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Angestoßen durch die Theoriedebatten in den Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften ist der ›spatial turn‹ mittlerweile in vielen Disziplinen angekommen. Dem Selbstverständnis einiger seiner Vertreter/innen folgend, handelt es sich dabei um eine der derzeit innovativsten ›Wenden‹, jedoch zeigt sich bei genauerer Betrachtung eine Reihe von Problemen: Die Hinwendung zum Raum ist weder mit einem gemeinsamen Forschungsziel noch mit einer klar erkennbaren Methode verbunden. Außerdem besteht eine gewisse Diskrepanz zwischen einem theoretischen Forschungsdiskurs und den dazugehörigen Appellen, sich mehr mit ›Räumen‹ zu beschäftigen, und der immer noch geringen Anzahl methodisch-reflektierter Untersuchungen.

Der erste Teil des Vortrags, der diese Debatte skizziert, endet mit dem Plädoyer, Raum als analytische Kategorie statt als Gegenstand zu betrachten. In einem zweiten Teil des Vortrags wird dann ein Untersuchungsraster vorgestellt, welches sich prinzipiell für alle historisch arbeitenden Disziplinen eignet. In diesem Analyseraster sind u.a. die im Vortragstitel genannten Kategorien zentral. Erst damit wird eine differenziertere Sicht auf die raumzeitlichen Dimensionen spezifischer Gesellschaften, aber auch einzelner Akteure möglich. An einem Beispiel aus der Stadtgeschichte wird diese Methode schließlich umzusetzen versucht.

Susanne Rau ist Professorin für Geschichte und Kulturen der Räume in der Neuzeit an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Erfurt.
Nach dem Studium der Fächer allgemeine Rhetorik, Geschichtswissenschaft, Philosophie und Französisch an den Universitäten Tübingen, Hamburg und Reims wurde Susanne Rau 2001 an der Universität Hamburg promoviert. 2008 habilitierte sie sich an der Technischen Universität Dresden. 2009 erhielt Susanne Rau eine Heisenberg-Professur der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft und ist seitdem Professorin für Geschichte und Kulturen der Räume in der Neuzeit an der Universität Erfurt. Seit 2007 nimmt sie regelmäßig Lehraufträge an französischen Universitäten wahr. Seit 2010 ist sie Mitglied bei AcademiaNet (www.academia-net.de).

Forschung
Zu den Forschungsschwerpunkten von Susanne Rau zählen die Bereiche: Stadtgeschichte und Urbanität, Geschichte der Historiographie, Erinnerungskultur, Reformation, Konfessionalisierung, religiöser Pluralismus in der Frühen Neuzeit, Soziabilität, Reiseberichte und Reiseerfahrung in der Vormoderne, Geschichte und Kulturen der Räume sowie „globaler” Handel in der Vormoderne.

Lehre
In der Lehre bietet Susanne Rau Veranstaltungen zu den Themen: Utopien, Repräsentationen und Theorien über Stadt in der Neuzeit, Geschichte und Anthropologie des Raums, Reisen und Schreiben über Reisen in der Neuzeit, Paläographie der Neuzeit, Kulturgeografie für Historiker, Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung, Weltkarten und Kosmographien sowie Orte des Konsums und der Soziabilität in frühneuzeitlichen Städten im BA und MA Geschichtswissenschaft an. Im Studium Fundamentale beteiligt sie sich an Veranstaltungen zu Themen wie öffentliche Räume in Geschichte und Gegenwart und an einem Wissenschaftspropädeutikum.

Ausgewählte Publikationen
2010: Fließende Räume oder: Wie läßsst sich die Geschichte des Flusses schreiben. Historische Zeitschrift Vol. 291: S. 103 ff. (ed. mit Schwerhoff, G.)
2008: Topographien des Sakralen. Religion und Raumordnung in der Vormoderne, Dölling & Galitz Verlag.
2007: Public order in public space. Tavern conflict in early modern Lyon. Urban History Vol. 34: S. 102 ff.
2005: Orte der Gastlichkeit – Orte der Kommunikation. Aspekte der Raumkonstitution von Herbergen in einer frühneuzeitlichen Stadt. Zeitsprünge. Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit Vol. 9: S. 394 ff.
2002: Geschichte und Konfession. Städtische Geschichtsschreibung und Erinnerungskultur im Zeitalter von Reformation und Konfessionalisierung in Bremen, Breslau, Hamburg und Köln, Dölling & Galitz Verlag.

