Bard College Berlin News
Prof. Dr. Kerry Bystrom presents research on academic freedom and the future of critical humanities at Universität Osnabrück
Bystrom's talk explored the current closure of space for critical thinking and academic freedom unfolding in the United States. Taking the perspective that academic freedom needs to be more widely understood as a transnational human right to be more successfully protected, she looked toward examples of how to sustain critical liberal arts and humanities education in the face of crackdown via university in exile initiatives created in the past five years in Russia, Myanmar, and beyond.
The lecture series, organized by Prof. Dr. Peter Schneck and Dr. Laura Zander, is meant to present different perspectives on migration, human rights and the role of literature and the critical humanities in resisting the increasingly dehumanizing tendencies in current anti-migration discourses and policies. It encourages interdisciplinary discussion across various disciplines and fields of research to foster an international exchange in scholarship as well as to encourage public outreach and human rights education.
Hosted by the Institute of English and American Studies (IfAA), the lecture series has been initiated in the context of the central research project at the IfAA "Universal Rights - Global Literature: Human Rights, Literary Form, and the Subject on the Move", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) which is associated to the Collaborative Research Center "Production of Migration" (SFB 1604) at Osnabrück University, also funded by the German Research Foundation.
Post Date: 01-26-2026