Jun 13, 2019
Six years ago, Fulbright Germany and the German Association for American Studies (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien-DGfA) premiered the Fulbright American Studies Award to promote and support particularly innovative and interdisciplinary research projects in the broad area of American Studies. The Award carries Euro 10,000 and helps to finance research in the U.S. that is conducted in the context of doctoral dissertations or a second book (“Habilitation”). A competitive selection process determines whom Fulbright Germany and the German Association for American Studies consider the most suitable awardee.
The 2019 Fulbright American Studies Award went to Dr. des. Stephan Kuhl, assistant professor at the Institute for English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. Charlotte Securius-Carr, Academic Counsel, Fulbright Germany, presented the award certificate to Stephan Kuhl at the opening ceremony of the 2019 DGfA Annual Conference on June 13 at the Universität Hamburg.
Excerpt from Charlotte Securius-Carr's presentation of the awardee:
Stephan Kuhl, a former Fulbright student at Harvard University, earned his Magister degree (“with honors”) in American Studies and Comparative Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. His doctoral dissertation on Crude Psychology: Richard Wright’s Literary Practice addresses the intellectual exchange between the US author Richard Nathaniel Wright and the German-American psychoanalyst Fredric Wertham. It was rated “summa cum laude“and won the 2016 Obama Dissertation Prize of the University of Mainz. Stephan Kuhl also received a Library of Congress Fellowship and numerous congress and travel grants.
In addition to his duties as assistant professor, Stephan Kuhl works in the DFG-funded project “American Literature and the Transformation of Privacy” in the context of which he is writing his second book (“Habilitation“) at Goethe University.
In the meantime, he has expanded his dissertation work on Richard Wright to a book manuscript under contract with the University Press of Mississippi. The book will include the study of material that has been available only since November 2018. The documents on Fredric Wertham and Richard Wright promise to bring to light the author´s intellectual involvement with other psychoanalysts well-known at the time and new perspectives on the relationship between African American literature and psychoanalysis in general.
The Fulbright American Studies Award helps finance a 3-month research trip that Stephan Kuhl will undertake this September and will lead him to the Library of Congress, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.
More information about Stephan Kuhl´s research is available here.
