Heike Paul's lecture discusses civil sentimentalism as a central element of U.S. political culture, i.e. a code of political communication, a motor for social change, and a culturally specific pattern of crisis management. Taking its cue from scholarship in the field of affect studies, the talk examines different recent forms and functions of sentimental community-building that range from powerful displays of statecraft to the affective mobilization in protest movements and aesthetic practices. Thus, a civil sentimentalist code can be activated both as part of a habitus of power or it can serve the articulation of protest and resistance. Its discontent may be seen in its (more or less) successful channeling of diffuse affects into accepted repertoires of public feeling, its tendency to prioritize affective identification in political discourse, and its potential disavowal of (historical) guilt. 

In preparation, students can look at George Washington's "Farewell Address" alongside its invocation in "One Last Time" from the musical Hamilton;  Laura Bush's opinion piece, and photographer Jon Henry's series "Stranger Fruit".

Heike Paul is chair of American Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuernberg and director of the Bavarian American Academy in Munich. She received her degrees from Goethe University Frankfurt and Leipzig University. In 2018, she was recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation, and she has been a member of the Bavarian American Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2019. She held fellowships at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, the IFUSS at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Graz University, and the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. Twice, she was Visiting Harris Professor at Dartmouth College. Among her publications are The Myths That Made America (2014), Understanding Stewart O’Nan (2020), and Amerikanischer Staatsbürgersentimentalismus (2021). She has published widely on cultural mobility, reeducation, critical regionalism, gender studies, populism, and sentimentality. She currently leads the “Global Sentimentality Project” at FAU.