtete Konzeptualisierungen des Anfangs, die für die im 19. Jahrhundert entstehende Nationalliteratur der USA von zentraler Bedeutung sind. Das Projekt geht von der Annahme aus, daß sowohl Orte als auch Anfänge grundsätzlich diskursiv konstituiert sind, und daß beide im literarischen Diskurs der Zeit in komplexer Weise miteinander verschränkt werden. Den kultur- und geistesgeschichtlichen Hintergrund für diese Verschränkung bildet dabei zum einen die Herausbildung einer eigenen, an der sublimen Weite des amerikanischen Naturraums orientierten nationalen Ästhetik. Zum anderen wird in einem Teil der zeitgenössischen Literatur genau dieses Ausgreifen in den transzendentalen Raum der Natur als Problem gesehen und nunmehr mit der (Selbst-)Beschränkung auf konkrete, genau bestimmbare ‚Orte’ beantwortet. In welchem Verhältnis diese Orte dann einerseits zum epochalen Projekt der neuen Nation stehen bzw. andererseits die Brüche und Ambiguitäten in der diskursiven Konstruktion von Modernität insgesamt widerspiegeln, soll am Beispiel zentraler Texte von Thoreau und Whitman unter Einbeziehung der „space/place“-Debatte im Ecocriticism und in den Environmental Studies herausgearbeitet werden.
Website: https://www.forschergruppe-anfaenge.uni-muenchen.de/index.html
Competing Modernities: Germany and the United States, 1890 to the Present
(Project Director: Prof. Dr. Christof Mauch and Kiran Patel, Harvard University)
The goal of this project is to systematically compare the paths of the United States and Germany from a number of vantage points over an extended period of time. Made possible by a grant from the Robert Bosch Stiftung (Stuttgart) and the support of the German Historical Institute, the project is directed by Christof Mauch (Amerika-Institut) and Kiran Patel (Harvard University) and is also supported by the American Institute of Contemporary German Studies. It is conceived for a broader public in addition to an academic audience. One of the project’s major objectives is the publication of a collection of scholarly but highly readable essays in English and German. Because it is the first comprehensive comparison of two national histories on this scale, it is hoped that the publication will serve as a model and a stimulus for future research. The project also strives to contribute to the public discussion about future social and political developments in Germany and in the United States.
Natural Disasters in Transatlantic Perspective: River Floods in German and U.S. History
(Project Director: Prof. Dr. Christof Mauch in collaboration with Uwe Lübken, Washington, DC)
