On 20 March 2009, 4 p.m., American Studies Leipzig will celebrate the release of the second issue of aspeers: emerging voices in american studies, Europe’s first and currently only peer-reviewed graduate journal in American studies. The publication project is part of American Studies Leipzig’s MA program. Over the course of the last semester, an editing team of six MA students has worked to select contributions, revise them together with the authors, edit them, and make them ready for publication. The

A few days ago, members of the aspeers project have founded the aspeers e.V., an incorporated association that will act as a legal entity for the project from now on.

To add to aspeers's fame and to solicit ever more art contributions, we came up with a couple of posters we put up. For those of you who can't see them in paper, here's a digital version:

Once again, we have received a large number of submissions for the upcoming issue of aspeers. We were a little worried that the topical call for papers would leave us with too few submissions... looks like that was nothing to worry about. However, the regional distribution seems a little narrower this time.

As of October 17, a new editorial team has begun to work on the second issue of aspeers, Europe’s first—and currently only—graduate-level peer-reviewed journal for American Studies. Between now and the Spring of 2009, Tanja Aho, Ingrid Betz, Franziska Böhme, Susan Büttner, Sebastian M. Herrmann, Benedikt Schäfer, and Isabel Simão will work to edit the second issue of the journal, the first to be organized around a topical call for papers.

America Adrift has asked us to publish the following call for papers:

Latino/a USA: Transnational Identities / Identidades Transnacionales

Seminar at University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Friday-Saturday, November 14-15, 2008

aspeers calls for submissions by graduate students (MA- or equivalent levels) of European American Studies and related fields by October 31 (November 14 for creative submissions).

David Mills, published in aspeers 1 (2008) with his piece "Illiterate Fish" did an interview about his time in Ghana. It will air every day 3x a day through Sunday. The website is
www.live365.com/stations/noboarderspoetry. Look for the David Mills Keith Roach interview. As well after the interview is finished there will be one poem about Amado Diallo by one cat and the poem he wrote called Forever's Bread about Sean Bell.

Bielefeld University has asked us to put online the conference announcement for their upcoming conference: "Cultidentinicity: Cultures in Negotiation, Translation, Metamorphosis," Bielefeld University July 11-12.

The conference aims at fostering research at a graduate level. More information is available at the interamerica webpage:

Yeahi! As of yesterday, aspeers is now also listed on scholar.google.com. With the first issue's articles already receiving a lot of attention over the last couple weeks, we hope that this development will boost the journal's visibility even more. Check out their listing at scholar.google.com.