Prof. Timo Müller: Transnational Mobility on the American Road

Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, is pleased to invite you to a lecture by Professor Timo Müller (University of Regensburg) “TRANSNATIONAL MOBILITY ON THE AMERICAN ROAD”.

Timo Müller is Professor and interim Chair of American Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany. His research areas include modernism, environmental studies, and African American studies. He is author of The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway (2010) and The African American Sonnet: A Literary History (UP of Mississippi, 2018). He has also written on environmental mobility, German ecocritical theory, and the influence of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory on environmental studies. His work has appeared in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He was a visiting professor at Ege University (Izmir, Turkey) and a visiting fellow at the British Library, Harvard, and Yale.

Mobility, with its attendant promises of freedom, adventure, and individualism, has been a key feature in narratives of the “American way of life.” Countless songs, movies, photographs, novels, and travel guides have depicted the American road as a “national” space. This lecture challenges such nationalist narratives by drawing attention to the transnational mobilities enacted on the American road. It discusses the pioneers’ interactions with Native Americans and other nations, the role of immigrants in sustaining American mobility, and the ambiguities of the cross-border road.

All welcome!