The very texts that became emblematic for the difference between the humanities and the natural sciences make rather strong claims as to the fundamental similarities between these disciplinary fields. In particular, both the natural sciences and the humanities are standardly viewed, in the period around 1900, as “empirical sciences” (to name an example: Wilhelm Windelband’s classical texts on the relationship between the natural sciences and the humanities do not tire to emphasize this point). The lecture will investigate the implications of this claim as to empiricity: which notion of “experience” and of “empirical method” is at issue here? Which types of experience are invoked (seeing that, at the same time, and closely related to the project of conceptually structuring the field of the scientific disciplines, new forms of experience were introduced in, f.i., phenomenology)? Which sort of demarcatory criteria are used to separate the humanities from the natural sciences, when both can be viewed as being ‘empirical’?

Paul Ziche is professor for the history of modern philosophy at the University of Utrecht.

1986-1992: studies in Munich and Oxford (1986-1988 physics, then M.A. in philosophy, with minors in physics and psychology)
1988: Diploma-„Zwischenpruefung“ in physics, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich
1989/1990: Graduate student in philosophy, University of Oxford
1992: M.A. in philosophy (minors: Physics, psychology), Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich
1995: Dr.phil., Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich; Title of Dr.phil.-Thesis: „Mathematische und naturwissenschaftliche Modelle in der Philosophie Schellings und Hegels“
2003: Habilitation, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich; Title of the Habilitation-thesis: „Philosophie und Wissenschaften um 1900. Wissenschaftliche Philosophie als ‚nicht-reduktiver Szientismus’“
since 2008: professor (chair) for the history of modern philosophy at the University of Utrecht
2010: „Teacher of the year“ of Utrecht University

Functions include
Member of the Descartes Centrum for the history and philosophy of the sciences and the humanities
(With Hans Bertens) Coordinator of the Honours-Minor-program of Utrecht University („Descartes College“)
Member of the „bibliotheekscommissie“ of the faculty of humanities, University of Utrecht
Member of the „opleidingscommissie“, department of philosophy, University of Utrecht

Academic positions
Member of the „Commission for the history of science“ at the Bavarian Academy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Munich
Secretary of the „Internationale Schelling-Gesellschaft“
Member of the TransCoop-project (funded by the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Gesellschaft): „Imaginary and Ideal Elements and Limit Concepts in Mathematics: Their Theory, History, and Philosophical Understanding“ (Directors: Michael Detlefsen, University of Notre Dame/Godehard Link, University, Munich)

Former positions
2001-2007: Academic employee at the „Kommission zur Herausgabe der Schriften von Schelling“, Bavarian Academy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Munich
Lecturer (Privatdozent), Philosophy Department, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich1996-2000:  „Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter“ (research assistant/assistant professor), Institute for the history of science, medicine and technology, Friedrich-Schiller-University, Jena
Guest docent e.g. at the Institute Vienna Circle; Institut „HyperWerk“, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Basel; Venice International University

Research interests include
- History of philosophy, with a focus on the 18th and 19th century
- German Idealism
- Philosophy of nature
- The historical development and systematic implications of the relationship between different forms of „Wissenschaft“/“wetenschappen“
- History of universities and scientific organisations
- History of psychology

Today Russia lives through a very unique and difficult moment, when almost the entire society actively transforms and turns into opposition to the autocratic state power. This situation seems to completely transfigure Russian cultural and intellectual milieu, not only politically, but also scientifically: methodological preferences and paradigms in human sciences, cultural studies, philosophy are changing. There is a huge demand and a mutual search for a dialog between traditional humanitarian progressive liberal intelligentsia and the younger generation of radical left, intellectuals and artists. This dialog tends to oppose the dimension of critical knowledge and analysis not only to a blind violence of the state, but also to its growing religious ideology. This lecture aims to track possible turns and dispositions and to expose all the difficulties of such a dialog.

