Research Projects
American Studies Leipzig has a wide range of research projects that share common traits: They are interdisciplinary, international, and integrated into the classroom, thus allowing for many forms of invidual participation by students.
Research projects at American Studies Leipzig reflect the diversity of the United States and its place in the world. Themes incude consumption culture, notions of Americanization, literature and society, ethnicity and identity, citizenship and immigration, and contemporary transatlantic relations.
Below you will find a brief overview of ongoing research projects at American Studies Leipzig.
Current Research Projects
Mail Order Catalogs, Consumption, and the Construction of American Identity
(Prof. Dr. Anne Koenen)
Consumerism, based on mass production and standardization, emerged in the US in the first decades of the 20th century. One of the effects of consumerism has been identified as homogenization in the social sphere. That process of homogenization contributed to nation-building and was perceived as both democratizing (levelling, for example, class markers in dress) and desirable. Mail order (especially the most successful company, Sears Roebuck) was the most important media of homogenization for the rural population: it provided the rural population with an access to consumerism (and thus prevented an already starting exodus from the country, as Postmaster General Wanamaker stated when reforming the postal service with the explicit aim to facilitate the mail-order companies’ business); it helped to "civilize" the still underdeveloped regions on the frontier, helping them join the rest of the US. In addition, it served as a primer and as a venue of buying for immigrants (who were consciously targeted as customers) who not only used to catalogs to learn to read and write, but also to achieve cultural literacy; and, as research has demonstrated, helped at least some African-Americans to be customers without having to suffer repression - mail order was color blind at a time when the US was mostly segregated. As a result, mail order served to "standardize" various groups into "Americans," enabling them join modernization. Consumption thus contributed in a major way to create a national identity in the US.
Romances of Healing: Constructions of American National Identity in Popular Narratives and Discourses of Medicalization, ca. 1850-1920 (Dr. Antje Dallmann)
My project aims to discuss how narrative texts from the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, which are indebted to the genre of the romance, construct and negotiate American national identity by appealing to modern medicine's rising authority and by applying and naturalizing "medical" dichotomies of health and pathology to explain and create a modern body politic. I am interested in analyzing how "medical romances," most obviously the emerging doctoral and hospital romances as respective genres, establish and narrate visual regimes of the "medical gaze," to use the famous term introduced by Michel Foucault, at symbolic, discursive or narrative levels, and how "traditional" generic elements and conventions are used and subverted in the course of the appropriation of this genre.
I read the respective narratives in the context of a thorough medicalization of U.S.-American society, understood as shorthand for an ambiguously received modernization under advancing capitalism. They imagine and narrate a body politic, economic and social as subject to the same reductive mechanisms of "norm" and "divergence" which at that time standardized and economized the individual human and the individual human body. They are evidence of how medicine was in the process of becoming a central instance to authorize the ever-present 19th-century discourse of American national identity: medicine, in fact, became a strategy to narrate (Homi Bhaba) and, simultaneously, to naturalize concepts of the American nation and American national identity. The resulting constructs, however, are by no means identical. While all refer to medicine and healing, they develop ambiguous notions: the meaning of the symbolic field of "medicine" imparted in different medical romances is, in fact, ambivalent and contradictory. In my project, I intend to address these ambiguities as characteristic of 19th-century discourses both of the nation and of health/healing/the human body.
Post-Revolutionary American Identity Formation in a Trans-National Context (Dr. Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez)
This project explores the emergence of a national identity in the literature produced in the decades after the American Revolution from a transnational perspective. I argue that post-revolutionary identity was formed not only as a result of developments within the United States and against Europe, but also in reaction to the relations that the United States had with other regions, specifically with the Caribbean, Latin America, and the parts of North Africa called "the Orient". The study aims to revise existing research in two important aspects. First, it situates the USA within a hemispheric and circum-Atlantic transnational context and thus modifies approaches which regard Europe and particularly England as sole /exclusive reference points of an emerging U.S. American identity. Second, it moves away from the still predominant "inward" view which takes the nation-form as an umbrella and views U.S. American identity formation predominantly as a negotiation of inner national differences and traditions.
