Research Approach

Research at the Chair of American Studies with a Focus on Diversity Studies addresses American culture in a broad sense. We explore access to cultural patterns that shape realities, not least through genres, media, and categories of social stratification. Our research activities in the fields of literary and cultural studies focus in particular on structural violence and social inequality from historical and contemporary perspectives. We pay attention to normative gender orders and the legacy of settler colonialism in North America as well as the transatlantic enslavement trade as both a constitutive flip side of Western modernity and an epistemological challenge.

Three focus areas structure the research conducted at the chair: positionings, conceptualizations, and normalizations. The area positionings addresses how subjects are positioned and how they position themselves on the basis of diverse, overlapping practices of categorization. Topics include ways of constituting persons and groups in scenarios of social diversity and inequality that are historically shaped, narrativized, and medially mediated, as well as patterns by which discourses on diversity are formalized. In the area conceptualizations we focus on the formation of analytical categories and epistemological potentials of concepts as well as methodologies such as diversity, difference, and decoloniality. In the focus area normalizations we investigate strategies of authorization and legitimization and ethical questions of American Studies, as they are articulated in particular in foundational, impulse-giving publications of the field.