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REAF Meet and Greet with Kansas visiting Fellows Nishani Frazier and Ben Chappell

REAF and the ScienceCampus cordially invite you to a Meet and Greet with our guests from the University of Kansas Prof. Dr. Nishani Frazier (Associate Professor of American Studies and History, University of Kansas – Leibniz Science Campus Regensburg Visiting Fellow) and Prof. Dr. Ben Chappell (Professor of American Studies, University of Kansas – Leibniz Science Campus Regensburg Visiting Fellow) on Wednesday, 29 June 2022, 6 p.m. (s.t.) in SG 2.14 (CITAS office)

 

You will have the opportunity to get to know REAF’s and the Leibniz ScienceCampus Regensburg’s next guest, Prof. Dr. Nishani Frazier, while we are also bidding farewell to Prof. Dr. Ben Chappell, who has been here for June and will unfotunately be leaving at the end of this month. They will be talking about their work at KU, American Studies and Area Studies there, as well as the longstanding cooperation between KU and UR.

REAF and the ScienceCampus cordially invite you to a Meet and Greet with our guests from the University of Kansas Prof. Dr. Nishani Frazier (Associate Professor of American Studies and History, University of Kansas – Leibniz Science Campus Regensburg Visiting Fellow) and Prof. Dr. Ben Chappell (Professor of American Studies, University of Kansas – Leibniz Science Campus Regensburg Visiting Fellow) on Wednesday, 29 June 2022, 6 p.m. (s.t.) in SG 2.14 (CITAS office)

You will have the opportunity to get to know REAF’s and the Leibniz ScienceCampus Regensburg’s next guest, Prof. Dr. Nishani Frazier, while we are also bidding farewell to Prof. Dr. Ben Chappell, who has been here for June and will unfotunately be leaving at the end of this month. They will be talking about their work at KU, American Studies and Area Studies there, as well as the longstanding cooperation between KU and UR.

Where? SG.214 (CITAS) in Sammelgebäude at UR

When? Weds 29 June, 18:00


Nishani Frazier is Associate Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Kansas. Her areas of research include African American History, including freedom, resistance and social movements; gentrification; oral history and historical methods; and digital history and black digital humanities. Before taking up her post at Kansas, she was Associate Curator of African American History and Archives at Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS), Assistant to the Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Archives at the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and personal assistant for Dr. John Hope Franklin, before and during his tenure as chair of President Bill Clinton's advisory board on "One America". She was also professor at the Miami University, Ohio.

Her most recent book publication is  Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism (University of Arkansas Press, 2017), and was released with an accompanying website also titled Harambee City. She has published extensively in academic journals and edited volumes, as well as on scholarly blogs, while also producing digital history projects showcasing her oral history studies on black urban history, resistance and social movements, including Voices of the Displaced: The Fight Over Sound and Space Gentrification. For more on Nishani Frazier and her publication record click here.


Ben Chappell is Professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas, where he teaches in areas of identity, ethnography, cultural studies and critical theory. He is an ethnographer of Mexican America, trained in the tradition of Américo Paredes and specializing in the politics and aesthetics of vernacular cultural forms. In this work he has published books on lowrider custom car style and community-based softball as modern Mexican American traditions. In 2021 he shared the honor with other presenters at the inaugural International Lowrider Studies conference of being named “Lowrider Scholar-Activist of the Year.” He founded the Ethnography Caucus of the American Studies Association and has served leadership roles in the Mid-America American Studies Association and the Society for the Anthropology of North America. He taught courses in Regensburg as a guest of American Studies in 2015 and as a Fulbright visiting professor in 2018. During his time at Regensburg, he will collaborate closely with the ScienceCampus’ Regensburg European-American Forum (REAF) and the American Studies department.

His most recent book  is Mexican American Fastpitch: Identity at Play in Vernacular Sport (Stanford UP, 2021), while he has also published the book Lowrider Space: Aesthetics and Politics of Mexican American Custom Cars (University of Texas Press, 2012) as well as numerous articles on popular sport, aesthetics and other aspects of Mexican American culture where he has employed ethnographic approaches. In Regensburg, he will be developing a new project at the intersection of cultural studies and critical university studies that examines how certain contemporary sites, including high-tech industry, business management, and neoliberal market-based models of social organization, have produced powerful forms of epistemology that in turn come to bear on intellectual work in the academy. His study will consider, among other things, data collection, the use of algorithms and the transnational transfer of “the American model” of research management. His current turn to critical university studies originated in teaching about neoliberalism and his efforts to mentor graduate students entering a profession in seemingly perpetual crisis. This new research trajectory centers on an examination of knowledge ideologies, a subject first presented in a lecture in Regensburg entitled “Everything Can Be Counted/Nothing Can Be Known.” He will commence his first field research since the COVID pandemic this fall, examining the epistemology and socialization of university faculty members who move into positions in administration.  

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