Curriculum Vitae Dr phil. Christian Schmidt Contact data

Assistant Professor

American Studies and Intercultural Anglophone Studies

University of Bayreuth

Building: GW1, Room 1.27

Universitätsstr. 30

95447 Bayreuth

E-Mail: cschmidt@post.harvard.edu

10/2014 - Assistant Professor (“wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter”), American Studies and Intercultural Anglophone Studies, University of Bayreuth

2008 - 2014 Lecturer, American Studies and Intercultural Anglophone Studies, University of Bayreuth

2004 – 2007 Fellow, Interdisciplinary Graduate College / Research Training Group of the German Research Foundation (DFG) “Cultural Hermeneutics: Perspectives on Difference and Transdifference” (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg)

Ph.D. (2014) Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg (Grade: summa cum laude)

Awarded the Lilli Bechmann-Rahn Prize for the best dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology of the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg

Awarded the annual dissertation prize of the Bavarian American Academy

M.A. (2004) Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg

(American Studies/Literature, Political Science, American Studies/Cultural Studies)

2002 Harvard University Special Student Program, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

(Department of Afro-American Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences)

“The Parody of Postblackness in Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier and the End(s) of African American Literature.” Black Studies Papers 2.1 (2015). Web. Forthcoming.

“‘Famous in a Small Town’: The Authenticity of Unpopularity in Contemporary Country Music.” Unpopular Culture. Ed. Martin Lüthe and Sascha Pöhlmann. Amsterdam: U of Amsterdam P, 2016. Forthcoming.

“Postblack Unnatural Narrative—Or, Is the Implied Author of Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier Black?” Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the Americas. Ed. James J. Donahue, Jennifer Ho, and Shaun Morgan. In Preparation.

(with Jeanne Cortiel). “Editorial: (En)Sounding the Future.” Sounds of the Future: Musical and Sonic Anticipation in American Popular Culture. Spec. issue of Act—Zeitschrift für Musik & Performance 6 (2015). 1-13. Web. 13 Jan. 2016.

“All Kinds of Queer Rednecks: The Sexual Politics of Contemporary Country Music.” America and the Musical Unconscious. Ed. Julius Greve and Sascha Pöhlmann. New York/Dresden: Atropos P, 2015. 65-92. Print.

“Nashville—The Authentic Heart and Soul of Country Music?” Rural America. Ed. Antje Kley and Heike Paul. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015. 327-345. Print.

“Dissimulating Blackness: The Degenerative Satires of Paul Beatty and Percival Everett.” Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights. Ed. Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2014. 150-161. Print.

“Singing 9/11: Mourning Humanity in U.S.-American Popular Music.” 9/11 as Catalyst: American and British Cultural Responses. Spec. issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 58 (2010): 23-37. Print.
As Editor

(with Jeanne Cortiel). Sounds of the Future: Musical and Sonic Anticipation in American Popular Culture. Spec. issue of Act—Zeitschrift für Musik & Performance 6 (2015). Web. 13 Jan. 2016.

“Postblack Aesthetics: The Freedom to Be Black in Contemporary African American Fiction” (Dissertation; Advisor: Prof. Dr. Helmbrecht Breinig; University of Erlangen-Nuremberg); submitted and defended (May 14, 2014); grade: “summa cum laude”

Translation/transcription of various interviews conducted by David P. Boder with Holocaust survivors for the digital project Voices of the Holocaust under supervision by the Illinois Institute of Technology (http://voices.iit.ed) [German – English]

Co-Translator of David P. Boder’s I Did Not Interview the Dead. Ed. Julia Faisst, Alan Rosen, and Werner Sollors. Winter, 2011. [English – German]

Presentations

“Garth Brooks’s Concept Album Chris Gaines Greatest Hits; or, Why Country Music Wasn’t Ready for Chris Gaines” (11/2015)

(“Kleine Formen, große Konzepte. Ein genreübergreifender Blick auf Anspruch und Widerspruch konzeptionellen Denkens in der populären Musik“; Panel at „Große Formen in der populären Musik/Large-Scale Forms in Popular Music“; Zentrum für Populäre Kultur und Musik, Freiburg)

“Famous in a Small Town”: Contemporary Country Music and/as Popular Culture (6/2015)

(Guest Lecture; University of Leipzig)
“Song of the South”: Country Music and/as Southern Music (2015)

(Guest lecture in the Graduate Seminar “Language, Literature, and Culture in the American South”; Prof. Jeanne Cortiel and Prof. Susanne Mühleisen, University of Bayreuth)

(America and the Musical Unconscious, LMU & Junior Year in Munich)

(The Futures of Black Studies, University of Bremen)

“Postblack Aesthetics: ‘Redefining Complex Notions of Blackness’ in Contemporary African American Literature” (2014)

