Heidelberg Center for American Studies Spring Academy

Paul Harvey

I've been asked by Hilde, our Senior Norwegian Correspondent, to forward along information on this unique opportunity for finishing graduate students, to present their work with fellow American and European colleagues in Heidelberg. Hilde writes: "I attended the Spring Academy last year, and it was a wonderful experience! It's a great mix of students from Europe and the USA, covers many disciplines, and has a supportive and safe atmosphere to present your material." Hilde, any chance the Oslo Soul Children will be a warm-up act at the conference?

More information below:
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HCA Spring Academy:

American History, Culture & Politics

Gruppenbild WebHCA Spring Academy on American History, Culture & Politics is an annual, one-week interdisciplinary conference for Ph.D. candidates working in different fields of American studies.

Every year twenty outstanding Ph.D. students from European and American universities come to Heidelberg to present their dissertation projects. All presentations are thematically arranged into ten panels. Participants are requested to prepare a twenty-minute presentation of their research projects which is followed by a forty-minute discussion session. Four experts are invited for afternoon workshops that elaborate on topics discussed during the conference.

Uni1Possible topics for discussion are American literature and culture, U.S. history, domestic and foreign policy, as well as the economy and aspects of jurisprudence. Race, class, and gender are frequently employed analytical categories. This diversity of disciplines and approaches enables students from different academic backgrounds to become part of a unique international intellectual network which has been successfully established and broadened by the HCA in the last six years.

Comments

Hilde said…
I doubt it, Paul. They'll have to settle for visit to a real life German castle instead.
Tom Van Dyke said…
Race, class, and gender are frequently employed analytical categories.

Interesting. Is this that "Marxist" analysis of history thing? I have always heard that the "winners" write the history. Still, they have a certain legitimacy in that they describe the "normative," the eventual consensus, that which powered the history.

This is not to say it was right---Dred Scott---but telling history from the dissenting POV is not history atall, only hindsight.

As we all know, hindsight sees 20/20.

I was just writing back and forth with a friend of mine from Yorkshire. What came up was in our divergent non-cosmopolitan "back countries," where in England there's still a certain fatalistic acceptance of class distinctions and a top-down social order--- the place where you start is where you will end---in America, we do are not content to "remain in our place."

This of course applies to race and gender as well, but the irony is that the best analogy of all to the Republican Tea Party thing is Jacksonian democracy. For better or worse. England has no true analogue to it; we have never had a monarch or a House of Lords, although Hamilton and John Adams floated those ideas, respectively.

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