Authors’ Workshop: Handbook American Globalization
Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez (SFB 1199 & U Leipzig)
Abstract
This three-day authors’ workshop is designed as a first step towards publishing a Handbook of U.S. Globalizations, part of a handbook series published by Vandenhoek & Ruprecht. The Handbook is devoted to uncovering multiple globalization projects and the actors behind them. It contributes to the de-exceptionalization of U.S. globalization(s) by exploring the many histories, cultures, and discourses of American globalization projects. A key concept defining the handbook is spatialization, defined as processes of creating stability, permanence, and order in space.
Using space and endeavors to order it as an entry point, the Handbook offers perspectives on U.S. engagements with the world through the lenses of historical, literary, cultural, and media studies. In the workshop, contributors to the Handbook from the US, Australia, and Europe will discuss the imagination, advancement, and contestation of American globalizations and its spatialization processes, as well as the place of the US in the world both historically and in the contemporary period. The workshop is organized by the Handbook editors Megan Maruschke, Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez, Frank Schumacher, Olaf Stieglitz, and Julius Wilm and funded by the CRC 1199.
Programme
Download the full programme here.
Biographical Notes
Niels Eichhorn is a history writer in Southeastern New Mexico. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Arkansas. He is interested in international aspects of the Civil War, including diplomacy. He has published articles on Civil War diplomacy in Civil War History and American Nineteenth Century History.
Astrid Fellner (Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany)
Astrid M. Fellner is chair of North American literary and cultural studies at Saarland University. She is head of the UniGR-center for border studies at Saarland University and co-editor a trilingual border glossary, a handbook of key terms in border studies. A member of the BMBF-project “Linking Borderlands,” she has worked on industrial films of the greater region SaarLorLux+ and the German/Polish border. She has been involved in a DAAD-East partnership project with Petro Mohyla from Black Sea National University in Mykolaiv since 2014, most recently on the topic of “Border Chronotopes.” She is also part of the DAAD “Ukraine Digital” program “Studybridge Ukraine-Saar” and the ERASMUS+ project “Distance Education for Future,” and she was project leader of the project “Borders in Crisis,” which was funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung.
Her publications include Articulating Selves: Contemporary Chicana Self-Representation (2002), the (co-)edited collections Narratives of Border Crossings: Literary Approaches and Negotiations (2021), B/Orders are (not) everywhere (for everyone) (2023), The Biopolitics of Borders in Times of Crisis (2023), and Bordertextures: A Complexity Approach to Cultural Border Studies (forthcoming), as well as the journal issues Desbordes/Undoing Borders (2021) and Border Renaissance. Spaces, Cultures, Identities, and The Return to Borders (2004).
Anne L. Foster (Indiana State University, Terre Haute, USA)
Anne L. Foster is professor of history at Indiana State University, where she has taught since 2003. She is the author of The Long War on Drugs (2023) and Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919-1941 (2010), both published by Duke University Press. Her work on the history of opium regulation and use in colonial Southeast Asia has appeared in a number of journals and edited volumes, including in Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, eds., Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) and Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton, eds., Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain (Duke University Press, 2020). She also has been co-editor of Diplomatic History since 2014.
Alexandra Ganser (University of Vienna, Austria)
Alexandra Ganser is professor of American studies at the University of Vienna. She is head of the interdisciplinary research platform “Mobile Cultures and Societies” as well as key researcher of the “doc.funds” PhD program “Cultural Mobility Studies”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). She is also co-director of the “Centre for Canadian Studies”. Recent publications include the volumes Crisis and Legitimacy in American Narratives of Piracy, 1678-1865 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Mobile Cultures and Societies (Vienna University Press, 2020) and Maritime Mobilities in Anglophone Literature and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Her current research investigates mobility futures, astrofuturism, and maritime im/mobilities.
Andreas Greiner (German Historical Institute, Washington D.C., USA)
Andreas Greiner is a research fellow at the German Historical Institute Washington. His research specializes in infrastructure networks, their spatiality and materiality in the long 19th and early 20th centuries. He received his PhD in history from ETH Zurich. Before joining the GHI in January 2021, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Max Weber Program at the European University Institute in Florence. His first monograph Human Porterage and Colonial State Formation in German East Africa, 1880s–1914: Tensions of Transport (2022) explores the shifting role of caravan transport and human porterage in colonial East Africa, unveiling the resilience of precolonial structures in the era of “high imperialism.” His current research project examines the entangled history of intercontinental airline networks in the interwar period.