Blurring the Boundaries: Genre and Separate Spheres in Antebellum Women's Writing
(Dr. Katja Kanzler)
My project is concerned with antebellum (1820-60) writings originating from and/or about the kitchen and the textile mill as 'feminine' spaces. I am interested in the negotiations of gender, class, national belonging, and authorship these spaces script. By focusing on these hitherto neglected sites of literary production – and the socially diverse authors and protagonists they host – I hope to expand our understanding of women's writing in this crucial period of America's national and cultural formation.
Contesting Transatlantic Spaces (Prof. Crister S. Garrett)
This research project explores how members of the transatlantic community (especially the United States, Germany, France, and Sweden) are struggling to create cultures of change that permit their societies to adapt to the multiple challenges of globalization and the emergence of the post-industrial or information economy. This can be especially seen in domestic and international (transatlantic) debates about how to innovate in the "cornerstones" of a confident and dynamic community: citizenship policy, education policy, economic policy, and security policy. As America and Europe struggle via democratic processes and open societies to construct new forms of consensus to allow broad and deep reforms to be pursued, we see a contested transatlantic space where notions of the “West” come under closer scrutiny, and where transatlantic discourse becomes increasingly a transatlantic debate in a global context.
Funding for this research has been provided so far by the Robert Bosch Foundation, the Hertie Foundation, and the DAAD.
The Cultural Work of Shopping Malls (Zoe A. Kusmierz)
Despised and loved at the same time, shopping malls have come to structure the American experience. Malls are spaces of rituals, of complex practices and negotiations, most of these circling around consumption, but certainly not all. This project engages with the signature structures of a postwar American consumer landscape as spaces that collapse fantasy and reality. In tracing the 'cultural work' of malls, I read various texts, film and literature, to reveal the complex fantasies and plots that the mall generates, focusing on fictions of community, the topography of control, and narratives of abundance. This project thus contributes to American Studies by centre staging a popular space and asking for its cultural and social significance.
Ambivalent Americanizations: Popular and Consumer Culture in Central and Eastern Europe.
The project explores the complex dynamics involved in the 'Americanization' of popular and consumer cultures across Europe with a focus on the years 1945-89. A central concern is to advance scholarship on 'Americanization' by asking for the experience of Central and Eastern Europe. Here 'Americanization' figured within a political, cultural, and economic context that defined itself in sharp contrast to 'America.' This perspective provides for a concept of 'Americanization' as a set of complex processes of cultural mixing and practices of cultural appropriation, underscoring the various ambivalences of boundaries, parameters and modes of engagement.
Participants: Zoe Kusmierz, Dr. Katja Kanzler, Prof. Dr. Anne Koenen, Sebastian Hermann, Leonard Schmieding
"Fellow Peoples" - German Affinity for American Indians and German Nazi Propaganda among American Indians 1933-1945
(Frank Usbeck)
There is some reference in the literature on Native Americans and their World War II experience to National Socialist propaganda. Why did German leaders regard the poorest and one of the smallest minority groups in the US a suitable target for propaganda? Who in the Nazi government initiated and sponsored such a campaign? Were the goals just general destabilization of US society, or did the Nazis hope to use Native Americans as fifth column in the event of invasion? Apparently, Germans must have had an understanding of the history of U.S. Indian policy and relations. By playing the anti-colonial card, the Nazis attempted to drive a wedge between the U.S. government and its Indian "wards." This very specific aspect of World War II history exemplifies the state of German-American relations at that time and gives some insight in the skewed German perceptions of how American society works and deals with its heterogeneity.
Science and Literature as Fact and Fiction: the Contemporary American Crime Novel (Katja Schmieder)
In my dissertation project, I explore the manifold relations between literature and science with a special focus on forensic science as a constituting element of contemporary American crime fiction. I start out assuming that the ongoing dialog between scientific and literary discourses is restructured and redefined by a triangular constellation "criminal – victim – investigator" in current crime fiction. Being aware of the problematic gender aspects within this constellation, I argue that crime novels – such as Patricia Cornwell's and Kathy Reichs's page-turners – popularize, functionalize, and even distort scientific disciplines via a synthesis of fact and fiction.