Katharina Gerund is professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Zurich and currently serves as president of the Swiss Association for American Studies (SANAS). She completed her PhD in American Studies at the University of Bremen and her Habilitation at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her dissertation has been published as Transatlantic Cultural Exchange: African American Women’s Art and Activism in West Germany (transcript, 2013). Her second book manuscript, which received FAU’s Habilitation Award in 2025, is tentatively titled “Happy Home Front Heroines? Military Spouses in the Cultural Imaginary of the US.” Katharina’s research and teaching spans cultures of war and critical military studies, cultural theory and US popular culture, affect and sentimentality, cultural mobility, as well as race and gender in the transatlantic world. Her most recent publications include “Liberation, Re-Education, Democratisation: The Politics of Gratitude in German-American Relations after 1945” in Contemporary European History 34.2 (2025) and “Feeling Barbie: Mothers, Daughters, and White Feminist Genealogies” in Feminist Theory 26.3 (2025, with Stefanie Schäfer) as well as the co-edited special issues Re-Thinking Solidarity (Amerikastudien / American Studies 2023, with Nathalie Aghoro and Sylvia Mayer) and Civilization, Democratization, Containment: Strategies of Re-Education in Imperial Settings and Beyond (The International History Review 2024, with Jana Aresin).

ABSTRACT: Military Spouses Making Kin: Families, Friends, and Foremothers
The nuclear family with its heteropatriarchal structures as well as its 1950s nostalgic connotations is central to contemporary representations of military culture. The military family frequently stands in for a nation imagined along familial lines. Especially military spouses have gained visibility and affective agency at least since the post-9/11 era and often in the culturally idealized form of what I have termed “happy home front heroine.” Yet, kinship structures in the military community are obviously more complex than these representations suggest, and my talk examines how military spouses, real and imagined, (try to) make kin across time, across cultures, and beyond ‘traditional’ family ties.

I will analyze cultural representations in different genres and media that position modern military spouses within a long historical genealogy and that show how they cultivate friendships, community, and connections within and beyond military culture. My case studies include memoirs by journalists Dana Canedy and Lily Burana, Jehanne Dubrow’s re-imagining of The Odyssey, and the prestige TV show The Unit. All of these texts engage with and, to some extent, validate hegemonic discourses on marriage, family, and gender roles, which provide a framework for military spouses to become intelligible. Yet, as I argue, they also represent attempts at making kin beyond these confines as they highlight the sisterhood of “Unit wives,” the transhistorical community of women waiting at the home front, and the need to foster, at least for the time being, (alternative) relationships that not always endorse the dominant logics of military culture.

Shannon Gibney is professor in the English Department at Minneapolis Community and Technical College and an award-winning author and editor of novels, anthologies, picture books, and YA literature. Her keynote will be built around her critically acclaimed experimental memoir, The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be (2024), and her work on transracial adoption as a kinship of loss.

ABSTRACT: The Kinship of Loss
Using her 2023 speculative memoir The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be as a guide, Shannon Gibney will explore the generative power of this nascent genre. She will examine how those with histories of trauma might use the speculative to create alternate modes of kinship — both in their creative/critical work and lived experiences.

Mark Rifkin is professor of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies and Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo.  He is the author of nine books, including The Cambridge Introduction to Queer and Trans Studies, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, and When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality and Native Sovereignty.  His work has won a number of awards including the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book in American Studies from the American Studies Association, Best Subsequent Book from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and Best Special Issue from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.  He also has served as president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

ABSTRACT: The Politics of Kinship 
What is kinship? While scholars, activists, and intellectuals often turn to it as a way of thinking beyond the nuclear family form, the kinship-concept comes out of nineteenth-century efforts to transpose Indigenous political forms into the terms of liberal governance as evidence of Native peoples’ barbaric, backward inability to understand true home and family and to separate them from politics. Even when used in the present to praise alternative networks of care and interdependence, kinship still bears this deeply racialized history and orientation. Tracing these patterns from the nineteenth century illustrates how alternative political orders have been translated as expressions of failed family rather than as governance. Drawing on work in Indigenous studies, this presentation will illustrate how discourses of family and kinship present divergence from normative liberal social patterns and jurisdictional frameworks as dangerous and disruptive racial tendencies, while also casting such collective forms of self-organization and placemaking as disorder in need of state intervention. Racialization works through presenting what might otherwise be understood as collective modes of self-governance as, instead, signs of ingrained deviancy (tendencies toward savagery, criminality, alienness, etc.), in ways that work to neutralize and contain political orders -- Indigenous and otherwise -- that would otherwise potentially pose a challenge to the legitimacy of the state and existing legal geographies. Drawing on Indigenous frameworks opens new possibilities for envisioning what kinds of relations, networks, and formations can and should be seen as governance on lands claimed by the U.S.