HCA - Spring Academy

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HCA - Spring Academy

The Spring Academy is an annual, one-week interdisciplinary conference for Ph.D. students at the HCA The conference is targeted at at Ph.D.

The Spring Academy on American History, Culture & Politics is an annual, one-week interdisciplinary conference for Ph.D. candidates from around the world, organized by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA), in Heidelberg, Germany. candidates working in different fields of American studies. Possible topics for discussion are American literature and culture, U.S. history, domestic and for

eign policy, geography, religion, and musicology as well as economic and sociological issues, 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 of young and aspiring researchers which has been successfully established by the HCA over the past years and is continuously expanded. Every year the HCA invites twenty outstanding Ph.D. students from diverse academic disciplines to Heidelberg to present their dissertation projects in the field of American Studies. The presentations are thematically arranged into ten two-person panels. Participants are requested to prepare a twenty-minute presentation of their research projects. Each presentation is followed by a forty-minute discussion session. The participants of the HCA Spring Academy greatly benefit from the insights generated by this cross-disciplinary and intercultural dialogue. For more information, please visit: http://www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de/spring/index_en.html

28/03/2026

The Spring Academy 2026 has come to an end!

We want to express our gratitude and appreciation to all participants, chairs, and facilitators who have contributed to an insightful conference at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies.

Watch out for our call for papers in Fall for 2026!

27/03/2026

The 2026 Spring Academy is coming to a close!

After 9 wonderful panels and 2 great workshops throughout the week, we are celebrating a successful conference week with a nice shared farewell dinner.

27/03/2026

The last panel of this year's Spring Academy deals with Writing the Body and Its Threats.

Joining us from Paris Cité, Lisa Bognenko discussses her project on “Germs of Reform: Building a Literary Politics of Sanitation in the Writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pauline Hopkins and Edith Wharton.” Bognenko’s dissertation explores how the three aforementioned writers reacted to newly-emerging knowledge on health threats like contamination and how it influenced their writings of the domestic and the home as sites of political significance.

Anna Shmatenko from the Sorbonne University concludes the panel with her talk on “Liminal States between Life and Death in the Literature and Medicine of the Nineteenth-Century United States.” In her dissertation, she examines deathly liminality in literature and medicine and their varied meanings and considers how real medical practices like dissections influenced medical and cultural imaginaries of the time and were mirrored in literary works.

27/03/2026

The conference week has been a great experience so far, inspiring us all to engage in deep academic discourse! Today, we are heading into the last round starting off with a panel on Creating Religious Culture.

Rachel Bodily Birch from George Mason University talks on “The Narrative Dissonance of Idealized Womanhood: Forging a Distinct Culture of Print and Power in the American West.” Employing a digital scholarship to identify larger trends and changes in Mormon women’s printed periodicals of the 19th and early 20th century, she examines the way these women create spaces of self-identify and self-determination through print.

Following, Sam Herrmann from the University of Pennsylvania presents his work “Converting Teens through Converted Media: Popular Culture and Evangelical Style in Postwar America.” Part of his larger project on Youth for Christ, his thesis retells the story of an American evangelicalism marked by cultural style rather than theology. Youth and the emergence of adolescents as a defined interest group play an important role in this cultural project.

26/03/2026

Today's last panel at deals with Literature on the Margins.

Shika Amelordzi from the University of Würzburg kicks off with her presentation on “Passports and Precarity: Contested Afropolitanism” In her project, she explores how selected female African novelists depict the complexity and fluidity of African migrant experiences across generations. Through close readings she shows how Black African migrants negotiate and reconfigure notions of identity, home, kinship, mobility and homeland returns.

Further, Nicole Koenigsknecht from the University of Zürich talks about her dissertation on “Towards (and Away from) Hungry Reading in/through North American Indigenous Literatures.” She investigates if and/or how Indigenous literatures can nourish readers’ relationships with places and communities in North America. She argues that Indigenous literary texts resist hungry reading practices as they destabilize Western literary conventions to unsettle colonial appetites and nourish Indigenous presence and futurity.

26/03/2026

Our second panel today at focusses on Methodological Interventions in U.S. Literature.

Marcelo Fornari, PhD candidate at the University of Barcelona, introduces us to his project on “Interstitial Selves: Autotheory in Contemporary U.S. Literature” in which he explores autotheory as a contemporary textual modality and intellectual practice that permeates U.S. literature and criticism. He challenges its unstable use through close readings of literary and critical works by Ann Cvetkovich, Frank B. Wilderson III, McKenzie Wark, and Kate Zambreno.

