American Studies Center Aarhus

Round Table and Guest Lectures

Spring 1997

Professor Kimball is a leading authority on American foreign policy during World War Two, and in particular on the relationship between US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. During the Spring 1997 semester, Professor Kimball is Visiting Professor at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University. In this lecture he will address the personal factors that helped cement the extraordinarily close Anglo-American alliance during World War Two.

Place: Mødelokale 2, Studenternes Hus, Aarhus University.

Time: 11:15

Following his guest lecture, Professor Kimball will participate in a seminar for interested staff and Ph.D. students from institutions of higher education. The seminar will focus on the state of historical research into American foreign policy. All those participating in the seminar will be asked to read in preparation extracts from Michael Hogan (ed), America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941 (1995).

Place: Room 319, building 326; Department of English, Aarhus University

Time: 13:30

Professor Michael Prohl of the Department of History, Purdue University, has carried out extensive research into the public image of US human rights policies and their actual status and effects on the nation's diplomacy. In this Round Table lecture, he emphasizes the many distinctions that exist between public perception and practice, and seeks to explain the achievements and shortcomings of American human rights policies.

Place: Room 402, Danish School of Journalism

Time: 15:30

Professor John Cawelti of the Department of English, University of Kentucky, is visiting professor at the Department of English, University of Aarhus, during the Spring 1997 semester. He is a leading authority on American popular culture, and one of the pioneers in the development of American Studies. In this Guest Lecture he will trace major phases in the development of the American film western and seek to explain what factors have shaped the growth and possible decline of the genre.

Place: Room 402, Trøjborg, Aarhus University.

Time: 14:15

Professor Bruce Leslie from the Department of History at the State University of New York, Brockport, is 1996/97 Fulbright Professor at the Department of English, University of Aarhus. In this American Studies Round Table lecture, he will examine the process of Americanization of European immigrants before World War One, and then discuss its possible implications for the American future and the exceptional immigration of the past two decades. The lecture will also engage both Danish and American perceptions of the ethnic and racial make-up of the modern United States, and question how diverse the nation actually is when compared with Europe.

Place: Room 024, Building 327, Aarhus University

Time: 16:30

Fall 1997

Professor Betty Medsger, former Washington Post reporter and Chair of the Department of Journalism at San Francisco State University, offers a description and critical evaluation of the current state of American journalism at the end of the twentieth century. Drawing on her experience as a print journalist, press photographer and television administrator, Professor Medsger will relate developments in radio, television and the press since World War Two to the concepts of democracy and freedom of speech.

Place: Store Auditorium, Danish School of Journalism

Time: 14:00

Patrick O'Donnell is Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Michigan State University. His main fields of interest are modern and contemporary American literature, literary and cultural theory, postmodernism, and film. In this guest lecture, Professor O'Donnell will address aspects of Don DeLillo's 1988 novel, Libra, one of the texts he has been researching in connection with his forthcoming book, Latent Destinies: Paranoia and History in Contemporary U.S. Narrative, to be published by Duke University Press in 1998.

Professor O'Donnell is also the author of John Hawkes (1982) and Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contemporary American Fiction (1986); and the editor of New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49 (1991), Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative (1992), and (with Robert Con Davis) Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction (1989). He has also edited the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition of Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and acted as Associate Editor of The Columbia History of the American Novel (1991).

Place: Room 340, Building 325, Aarhus University

Time: 12:00

The Fall 1997 American Studies Consortium seminar focuses on recent cultural exchanges between the United States and Europe. Speakers include: Professor Richard Pells (University of Texas at Austin), author of Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (1997); the Copenhagen-based short story writer and editor Thomas Kennedy, author most recently of Drive, Dive, Dance and Fight, who addresses nationality and nationalism today; and lektor Helle Porsdam (Odense University), who discusses American law's growing importance for Europeans.

There are also presentations by doctoral candidates Henrik Bødker and Ole Bech-Petersen; and a hands-on demonstration of new CD-Rom materials by Fulbright Professor Robert Wells (Union College, Schenectady).