Oxana Timofeeva

Oxana Timofeeva was born in Siberia in 1978. She currently works in Moscow as a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), she is editor of the Theory section of the “New Literary Observer” magazine, a member of the group and critical internet platform “Chtodelat”, author of the books “Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille” (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2009 – in Russian) and “History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom” (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academy, 2012 – in English). In 2010-2011 she was a researcher at the Theory Department of the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Holland, an international post-academic institution. From May 2013 she is awarded a Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for experienced researchers (Humboldt University of Berlin).

Against a model of singular and unilinear diffusionism, social theorists have proposed that we approach global modernity by understanding European modernity itself not as ’self-producing, self-referential system’ but rather as ‘part of a world system’ and thus in dynamic, even dialectical tension with the peripheries it has produced (Dussel). Yet a model of diffusionism and unidirectional “influence” persists in comparative studies of artistic and literary modernism in the humanities, with “indigenization” as the governing concept. A critique, or style, or disposition is born in Europe, travels to the colonial periphery usually through an elite intellectual and there eventually mixes with local forms and becomes indigenized. This lecture will explore instead the idea of creolization and “transculturation” as concepts adequate to a modernism in sync with the dynamic tension of modernity as a world system and with the political edge of anticolonial modernist experimentation. My primary focus will be on the chance encounter of two pre-eminent anti-colonial artists in the Caribbean of the early 1940s, Martinican poet Aimé Césaire and Cuban painter Wifredo Lam.

Natalie Melas, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (English, French, Ancient Greek) from UC Berkeley. Her areas of interest include transcultural theory (between postcolonialism and globalism), the politics of disciplinary histories, cultural comparison, postcolonial neo-formalism, turn-of-the-century English literature, Anglophone and especially Francophone Caribbean literature and theory, modern reconfigurations of antiquity, Homer. She has published essays on the fate of the humanities in the contemporary university, on incommensurability, on Joseph Conrad, and on French Caribbean Literature. Her book, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. Her current project, provisionally entitled The Poetics and Politics of Untimeliness, addresses the formation of alternative modernities in the broken link between modernism and colonialism around two incommensurable figures, the modern Greek poet Constantin Cavafy and Aime Cesaire.

Since its birth in the early 1990s, queer theory and queer studies have circulated globally, by way of conferences, internationally influential essays and books, and other flows of scholarly information. However, in 2012 it is still worthwhile asking, “is there today a truly transnational queer studies?” This lecture will examine two ways of answering that question: one is practical and skeptical; the other is theoretical and optimistic. In the first half of this talk, I will discuss the sometimes frustrating, if always exciting and rewarding work of co-editing a massive new anthology that attempts to capture “queer studies” in its current complexity and global circulation. The process of constructing The Routledge Queer Studies Reader (co-editors Hall and Jagose, published this year) revealed many of the impediments to realizing a transnational queer studies. The field remains constricted by linguistic, geographical, and base theoretical “norms,” even though, as a political and intellectual project, it claims to devote itself to challenging normative concepts and processes. On the other hand, there is cause for optimism. A highly dynamic “queer conversation” is flourishing globally that reveals the continuing, open-ended potentials of the field. In referencing Gadamerian concepts of dialogic challenge and epistemological change, I will conclude my talk with a set of reflections and queries that should lead to a productive conversation among audience members on the inherent limitations and still-to-be-realized potentials of queer studies in a transnational context.

Donald E. Hall has published widely in the fields of British studies, queer theory, cultural studies, and professional studies. Prior to arriving at Lehigh in 2011, he served as Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at West Virginia University (WVU). Before his tenure at WVU, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for thirteen years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was 2001 Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, for 2004-05, and was Fulbright Senior Specialist at the University of Helsinki for 2006. He has served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association, including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion and the Convention Program Committee. From 2006-2007, he served as chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at WVU. In 2007, he became chair of the Department of English. In 2012, he was elected National President of the Association of Departments of English.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, ethics and agency in sexuality studies, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. His book, The Academic Community: A Manual For Change, was published by Ohio State University Press in the fall of 2007. His tenth book, Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Sexuality Studies, was published in the spring of 2009. In 2012, he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, collaborated on a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, which was published in July of that year.

