Guest Lecture Susanne Leikam (University of Regensburg)
In my talk, I will revisit the established ‘manifestos’ of Transnational American Studies such as Shelley Fischer Fishkin’s 2004 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association and more recent updates in the field such as Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe’s Re-Framing the Transnational Turn (2011) as well as efforts to establish cultural mobility studies and tri-/transangular approaches in Transnational American Studies (cf. Desmond; Kunow; Paul). In particular, I will scrutinize these canonical texts for their consideration of the environment as a decisive factor in the complex transregional and transnational networks of exchange and movement. The fact that none of the conceptual texts ascribes the natural environment—from the dissemination of energy to atmospheric and geophysical circulations to natural resource flows—a crucial role in the shaping of global mobility brings me to my thesis that Transnational American Studies needs to pay much more attention to the natural environment, not only as a stable entity but as a shifting, circular system in flux and connector to manifold other regions and spheres that influences—and is greatly influenced by—the interplay of the cultural, political, and economic networks of transnational exchanges. I will conclude my talk by demonstrating the need of including the environment as a key dynamic factor in transnational analyses by turning to the performance poetry of Marshallese artist Kathy Jetnil Kijiner and media images from reports about climate migration from the Marshall Islands to the US.
Susanne Leikam is assistant professor of American studies in the American Studies Department at the University of Regensburg, Germany. In her research, she focuses on visual culture studies, memory studies, disaster studies, and ecocriticism and currently works on a project located at the nexus of environmental justice and transnational American studies. Her dissertation Framing Spaces in Motion: Tracing Visualizations of Earthquakes into Twentieth-Century San Francisco (Winter; 2015) analyzes the development of the visual repertoires and interpretive framings of earthquakes from early modern Europe into the twentieth-century United States. Further publications include, among others, Iconographies of the Calamitous in American Visual Culture (spec. issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies; co-edited with Ingrid Gessner; 2013), “‘Transnational Tales’ of Risk and Coping: Californian Disaster Narratives in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” (Transnational American Studies, ed. Udo J. Hebel; 2012), "Environmental Imaginations of the California Channel Islands and Ecological Crisis in T.C. Boyle’s When the Killing's Done” (Ecozon@; 2014), “Picturing High Water: The 2013 Floods in Southeastern Germany and Colorado” (Extreme Weather and Global Media, eds. Julia Leyda and Diane Negra; 2015), and “Animal Portraits in American Environmentalism: Affect, Endangered Species, and the Anthropocenic Sublime” (forthcoming).
This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies in cooperation with
FWF-DK Climate Change, Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG)
and Institute for Philosophy at the University of Graz.
Katharina Fackler
Postdoctoral University Assistant
Department of American Studies
University of Graz
Attemsgasse 25/II
8010 Graz, Austria
Fon: +43 (0)316 380 - 8146
Fax: +43 (0)316 380 - 9768
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