Leipzig is a vibrant, unique, and fascinating city of 500,000 residents. Located at the heart of Mitteldeutschland, the city is an important cultural and intellectual center where both the classical and the contemporary Germany meet.
The Frank Freidel Residency Program is meant to allow US scholars to enjoy the resources of the Frank Freidel Memorial Library at Leipzig University while engaging Leipzig’s American studies community and meeting other scholars across Germany. The Frank Freidel Memorial Library is an interdisciplinary collection in the field of American studies. Integrated into the Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, it is part of Germany’s second-oldest university library, founded in 1543.
With student conferences and student workshops, the Institute for American Studies is offering new teaching formats. Besides highlighting the students dedication to and engagement with their scholarly interests, these new formats seek to teach key professional skills in a thematic context. Student conferences underscore how area expertise, international skills, and global reach (in terms of acquired knowledge and abilities) can be integrated into a dynamic and unique program of study to encourage personal and professional advancement.
The Student Thesis - whether for the Magister, BA, or MA - represents a student's most substantial effort to create new knowledge, to create new scholarship. At American Studies in Leipzig we think it is especially important to highlight the wide variety of Student Theses, and their outstanding quality.
The diversity of topics explored by students underscores the complexity, richness, and importance of American Studies.
Faculty members have published widely on various topics such as the history of immigration, transatlantic relations, popular culture, consumer culture, the gothic tradition, border concepts and identities, ecology and landscape, thereby reflecting the multifaceted and interdisciplinary character of scholarship at the Institute for American Studies in Leipzig.
American Studies Leipzig works each day with the core assumption at America’s leading universities: A program is only as good as the students it attracts, and the energy these students bring to a program.
This is especially true in terms of the teaching and research that can take place in any program. Dialogue in the classroom and creativity in research is only so innovative and dynamic as the ability and willingness of students to empower these pursuits.
Guest scholars enrich and enliven a scholarly program substantially. The Institute for American Studies at Leipzig has a particularly distinguished record attracting a steady flow of prominent international guest scholars. Indeed, just in the last three years alone, the Institute for American Studies has been awarded three highly competitive international guest professorships.
Affiliated Faculty are colleagues from throughout the University of Leipzig with whom the Institute for American Studies cooperates to work on integrated and interdisciplinary teaching, research projects, and events dealing with contemporary subjects involving the United States in a transatlantic and global context. Affiliated faculty are also faculty on a longer leave and faculty who are not teaching at ASL anymore but who are still associated to the institute through various projects.