Die Kategorien der neueren Emotionsforschung bedürfen weiterhin der Klärung und Differenzierung. Dies gilt bereits für den Begriff ‚Emotion‘ selbst, der zur Zeit häufig anderen affinen Begriffen wie Gefühl, Empfindung, Begehren, Stimmung, Affekt, Leidenschaft vorgezogen wird, aber auch für den Begriff der Performativität. Von diesem Problem ausgehend wird der Vortrag zeigen, wie die Kategorie der Performativität für die literaturwissenschaftlich orientierte historische Emotionsforschung produktiv gemacht werden kann. Zugleich wird die Frage erörtert, welchen Erkenntniswert andere wichtige Kategorien haben, zum Beispiel die der Alterität, der Historischen Semantik und der Räumlichkeit.

Ingrid Kasten, Study of Philosophy, Romance and Germanic Studies. 1973: PhD., 1983: Habilitation for German Philology, with particular consideration of the Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages. 1983: Professor at the University of Hamburg. 1986/87: substitute Professor at the Universities of Heidelberg and Göttingen. 1987: Professor and Chair of Medieval German Literature and Language at the Free University Berlin. 1991-1997: Member of the Board of Directors of the Deutscher Germanistenverband (from 1994-1997 as Vice-President). 1995-1997: Dean of the Department of Germanic Studies at the Free University Berlin. Member of the Berlin Zentrum für Historische Anthropologie (since 1996). Member of the Graduate School Körper-Inszenierungen (since 1997). Leader of the research project Emotionalität in der Literatur des Mittelalters within the framework of the Special Research Area Kulturen des Performativen at the Free University Berlin (since 1999). 2000 Election as a DFG Assessor. 2003: Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the Washington University in St. Louis, MO
Main focus of research: Romance-Germanic literary relations in the Middle Ages, medieval lyric poetry, literary theory and literary history of feelings. In addition publications on female mysticism, the courtly romance, the verse novella, hagiographical texts, on the Geistliches Spiel and on the history of literary science.

Projekt Emotionalität in der Literatur des Mittelalters, Sonderforschungsbereich “Kulturen des Performativen”, FU Berlin.

This lecture has a theoretical and an interpretive component. The main theoretical component develops the explanatory value of the concept of “occasion” in the rhetorical definition of narrative: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purposes that something happened. In particular, I will consider the ways in which the occasion of narration in fiction functions to help communicate authorial purpose. The interpretive component follows from this theoretical component and in turn leads to another set of theoretical claims. I consider the three occasions of telling by three different tellers in McEwan’s novel: that of Joe Rose’s character narration that constitutes the main narrative; that of the scientific essay on erotomania that constitutes the first Appendix; and that of Jed Parry’s unsent letter to Joe, written from a mental institution considerably after the events in the main narrative. I argue that the latter two occasions shed considerable light on the occasion of Joe’s narration and that such light in turn illuminates Joe’s purpose and its differences from McEwan’s. This analysis of occasion and its consequences leads to some reflections on the relationships between reliable and unreliable narration.

James Phelan is Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University. Born in Flushing, NY in 1951, he received his BA from Boston College (1972) and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1977). He began as an Assistant Professor at Ohio State in 1977, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1983, to Professor in 1989, and to Humanities Distinguished Professor in 2004. He served as Department Chair from 1994-2002.
Rather than working in only one historical period, Phelan gravitates toward theoretical issues or problems, most often connected with the genre of narrative, and pursues them in texts from different periods. His recent work, however, has focused primarily on twentieth-century British and American narrative, and he now claims the twentieth-century as a specialty. He has written about style in Worlds from Words, about character and narrative progression in Reading People, Reading Plots, about technique, ethics, and audiences in Narrative as Rhetoric, about character narration in Living to Tell about It, and about reader judgments in Experiencing Fiction. He has also published the autobiographical journal Beyond the Tenure Track and has edited, with Peter J. Rabinowitz, Understanding Narrative, and the Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory. With Gerald Graff, he has edited Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy, which was awarded the 1997 Nancy Dasher Award by the College English Association of Ohio as the best book on pedagogy from an Ohio faculty member for 1994-96, and The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy.
Since 1992, Phelan has been the editor of Narrative, the journal of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature and winner of the 1993 CELJ Award for Best New Journal. Since 1993, he has been co-editor, with Peter J. Rabinowitz, of the Ohio State University Press series on the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative.  He is currently working on several manuscript projects and preparing for his 2008 NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on “Narrative Theory: Rhetoric and Ethics in Fiction and Nonfiction.”

