We would like to cordially invite you to the Salzburg lecture of the CIVIS Gender Studies Network Online Lecture Series. Ralph J. Poole (University of Salzburg) will present the lecture “Women in American Studies: History of a Discipline from a Gender Perspective”.

When? Wednesday 21 June 2023, 5 pm (CET)
Where? All seminars are organised digitally on Zoom, hosted by MinervaLab Sapienza. To receive a Zoom link and passcode, please register before the seminar by writing to

Description: The talk provides an overview of the history of American Studies as a discipline from a gendered perspective by discussing (1) the inclusion of women in that history as protagonists, i.e. as teachers, researchers, etc., (2) the inclusion of women as topics, for example researching female novelists and artists, (3) the inclusion of gender as a method, i.e. as a category for analyzing topics within American Studies

Speaker: Ralph J. Poole is an American-German researcher who teaches as Professor of American Studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He taught at the University of Munich, Germany, at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey, and was a research scholar at CUNY’s Center for Advanced Studies in Theater Arts in Manhattan. His publications include a study on the Avant-Garde tradition in American theatre, a book on satirical and autoethnographic “cannibal” texts, a collection of essays on “dangerous masculinities”, and another collection on “queer Turkey”. Having wrapped up a project funded by the Austrian Science Fund on “Gender and Comedy in the Age of the American Revolution”, he is currently researching the Austrian Heimatfilm from a trans-European and genderqueer perspective.