Summer Semester 2001
In the summer of 2001 (May, 15- July, 15) the Center of Intercultural Studies won over the internationally acclaimed literary and cultural scholar Ihab Hassan as a guest professor at Johannes Gutenberg-University at Mainz. Professor Hassan was born in Cairo and was educated in Egypt and the United States. He has lived and worked throughout Europe, Asia and Australia and brings a strong intercultural awareness to his extensive body of work. After his universally acclaimed studies on contemporary literature and culture, especially his innovative theories on postmodernism, Hassan has recently turned to studies of intercultural travel and cultural criticism, including pragmatism and religion at the turn of the millennium (see also his Between the Eagle and the Sun: Traces of Japan [1996]). Hassan is currently Vilas Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
Prof. Hassan held a seminar on "Intercultural Perspectives: The Australian Example" and public lectures on "Queries for Postcolonial Studies: The Local and the Global", "Four Memos to the Third Millennium: Present and Future Concerns" as well as "Lectures on Interculturalism". Also, in the seminar "Intercultural Perspecitives", he held a colloquium with the Australian novelist of Lebanese-English origin, David Malouf. Afterwards, David Malouf held a public reading of his work at the Frankfurter Hof Mainz.