UdS American Studies Graduate Forum, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, 7 – 8 December 2018m Venue: Campus Buildings C 7 4 on Friday and C 9 3 on Saturday
In cooperation with the German-American Institute Saarland, the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University (UdS) will hold a 2-day American Studies Graduate Forum that invites advanced Master students, doctoral students, as well as advanced scholars to present their current projects-in-progress in a workshop-style setting. The forum will offer participants a chance to discuss their research with peers as well as with experienced scholars. This year, we invite submissions dealing with aesthetic border practices.
This year’s UdS American Studies Graduate Forum will be organized together with our DAAD Eastpartnership group “The Bio-Politics of Borders in Times of Crisis,” bringing experts in the field of Cultural Border Studies from Petro-Mohyla-Black Sea National U, Mykolaiv (Ukraine) to Saarbrücken.
In the context of the continually evolving field of Border Studies, the UdS American Studies Graduate Forum 2018 offers a setting in which a decidedly humanities-driven, cultural approach to borders will be discussed. Focusing on aesthetic practices, this workshop seeks to investigate various cultural borderlands in North America and Europe. In particular, it aims at carving out a politics of borderlands aesthetics. Following Jacques Rancière, politics is aesthetics when it constitutes a challenge to dominant social perception. Aesthetics, in turn, is also political. It is precisely this dynamic relation that aesthetic practices engage in which will be of interest for us in our explorations of cultural borderlands.
See the full Call for Papers here.
Submission deadline: September 15, 2018.