Amon Pierson from Princeton University continues the panel with his presentation titled “mathematiX::poetiX--A speculation.” His dissertation explores the ways in which existential absurdity defines and characterizes black being during the postracial era.

26/03/2026

Another great group this year, captured on the Old Bridge with scenic castle views!

26/03/2026

The fourth day at the begins with the topic of worldmaking and cultural assimilation.

William Ockendon visits us from the University of Chicago to present on “Mississippi Yearning. The Spectre of Reconstruction and Insurgent Black Constitutionalism in the 1960’s Deep South Countryside.” Investigating the Black Levellers, he maps how an insurgent movement of rural Black Southerners pursued a ‘Second Reconstruction’ against the limits imposed by the state-sanctioned project of Civil Rights.

Next, Vincent Veerbeek from the University of Helsinki continues the panel with his talk on “In Tune with the Nation? Marching Bands, Cultural Assimilation, and Native American Influences on Music Education at United States Off-reservation Boarding Schools, 1879-1940.” His project analyzes how marching band music in boarding schools for Native American children promoted and represented cultural assimilation, while at the same time creating spaces for Native American empowerment and self-expression.

25/03/2026

As our participants gather back after the lunch break, the next panel will be about financial and political visions, combining political science and history.

Hugo Fraslin from École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS Paris) starts us off with his thesis on “Lehman Brothers and America’s Financial and Political Worlds. A Social-Political History of Banking Elites (1918-2018).” Through a Lehman Brothers case study, he seeks to understand how the bank nurtured relationships with US federal governments, Congresses, as well as the Republican and Democratic Parties.

From the University College London, Henry James joins us to discuss his project “Toward ‘What Works?’: Moynihan, Wilson, and Social Policy in an Age of Collapsing Trust, 1958-2010.” In his project, he examines how the collapse of institutional trust contributed to a reshaping of elite thinking about crime and poverty across the second half of the twentieth century.

Ming Kit Wong from the University of Oxford ends the panel with a presentation of his thesis on “Utopia in the Thought of Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty.” By looking at these two American liberal thinkers, he seeks to challenge, elaborate on, and illuminate their concepts of utopia and their value for understanding and guiding contemporary politics.

25/03/2026

Day 3 is starting off with an exciting Workshop talk!

Keith Brown, a professor at Arizona State University and the director of the Melikian Center: Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies at ASU, has joined us in Heidelberg to present his work on “American Microhistory and the Ottoman Transatlantic, 1872-1924.”
Brown is spending the current academic year at Helsinki University as the Fulbright Bicentennial Chair in North American Studies, where he is also working on the above project on the arms trade between the US and imperial European powers.

Thanks to Fulbright Finland for granting Prof. Brown some days of leave. Many thanks also to Fulbright Germany for supporting his trip to Heidelberg with the Inter-Country Travel Grant.

24/03/2026

For our third panel of the day here at the , we will consider different forms of activism and humanitarian work during the Cold War.

Joining us from the University of Graz, Linus Lanfermann-Baumann introduces “Deadly Connections: U.S. Peace Activism between Anti-Interventionism and Nuclear Disarmament.” His dissertation project draws connections between the solidarity movement and the antinuclear movement, showing, on the one hand, the global dimensions of peace, but also the conceptions of violence played for the activists.

Up next, Catherine Wood from Leiden University discusses "Modernization Theory and U.S. Volunteer Service Programs.” In her thesis, Wood explores Volunteer Service Programs in light of their work as agents of modernization and U.S. empire in foreign and domestic spheres.

24/03/2026

After lunch, the group will reconvene with a panel on the extraction practices in North America.

Philine Schiller from the University of Augsburg talks about her dissertation “From Craze to Crisis: Eating, Ecology and the Collapse of US Oyster Fisheries.” She studies the way food practices influence both culture and environment through the example of oysters.

From the University of Texas at Austin, Elybeth Sofia Alcantar presents on “Poisoned ndutu: River pollution and body-mapping the agua-cuerpo-territorio of Indigenous Mixteca women in Oaxaca.” One part of her overall dissertation, the project examines resistance to political and environmental forced displacements by Indigenous Mixtecos.

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http://www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de/spring/index_en.html

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