Im gemeinsamen Forschungscolloquium der Abteilungen Kultur und Literatur wurden im vergangenen Semester folgende Vorträge gehalten: Jonathan Hyman (Bryn Mawr College): „The American Melting Pot: Visual Culture and Vernacular Response to 9/11“; Lawrence Buell (Harvard University): „Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis?“; Christa Buschendorf (Universität Frankfurt): „Race Relations as Established-Outsider Figurations: The Case of Jesse Hill Ford's Novel The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones“; Theodora Tsimpouki (Universität Athen): „The Sixties Are Dead: Long Live Their Legacy. The Politics and Poetics of Counterculture“; Günther Leypoldt (Universität Mainz): „Tropes of Literary Authority in the Age of Emerson and Whitman“; Gerd Hurm (Universität Trier): „Paradise on Speed: Discourses of Acceleration in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road“; Klaus Milich (Dartmouth College): „Put to Death and Born Again: Religion and Punishment“; Carla Peterson (University of Maryland): „Literary Transnationalism and Diasporic History in Mid 19th-Century African-American Literature: The Sketches of Frances W. Harper“; Sabine Sielke (Universität Bonn): „Re-cognizing American Studies“; Winfried Fluck (FU Berlin): „American Studies and the Romance with America“; Pierre Guerlain (Université Paris X Nanterre): „The battle for the hearts and minds of American Jews“; Stefan Brandt (FU Berlin): „TransAmerica? Cultural Hybridity and Transgendered Desire from Columbia to Babe Ruth“; Ulfried Reichardt (Universität Mannheim): „Towards a Poetics of the Global“; Astrid Franke (Universität Tübingen): „How does it feel? Social Processes and the Psyche in Elias's Theory“.