Events

On Wednesday, 21 January 2026, Prof. Dr. Sandra Dinter (University of Hamburg) will join us to give a guest lecture! Stay tuned for more information!

You can find the abstract of her lecture below;

“Will you walk with me through our village, courteous reader?”

Women’s Walking as Place-Making in Nineteenth-Century British Provincial Fiction

Abstract: Many classics of nineteenth-century British provincial fiction – such as Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery (1824), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878) – abound with detailed representations of women walking. Yet these women walkers have received surprisingly little academic attention. Proceeding from the central claim of literary mobility studies that “mobility produces space” (Mathieson 2025, 202), the first part of this talk demonstrates that readers come to know fictional provincial villages and towns – their cottages, estates, high streets, lanes, fields, rivers, and forests – through the footsteps of female protagonists, whose patterns, functions, and meanings I will analyse. The second part of the talk proposes that, when such provincial works are read diachronically, it becomes evident that they generate a distinct literary figure of the walking woman, whom I refer to as the “provincial woman walker”. Throughout the nineteenth century, a range of writers in Britain adopted and recast this figure, whose mobility differs from other pedestrian types in Romantic and Victorian literature that critics have focused on so far, most famously the Romantic wanderer and the flâneur. I will conclude by tracing how the figure of the provincial woman walker and her place-making evolve over the course of the century, shifting from a more optimistic to a more precarious pedestrian practice.

On January 28 2026, Prof. Dr. Thomas Bedorf (FernUniversität Hagen) will join us to give a guest lecture! Stay tuned for more information!

You can find the abstract of his lecture below;

Seeing and Being Seen: A Political Phenomenology of Posture

Abstract: Political phenomenology, like all phenomenological philosophy, starts from experiences: from encounters which affect us. Experiences are made in situations that define the horizons of possibilities of meaningful world relations. The situatedness of the respective experiential spaces also reveals the limits of possibilities, i.e., socially and culturally produced exclusions and discriminations. With regard to these situatednesses, then, we can take a stance politically. The positions that can be taken in this way relate reflexively to situatednesses, but do not simply follow from the situations. There remains a “situative difference” for which we must take political responsibility. The presentation introduces and this approach to political phenomenology and invites discussing it.

On May 28 2025, Professor Christopher Breu (Illinois State University) will join us for a guest lecture. The lecture will be held at the KU Eichstätt at Domplatz 8, Room 103, from 12:15 pm to 13:45 pm. In case you want to join us digitally, kindly subscribe to the newsletter or email at gk-practicingplace@ku.de.

You can find the abstract of his talk below.

Melancholic Man and the Encrypted Earth: Mourning Terminable and Interminable.

Abstract: This presentation argues that much of humanity is in a state of interminable mourning in relationship to the climate emergency. The endlessness of this mourning suggests that what we are experiencing is not merely mourning but its more troublesome sibling, melancholia. Freud theorizes melancholia as a form of interminable mourning that involves an unconscious, internalized lost love object or ideal. The melancholic incorporates this lost object into the psyche, where they simultaneously berate and remain attached to it. The melancholic object, in this case, is Enlightenment Man, a gendered and Eurocentric fantasy figure whose time has passed, even as the legacy of the Enlightenment remains both crucial and ambiguous. Paired with this figure is another fantasy object, the earth itself, imagined as a living world ecology. On a conscious level, the earth has been rendered dead, so much inert materiality that can be appropriated and exploited, and that is thoroughly quantified by what Beverly Best theorizes as the automatic fetish of Marx’s law of value. This conscious apprehension of the earth as so much inert matter is subtended by what Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok describe as encrypted (i.e. secret and buried) identification with the earth as a living system. The paper argues that those of us transfixed by melancholia and encryption must work through our relationship to both dynamics. Only by such a working through can we move past inaction and build a just and flourishing political, economic and ecological response to the climate emergency.

Christopher Breu is Professor of English at Illinois State University. He is the author of In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire(Fordham, 2024); Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics(Minnesota, 2014), and Hard-Boiled Masculinities (Minnesota, 2005). He is also co-editor, with the late Elizabeth A Hatmaker, of Noir Affect (Fordham, 2020).

On May 14 2025, Professor Roberta Maierhofer (University of Graz) will join us for a guest lecture. The lecture will be held at the KU Eichstätt in the Interim building, Room 201, from 4 to 6 pm. In case you want to join us digitally, kindly subscribe to the newsletter or email us at gk-practicingplace@ku.de.

You can find the abstract of her talk below.

