Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez is Professor for American Studies and Minority Studies at Leipzig University. In her research she addresses questions of mobility from an inter-American and transhemispheric perspective, e.g. as researcher in the Collaborative Research Center Spatialization Processes under the Global Condition where she investigates US peripheral spaces, contact zones and mobilities in the 19th century with a focus on Florida. As an expert on US ethnic minorities she has published on African American and Latino/a mobilities, bordercultures and migrant subjectivities and has organized several conferences on hemispheric issues, e.g. "Spatialization Processes in the Americas: Configurations and Narratives" (2017), "Hemispheric Encounters" (2015), as well as the lecture series "People On the Move - Minorities, Diversity and Mobility in the Americas" (2016).
Selected Publications
Pisarz-Ramirez, G. 2018. “‘A Backcountry out of Control’: Tropical Spaces of Radical Resistance in Joshua Giddings’ The Exiles of Florida-" Amerikastudien/American Studies 63 (3): 351-366.
Addresses the mobility of fugitive slaves southward, focusing on an abolitionist history of Black Seminoles and their trajectory from the southern states to Spanish Florida and the Bahamas and later to the „Western Territory“.
Processes of Spatialization in the Americas. Configurations and Narratives. Eds. Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez and Hannes Warnecke-Berger. (Interamericana vol. 13) Frankfurt/Main/New York: Peter Lang, 2018.
This interdisciplinary volume addresses competing and conflicting configurations and narratives of spatialization about the Americas in the context of globalization processes. Questioning the naturalness of national and continental borders, it investigates the constructedness of and mobility across these borders in imaginations and discourses of “America” as a continent, nation and region from the 19th century to the present.
"Border Studies and Hemispheric Studies: Rethinking America". Approaches to American Cultural Studies. Eds. Antje Dallmann, Eva Boesenberg and Martin Klepper. London and New York: Routledge, 2016, 242-251.
This essay explores the application of theories of border and hemispheric studies –theories that are particularly influential in American Studies – to the analysis of texts and films about the US Mexican border.
Hemispheric Encounters. The Early United States in a Transnational Perspective. Eds. Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez and Markus Heide. Interamericana Series. Frankfurt u. New York: Peter Lang, 2016.
This volume of collected essays discusses inter-American relations and mobilities in the early United States, and in American, European and Spanish-American writing of the period. In the decades following the American Revolution, literary and cultural discourses, but also American collective and individual identification were shaped by transatlantic relations and inter-American exchanges and conflicts. The book also addresses the role of historical events and social issues as the Haitian Revolution, the struggles for independence in Spanish America, ties with Caribbean slave economies, and rivalries with other colonial powers in the way Americans defined themselves.
Selling Ethnicity and Race. Consumerism and Representation in Twenty-First-Century America. Eds. Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez, Frank Usbeck, Anne Grob and Maria Lippold. Trier: WVT, 2015.
This collection of essays explores the production and performance of ethnic and racial identities as well as the consumption of ‘ethnic’ and racialized products in the complex field between representational politics, economics, and consumerism. The volume investigates new emerging ethnic imaginaries among minority groups and the ways in which they respond to the revival of ethnic identification and to the increased visibility of nonwhite Americans in the United States.