Of ‘Contact Zones’ and ‘Liminal Spaces’

Ursula Lehmkuhl is Professor of International History at the University of Trier and director of the International Research Training Group Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces. Her research interests include migration history, colonial history, environmental history, and the history of international relations. She has published several books, among them Pax Anglo-Americana: Machtstrukturelle Grundlagen anglo-amerikanischer Asien- und Fernostpolitik in den 1950er Jahren (1999), From Enmity to Friendship: Anglo-American Relations in the 19th and 20th Century (2005) (co-edited with Gustav Schmidt), Historians and Nature: Comparative Approaches to Environmental History (co-edited with Hermann Wellenreuther) (2007), Regieren ohne Staat? Governance in Räumen begrenzter Staatlichkeit (2007) (co-edited with Thomas Risse), and Provincializing the United States (2014) (coedited with Norbert Finzsch and Eva Bischoff). She is currently working on a book enTitled Das Dilemma der Gleichheit: Die Konstruktion und Repräsentation von ‘Vielfalt’ und ‘Differenz’ im euro-atlantischen Raum des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts.

Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink is Professor of Romance Cultural Studies and Intercultural Communication at Saarland University. He holds a PhD in Romance Philology (Bayreuth, Germany) and in History (EHESS, France) and is co-director of the International Research Training Group Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces. His research fields concern cultural transfers between France and Germany and between Europe and non-European societies, conceptual history, francophone literatures and medias (Québec, Sub-Saharan Africa), and the theory of intercultural communication. Recent books: (co-edited with Christoph Vatter): Multiculturalisme et diversité culturelle dans les médias au Canada et au Québec (2013); (co-edited with Aurélien Boivin and Jacques Walter): Régionalismes littéraires et artistiques comparés. Québec/Canada – Europe (2014); Le livre aimé du peuple. Les almanachs québécois de 1777 à nos jours (2014); (co-edited with Marc-André and Clorinda Donato): Jesuit Accounts on the Colonial Americas. Intercultural Transfers, intellectual Disputes, and Textualities (2014); (co-edited with Sylvère Mbondobari): Villes coloniales/métropoles postcoloniales. Représentations littéraires, images médiatiques et regards croisés (2015); (co-edited with Michel Espagne): Transferts de savoirs sur l’Afrique (2015).

Laurence McFalls is Professor of Political Science at Université de Montréal as well as director of the Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes and of the International Research Training Group Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces. His research interests include social theory, German politics and culture since re-unification, GDR history and memory politics, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and the emergence of new modes of therapeutic domination. His recent books are Construire le politique: causalité, contingence et connaissance (2006) and Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered (2007). Together with Mariella Pandolfi, he has published numerous articles and book chapters offering a critical analysis of contemporary humanitarian and neoliberal politics.

Ludger Pries is Professor of Sociology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He taught and did research in Brazil, Mexico, Spain and the USA. Main fields of research are Sociology of Organisations, Work and Labour Regulation, migration in international comparison, transnationalisation, transnational migration and processes of social incorporation. He was/is member of editorial boards of five scientific journals and is Deputy President of the Expert Council of German Foundations on Integration and Migration (SVR). Recent books include Cross-border Staff Mobility. German and Mexican Profit- and Non-Profit-Organisations between Centre-Periphery and Transnationalization (2014, Houndmills: Palgrave), Shifting Boundaries of Belonging and New Migration Dynamics in Europe and China (2013, New York: Palgrave), Cross-Border Migrant Organisations in Comparative Perspective (2012, Houndmills: Palgrave).

Regine Robin is a historian, novelist, translator and professor of sociology. Starting her university career in France, she moved to the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1978 where she was professor of sociology until 2004. Her research interests include, among others, questions of identity, Yiddish culture, questions on collective memory, and culture(s) during the interwar period between World War I and World War II. She received different Prizes, like the Prix du Gouverneur général au Canada for her book Le Réalisme socialiste : une esthétique impossible (1986) and le Prix Jacques Rousseau de l’Association canadienne-française pour l’avancement des sciences for her whole work. She has published numerous books, among them Histoire et linguistique (1973), Le Discours social et ses usages (1983), Le Roman mémoriel: de l’histoire à l’écriture du hors-lieu (1989), Berlin Chantiers. Essai sur les passés fragiles (2001), for which she was awarded the Grand prix du livre de Montréal; La mémoire saturée (2003) and Nous autres les autres. Difficile pluralisme (2011). Her work also includes prose fiction, such as the novel La Québécoite (1983) and L’immense fatigue des pierres. Biofictions (1998).

Phillip Rousseau holds a joint PhD in anthropology from the Université de Montréal and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris). His research has focused mainly on contemporary negotiated uses and elaboration of frameworks attempting to ensure attention to culture(s) in a wide range of contrasting institutionalized fields. Thus far, his venture in the proliferation of such efforts to gain cultural insight has led him to engage with this topic in international politics (UNESCO, WTO), North American marketing and the U.S. military (Human Terrain System). He currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Montreal with the International Research Training Group (IRTG) Diversity.

Werner Schiffauer is Professor of Comparative Social and Cultural Anthropology at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). His research interests include anthropology of migration, the organization of societal heterogeneity, Islam in Europe and anthropology of the state. He has published several books, among them Die Gottesmänner – Türkische Islamisten in Deutschland (Suhrkamp 2000); Migration und kulturelle Differenz (Studie für das Büro der Ausländerbeauftragten des Senats von Berlin, 2002); Parallelgesellschaften. Wieviel Wertekonsens braucht unsere Gesellschaft? Ethnographische Überlegungen (transcript 2008); Nach dem Islamismus. Die Islamische Gemeinde Milli Görüs. Eine Ethnographie (Suhrkamp 2010).

Bertrand Westphal is Professor for Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Limoges, where he also leads the research group “E.A. 1087 Espaces Humains et Interactions Culturelles”. He has developed an analytical approach called ‘geocriticism’, a concept that is quickly expanding as it is applied in studies of the representation of space in literature and the arts. He elaborated the fundamental principles of geocriticism in La Géocritique (2007) and Le Monde plausible (2011), two essays published in French with Minuit, Paris, and in English with Palgrave Macmillan, New York. A third volume, La Cage des méridiens, will be published in 2016. Westphal has applied the concept of geocriticism to the study of 1) Austrian literature, Austro-fictions. Une géographie de l’intime (Rouen, Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2010) and 2) Mediterranean literature, L’oeil de la Méditerranée. Une odyssée littéraire (éditions de l’Aube, 2005). Westphal previously examined the novelistic transpositions of the Gospels from a narratological perspective in Roman et évangile (Pulim, 2002).