Leibniz ScienceCampus Regensburg - Europe and America in the Modern World

The lecture series continues this Wednesday with Victoria Harms (Johns Hopkins University) who is going to talk about “The Games that Made a President: The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles & Ronald Reagan’s America”.

14.15, H5, open to all!

With the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles approaching, this presentation revisits the meaning of LA84 for Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It discusses the ways in which the Games shaped American perceptions of their country and its place in the world. Archival research in the Reagan Presidential Library, the LA84 Foundation, UCLA Special Collection, and in relevant national newspapers illustrates how Reagan used the Olympics to portray himself as a man of world peace, an advocate for women and a champion of diversity. While many West Europeans chafed at Reagan’s Cold War rhetoric and his policies, this presentation discusses how, after a difficult first term, decade-long domestic discord and economic woes, the Games helped propel him by November 1984 to one of the most stunning electoral victories in U.S. history.

Find the whole abstract on our website!

Universität Regensburg IOS Regensburg Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

Join our friends at REAF - Regensburg European American Forum onb Monday 29 June for an exchange with Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, who on Thursday gave a brilliant keynote talk at our annual conference

STUDENT ROUNDTABLE with Amrita Chakrabarti Myers (IU Bloomington). After her fabulous keynote at the LSC Annual Conference, don‘t miss out on this conversation about „Black Women and U.S. History in the Age of Trump“
⏰ Monday, 29 June, 2:30pm
📌 S0.15, UR Campus

Excited to be collaborating with Seeffield - see you on Thursday for a talk with our visiting scholar Karin Roginer Hofmeister

Mark your calendars! 📚 🌟

On June 25 🗓️, Karin Roginer Hofmeister (Charles University, Prague) joins us for a deep dive into postsecular memory studies and the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in shaping hybrid spaces of remembrance.

🕓16:00-18:00
📍AlFi, R. 017

The talk argues that in contexts of political upheaval and moral uncertainty, the quest for collective memory becomes especially urgent, and religious institutions such as the Serbian Orthodox Church emerge as influential actors in both memory-making and identity formation within the evolving post-socialist, post-conflict, and post-secular public sphere.

"Borders are created by the law. But they are what people make of them."

Congrats to the successful launch of our second research network "Law and Borders" led by Dr. Marie Beyrich and Dr. Mélanie Sadozaï.👏

About the network:
Drawing on our backgrounds in law and border studies, our project begins with the observation that law does not only draw borders on paper. It shapes and regulates them, creating thresholds that complicate the lives of those who cross or live alongside them. Borders, in this sense, are not static lines but shifting legal constructs that affect who may move, under what conditions, and with what consequences.

The Law & Borders Network, launched at this event, is both a research agenda and a collaborative experiment. By grounding legal analysis in interdisciplinary dialogue and fieldwork, we hope to capture the evolving, uneven, and deeply human realities of borders.
Period of funding: 2026-2028

Read more about the launch event on the UR website: https://www.uni-regensburg.de/en/university/news-events/news/news/15-06-2026_law-and-borders-new-early-career-research-network-in-regensburg


Universität Regensburg Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

Newly arrived, Jeff Veidlinger will be speaking in the joint LSC-Graduate School research colloquium on Thursday, 25 June. You are warmly invited to attend his talk on American Zion: The Global Plan to Settle Jews in the American West, where he will explore the Galveston Movement, a plan initiated in 1907 to redirect Jewish migration from Russia away from New York and the Northeast through the port of Galveston, Texas in an attempt to settle Jews in the Great Plains of the United States. The story sheds important light on issues related to Zionism, migration, and race in the United States and around the Jewish world.

Prof. Veidlinger will also give a talk on Thursday 18 June at the LSC annual conference (Panel 4, starting 15:30 at IOS, Room 319) on Autoemancipation and Self-Determination: Jewish Autonomy and National Sovereignty in the Twilight of Empire, 1903-1919.

Both events are open to all. No registration is required.

Universität Regensburg Graduiertenschule für Ost- und Südosteuropastudien IOS Regensburg Leibniz-Gemeinschaft
University of Michigan Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia

👋The ScienceCampus is deligthed to welcome three further visiting researchers!

Kamil Kowalski (Uniwersytet Łódzki), assistant professor at the Department of the History of Economics, joins on a DAAD Eastern Partnership (Ostpartnership) visit through the University of Regensburg.

Alexandra Rahr (University of Toronto), is associate professor in the teaching stream in American Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.

Jeffrey Veidlinger (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) is a Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies and Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at the University of Michigan.


Universität Regensburg IOS Regensburg Leibniz-Gemeinschaft
Graduiertenschule für Ost- und Südosteuropastudien

⚽This Wednesday, Ben Chappel, Professor of American Studies The University of Kansas, is going to discuss commerce and culture in American Sports while responding to the question if the US could win the 2026 world cup. As a REAF - Regensburg European American Forum visiting professor he will also be moderating the roundtable “ The (In)Dependence of Knowledge? Academic Freedom Today” this Wednesday at 18:30.

Abstract: The United States is co-hosting the FIFA World Cup this summer, 96 years after the best-ever finish of its men’s team in the tournament, reaching the semifinals in the first championship, in Uruguay. For the U.S. to host the most prominent sporting event in the world under an administration that has wrecked U.S. international relations and practiced violent hostility to foreigners within its jurisdiction presents a very specific kind of spectacle. Beyond these current circumstances, the tournament brings into relief a perennial question: will the most powerful nation-state in the world ever compete at the top level of the world’s game? ...

Find the whole abstract on our website!


Universität Regensburg IOS Regensburg Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

📯Join us! The roundtable brings together Marie Beyrich (Regensburg), Ulf Brunnbauer (Regensburg), Marike Janzen (Kansas), Livia de Souza Lima (Regensburg), and Marta Vicente (Kansas). We are very grateful that Ben Chappell (Kansas) has kindly agreed to chair the session and guide the discussion. And, of course, we are delighted that UR's strategic partner, The University of Kansas, is represented so well.

Taking up the broader conference theme of in/ter/dependence, the roundtable is intended to explore the conditions, limits, and contested meanings of academic freedom today. We would like to invite you to approach the topic from an angle of your choice, drawing on your research, institutional experience, regional expertise, or broader reflections. Possible points of departure might include political interference in academia and knowledge circulation, war, censorship (and self-censorship), as well as university structures, academic hierarchies, precarity, and organizational cultures. We are especially interested in discussing how these factors shape the production and circulation of knowledge, where academic independence is under threat, and where dependence and independence become more complexly entangled.


Universität Regensburg IOS Regensburg Leibniz-Gemeinschaft REAF - Regensburg European American Forum

We’re delighted to welcome Prof. Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Ruth N. Halls Professor at the Departments of History and Gender Studies at Indiana University and current visiting professor at the REAF - Regensburg European American Forum, who will be giving the second keynote of our annual conference: “Dangerous Characters”: Black Women, Constructions of Freedom, and White Violence in the Post-Civil War South.

⏰18 June, 17:00
📍R319, IOS (Landshuter Str. 4)

Freedom. A small word with a long, often tortuous history. Its definition is constantly evolving, and still hotly contested. Perhaps the only thing people can agree on is that, as US labor activist and leader A. Philip Randolph noted, “Freedom is never granted. It is won.” This talk focuses on this “friction of freedom” by focusing on the lives of Black women in the Post-Civil War South.
Find the full abstract on our website!

Universität Regensburg IOS Regensburg Leibniz-Gemeinschaft