Home > Fellowships & Grants : Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute
Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute (TASI)
Borders in Motion — New Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion across Europe and North America
Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute in European Studies—Graduate Student Fellowship Program
July 8 - July 20, 2013, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA.
Application deadline: April 22, 2013
Presented by the Center for German & European Studies at the University of Minnesota, which is funded by the University of Minnesota and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), in cooperation with Europa Universität Viadrina (Germany) and the Institut d'Histoire Culturelle Européenne and Université de Lorraine (France).
We thank all cooperating partners and sponsors for their generous support.
Working Schedule & Documents
Working Schedule/Program. Full program content is available for registered participants in the Summer Institute after admission to the program. If you are a registered participant and need to access this page, please e-mail Jessica Oakes .
Overview
Since 2001 the Trans-Atlantic Summer Institutes (TASI) provide a unique forum for advanced graduate students from North America, Germany, and other European countries to explore together topics relating to Germany's and Europe's history, politics, and society. Each summer, 10-12 European and 10-12 North American graduate students work intensively for two weeks and explore in depth questions that will enrich their dissertations in German and European Studies. The Summer Institutes are co-taught by a multi-disciplinary team of faculty and aim to make a major contribution to the training of the next generation of experts on Germany and Europe. They introduce European students to the American university; North American students will acquire a similar familiarity with the European setting. They foster the international discussions and collaborations that are fundamental to the scholarly enterprise. As a student in the Summer Institute, you will learn how to combine the best aspects of training in both settings—the close attention to archival sources and their interpretation in Europe with the broad trans-disciplinary readings that characterize North American scholarship.
TASI is a non-credit seminar for advanced graduate-level students in all fields; the 2013 Institute will convene on the campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (USA).
Topic
"Mobility" and "flexibility" are buzz words of the postsocialist, post-9/11 decades. With E.U. enlargement, national borders between member states have become less important. At the same time, new internal boundaries proliferate: distinctions between immigrants and native citizens, between "ethnic" and supposedly non-ethnic groups, between religious communities and a supposedly secular and liberal society. Emancipatory values and human rights seem to become instruments of distinctions. Religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities are often pitted against one another. The new boundaries are reconfirmed through public policy, practices, and security technology and reflected in discourses of belonging. The 2013 Trans-Atlantic Summer Institute draws on a broad range of academic fields—including anthropology, sociology, political philosophy, history, political science, and cultural studies—to investigate dynamics of inclusion and exclusion across Europe and North America. Fellows will engage an array of intriguing questions: How do we most appropriately conceptualize phenomena of inclusion and exclusion in late modern heterogeneous societies? What criteria are employed to mark differences and how does the function of difference itself change? How do security regimes reinscribe differences of gender, sexuality, and race? How do these processes and dynamics resemble each other or differ in the E.U. and North America?
TASI 2013 provides fellows an excellent opportunity to explore these and other questions across disciplinary fields. The Institute offers a diverse mix of seminar discussions of key readings, research presentations by guest faculty and fellows, and informal discussions of fellows' research projects. The international faculty team solicits applications from young scholars in the social sciences and humanities who are eager to situate their own projects at the intersection of several fields.
Faculty
Anika Keinz is assistant professor of Comparative Cultural and Social Anthropology of late modern societies at European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder). Her publications include Polens Andere. Verhandlungen von Geschlecht und Sexualität in Polen nach 1989 (Bielefeld: Transcript 2008) and "European Desires and National Bedrooms? Negotiating 'Normalcy' in Postsocialist Poland" (2011). Her research focuses on issues of inequality, discourses of belonging, and cultural, religious and sexual rights in late modern societies, as well as the intersection of scholarly, activist, and artistic interventions in politics and the public sphere.
Matthias Rothe is assistant professor in the department of German, Scandinavian & Dutch at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Lesen und Zuschauen im 18. Jahrhundert, die Erzeugung und Aufhebung von Abwesenheit (Königshausen & Neumann, 2005) and of various articles on conceptions of surveillance and control in late modernity. He works at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and conceptual history and is especially interested in the correlation between (security-) technologies and knowledge production.
Fellowship Information & Application Materials
The Institute is intended for advanced graduate students working toward a Ph.D. or other terminal degree at a North American or European university. Preference will be given to students who have already defined a dissertation topic. The language of instruction is English. Competency in English and a reading knowledge of another European language are required. Logistics: arrive in Minneapolis on Monday, July 8 for the TASI opening dinner; class starts on Tuesday, July 9; class ends on Saturday, July 20 at 1 p.m.; depart from Minneapolis on Saturday, July 20 after 2:30 p.m.
Pending final budget approval, all fellows will receive a fellowship to cover most expenses:
- Institute tuition
- Housing and meals for the duration of the Institute
- Access to library and archival materials and Internet resources
Fellowships for advanced graduate students enrolled at North American universities will also include up to $350 in support of round-trip airfare to Minneapolis. This support will be granted on a matching fund basis. The fellow's home department will need to provide at least $200 to trigger the University of Minnesota match. Unfortunately the tight fiscal situation at US universities at present precludes a similar arrangement for the European university fellows.
Complete applications for admission to the Institute must be received by April 22, 2013. Applications may be submitted electronically to cges@umn.edu. If you choose this option, please put "2013 TASI Application" in subject line. Decisions will be made by May 10, 2013.
A complete application consists of 1) a letter of interest, 2) a two-page dissertation abstract, or a two-page statement about the relevance of this topic to the applicant's research, 3) a curriculum vitae, 4) an unofficial graduate transcript, and 5) one confidential letter of recommendation by a faculty member familiar with the applicant's research project. The letter of interest should include information on the applicant's scholarly background, interests, and career goals. The statement should address how the Institute topic fits into the applicant's program of study, and what the applicant hopes to gain through participation in the Institute. Please send applications to:
Professors Matthias Rothe and Anika Keinz
DAAD Center for German & European Studies
University of Minnesota
214 Social Science Building
267— 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
USA
cges@umn.edu
