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American Studies

English Studies

Okt 31 2025
- 01.11.2025

31 October – 1 November 2025 | Goethe University Frankfurt

Workshop: The Companies We Keep – Figurations, Narratives, and Practices of Co-Living in Common Spaces

Questions of housing and cohabitation are a topic of undeniable relevance today. Contemporary literature in particular shows that the polycrisis and cultural trends of the 21st century reflect and influence the way we experience figurations and practices of cohabitation in an ambivalent way. While existing research focuses on the home as the place where questions of identity, ideology and power are negotiated, the interdisciplinary workshop The Companies We Keep focuses on the relationality of humans, animals, objects and technologies in all types of dwellings in 21st-century British and Anglophone literature. 
The aim of this event is to examine dynamic constellations of co-living from a literary, cultural and media studies perspective and therefore to outline cohabitation and its constitutive relationalities as a field of research. 
Keynote speaker Professor Ben Highmore (University of Sussex) will deliver a lecture entitled “Domestic Milieux: Infrastructure, Osmosis, Reflux" (31.10., 6 pm., s.t.) The workshop is organized by Dr. Susanne Bayerlipp (Goethe University Frankfurt) and hosted by the Institute for English and American Studies.

For further information and the full programme please contact bayerlipp@em.uni-fankfurt.de


Events

This Reading Group is open to all researchers (specifically Master's students, PhDs, and Postdocs) interested in the burgeoning field of the Environmental Humanities. We will meet online fortnightly during the winter term (please see dates below), and venture into reading a text that has already become a classic of the Environmental Humanities:

Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013) 

Please join us via the following Zoom link: 

American Studies

Okt 16 2025

Episode on Justin Torres’s novel "Blackouts"

"Well Read" Podcast

Well Read is the American Studies' departments book review podcast, in which we can't help ourselves but also be literary scholars. In the first episode of Well Read, Tim Lanzendörfer, Heike Schäfer, and Cameron Seglias talk about Justin Torres's novel Blackouts, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 2024. Is it any good? Did we like it? Have we got any intelligent things to say about it? You'll need to find out.


Credits

Well Read Theme and Well Read Pon Take by
Torsten Schmidt and Nicholas Epe
Well Read Episode One edited by
Tim Lanzendörfer