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On January 26th, 2015, Florian Bast defended his doctoral thesis on “Agency in Works by Octavia E. Butler” in front of a committe of professors from other philological institutes at the university and an audience of about 40.

This year's American Studies Association convention on “The Fun and the Fury: New Dialectics of Pleasure and Pain In the Post-American Century” featured a panel initiated by the Dresden-Leipzig Research Initiative Selbst-Bewusste Erzählu

Office Hours for Sebastian Herrmann will have to be canceled on November 3 and 10 due to conference travel.

In May, American Studies Leipzig celebrated its 20th anniversary with a two-day symposium that brought together practitioners of American studies from the entire region. On Friday, 23 May, scholars from Erfurt, Dresden, Jena, Magdeburg, and Halle met in Leipzig to discuss the current situation of American studies in Mitteldeutschland, recent developments, and challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. On Saturday, the group launched a new academic network for American studies in the region.

Several members of American Studies Leipzig contributed to the 60th Anniversary Conference of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA / GAAS) in Marburg from November 1st to November 3rd. The conference, entitled “Usable Pasts, Possible Futures: The DGfA/GAAS at 60,” consisted of three days of lively and often controversial discussions among Americanists from all over Germany.

ASL faculty member and doctoral student Florian Bast recently presented his work at the 40th International Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies.

American Studies Leipzig doctoral student Claudia Müller was interviewed about the cultural dimension of fatness in the Kreuzer magazine. In the interview, Müller speaks about the cultural studies perspective on fatness, on differences between fat discourses in Germany and the US, and about the stereotype of the Fat Poor.

Read the entire interview at www.kreuzer-leipzig.de/2013/10/23/es-geht-um-selbstoptimierung.