Die Graduiertenschule "Locating Media/Situierte Medien" lädt herzlich ein:

"Negative Space and the Making of Modern America: Spatial Reconfigurations in American Architecture, Photography, and Literature (1850-1920)"

 
Lecture, Kerstin Schmidt (University of Siegen)

Tuesday, 10th of July 2012, 16 to 18 h
Artur-Woll-Haus, Room AE-A 102, University of Siegen

 
"I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America," writes Charles Olson in his study on Melville, Call me Ishmael. In her talk, Kerstin Schmidt will argue that the use and presentation of space, so paramount for American culture, has experienced major changes in the second half of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century and that a concept that she refers to as "negative space" can be used to theorize these new spatial configurations. She will present examples from the field of literature (Whitman and the James brothers), architecture (Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright) as well as photography (Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine) to elucidate her observations.

Personal Information

Kerstin Schmidt is Professor of American Studies at the University of Siegen/Germany. She studied at the Universities of Freiburg and of Massachusetts/Amherst (USA) and taught at the Universities of Freiburg and Bayreuth, at the University of Munich's "Amerika-Institut" as well as at Weber State University in Ogden, UT (USA). Scholarships and research stipends have brought her to Yale University, Indiana University/Bloomington, the "Schomburg Center for Research in Black Life" and the "Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts" in New York City as well as to the Universities of Toronto and British Columbia/Vancouver in Canada.

She is the author of The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama (2005) and has published on modern American drama, ethnic literatures in the US and Canada, the Harlem Renaissance, theories and cultures of diaspora as well as on media studies. She co-edited the essay collection America and the Sea (2004) and has edited and contributed to Space in America: Theory History Culture (2005). She is also a founding member of the women's studies journal Freiburger FrauenStudien. Together with Martina Leeker and Derrick de Kerckhove, she edited McLuhan neu lesen: Kritische Analysen zu Medien und Kultur im 21. Jahrhundert (2008).

Contact

Graduate School "Locating Media"
Mail: info@locatingmedia.uni-siegen.de