"Their Stories"
Annual American Studies Committee Meeting 2011
(American Studies and English Language Teaching Seminar)

November 24–26, 2011
Center for United States Studies
Lutherstadt Wittenberg, Leucorea Foundation

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Speakers

Kirsten Fischer received her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Duke University in North Carolina. After six years at the University of South Florida in Tampa, she moved to the University of Minnesota where she is now a tenured associate professor of early American history. Her first book, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Cornell, 2002), shows how ordinary people, through their everyday interactions, participated in the construction of racialized thought in this developing slave society. Fischer also co-edited Colonial American History, a collection of scholarly essays and primary sources (Blackwell, 2002). Fischer is currently researching American religious history and especially the presence of freethought in the early Republic. She is writing a book about Elihu Palmer (1764–1806), an ardent advocate in New York of radical ideas coming out of the European Enlightenment. Fischer conceived this project while on a fellowship at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg, in 2008–2009. This year she has returned to the HCA as a Fulbright scholar. Fischer enjoys teaching, and in 2011 she received an award from the University of Minnesota for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education.

Anton Hieke studied History, British and American Studies, and Jewish Studies at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. In 2008, he received his Master’s degree with a thesis on the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. He is currently working on a doctoral thesis entitled “The German Jewish Immigrants of Reconstruction Georgia and the Carolinas.” Anton Hieke received a Transatlantic Grant from the European Association for American Studies, a Bornblum Grant from the Southern Jewish Historical Society, a library grant from John F. Kennedy Institute of the Free University of Berlin, and a graduate scholarship from the state of Saxony-Anhalt. He published “Jews at the Cape Fear Coast: A Portrait of Jewish Wilmington, NC, 1860–1880,” Southern Jewish History 13 (2010) and “Farbrekhers in America: The Americanization of Jewish Blue-Collar Crime, 1900–1931,” aspeers 3 (2010). Since 2008, Anton Hieke has been supervising the library of the Center for United States Studies.

Julianne Lynch holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Houston and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. Her fiction has appeared in such journals as LIT, Crab Creek Review, and New Madrid. From 2007–2009, she served as an Assistant Editor for The Cincinnati Review. More recently, she has presented at the Ohio Festival of the Short Story and the Annual Conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. In 2010, she received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction to the Sewanee Writer's Conference. Currently, she is the Fulbright Junior Lecturer of American Studies at Universität Potsdam.

Kevin Mumford is professor in the Department of History and the Program in African American Studies at the University of Iowa. He received his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University, and a B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin. His teaching and research cover the history of African Americans from 1500-2000, race relations in the United States and in comparative perspective, the history of sexuality, and LGBT studies. His first book, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York, 1997), attempted to revise the history of what was at the time termed "miscegenation" (or interracial relations) by documenting a remarkable underworld of interracial dance halls, streetwalking and strolling, white dance hostesses serving Asian patrons, and a bold gay and lesbian nightlife. His second book, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (New York, 2007), is a case study of the long history of civil rights and Black Power in an important twentieth-century city.