(Lecture series Current Issues in North American Studies and Cultural Studies; University of Bonn)

“Famous in a Small Town”: The Authenticity of Unpopularity in Country Music (2013)

(Unpopular Culture, Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich)

“Nashville—The Heart and Soul of Country Music?” (2013)

(DGfA annual conference, Rural America, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg)

“Faking the ‘Real’ Black Text—or, Six Degrees of Sidney Poitier” (2012)

(Fake Identities? Impostors, ConMen, Wannabes in North American Culture, A Symposium, University of Jena)

“Invisible Walls and Cosmopolitan Conviviality: Paul Beatty’s Slumberland (2008)” (2011)

(DGfA annual conference, Transnational American Studies, University of Regensburg)

“Singing 9/11: Mourning Humanity in Popular Music” (2009)

(9/11 as Catalyst: American and British Cultural Responses, University of Bayreuth)

“Treading the (Academic) Fault Lines of (Black) Writing in Everett’s Erasure (2001)” (2009)

(DGfA annual conference, Education and the USA, University of Jena)

“Postethnicity as Groundless Solidarity” (2006)

(Annual conference of the American Literature Association, ALA, in San Francisco, MELUS-sponsored panel: Beyond Multiculturalism)

Country Music and its politics of (un)popularity

Issues of Authenticity (in literature and music)

“The curvature of intersubjective space”—The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas

“Postsoul and Postethnic Literatures—Theorizing Postblack Aesthetics”

“Charles Chesnutt’s Quest for Loyalty: ‘The March of Progress’ and ‘The Wife of His Youth’”

“Talking to the Enemy: The Protest of Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin”

2015 Dissertation Award of the Bavarian American Academy

of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology of the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg

2004 – 2007 German Research Foundation (DFG) Fellowship

2006 Bavarian American Academy (BAA) Postgraduate Scholarship (travel grant; attendance of ALA conference San Francisco; research trip to UC Berkeley & Widener Library, Harvard University)

2001 – 2002 German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Scholarship (Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Afro- American Studies)
Other

2013 Work-session moderator at student-organized conference “Die Intermediale” (University of Bayreuth)

2012 Panel chaired at the conference The Shaping Power of Risk: Literature, Culture, Environment (University of Bayreuth)

2/2012 Certificate “University Teaching” (FBZHL, University of Bayreuth) ProfiLehre Bayern

2010 Co-Organizer of “ReVisions of American Studies” at U of Bayreuth (network of younger scholars of American Studies)

2009 panels chaired at the conferences 9/11 as Catalyst (Bayreuth) and Critical Perspectives: Turns, Trends, Theories (annual Gradnet conference, Erlangen)

2007 Bavarian American Academy Summer Institute “Ethnicity and Society in America” (contributing participant)

2005-2006 Elected Representative of the fellows, DFG-graduate college

2003-2004 Student assistant in a research project on “Inter-American Studies” by Prof. Dr. Helmbrecht Breinig (U of Erlangen-Nuremberg)
Courses Taught (since 2006; Universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Bayreuth, selection)

Edgar Allan Poe: Renaissance Man

“What’s Race Got To Do With It?” Contemporary African American Fiction

Postmodern American Drama: From Albee and Mamet to Hwang and Kushner

Race and Identity in African American Fiction

The Beat Generation: Poetry and Prose

(Re-)Writing Slavery: The Slave Narrative and the African American Narrative Tradition

From Poe to Chesnutt: 19^th Century American Short Stories

Black Feminist Literature

Passing for White: Negotiating Identities in African American Fiction

“The End of Something”: Fragmented Stories of Modernity

The Satire of Race: Reading Contemporary Black Satire

The Plays of Eugene O’Neill

“Isn’t It Pretty to Think So?”: The Fiction of Ernest Hemingway

Since 2015 Member of the Governing Board of the Bayreuth Institute for American Studies

(BIFAS)

2009 Member of the Search Committee (Berufungskommission) for the W2-Professorship

“The Representation of Space and Place in in Stephen Crane’s Maggie and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie”

“Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained as Modern Rendition of the Classic Slave Narrative—A Comparison to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave”

“Voice in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God”

“American Race Relations in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: How Racial Theories Influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Perception of Race”

“David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Transcending Postmodernism?”

“Chappelle’s Show and Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks—Satire or Racism?”

German: native language

English: near-native (TOEFL-score: 300 out of 300)

Spanish: reading (Unicert I)

French: reading
Professional Memberships

DGfA Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien (German Association for American Studies)

MELUS The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States

BIFAS Bayreuth Institute for American Studies

BAA Bavarian American Academy

CSJ Charles Johnson Society

BAAAS Bayreuth Academy for Advanced African Studies