Place: Center for American Studies, Odense University

Time: 10:00

Spring 1998

Before settling in Sweden in 1979, Dennis Nordin taught at a number of American universities (most recently Livingston University, Alabama), and published, among other works, Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange, 1867-1900 (1974). In this guest lecture Professor Nordin will focus on the research behins his recent study of the first African-American Congressional Democrat, The New Deal's Black Congressman: A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell (1997), to address questions raised by the practice of biography.

Place: Room 340, Building 325, Department of English, Aarhus University

Time: 15:15

Susan O'Hara teaches at Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, and during this academic year is a Fulbright Exchange teacher at Allerød Gymnasium, Stenløse Gymnasium and Marie Kruses Skole. Her guest lecture will address the recent explosion of Native American thematics in Hollywood cinema, reading recent trends in the light of earlier representations. Films discussed will include Pocohontas, Peter Pan, Dances with Wolves, Broken Arrow and The Searchers.

Place: Room 340, Building 325, Department of English, Aarhus University

Time: 15:15

Reports and pictures of the rioting in Watts and other parts of Los Angeles in 1992 have not only come to symbolize the problems of race relations in the United States in recent years. They have also made the contrasts between social conditions across the Atlantic and in Scandinavia seem all the more obvious. Yet the lessons of race relations in the United States may not only be those of failure; and in an era of increasing globalization - not least of economic integration and physical migration - they may be of greater significance closer to home than we think.

This seminar will survey the current state of race relations in the United States, describing and evaluating the complex of achievements and shortcomings, changes and continuities, initiatives and blind spots of which the Watts riots are only one part. In addressing race in America, it will also ask what lessons, if any, we in Denmark can draw from the American experience. Speakers with knowledge of both countries will consider a variety of topics, ranging from experiences of and challenges to racism via the relationships between race and politics to images of African-Americans in the mass media, from the attitudes and behaviour of white Americans to questions of social welfare, employment and education.

The Speakers will be Nancy Graham Holm (Danish School of Journalism), Carl Pedersen (Odense University), Coleman Jordan (Clemson University, South Carolina), and Nina Roth (University of Copenhagen). The complete program is now available.

This seminar is being arranged by ASCA on behalf of the Danish Association of Teachers of English (DATE) though non-members are also very welcome to register. Registration for the seminar costs KR 350 and includes the cost of lunch, coffee and a package of preparatory readings and support materials in connection with the seminar.

Place: Danish School of Journalism, Olof Palmes Allé 11, 8200 Aarhus N (Bus 17 stops right outside the entrance)

Time: 9:30 - 16:15

New technology has informed and, in some ways, transformed academic study. In this two-part workshop, Odense University's Visiting Fulbright Professor Robert Wells will demonstrate a computer program which enables us to display, study and analyse a wide range of social and demographic information through interactive maps. The workshop will first demonstrate the uses of the program and then focus on a case study of migration patterns in order to address the potentials, limitations and implications of new technology for the study of American history.

Space for this session will be limited; those wishing to participate in the workshop should register at the ASCA office by 13 March in order to receive a brief preparatory reading.

Robert V. Wells received his doctorate in American History from Princeton University, and is currently Professor of History at Union College, Schenectady, New York. During the 1997/1998 academic year he holds the Fulbright Chair in American Studies at the Center for American Studies, Odense University. His research and teaching interests focus on early American and demographic history, and he is currently working on American customs regarding death. Professor Wells is the author of five books, including Revolutions in Americans Lives and Uncle Sam's Family: Issues in and Perspectives on American Demographic History (1985).

Place: Multimedia laboratory: Room 018, Building 327, Aarhus University

Time: 15:15 - 17:00

In their own day published as fictional travelogues, Melville's South Seas fictions Typee, Omoo and Mardi still challenge genre distinctions and promote innovative ways of reading by developing an anthropologically-inclined first-person narrator whose social criticism, particularly regarding transgression and rehabilitation, reflects his ambivalent cultural identity and understanding. In this guest lecture, Professor Colatrella analyses in what ways the novels delineate how cultures change in interacting with outsiders and how those cultural developments and declines can be understood in relation to Melville's narrative choices.