“Faces, Places, and Moments of Connections: Visages Villages (2017) by Agnès Varda and JR as Intergenerational Representations of Time and Place”

Whereas Varda’s documentary The Beaches of Agnès (2007) focuses on memory as “sand in my hand,” her collaborative work with the muralist JR Visages Villages (2017) emphasizes passing moments as visually representing life-affirming connections between people from different backgrounds and places at different stages of their lives. Agnès Varda, a prominent figure in French New Wave cinema, who made her first feature-length film La Pointe Courte in 1955, plays in her own cinematic life-story “the role of a little old lady.” In Visages Villages (2017), however, the intergenerational collaboration allows for a stronger acknowledgement of similarities and differences over the life-course, and captures identities as spatial stories in the here and now. The message that “each face tells a story” is also present in the translation of the film title into English (Faces Places) and German (Augenblicke: Gesichter einer Reise). Whereas the English term emphasizes the spatial aspect of the film, the German title focuses on capturing passing moments by traveling in time. In both instances, the message of the film, “to meet new faces and photograph them” in order not to forget, is countered by the emphasis on the value of momentary encounters in different places captured through art. In my presentation, I will discuss Visages Villages (2017) as providing an imaginative reflection of beauty as dynamic and performative, determined by our limited time and situated in momentary places. In addition, it carries a subtle and unobtrusive political message: the necessity of establishing intergenerational connections as mutual and supportive relationships at all times, and in all places.

Roberta Maierhofer is a professor of American Studies and director of the Center for Inter-American Studies (C.IAS) at the University of Graz, Austria. From 1999 to 2011, she held a series of Vice-Rector positions for International Relations (1999-2003), International Relations and Affirmative Action for Women (2003-2007), and International Relations and Interdisciplinary Cooperation (2007-2011). Her expertise in regional and interregional collaboration has been fundamental to her leadership role at the Center for Inter-American Studies, which she has directed since February 2007. Since 2004, she has been directing the Graz International Summer School Seggau, which was established as an interdisciplinary and intercultural platform in the fields of European and Inter-American Studies. Recently, she has been appointed Co-Director of the newly founded Graz School of Interdisciplinary Transnational Studies (2025). Her research focuses on (Inter)-American Literature and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Transatlantic Cooperation in Education, Interculturality, Narrative Didactics, as well as Age/Aging Studies. In her publication Salty Old Women: Gender, Age, and Identity in American Culture, she developed a theoretical approach to gender and aging (anocriticism), and from 1990 on, was one of the first to define her work within the field of cultural/ narrative gerontology.

Our faculty member Christian Steiner has co-organized this year’s K’Universale that brings together acclaimed scholars discussing posthumanism and its meanings.

Please find the programme of the lecture series here!

On December 7, 2023, Sabine N. Meyer from the University of Bonn will join for a guest lecture. Under the title “Entangled Lives, Entangled Freedom(s): The Transformative Potential of Contemporary Black Indigenous Literature,” she will talk about The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (2021) and Black Indigenous Literature. Please find an abstract of her talk below. The lecture will be held on Zoom from 12 to 2 pm.

If you would like to join, please use this link: https://kuei.zoom.us/j/62362308168

“Entangled Lives, Entangled Freedom(s): The Transformative Potential of Contemporary Black Indigenous Literature”

Over the last two decades, Black Indigenous literature, that is, literary works written by authors who identify as Black Indigenous, has emerged as a prominent medium for the negotiation of Black Indigeneity and for carving out a space outside the racial order implemented by North American settler states since the 18^th century. My talk sets out to explore negotiations of Black Indigenous identity and relationality in one of the most recent examples of Black Indigenous fiction, Honorée Fannone Jeffers’ debut novel The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (2021). My close reading demonstrates that the novel, through theme and form, consequently thinks together Blackness and Indigeneity in both past and present and explores the possibilities of shared Black Indigenous futures. Throughout my analysis, I also emphasize why it is important for scholars to engage with Black Indigenous literary production: shedding light on the politics and methodological limits of Western epistemologies and advancing alternative ways of knowing and making known, Black Indigenous literature is useful for confronting the “impasse between Blackness and Indigeneity” (Cheryl Harris) that has come to dominate discourses on Blackness and Indigeneity inside and outside academia.

We are delighted to announce that Hanjo Berressem (Cologne/Colorado Springs) will hold a guest lecture at “Practicing Place” that we organize in collaboration with the department for American Studies at the University of Munich:

Title: Concrete Ecology: Brutalist Architecture with Félix Guattari
Date: November 28
Time: 6 pm

You can download the poster for the lecture here.

The lecture will take place virtually. Please contact gk-practicingplace@ku.de if you would like to join!