21.06.2024 New Lecture Series on North American Women Initiated

A new lecture series on North American Women will be inaugurated at the Department of English and American Studies this week. Professor Dr. Cynthia Davis (University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA), current Senior Fulbright Professor in American Literature, will open the series together with her host, Professor Dr. Carmen Birkle (Philipps-Universität, North American Literary and Cultural Studies) in the form of a panel discussion open to the public. They will both speak on the medical profession in nineteenth-century U.S. America’s literature and culture. While Professor Davis will focus on the perspective of female patients, as, for example, represented in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) or in literature by Edith Wharton, Professor Birkle will use the women doctors’ perspectives to highlight, in both history and literature, the construction of obstacles women had to overcome on moral, religious, political, and biological levels, in order to study and practice medicine. Several novels, such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Doctor Zay (1882), Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor (1884), and Annie Nathan Meyer’s Helen Brent, M.D. (1892) will serve as examples refusing William Dean Howells’s provocative narrative Dr. Breen’s Practice (1881). 

When? Thursday, June 20, 2024, 10 c.t. – 11.45 in room 01D05.

A second event will be hosted by Marburg’s American Studies team with Professor Cynthia Davis as guest-speaker. Her lecture on “Edith Wharton on Exile, Expatriation, and Exceptionality” will cover some of her most recent research on Edith Wharton, a U.S.-American writer of the Gilded Age who knew the New York City upper class well and presented representatives in her fiction. Her novels Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth were immediate bestsellers and have remained so until today. In her talk, Professor Davis will address Wharton’s “argument with America” and her preference for Europe, which strengthened when she settled permanently in France in the 1900s.

When? Tuesday, June 25, 2024, 10 c.t. – 11.45 online. Link: https://webconf.hrz.unimarburg.de/n/rooms/c4r-bjo-men-cns/join.

Bios:

Cynthia Davis is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She received her PhD in English Literature from Duke University. She specializes in U.S. literature from the Civil War to World War II, with a focus on the medical humanities, literary history, and gender studies. On these issues, she has published many articles and books, such as her monographs Bodily and Narrative Forms: The Influence of Medicine on American Literature, 1845-1915 (Stanford UP, 2000) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Biography (Stanford UP, 2010). In her most recent book, Pain and the Aesthetics of US Literary Realism (Oxford UP, 2023), she explores how U.S.-American realists (such as William James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, and W. E. B. Du Bois) were invested in the depiction of physical suffering and argues that these writers considered a “heightened sensitivity to pain as an inevitable effect of the civilizing process.” For 2023/24, she has received a Fulbright US Scholar Research Award which enables her to conduct research for her current project, editing the life writings volume of The Complete Works of Edith Wharton (Oxford UP), here in Marburg.

Carmen Birkle is Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg. She was president, vice president, executive director, and international delegate of the German Association for American Studies, was treasurer of the European Association for American Studies, and served on the board of the Committee of Chairs and Program Directors of the American Studies Association (USA). She was Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Philipps-Universität (2017-23) and was a member of the North Atlantic Triangle Commission at the ÖAW until 2023 and currently is a member of the newly inaugurated Commission on Connecting Worlds: Europe, Africa, and the Americas. She is the author of two monographs, Women’s Stories of the Looking Glass (1996) and Migration—Miscegenation—Transculturation (2004), and of numerous articles and (co-)editor of 19 volumes of essays and special issues of journals. She is General (Co-)Editor of the journal Amerikastudien / American Studies (open access). She is currently at work on a monograph situated at the intersection of American literature, culture, and medicine in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and prepares a biography of Muriel Gardiner. She also contributes to a larger interdisciplinary project on “Geschlecht—Macht—Staat” with a special project on female presidents in U.S.-American TV series.