Current Fellows at the IAAK

Project title: New Geographies of North American Studies: European and Australasian Perspectives on the United States

Dr. Aaron Nyerges is the Academic Director of the United States Studies Centre (USSC) and Chair of American Studies within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. Holding a PhD in English (American Studies) and an MA in English and Film Studies from the University of Sydney and a BA in Creative Writing from the State University of New York, Dr. Nyerges is an internationally recognized expert in the study of the United States from a transnational perspective.

His scholarship on media, literature, and geography has been published by university presses and world-renowned journals such as Textual Practice and The Journal of Popular Culture. His first book, on the cartographic literature of US colonialism in the Caribbean and Pacific, entitled American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination, is forthcoming in 2025 at Cambridge University Press. In his leadership role as Academic Director of the USSC and Chair of American Studies, Dr. Nyerges has achieved a dynamic growth in undergraduate and postgraduate enrolments in American Studies, which grew by 200% between 2018 and 2023. The success of the program positions him as a transformative figure in the global study of the United States, who has used his distinct, multi-disciplinary specialization to drive a culture of innovative pedagogy and research-led teaching outcomes.  

In addition, Dr. Nyerges holds an executive role within the Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association (ANZASA). He has worked to link the association to American Studies associations in the region, such as the Korean and Japanese American Studies associations, and, at a global level, the European and British American Studies associations. In 2023, he chaired the organizing committee of ANZASA’s conference, Connection and Conflict in the Americas. In 2024, he will lead an international delegation of Australian scholars to the American Studies Association conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Our cooperation with Dr. Nyerges has been ongoing since 2018 and is based on mutual research interests and extensive common ground between our institutions as well as on publication projects.

The Fellow’s Contribution to Academic Life in Bonn

Aaron Nyerges will visit Bonn from 12 to 26 October 2024. This stay serves both his current individual research and shared plans, part of which aim at intensifying the collaboration between the centre in Sydney and our North American Studies Program. During his time in Bonn, Dr. Nyerges will be engaged in public lectures, seminars, and classroom teaching as well as meetings with all colleagues of our program and our cooperation partners in and outside the university.

Scheduled is a public talk in our Lecture Series “Current Issues in North American and Cultural Studies,” which during the summer term 2024 and the weeks before 4 November 2024 is dedicated to the presidential race in the US. Dr. Nyerges’s lecture closely interrogates the role of social media in framing the thematic flashpoints of the US elections and puts a special emphasis on the public discourse of climate change and political leadership. In addition, Dr. Nyerges will convene a seminar within the North American Studies Program on his forthcoming book, a literary mapping of US territorialism in the Pacific and Caribbean. The seminar will discuss interdisciplinary American studies methodologies with a focus on the intersections of literary criticism, cultural geography, and social history of media technologies. Moreover, our guest will contribute a guest lecture to our course on “American Pop: Processes and Practices of Popular Culture,” pinpointing how social media and political memes affect the 2024 presidential race.

Expected Longer-Term Impact of the Stay and Plans for Further Collaboration

The five-years of our collaboration have been so productive in part due to both the common ground of our work and illuminating differences in Australasian and European perspectives on United States culture, politics, economics, and history. Our common interests extend way beyond a considerable overlap of our individual research areas. Dr. Nyerges writes more broadly on US popular culture, critical theory, film studies, media and technology, literature, sexuality, race and gender, as well as US cultural interactions with Mexico, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

During Dr. Nyerges’s visit we aim to initiate an exchange about the internationalization of the field by implementing a transnational cooperation between scholars working on issues of indigeneity in Europe, Australia, and North America. Likewise, a mutual interest in the field of Sound Studies has the potential to foster future collaboration between Bonn and Sydney. Indeed, as a university-based interdisciplinary research institution, dedicated to expert analyses of American foreign policy, economic security, emerging technology, politics and culture, the USSC is a highly interesting ally in dialogues with a series of other institutes and departments of our university.

The concrete plan for our collaborative meetings with Dr. Nyerges in October 2024 is to advise a research plan for our future cooperation. Building on our shared reputation in the study of culture, media, politics, and geography, we aim to scope a two-to-three-year research program on art, media, and climate change, with focal points the US, Europe, and Oceania. The institute-to-institute collaboration interrogates a compelling geographical framework, triangulating the global regions of Europe, Australasia, and North America around the on-going interactions between media technologies and the climate. The goal of our discussions is to identify and plan the application to foundation grants that ensure the expected longer-term impacts of the institutional affiliation of the University of Sydney and the University of Bonn.

Finally, given the fact that the University of Bonn selected Australia as one focus of its international cooperation and acknowledges the University of Sydney as a particularly renowned institution of study and research, Dr. Nyerges’s visit will be highly instrumental in strengthening this exchange and further enhancing the effort to find strong academically competent partners in that region.

Prof. Bryan Wagner was a Rolf-Lessenich-Fellow from 17 June until 17 July 2024. He was researching and teaching in Bonn in collaboration with Prof. Sabine N. Meyer. One part of this collaboration was a workshop entitled Law & Humanities. The workshop program can be downloaded here.

Bryan Wagner is Professor in the English Department and affiliated faculty in the American Studies Program, Folklore Program, and Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley.

His research focuses on African American expression in the context of slavery and its aftermath, and he has particular interests in legal history, vernacular culture, urban studies, and digital humanities.

His first book, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard UP, 2009), offers a new theory of black vernacular tradition based on the tradition’s historical engagement with criminal law. By interpreting outlaw legends and blues lyrics via the cues they take from the modern law of slavery and police, we discover a historical consciousness derived from the experience of legal dispossession that does not reduce to cultural inheritance.

His second book, The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton UP, 2017), interprets the global tradition of the tar baby, a folktale that exists in hundreds of versions derived over centuries on at least five continents. We know the tar baby was circulating at the same time and in many of the same places as the philosophy of property and politics developed in colonial law and political economy, and it can also be shown that the story is addressed to many of the same problems – labor and value, enclosure and settlement, crime and captivity – presented in tracts and charters associated with the so-called great transformation in world history. When the tar baby is read alongside these philosophical cognates, it begins to look less like a hidden transcript coding context-bound and interest-based resistance, and instead more like a universal history that seeks to grasp all at once the interlocking processes by which custom was criminalized, lands were colonized, slaves were captured, and labor was bought and sold, even as it also reflects on the experience of disenchantment and the impact of science on the conflict over resources. 

Other books include Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places (Fordham UP, 2019), an essay collection, edited with Marianne Constable and Leti Volpp; The Wild Tchoupitoulas (Bloomsbury, 33⅓ Series, 2019), a study of a classic funk album that helped to set the template for the commercialization of processional second-line music; and The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love (Louisiana State UP, 2019), a documentary history of an eminent maroon.

Prof. Wagner directs two multidisciplinary projects in the digital humanities: Louisiana Slave Conspiracies, an interactive archive of trial manuscripts related to slave conspiracies organized at the Pointe Coupée Post in the Spanish territory of Louisiana in 1791 and 1795, and Tremé 1908, which tells the story of one year in the everyday life of an extraordinary neighborhood that was a crucible for civil rights activism, cultural fusion, and musical innovation. He is currently working on a public humanities project, An Open Classroom on New Orleans Culture, which is producing and sharing open educational resources with educators in collaboration with partnering organizations including Neighborhood Story Project and New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts.