Welcome!

Doing Southern Studies Today

This international conference aims to bring together scholars who want to share their

work on “the South” and “doing Southern Studies” in an uncommon place: Berlin – a

place outside the South. Unfortunately, because of the current pandemic, Berlin was

substituted by a digital space. Our objectives remain: We want to explore the

trajectories of Southern Studies in and outside the U.S. We owe our title to Scott

Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson who claim that “[d]oing Southern Studies is

unmasking and refusing the binary thinking – ‘North’/‘South,’ nation/South, First

World/Third World, self/other,” it is “thinking geographically, thinking historically,

thinking relationally, thinking about power, thinking about justice, thinking back” (2016).

We take their definitions as this conference’s objective and seek an exchange of these

thoughts. We are particularly interested in the South as a “multiplicity of communities”

(Richard Gray 2002), factoring in race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity; queer

perspectives in Southern Studies; the role of indigeneity in the study of the South; the

role (or rather the problematic exclusivity) of whiteness in Southern Studies;

imaginations of “the South” in popular media; the Global South and the possible

transnational routes of Southern Studies.

This conference is supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), as part of

the DFG-project "Liminal Whiteness."

Due to the effects of the current pandemic and the resulting travel restrictions, this

conference will take place online, via Zoom. All panels are scheduled according to

Central European Time (Berlin). To register, please send an e-mail to the

conference organizers Greta Kaisen and Evangelia Kindinger:

Please specify which days you’d like to attend.

See you in January 2021!