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Guest Lecture

Crisis Ordinariness or Crisis Pervasiveness? American Studies and/as Twenty-First-Century Pop

Date/Time: to
Type: Lecture, Presence
Location: Villa Tillmanns, Wächterstraße 30, 04107 Leipzig

A part of the 35th Annual Conference of the Postgraduate Forum (PGF) of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS/DGfA), we invite you to the keynote lecture "Crisis Ordinariness or Crisis Pervasiveness? American Studies and/as Twenty-First-Century Pop" by Privatdozent Dr. Martin Lüthe (Freie Universität Berlin). No sign-up is necessary to attend the opening event of the conference, which includes the keynote.

Guest Lecture: "Crisis Ordinariness or Crisis Pervasiveness? American Studies and/as Twenty-First-Century Pop," Photo: ASL

In this keynote, which forms part of the annual conference of the Postgraduate Forum (PGF) of the German Association for American Studies, PD Dr. Martin Lüthe explores why North American Studies obsesses over "crisis" in our times and what we can learn from listening to US popular music in this context.

While embedded in the conference program, the keynote is open to all interested guests, including students of American Studies Leipzig. No sign-up is necessary to attend the opening event of the conference, which includes the keynote.

About the Speaker

PD Dr. Martin Lüthe is an associate professor for American cultural studies at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. A former member of the PGF, his dissertation focused on Color-Line and Crossing-Over: Motown and Performances of Blackness in 1960s American Culture (2011) and his habilitation on Wire Writing: Media Change in the Culture of the Progressive Era (2025).

Postgraduate Forum 2025

The 35th Annual Conference of the Postgraduate Forum of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA/GAAS) is organized and hosted by doctoral candidates of Leipzig University's Institute for American Studies. It takes place on November 6-8, 2025, at the Graduate Academy Leipzig (Villa Tillmanns). The theme of this year's conference is “Crisis and Resilience in American Literature, Culture, History, and Politics.” The three-day conference will bring together doctoral researchers in American Studies from all across Germany.