Workshop Theme & Organizers

Sustained engagement with the wider public has been a long-stated goal of the modern university. Most institutions in American higher education actively foster community outreach, encouraging both students and faculty to become involved in local schools, cultural societies, arts initiatives, and other community organizations. Recent years have seen the swift ascendance of new humanities-related approaches to this interface between scholarship and the public also in Europe. Often crucially inspired by the work of American Studies scholars and activists and closely tied to innovative trends in research communication developed in the Digital Humanities, these approaches seek to challenge traditional, hierarchical relationships so as to spark dialogic partnerships and collaborative knowledge creation. In their report on the increased relevance of what is now labeled the “Public Humanities,” Ellison and Eatman (2008) define this new ideal of publicly engaged scholarship as “scholarly or creative activity integral to a faculty member’s academic area” that encompasses “different forms of making knowledge ‘about, for, and with’ diverse publics and communities.” In an effort to initiate transatlantic conversations on the epistemic potentials and the strategic values of Public Humanities work in transnational American Studies, the presentations in this panel discuss exemplary practices and/or theoretical approaches to ‘knowledge production’ and ‘the public.’ Questions debated will include the following:

  • Who is the ‘public’ in the Public Humanities and in how far do theories of the publicsphere influence the design of Public Humanities projects?
  • Which underlying cultural assumptions and political claims are attached to the call forpublic engagement? Do the Public Humanities challenge or reproduce the elitist culturalauthority that the humanities have traditionally fostered?
  • How do the Public Humanities prompt us to remodel our research infrastructure, adaptto new media usage, and modify reward systems within the university?
  • What can the transnational perspective of European Americanists contribute to thePublic Humanities? How do institutional (public vs. private higher education) and funding-related (NEH, ERC, DFG, etc.) differences affect modes of public engagement?

Workshop Organizers

SchoberRegina Schober is assistant professor of American Studies at Mannheim University, Germany. Her current research fields are network culture and aesthetics, the quantified self, and adaptation studies. She is the author of Unexpected Chords: Musico-Poetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell’s Poetry and Poetics (Winter, 2011) as well as co-editor, with Ulfried Reichardt and Heike Schaefer, of Network Theory and American Studies, a special issue of American Studies (2015), co-editor (with James Dorson) of the volume Data Fiction: Naturalism, Numbers, Narrative, a special issue of Studies in American Naturalism (2017), and co-editor (with Katharina Motyl) of The Failed Individual (Campus, 2017).

StarreAlexander Starre is assistant professor of North American culture at the John-F.-Kennedy Institute Berlin, Germany. His research interests include American cultural history, knowledge production, media theory, as well as print culture and the history of the book. He is the author of Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization (University of Iowa Press, 2015). He recently co-edited (with Frank Kelleter) the volume Projecting American Studies: Essays on Theory, Method and Practice (Winter Verlag, 2018).