American Studies 2006

36th Annual American Studies “Fachleiter” Seminar

Imagining (the) American Community(ies) in History, Politics and the Arts
Potsdam, May 25-28, 2006
In cooperation with the Amerikazentrum Hamburg

Faculty:
∙ John Belton, Professor of English and Film Studies, Rutgers University, New Jersey
∙ Mitchell Cohen, Professor of Political Science, Baruch College, New York
∙ Bill Flood, Community Development Consultant, Arts and Administration Program, University of Oregon
∙ Rüdiger Kunow, President of the German Association for American Studies and Professor and Chair of American Studies, Potsdam University
∙ Jeffrey M. Peck, Professor in the "Communication, Culture and Technology" Program, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.
∙ Anna Muza, Lecturer, University of California at Berkeley
∙ Moira Roth, Writer and Professor of Art History, Mills College, California

John Belton, Professor of English and Film Studies, Rutgers University, New Jersey
Professor Belton teaches and does scholarly research about film. He was on the National Film Preservation Board, and served for over a decade as Chair of the Archival Papers and Historical Committee of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. He teaches classes on film theory and the history of American cinema, and he is the author of five books about movies and film history, including a popular textbook called American Cinema/American Culture. Professor Belton is also interested in the medium’s future, and is currently planning on writing a book about the use of digital technology in the film industry. He has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship 2005/06 for this project. Professor Belton's publications include: American Cinema/American Culture 2nd Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2004); Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" (Cambridge, 1999); American Cinema/American Culture (McGraw Humanities, 1993); Widescreen Cinema(Harvard, 1992).

Mitchell Cohen, Professor of Political Science, Baruch College, New York
Professor Mitchell Cohen specializes in 19th and 20th century political theory and contemporary European and Middle Eastern politics, and teaches courses on political thought, comparative government, and politics and literature. Prof. Cohen has been National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is co-editor of Dissent, one of the most prestigious American political journals; he traveled to Eastern Europe to cover the collapse of communism for its pages.

Professor Cohen is the author of The Wager of Lucien Goldmann (1994), a study of a prominent French political thinker, and Zion and State (1987; French translation, 1990), which won Baruch College's Presidential Scholarship Achievement Award. He has also edited Princeton Readings in Political Thought (1995) and Rebels and Reactionaries: An Anthology of Great Political Stories (1992). In addition to American scholarly journals, he has written for the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement (London), Les Temps Modernes (Paris), Reset (Rome), MicroMega(Rome), Aesthetik and Kommunikation (Berlin), Etcetera (Mexico City), and Davar(Tel Aviv).

Bill Flood, Community Development Consultant, Arts and Administration Program, University of Oregon
Bill Flood is a consultant in the area of community cultural development from Portland, Oregon (U.S.A.) now living in Berlin. The primary emphasis of his 20-year consulting practice with public organizations and private non-profit groups has been on utilizing culture to build sustainable organizations and communities. His website details his philosophy and practice (www.billflood.org).

Prior to coming to Berlin in August 2005, Bill Flood served for nine years as the Community Development Coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission. There he developed and managed grants and technical assistance programs to assist hundreds of Oregon communities, Indian tribes, and schools utilize local arts resources to build stronger places. He holds a Master of Science degree in Community Systems Planning and Development from Pennsylvania State University. He is currently a Senior Specialists Candidate with the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Department of State, and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars. Mr. Flood regularly lectures at the University of Oregon and Portland State University, and is an affiliate of the Institute for Community Arts Studies at the University of Oregon and a member of the University of Oregon’s Arts and Administration Program Professional Resource Council.

Rüdiger Kunow, President of the German Association for American Studies and Professor and Chair of American Studies, Potsdam University
Professor Kunow has taught at the Universities of Wuerzburg, Nürnberg-Erlangen, Freiburg, Hanover, and Magdeburg. He was a Research Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the State University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and the State University of New York at Albany. His areas of research include transnationalisms (Diaspora, Migration, Identity Politics), the cultural imagination of aging, history in fiction, transformations of literary presentation, AIDS narratives and the Indian diaspora in the US and Canada. He is editor, with Renate Brosch, of Transgressions: Cultural Interventions in the Global Manifold (2005), and with Liselotte Glage, of The Decolonizing Pen. Cultural Diversity and the Transnational Imaginary in Rushdie's Fiction (2001) and author of Das Klischee: Reproduzierte Wirklichkeiten in der englischen und amerikanischen Literatur (1994).

