From Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black to Amazon’s Transparent to Paramount’s Star Trek: Discovery – contemporary television and streaming media arguably have become more inclusive than ever, giving stories and screen time to cultural differences and showcasing racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual diversity across genres. The research and teaching focus “Diverseries” of American Studies Münster critically examines this recent attention to diversity politics in television storytelling: In what ways do contemporary TV series really promote equality and social justice? What kinds of affective economies do these series help circulate and who are their intended audiences? To what extent are “diverseries” symptoms of the neoliberal commercialization of difference that seldom goes beyond tokenism? And how do the algorithmic structure and international reach of most streaming services shape the representation of diversity?
The “Diverseries” focus will feature regular guest lectures, classes, discussion events.
The first event in this series was held on May 5, 2022. Barbara Maly from the University of Vienna gave a talk on “The (Impossible) Promise of Diversity - Netflix and Cultural Politics.”
The film was about the Dayan family, who fled their home in Iran to the United States, only to be greeted in Houston with hurricanes and perilous politics. In particular, the film accompanied the nine-year-old Hana in her struggles to be heard, questioning the immigrant realities in the USA, while longing for songs about a kind world.
This event was hosted by the Erasmus+ "MigraMedia" Project on March 18, 2024.
In this workshop, we delved into the realms of critique, postcritique, and contemporary methods, as we navigated the shifting currents of literary analysis, thereby gaining fresh perspectives on the art of interpretation and critique in today's diverse literary landscape.
The master class was co-organized by Gulsin Ciftci and Nursan Celik (Freie Universität Berlin).
What does it mean to write poetry from and to a place as an outsider? How do our transnational attachments and belonging shape our modes of expression? Aesthetics, poetics, experience, and language: Jennifer A. Reimer’s poetry collection Keşke, which roughly translates to “if only/I wish” from Turkish to English, is an exploration of a space of longing.
Jennifer A. Reimer and Gulsin Ciftci discussed this space of longing to read, hear, and talk about the role of poetry in our transnational belongings.
The event was hosted by Silvia Schultermandl, Gulsin Ciftci, and The AmerikaHaus NRW.
Kelly Hoffer, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, discussed "The Noise in the Archive: Susan Howe's 'Telepathic' Poetics." The talk explored the role of medial noise in the visual poetry of Susan Howe as it relates to her archival practice. Further, building on Craig Dworkin’s contention that medial noise is an important element of Howe’s poetics, the talk examined how her textual collages from “Frolic Architecture” (2010) and “Concordance” (2020) both invite and resist consideration as archival artifacts.
In commemoration of the proclamation of the end of slavery in the United States on June 19, 1865, writer, activist, and performer Deborah D. E. E. P. Mouton read from and discussed her memoir Black Chameleon. The event was meant to not only enter into a discussion on contemporary systemic racism in the U. S. but also to discuss the importance of mythology for Black women in the U. S., the potentials of autobiographical genres, and the role literature plays for the times in which we currently live.
The event was hosted by Silvia Schultermandl and Gulsin Ciftci.
As part of this 2023 Juneteenth event, we are happy to announce that our conversation with Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton has been published: Writing Black Women’s Mythology: A Conversation with Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, Gulsin Ciftci, and Silvia Schultermandl. You may find it here.
This workshop engaged with Prof. Bewes’s latest book, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (Columbia University Press, 2022), which shakes the grounds on which the theory of the novel has long been standing and offers new ways of seeing and engaging with literature.
This event was co-organized by Gulsin Ciftci and Anna Thiemann, in cooperation with the Graduate School Practices of Literature.
This workshop covered the life cycle of the American academic job market with a focus on early career positions in the humanities (assistant professorships) and was designed to help Ph.D. students who are finishing or have recently completed their dissertations and who will be applying for academic positions in fall 2023 or fall 2024.
Eugenie Brinkema focussed on concrete strategies for best representing one's scholarship, teaching experience, and readiness for a professional position. Topics included: how to find, read, and interpret job advertisements; how to frame interdisciplinary scholarship for disciplinary positions; typical application requirements; and the specific (and different) discursive forms of the group interview and on-campus job talk.
