The Escape Lab is a workshop by Francesco Casalbordino, co-hosted by Barbara Buchenau on November 5, 2024, 12-2 in T03 R04 D10. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining architecture and the humanities, with the goal of recognizing, mapping, and describing the significant places in the contemporary landscape of the Ruhr.

A key element of the lab is the active involvement of students, who are invited to reflect on the places they frequent in their daily lives – such as the routes they take to university, public spaces, recreational areas, transport hubs, and areas along infrastructure. Students will be encouraged to identify one or two significant places in their everyday lives that hold particular meaning in the region's transition from an extractive and industrial hub to a commercial and logistics center. Please register with Barbara Buchenau.

On the eve of the U.S. Presidential election, on November 4, 2024, in the Proust bookstore, Akazienallee, Am Handelshof 1, 45127 Essen, you are cordially invited to join us for a reading by the novelist Jarred Johnson. Jarred will read from his new novel-in-progress, launching a conversation about memory, postindustrial spaces, political polarization and disenfranchisement in the American heartlands. Please register for the event by sending an E-Mail to Zohra Hassan-Pieper.

Join us for the workshop "Scripting Urban Resilience: Navigating Disaster & Sustainable Futures", which brings together interdisciplinary and global perspectives on how cities are confronting disasters and planning for sustainable urban futures. This event is hosted by Barbara Buchenau, Florian Freitag & Zohra Hassan-Pieper. 
Focusing on the critical impact of disasters from climate-induced storms and wildfires to pandemics, police violence, or political propaganda, our speakers from Wilmington, the US, Naples, and the Czech Republic will offer interdisciplinary insights on how cities are overcoming challenges and striving toward ecological & social sustainability. This gathering is linked to our ongoing focus on urbanities in Aurora and our UDE seminars "Green Utopias" & "Sustainable Urbanities in North America & Europe", allowing students from all over Europe to participate, foster rich discussion, and develop new ideas. Engage in a conversation that is shaping the future of urban resilience & sustainability!

Jarred Johnson is a writer and educator from Kentucky in the United States. He graduated in spring 2024 from the University of North Carolina Wilmington with a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and previously worked for three years at the German Center for Research and Innovation New York City. He is visiting the Department of American Studies at UDE under Prof. Florian Freitag's tutelage after receiving a short-term research grant from the DAAD. He will spend fall 2024 researching memory and history in post-industrial areas, comparing the Ruhr region of Germany to the Appalachian region of the United States. He is at work on a novel that explores the future of former coal mining regions. Jarred will use the UDE as a base for his work and research in the Ruhr region and will collaborate with Prof. Barbara Buchenau's and Prof. Florian Freitag's BA Seminar "Sustainable Urbanities."

Join us in welcoming Jarred Johnson and supporting his research during his visit. Stay tuned for updates and opportunities to engage with his work.

For more information, please contact Prof. Florian Freitag

"Sounds We Saw, Visions We Heard: The History of Jazz Fandom and the Politics of Imagining the Past and Envisaging a Future through Jazz Listening"

Masayoshi Yamada (PhD candidate in History at UCLA) presented a lecture on his dissertation topic, which offers the first extensive study of the history of jazz fans-defined as ardent devotees of jazz music with a deep and lasting attachment - in the United States and Japan.  Drawing upon a extensive array of archival sources, such as fan mail, diaries, scrapbooks, fan club bulletins, meeting minutes, letters to editors, photographs, and legal and financial records, his dissertation recounts how jazz enthusiasts from diverse backgrounds invested materially, intellectually, and emotionally in listening to the music and debating its history. In his talk, Yamada discussed how from the Great Depression to the Cold War, devoted jazz listeners transformed the social space of music-listening into a vehicle of confronting structural racism on local, national, and transnational levels.
This talk was part of the Master's colloquium “Theses in American Studies”. For more on Masayoshi Yamada visit https://history.ucla.edu/person/masayoshi-yamada/. For further information about this event, please contact Prof. Florian Freitag.

The Ruhr PhD Forum in American Studies took place on January 26 and 27, 2024, with day one hosted by the UDE. Access the full conference schedule here. This event brought together scholars from the Ruhr Center for American Studies for a two-day forum organized by PhD students from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Ruhr-Universität Bochum and TU Dortmund University. Candidates had the chance to present and discuss their current research and they were joined by select number of national and international guests, including fellow PhD candidates as well as invited Senior Experts in the field of American Studies.  For further information, please contact Zohra Hassan-Pieper (zohra.hassan-pieper@uni-due.de).

"Theme parks must be taken seriously as spaces of cultural significance" - Prof. Dr. Florian Freitag, Prof. Salvador Anton Clavé und Prof. Dr. Filippo Carlà-Uhink zu Ihrem neuen Buch *Key Concepts in Theme Park Studies*. Interview mit *Attractions Magazine*.

Kompromisse gelten als Schwäche – Prof. Dr. Barbara Buchenau zur Lage der US-Politik.

Interview mit Mascha Drost, Information und Musik, October 8, 2023. Deutschlandfunk.

In preparation for their literary studies seminar examining the works of AfroIndigenous, Queer, migrant activist poet and scholar Alan Pelaez Lopez (they/them), students, accompanied by lecturer Ana Elisa Gomez Laris, had the opportunity to meet and familiarize themselves with the author in a fairly relaxed yet formal in-person classroom session.

During the session, students learned about Pelaez Lopez's past as a multilingual/multicultural child, their (illegal) border crossing/migration to the US as a five-year-old child and about their adult years working as an immigration and Trans-rights activist. The poet then performed several of their poems and emotions transcending the page were witnessed. Afterwards students could ask questions to Pelaez Lopez and learned about some of the meanings and inspirations behind their works.

The session on October 4, 2023 closed with a writing workshop moderated by Pelaez Lopez for the students centered around a group reading of poems by other migrant authors, a short discussion, and a timed poetry-writing activity.

Experiencing American Studies first-hand, students Jule Windeler and Sophie Karkowski had the opportunity to join Prof. Dr. Florian Freitag and Dr. Elena Furlanetto for the third transnational Suburbanization and Urbanism in the EU Countries and Abroad (SUBEUA) meeting. The three-day conference (Sept. 7th–9th 2023) brought scholars from France, Czechia, and the United States to San Diego, Los Angeles, and Pasadena and focused on exploring suburban areas in Southern California from various interdisciplinary angles, ranging from theme park studies to literature and geoinformatics.

City Scripts, edited by Buchenau, Gurr and Sulimma, analyzes how forward-looking social and political action is empowered by a new kind of cross-fertilization between narrativity, scriptivity, and urban change management. It studies uncommon alliances between writers, artists, activists, media professionals, administrators, and businesspeople, showing how these alliances produce pragmatic storytelling and artwork that imagines innovative solutions for hard-wired conflicts and wicked problems. The authors assembled here use their expertise in American studies and urban research in the German Ruhr region and in US American postindustrial cities to delineate a transdisciplinary narratology that is particularly adapt to the critical analysis of postindustrial scriptings for futurity.