Jeffrey M. Peck, Professor in the "Communication, Culture and Technology" Program, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.
Jeffrey Peck is a Professor in the Program in "Communication, Culture and Technology" at Georgetown University and is a Senior Fellow in Residence at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington. He served as Director of the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at York University and the Université de Montréal, and Co-Director of the Institute of European Studies at York University and the University of Toronto. Professor Peck was Fulbright Professor at the Free University, Berlin, 1990/91) and taught at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1994. His research focuses on questions of national and minority identities, particularly German-Jewish life since unification and contemporary responses to the Holocaust in a transatlantic context. His work has moved increasingly towards transatlantic questions about nationality, ethnicity, religion, culture, and politics. Regarding the latter, he also is interested in the effects of globalization, technology and the media on cultural identities, the relationship between culture and foreign policy and the role of culture in the teaching of international studies as part of interdisciplinary global education. His publications include Being Jewish in the New Germany(forthcoming); together with Klaus Milich, eds., Multiculturalism in Transit. A German-American Exchange (1998); with E. Valentine Daniel, Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies(1996), and, with John Borneman, Sojourners: The Return of German Jews and the Question of Identity (1995).

Anna Muza, Lecturer, University of California at Berkeley
Ana Muza received her Ph.D. at the State Institute for Theater Art, in Moscow, Russia, where she taught European drama and literature prior to her relocation to the United States in 1992. Since 1996, she has been teaching Russian literature, drama, and theater at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research has been devoted to modern theater and visual culture; she has written on Chekhov, Meyerhold, Stoppard, and co-edited a volume of Kazimir Malevich’s writings on film. She is currently involved in preparing the first complete edition of Sergei Eisenstein’s manuscripts.

Moira Roth, Writer and Professor of Art History, Mills College, California
Moira Roth is the Trefethen Professor of Art History at Mills College in Oakland, California (previously she taught at the University of California, San Diego) and an internationally recognized writer of both scholarly texts on modern and contemporary art and of fiction and plays. She has edited The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, Connecting Conversations: Interviews with 28 Bay Area Women Artists, Rachel Rosenthal, We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold, and a collection of her essays, Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, and Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. From the 1970s, Professor Roth has worked in feminist art history and criticism, and from the 1980s, also cross-culturally with various groups and conferences, including the "Art of a Distinct Majority" series of symposia at the San Francisco Art Institute, and Asian American Women Artists Association.

Currently she is working on two series of texts. The Library of Maps, begun in 2001, is about a fictional library and its inhabitants, set in various spaces and times; the texts have been published in several journals, plus on the Internet (see www.picture-projects.com/between/essay.html). The second series of essays, Traveling Companions/ Fractured Worlds, addresses both individual artists and historians, and Roth’s travels in Europe and South-East Asia. In 2002-03, Roth created an international Cyber Theater exchange, The Cyber Theater of Mneme and Melete. Beginning in 2003, Roth has written and directed five plays in collaboration with various artists and writers: From Vietnam To Hollywood (San Francisco, 2003), Dancing/Dreaming: Izanami and Amaterasu (two productions staged in San Francisco and Tokyo, 2003), Amaterasu, The Blind Woman and Hiroshima(Kyoto Concert Hall, 2004), and 2005 staged readings of Through the Eyes of Rachel Marker and Rachel Marker, Franz Kafka and Alice Sommer. Her awards and honors include the Women's Caucus for the Art's Mid-career Art History Award (1989) and the Lifetime Achievement Award (1997); an Honorary Ph.D., San Francisco Art Institute, 1994; and two awards from the College Art Association: the Frank Jewett Mather Critic's Award 2000, and the Annual Achievement Award, Cttee. On Women in the Arts, 2006.