María Esther Hammack (Ohio State University, Columbus, USA)
María Esther Hammack is a Mexican scholar and public historian whose work bridges the histories of liberation and abolition that shaped the US, Mexico, and Canada. Her first book, Channels of Liberation: Freedom Fighters in the Age of Abolition reexamines the Underground Railroad to reconsider & broaden the actors, timelines, and geographies of black liberation in North America through the experiences of black Americans, principally women, who left the United States to claim freedom in Mexican spaces.
Peter Hintz (Leipzig University, Germany)
Peter Hintz is a research associate and lecturer at the Institute for American studies at Leipzig University. He is currently pursuing a PhD in American cultural history, working on a project on post-1960s ‘New Hollywood’ cinema and its interactions with discourses of caring masculinities in the post-war decades in the United States. Also located at the intersection of cultural studies and social history, his most recent publications and research interests have centered on transnational histories of gender and the body as well as on discourses on the structural transformation of East Germany.
Marie Huber (Philipps-University, Marburg, Germany)
Marie Huber researches the history of development and nation building in Africa from a global history perspective as well as the transnational emergence and circulation of knowledge and the development of economic expectations. She graduated with a PhD in history from the Humboldt University in Berlin. In her PhD project and first book, Marie looked at the Ethiopian example to examine the execution of the world heritage convention in developing countries. From 2019-2023 she served as PI in a research project on aviation in postcolonial Africa at the Humboldt University in Berlin. The project connects insights from postcolonial political history with an economic history approach. As part of the priority program “Experience & Expectation – Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour” she analyses, what functions the airlines fulfilled during the formation and modernization of the nation states in the decolonization period and what external events and instructions had influenced the entrepreneurial actions and decisions. Since 2022 she is a member of the subproject on foreign trade securitisation in the framework of the research cluster SFB/TRR 138 “Dynamics of Security” at the University of Marburg and investigates the economic relations of German companies with Africa and Asia after 1950.
Kerstin Knopf (University of Bremen, Germany)
Kerstin Knopf holds a full professorship in North American and postcolonial literary and cultural studies in the department English-speaking cultures, University of Bremen, Germany. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures and films, indigenous literatures and films, North American literature, specifically 19th century and prison literature, Postcolonial knowledges and epistemological power relations.
Megan Maruschke (Leipzig University, Germany)
Megan Maruschke is assistant professor for global studies at Leipzig University since 2022. Her research covers French and American transimperial histories, the age of revolutions (circa 1770-1830), and the history of free ports and special economic zones in a global perspective. She is currently working on a book project on refugees of empire in Philadelphia’s prison and almshouse during the French and Haitian revolutions. Her latest publications include a contribution in a special issue on the global history of the free port in the journal “Global Intellectual History” in 2023 and an article in 2023 on black French refugees in Philadelphia’s almshouse and prison in the online journal “Age of Revolutions”. She is vice president of the “Commission internationale d’histoire de la Révolution française”, and is a co-editor of the journals “Age of Revolutions” as well as “Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung”.
Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)
Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez is professor of American studies and minority studies at Leipzig University. Her more recent publications include a co-edited special forum on archipelagic spaces and mobilities in Journal of Transnational American Studies (1:2023), as well as the coedited volume Spatialization Processes in the Americas: Configurations and Narratives (Lang 2018). She is the coauthor of Periphere Räume in der Amerikanistik (DeGruyter 2019) and Imaginationen (DeGruyter 2019) and the author of MexAmerica: Genealogien und Analysen postnationaler Diskurse in der kulturellen Produktion von Chicanos/as (Winter 2025). She has published on Latinx literature and culture, spatial imaginations of Florida, and literary representations of the Panama canal zone. Her current research is concerned with spatialization and security.
Claudia Sadowski-Smith (Arizona State University, Tempe, USA)
Claudia Sadowski-Smith is professor of English and American studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of The New Immigrant Whiteness: Neoliberalism, Race, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States and Border Fictions: Globalization, Empire, and Writing at the Boundaries of the United States. She is the editor of Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders (Palgrave, 2002) and the editor or co-editor of three special journal issues. Sadowski-Smith has published on climate migration, comparative US migration, transnational adoption, and reality TV in such journals as American Quarterly, American Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Diaspora.