Media today thrive on crisis, shock, and disaster. At the first sign of meteorological turmoil, social unrest, financial turbulence, or natural cataclysm, print, televisual, and networked news media shift into crisis mode, generating on-the-ground reports, live updates, multiple commentaries and breaking news. CNN pioneered the 24-7 crisis mode in global cable news as far back as the 1980s, but the media’s thirst for crisis, its obsession with remediating disaster and premediating shock, has intensified in the 21st century, jump-started by the events of 9/11 but escalating in the subsequent decade. More than a decade after 9/11, much of the networked world remains in an acute state of “mediashock.” In many respects this mediashock follows from the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—and more crucially from the overwhelming media aftershocks that rumbled (and continue to rumble) through the global economic and securitization apparatuses and across print, televisual, and networked media. But mediashock preexisted 9/11 and has been intensified, transformed, and reinitiated many times in the 21st century.

This talk offers the concept of “mediashock,” as a way to try to make sense of the mood or atmosphere of shock or crisis which media in the 21st century work simultaneously to create and to contain. “Mediashock” can be understood as a form of what Nigel Thrift has characterized as “non-representational theory,” and as such participates in the critique of representationalism that has intensified in cultural, political, and media theory over the past couple of decades. Throughout the talk I emphasize the affectivity of our media themselves and how this is related to the affectivity of these natural/technical disasters or crises, these geotechnical media events which are produced neither by nature or society or technology but which emerge as complex assemblages, new kinds of events or objects or actants in the world that are related to but not finally reducible to the explosion of new information and media technologies in the past few decades. In this talk I will focus mainly on an exemplary case of the connection between the mediation of disasters or crises and the affectivity of disaster or shock that they produce, modulate, amplify, and shape—the remediation and premediation of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 and the still ongoing disaster at the Fukushima Daichii nuclear plant.

While “mediashock” names a specific condition of the 21st century, the concept also has its historical antecedents. Despite the intensification of media saturation, the unprecedented distribution of communication media and technical devices, and an everyday mediasphere that is much more complex, multiple, and contradictory than in previous centuries, the concept of “mediashock” itself has a genealogy that goes back at least to the beginning of the 20th century. One of the tasks of this initial foray into the concept of mediashock is to sketch out some pieces of this genealogy, to show how earlier theorists have articulated the way in which new technologies of mediation have entailed and brought about fundamental changes in what Walter Benjamin called the “human sensorium” or what Marshall McLuhan denoted as “sense ratios.”

Richard Grusin was named Center director starting with the 2010-11 academic year and is a Professor of English at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (UWM).

Professor Grusin received his Ph.D. from the University of California–Berkeley, and has held faculty appointments at the College of William and Mary, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Wayne State (where he chaired the Department of English from 2001 to 2008). He brings an outstanding record of institutional service and interdisciplinary scholarship to UWM, and is the author of four books:

Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible (Duke, 1991), which concerns the influence of European (primarily German) theories of biblical interpretation on the New England Transcendentalists

Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999), co-authored with Jay David Bolter, which sketches out a genealogy of new media, beginning with the contradictory visual logics underlying contemporary digital media

Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks (Cambridge, 2004), which focuses on the problematics of visual representation involved in the founding of America’s national parks

Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), which argues that in an era of heightened securitization, socially networked US and global media work to pre-mediate collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or fear.