On Thursday, April 27th, Jessica Pressman discussed her acclaimed book Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age and its reception since it was published in late 2020. In this two parts event, we first created a library of bookish objects to glance at the every day images of bookishness, which was followed by a masterclass by Jessica Pressman herself. Participants were invited to bring a bookish object of their choice to contribute to a temporary, onsite “library of bookish objects” to encourage thinking about and around bookishness.
This workshop offered insight into the currents debates in literary studies through the angle of new formalisms. In the workshop, Prof. Brinkema offered a framework for her proposed method of reading, radical formalism, and discussed methodologies among others.
Eugenie Brinkema — professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology — researches violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics in texts ranging from the horror film to gonzo pornography, from the body of films dubbed “New European Extremism” to the viral media forms of terrorism. Professor Brinkema’s articles have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals including Angelaki, Camera Obscura, Criticism, differences, Discourse, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The Journal of Visual Culture, LIT, Qui Parle, Somatechnics, and World Picture. Her first book, The Forms of the Affects, published with Duke University Press in 2014, won honorable mention in the Modern Language Association First Book Prize. Her 2022 book Life-Destroying Diagrams explores the theoretical potential of radical formalism in relation to horror and love.
In this intensive, participatory workshop, we dove into some of the basics of writing nonfiction for a general audience: style, structure, and powerful beginnings. Activities included close reading, discussion, and short, playful writing prompts.
Participants were encouraged to read widely in publications they enjoy (and can envision themselves writing for) ahead of time, and to choose one essay to break down paragraph by paragraph in writing. How does the piece begin and end? What happens in each paragraph? How are the sections organized? What stories are being told? Are there changes in time, place, focal character or perspective? Is there suspense, and if so, how is it established? And: what kind of language does the author use, how does their voice come through? Bring your notes to class.
Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn, where she organizes the Bonn Lectures in the Public Humanities. She is the author of The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge, 2018), a study of the role of difficult emotions in early medieval pedagogy. She has edited or co-edited four essay collections and two journal special issues, including Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (Punctum, 2016), on the role of the arts in times of crisis. Irina is a columnist at the Times Literary Supplement and co-hosts a podcast with Mary Wellesley at the London Review of Books. Besides these publications, she regularly writes for the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Longreads, Times Higher Education, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
As a memoirist, she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, and received the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for nonfiction. One piece was included in Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen and Bob Atwan, with five others selected as notables between 2013 and 2021. Her essays have also been reprinted in Holly Hughes’ Best Food Writing (2017), Jay McInerney’s Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing (2018), Longreads, The Rumpus, and in the Romanian literary journal Scena9. Her writing can be found at www.irinadumitrescu.com and her newsletter at "www.irinadumitrescu.substack.com".
The lecture was co-organized with the Graduate School Practices of Literature.
This lecture was part of our Diverseries initiative and collaborated with the lecture series "Hotspots in Literary and Cultural Studies, Book Studies and Linguistics."
This interactive lecture offered participants a crash course in writing for the general public, including the range of genres scholars can write in, how to find outlets open to new writers, how to pitch those outlets and how to deal with editors and revisions professionally. Further, various issues raised by “public writing” were explored, such as how to balance and integrate scholarly writing with creative work, what rigour looks like in other genres (and where we have to ensure it ourselves), and the unexpected pros and cons of public writing.
Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn, where she organizes the Bonn Lectures in the Public Humanities. She is the author of The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge, 2018), a study of the role of difficult emotions in early medieval pedagogy. She has edited or co-edited four essay collections and two journal special issues, including Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (Punctum, 2016), on the role of the arts in times of crisis. Irina is a columnist at the Times Literary Supplement and co-hosts a podcast with Mary Wellesley at the London Review of Books. Besides these publications, she regularly writes for the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Longreads, Times Higher Education, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
As a memoirist, she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, and received the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for nonfiction. One piece was included in Best American Essays 2016, edited by Jonathan Franzen and Bob Atwan, with five others selected as notables between 2013 and 2021. Her essays have also been reprinted in Holly Hughes’ Best Food Writing 2017, Jay McInerney’s Wine Reads: A Literary Anthology of Wine Writing (2018), Longreads, The Rumpus, and in the Romanian literary journal Scena9. Her writing can be found at www.irinadumitrescu.com and her newsletter at www.irinadumitrescu.substack.com.