Frank Schumacher (University of Western Ontario, London, Canada)
Frank Schumacher is a professor of history and director of the international relations program at the University of Western Ontario in London/Canada. He specializes in international and global history with a focus on the role of the United States in world affairs, the history of empires and colonialism, and the comparative global history of genocide and mass violence. Frank Schumacher has published widely on histories of the U.S. Empire, colonial mass violence, the role of culture in international relations, and cold war propaganda. His research integrates the writing of U.S. and global histories with a specific focus on the tensions between globalism and nationalism. His current book projects beyond our handbook on globalization(s), are: “Theodore Roosevelt: World-Making and the Struggle for Comprehensive Security”, “Theodore Roosevelt: Global American” (co-edited with Gaetano DiTommaso), “Imperial Fall: The United State and Decline”, and “Small Worlds: Global Histories of Children and Genocide”. Finally, he is currently preparing a series of symposia and conferences for 2025/26 on “Trauma and Crises in Modern U.S. history”, “Ending Wars and Finding Peace”, and “Future Histories”.
Matti Steinitz (Bielefeld University, Germany)
Matti Steinitz is a researcher on Afro-diasporic movements and cultures at the center for inter-American studies (Bielefeld University). His dissertation thesis on the impact of soul music and black power in Panama, Rio de Janeiro, and New York´s Afro-Latin community earned him a PhD in American studies. He is also coordinator of the “Black Americas Network” and executive director of the “International Association of Inter-American Studies”.
Olaf Stieglitz (Leipzig University, Germany)
Olaf Stieglitz is professor for American cultural history at Leipzig University. His research interests include gender history & the history of bodies; visual culture studies with an emphasis on Hollywood; sport history as cultural history; memory studies. He is currently working on a project on Hollywood during the 1970s and 1980s and how films from that era dealt with notions of gender, labor, and care; and on a memory studies project about the early transnational gay and lesbian rights movements.
Jens Temmen (Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany)
Jens Temmen is an assistant professor in American studies at Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf. He received his PhD in American studies at the graduate school “Minor Cosmopolitanisms” at the University of Potsdam with a thesis on The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s). His second book project focuses on North American astro-culture in the second space age and in relation to planetary discourse, a topic on which he has also published widely. He is fellow of the “Young Academy of Sciences and Literature” (Mainz) and co-editor of the book series Critical Futures (transcript). He is co-teacher and co-principal investigator in an international teaching and research project on “Critical Outer Space Studies” funded by the European Union (UNIVERSEH).
Ian Tyrrell (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)
Ian Tyrrell is Emeritus Professor History at the University of New South Wales. He has also taught at UCLA, Oxford University, Sydney University, and the University of Queensland. He was Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth professor of American history at Oxford University, 2010-11, and is the only non-American to hold that visiting chair in its century-long existence.
Born in Brisbane, Australia, Ian Tyrrell is an authority on 19th and early 20th century American history, especially focusing on transnational approaches, American empire, the study of American exceptionalism, and American historiography. He is the author of 11 single-authored books and co-editor of three others. Among his titles are Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective (Chapel Hill, 1991); True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930 (Berkeley, 1999); Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, 2010); Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (Chicago, 2015); and American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea (Chicago, 2021). He was between 1996 and 2015 the recipient of five consecutive Australian research council discovery grants. He is a fellow of the Australian academy of the humanities.
Michael A. Verney (Drury University, Springfield, USA)
Michael A. Verney is associate professor of history at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri. He specializes in the global history of the early U.S. republic with a focus on maritime and naval expansion and global encounters. He earned his B.A. in 2008 from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and his PhD in history from the University of New Hampshire in 2016. He is the author of A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in July 2022. He has previously published articles on the first US citizens to voyage to the Indian subcontinent in the early republic (Journal of the Early Republic 2013) and on US pro-slavery expansionism in South America in the 1850s (Diplomatic History 2020). His second book project examines Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry’s mission to Japan in light of the North Pacific Exploring Expedition, a forgotten but massive U.S. naval survey of East Asian and Russian waters in the mid-1850s.
Julius Wilm (SFB 1199, Leipzig University, Germany)
Julius Wilm is a postdoctoral researcher at Leipzig University’s collaborative research centre (SFB) 1199. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cologne in 2016 and has since taught and researched at different universities in Denmark, Switzerland, the United States, and Germany. His current project on the homestead act and indigenous dispossession began in 2019-2020 when he was the Gerda Henkel Postdoctoral Fellow in digital history at the German Historical Institute Washington and George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig center for history and new media. His publications include the 2022 interactive web map “Land Acquisition and Dispossession: Mapping the Homestead Act, 1865-1912” (with co-authors Robert K. Nelson and Justin Madron) as well as the books Settlers as Conquerors: Free Land Policy in the Antebellum United States from 2018 and Ein deutscher Revolutionär im Amt: Carl Schurz und der Niedergang der Minderheitenrechte in den USA der 1870er-Jahre from 2024.