Carol Colatrella is Associate Professor of Literature in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology, and Executive Director of the Society for Literature and Science. Her scholarly interests focus on the cultural study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European literary, historical, and scientific narratives, particularly those emphasizing moral transgression and rehabilitation. She is the author of Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative: Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner, and has co-edited (with Joseph Alkana) and contributed to Cohesion and Dissent in America, an anthology examining the influence of Sacvan Bercovich's scholarship on American culture. She is currently completing a book on Melville's fictions and nineteenth-century reform movements.

Place: Room 340, Building 325, Department of English, Aarhus University

Time: 10:15

This workshop focuses on theoretical and practical issues relevant to the recruitment, retention, and promotion of women in science and science studies. Professor Colatrella describes a curriculum (the minor program in Women, Science, and Technology at Georgia Tech) designed for general university students, especially those interested in pursuing a scientific or technological career, that prepares them to work with people from diverse backgrounds. The workshop also looks at how technology is marketed to women and how popular culture represents women engaged with technology in an effort to evaluate how the public understanding of science and technology is shaped by assumptions about gender.

Place: Room 319, Building 326, Department of English, Aarhus University

Time: 14:00

Fall 1998

David Kranes is a professor at the Department of English, University of Utah, and during September and October 1998 is Visiting Professor at the Department of English, Aarhus University. The author of both novels (including The National Tree (1994) and The Heart in Progress (1991)) and short story collections (most recently Low Tide on the Desert (1996) and Nevada Dreams (1996)), he has also written and produced a number of plays. Today he will read from a selection of his works.

Place: Room 240, Building 325, Department of English, Aarhus University

Time: 14:00

Tao Jie is a professor at the Department of English, Beijing University, and vice president of China’s Association for the Study of American Literature. Her main teaching and research interests lie in the fields of American literature and women’s literature. She has translated into Chinese Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, and has published articles on Hemingway, Faulkner, and Alice Walker, among others. In this guest lecture on Faulkner she will discuss three female characters in some of his best-known work: Caddy in The Sound and the Fury, Temple Drake in Sanctuary and Addie in As I Lay Dying.

Place: Room 026, Building 328, Department of English, Aarhus University

Time: 11:15

American authors, from Cooper to Kingston, are taught world-wide, and interesting light on the reading of American literature in Denmark may be found by considering such reading in other non-native speaking countries. In this staff/student workshop, led by Professor Tao Jie, we will be discussing the reading, teaching and reception of American literature in China, and looking at how they have developed over time. The workshop will address a variety of topics, such as Asian-American literature and literature by women, and their reception in China; American popular culture as an vehicle for and/or obstacle to liberalization; and issues of ethnicity and race. We will also consider comparisons and contrasts in the teaching of American literature in two very different non-American contexts.

Place: Room 319, Building 326, Department of English, Aarhus University

Time: 14:00

Robert G. O’Meally, Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University, New York, is the author of many books and articles, including The Craft of Ralph Ellison (l980) and Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (1991). As part of his continuing interest in the presence of jazz in American life, he has also edited The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1998) and written and co-produced the booklet for The Jazz Singers, released earlier this year by the Smithsonian Institution. In this guest lecture, Professor O’Meally focuses on one of the most powerful instruments in jazz music, the human voice.

Place: Auditorium B, Entrance C, Music Department, Langelandsgade 19, Aarhus University

Time: 16:00

Professor Theo D’Haen teaches at the Department of English and American Studies, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, and includes among his research interests post-modern, colonial and post-colonial, and comparative literature. He has (co-) authored and (co-) edited fifteen books, including Geschiedenis van de Amerikaanse Literatuur (1983), Text to Reader: A Communicative Approach to Fowles, Barth, Cortazar, and Boon (1983). Post-War Literatures in English (1988), Postmodern Studies 1, 3 and 6 (1988-1992), Tropes of Revolution (1991), Shades of Empires in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1993), and Constellation Caliban: Figurations of a Character (1997). He has also organized the XVth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (1997). In this guest lecture he will offer a marginal perspective on two otherwise canonical American authors.

Place: Room 440, Building 325, Department of English, Aarhus University

Time: 14:15