Heike Paul is professor and chair of American Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. 

She is the author of The Myths That Made America and four other monographs as well as numerous essays. She is editor and co-editor of essay collections on populism, future studies, reeducation, critical regionalism, and television series. Her research fields include gender studies, African American studies, cultural mobility, tacit knowledge, and contemporary American literature. She heads the "Global Sentimentality Project" and is a member of the project "Reeducation Revisited: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives on the Post-World War II Period in the US, Japan, and Germany."

 Heike Paul is engaged in public humanities projects and frequently contributes to news forums on topics of US culture and politics. In 2018, she was awarded the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Prize by the German Research Foundation.

Abstract

The "lost colony of Roanoke" has been canonized as the story of a failed attempt at an early settlement in North America and as the unsuccessful prequel to the founding of Jamestown. This talk looks back on the history and ideologically shifting memorializations of this settler-colonialist endeavor, and it identifies points of convergence in the use of the anti-foundational "lost colony"-narrative and the myth of the "lost cause." The latter was fully articulated after the end of the American Civil War for the first time and has recently been appropriated, re-invigorated, and weaponized for right-wing positions in culture war-arenas. In an eery embrace, both "lost colony"- and "lost cause"-invocations champion white supremacy and ethnonationalism against multiracial visions of America and as such have turned out to be sinister fabrications of American beginnings in struggles for hegemony and political power.