with
Melissa Gira Grant (The New Republic)
Teresa Eder (Wilson Center)
Frank Usbeck (GRASSI Museum for Ethnology)
Moderator: Sebastian Herrmann
(Institute for American Studies Leipzig)
This digital event will be live streamed via YouTube.
You can also join the panelists in the Zoom call. To register for the Zoom call, please send an email to mail@dai-sachsen.de
Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic. Melissa has reported on gender, sexuality, politics, and justice for more than a decade. She is the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work. Before coming to The New Republic, Melissa was a contributing writer at the Village Voice and Pacific Standard.
Melissa Grant recently published an extensive analysis of the cultification of the American right and on the sexual politics of QAnon.
Teresa Eder is a program associate for the Global Europe Program at the Wilson Center. Previously, she was a freelance journalist and producer focused on societal divisions, identity, and extremism. Before moving to the United States in 2015, Ms. Eder worked in several different positions for the Austrian newspaper Der Standard, including Deputy Head of the Foreign Affairs Department. She broadened her experience at the World Bank, the Atlantic Council and Human Rights First. Ms. Eder holds Master’s degrees in International Relations, Political Science, and Journalism from Georgetown University, the University of Vienna and the University of Applied Sciences in Vienna, respectively. She is an avid violinist, performing regularly with orchestras and chamber music groups in the DC area.
She recently published an article on the transatlantic dimensions of QAnon.
Dr. Frank Usbeck is a researcher in the humanities, and curator for the Americas at the State Art Collections Dresden / Ethnographic Collections Saxony (SKD/SES), a museum collaboration with three cultural-anthropology museums in Leipzig, Dresden, and Herrnhut. Dr. Usbeck holds an MA (magister artium) in American studies, modern and contemporary history, and journalism from Leipzig University. During his study-abroad year at the University of Arizona, he majored in American Indian Studies. In 2010, he earned his PhD at Leipzig, combining these disciplines in a study on Native American imagery in German periodicals and, particularly, in Nazi propaganda. His book titled Fellow Tribesmen was published with Berghahn (New York) in 2015.
In response to January 6, he published an article on political cosplay, nationalism, and cultural appropriation.
Dr. Sebastian M. Herrmann is an assistant professor at American Studies Leipzig. He published his dissertation on "Presidential Unrealities: Epistemic Panic, Cultural Work, and the US Presidency" in 2014 and has published widely on discourses of the fake and the real in US politics. He is currently preparing a project on "Populism as Non-Narrative" that sets out to theorize the poetics of post-narrative politics.