The lecture was co-organized with the Graduate School Practices of Literature.
This workshop, led by Jessica Cole, was for students who wanted to share their work, practice creative writing following prompts, and learn how to give and work with feedback.
This guest lecture was part of the seminar “The New Poetics: Introduction to 21st-Century American Poetry.”
Shermaine Jones from the Virginia Commonwealth University held a talk about "Blackness & Breath-taking." She explored the ways that Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and artist Shaun Leonardo’s “I Can’t Breathe” community workshops, as well as “The Breath of Empty Space” installation, engage the question at the center of Christina Sharpe’s concept wake work, “What [does it take], in the midst of the singularity, the virulent antiblackness everywhere and always remotivated, to keep breath in the Black body.”
The greenhouses, lakes, and lawns are our second classroom as we explore US poets writing today. Drawing inspiration from generative experiments and the poems we read, we took a field trip to the Botanical Garden to expand our drafts. After the workshop, writers had time to work on their poems. A special edition of the WWU-based literary journal Satura showcased participants’ writing in a print and online issue.
This generative poetry workshop was open to everyone curious about contemporary US poetry.
Sylee Gore is an Indian American poet who works with image and text. She has led poetry workshops for the British Council and Oxford University. She recently won the Bird in Your Hands Prize (Northern Arizona University) and the Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize (Oxford University). Her writing appears in Brooklyn Review, Dialogist, Guesthouse, Harvard Review, NationalPoetryMonth.ca, and elsewhere. She reads at the European Poetry Festival in London this June.
A literary critic and a cultural historian of the US, Mahshid Mayar is assistant professor of American Studies at Universität Bielefeld. Currently, she is also a research associate at the English Department, Amherst College, Massachusetts. Mahshid’s current research and teaching interests lie in 21st-century poetry of protest, silence and absence, new empire studies, 19th-century cultural history of the US, historical childhood studies, and history of race and racialization. In Erasure: Poetics, Politics, Performance, which is the title of her Habilitation project, Mahshid interrogates the intercutting of the empire’s politics and poetics in 21st-century examples of poetry of erasure. Mahshid is the author of numerous works on the entangled histories of childhood, empire, and education in the United States, including her first book, Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire that has been published by the University of North Carolina Press. Together with Marion Schulte (English linguistics, Rostock), Mahshid has edited the essay collection Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations Across Disciplines (currently in press with Palgrave Macmillan). Mahshid has held fellowships at the University of Georgetown, Washington, D.C., and at Amherst College, Massachusetts.
This lecture was part of Kolloquium Familie und Verwandtschaft: Historische und Aktuelle Zugänge SoSe 2022, organized by Michael Hecht, Isabel Heinemann, Silvia Schultermandl, Elisabeth Timm, Bettina Bock Von Wülfingen, and Julius Virnyi.
In this workshop, Merve Emre presented her current project “Love and Other Useless Pursuits” to the participants.
This talk was part of the lecture series "Hotspots in Literary and Cultural Studies, Book Studies and Linguistics."
This talk was part of the lecture series "Hotspots in Literary and Cultural Studies, Book Studies and Linguistics."
This workshop was for students of the English Department who need an overview of how to work with and write about literary texts within an academic framework.
Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton, former Poet Laureate of the city of Houston, read from her poetry collection Newsworthy, which was published by Bloomsday Literary in 2019. Newsworthy examines incidents with police brutality and the Black body and how the media chooses to report them. It won honorable mention for the Summerlee Book Prize, was a finalist for the Writer's Guild of Texas Book Award, and received a Pushcart Nomination.
To commemorate the proclamation of the end of slavery on June 19th, 1865 and to enter into a conversation about contemporary systemic racism in the US, the performance was embedded within a roundtable discussion on poetry, politics, and publishing.