The Morbidity of Culture

Contents: Stephanie Siewert: Reflections on the Culture(s) of Morbidity or the Morbidity of Culture - Rüdiger Kunow: «People between two countries always feel sorrow»: Some Preliminary Reflections on Transnational Affects - Antonia Mehnert: « Ou libéré ? » Transnational Trauma in Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat - John Carlos Rowe: Disease, Culture, and Transnationalism in the Americas - Marc Priewe: Making Sense of Morbidity in Early American Autobiography - Ariane Schröder: 'Descent into Hell': The Cultural and Biomedical Signification of Depression in William Styron's Darkness Visible - Sandra Poppe: The Aesthetics of Death and Mourning in American Literature and Film - Frederike Offizier: Death of the Other: Dying, Alterity, and Appropriation - Stephanie Siewert: «As for France, the Nation has Disposed of You»: The Penal Colony as Morbid Space and Discourse of Life.

Stephanie Siewert is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Potsdam and a fellow of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. She received her M.A. degree in American Studies, Comparative Literature and Educational Science. Her dissertation project focuses on carceral spaces and modalities of social visibility in literature and film of the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the co-editor of the essay collection Spaces of Desire - Spaces of Transition. Space and Emotion in Modern Literature (2011). Her main research interests include theories of space, affect theory, ethical criticism, and cultures of/in mobility.
Antonia Mehnert is a PhD candidate at the University of Munich (American Studies Department), working on her dissertation project entitled «The Cultural Imaginary of Climate Change». She is furthermore participating in the structured doctoral program «Environment and Society» at the Rachel Carson Center. For her dissertation project she receives a scholarship from the Foundation of German Business. She studied American Studies, Latin-American studies and Economics at the University of Potsdam and the Free University Berlin. Her research interests include ecocriticism, Chicano/a Studies, the Caribbean, transnationalism, postcolonialism.