HCA - Spring Academy

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HCA - Spring Academy

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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 foreign 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

02/10/2026

We're back! The application period for the Spring Academy 2027 is open and waiting for you! You can apply until November 15.

Our next conference will take place from April 5-9, 2027, at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies.

Please see the Call for Papers attached below and our website for more details and the application form!

https://www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research/projects-and-cooperation/spring-academy

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!

Adresse

Hauptstraße 120
Heidelberg
69117

Website

https://www.hca.uni-heidelberg.de/en/research/projects-and-cooperation/spring-academy

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