(Provisional) Program

9:00

Conference Opening: Katharina Gerund & Barbara Straumann (UZH)
RAA-G-01

9:15-10:30

Keynote 1: Elisabeth Anker (George Washington University)
Little Sovereigns: Personal Power in Crisis Times
Chair: Matthew Scully (U of Lausanne)
RAA-G-01

10:30-11:00

Coffee Break (Lichthof RAA)

11:00-12:30

Panels
1A (Transnational) American Origin Stories
Chair: Simona Kradolfer (UZH)
room tba

• Patrick Vincent (U of Neuchâtel): Representations of Swiss Un/Freedom in the New Republic
• Thomas Austenfeld (U of Fribourg): The Snare of Christian Nationalism: John Quincy Adams Reads, and Re-reads, the Declaration of Independence
• Andrew Wildermuth (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg/UZH): “Ain’t You Getting Very Tired Staying in Brazil?”: Sentimental Origin Stories and Un/Freedoms in the Archives of “Los Confederados”—Alabama and Brazil, 1865–1870

1B Contemporary Reading Practices
Chair: Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell (UZH)
room tba

• Michael Boyden (U of Fribourg): Poulet on Your Phone: Notes toward a Phenomenology of Algorithmic Reading
• Maxi Laumann (Heidelberg U): Banning Desire: Book Bans, Moral Offense, and the Re-Moralization of Reading in Contemporary America
• Laura Hartrampf (U of Münster): Don’t Read This Book: Queer YA Paratexts as Sites of Resistance in the Age of Book Bans

12:30-14:00

Lunch Break

14:00-15:30

Panels
2A Student Panel on American Unfreedoms
Chairs: Dr. Isis Giraldo and Prof. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (U of Lausanne)
room tba

2B Un/Freedom and African American Theory
Chair: Nicole Koenigsknecht (UZH)
room tba

• Lindsay Parkhowell (U of Basel): Hearing the Wild Ox Moan: Matana Roberts, Vera Hall, and the Sonic Afterlives of American Un/freedom
• Shayan Rahmanian (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg): Surviving Ontological Negation — Black Feminisms on Remembrance and the Interdiscipline in the Wake of the USA’s Semiquincentennial
• Malaika Sutter (U of Bern): Reflections on the Archive and Un/Freedom: Reading Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes

15:30-16:00

Coffee Break

16:00-17:30

Panels
3A Narratives of Illness and Care
Chair: Nastacia Schmoll (UZH)
room tba

• Julia von Bergen (U of Fribourg): Chronic Un/Freedom: The Entanglements of Chronicity and Freedom in Contemporary American Illness Narratives
• Liz Schoppelrei (Leuphana U Lüneburg): “Beyond suffering and survival”: Kinship and Care in Dystopic Science Ficton

3B Incarceration, Violence, and Redemption
Chair: Hana Vrdoljak (UZH)
room tba

• Anna Busse (HU Berlin): “Daddy empty like justice”: Demetrius Buckley’s Non-Redemptive Performance of Incarcerated Fatherhood
• Lee Flamand (Ruhr U Bochum): Incarcerating Conventions: Competing Codes of Redemption & Decline in American History X
• Alexander Hackel-Johnson (UZH): Illusory Neoliberal Freedom, Incarceration, and (Structural) Violence in Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room

18:30

Conference Dinner (Linde Oberstrass, separate registration required)

• Johanna Pelikan (U of Hamburg): Crafted Freedom? – (Re)Visions of Craft as Emancipation in Booker T. Washington’s Working with the Hands (1904)
• Aïcha Bouchelaghem (U of Geneva): Narrating the Self while Unfree: Fields Cook’s Conversion Narrative

4B Migration, Borders, and Surveillance across Media
Chair: Michael Frank (UZH)
RAA-G-01

• Tamara Imboden (U of Basel): "Never Let Them Out of Your Sight": Surveillance, Community and Authenticity in Aisha Abdel Gawad's Between Two Moons
• Michael Fuchs (U of Innsbruck): Becoming the Drone: Border Security and Necropolitical Subjectivity in Videogames

• Suzanne Enzerink (U of St. Gallen) & Sandra King-Savic (UZH): Civilizational Grammars: Dialogues of Belonging between the US and Europe
• Felix Brinker (U of Hannover): Configurations of Fascist Freedom in Contemporary US Right-Wing Independent Film
• Cornelia Klecker (U of Innsbruck): Whose Free Speech? Conservative Media Politics and the Paradox of "Un/Freedom" in Trump's Second Administration

5B Stories of Un/Freedom in North-American Literatures
Chair: Andrew Wildermuth (UZH)
room tba

• Cristian Alistar (U of Bucharest): Narrating "Ugly" Freedom: Biased Moral Repair and Uneven Justice in George Saunders's Liberation Day 
• Matthew Scully (U of Lausanne): Cartographies of Freedom: Literary Remappings in Dionne Brand's The Blue Clerk
• Sämi Ludwig (U de Haute-Alsace): From Bicentennial to Semiquincentennial: American Politics as Soap Opera in Ishmael Reed's Terribles Trilogy