American University’s American Studies Program has joined forces with Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Warsaw for the annual Transatlantic Symposium — the only long-standing international forum for students in the field. This year’s gathering, held in Warsaw in early May, brought together undergraduate and graduate students and faculty from across the Atlantic to explore “Disability and Care.” 

Co-organized by AU faculty members Drs. Toby Aho and Katharina Vester, the five-day symposium wove together academic panels, site visits, and cultural programming throughout Warsaw. AU students and faculty participated virtually this year and were fully integrated into the program; their presentations drew substantive responses from participants across all three universities. 

Student Presentations 

Three American University students presented original research at the symposium: 

• Katie Greenstein examined the gendered and racialized history of lobotomy at Washington D.C.’s St. Elizabeths Hospital in the 1940s–1950s — an inquiry into how medicine became a tool of social control. 
• Maddie Bussolari reimagined dance pedagogy through disability justice, arguing that access is not an accommodation but a practice — a framework for rethinking bodies, movement, and belonging. 
• Sensi Messner Baker interrogated the structural production of mental illness through a close reading of Willow Weep for Me, exploring how race and gender are pathologized by design in American institutions. 

Other AU students participated actively in discussions, many of them connected to the university’s Disability Studies Certificate Program, initiated by Dr. Aho. Their collective expertise enriched both the formal panels and the broader exchanges throughout the symposium. 

Key Themes 

The presentations and discussions ranged widely across the symposium’s twin themes. Conversations around care moved beyond definition to interrogate the concept itself: its entanglement with violence and control, its gendered dimensions as labor that is so often feminized and undervalued, and its tensions with a culture that prizes individualism and the American Dream. Several presentations explored what care means in institutional contexts where support and surveillance can be difficult to distinguish. 

Several presenters also challenged fixed binaries of ability and disability. Ideas of abledness, these scholars argued, are unstable, culturally produced, and inseparable from their technological, economic, and political moments — a historically grounded approach that reframed normality itself as a contested category. 

American Studies Without Borders 

The Transatlantic Symposium was built on the premise that the United States cannot be understood in isolation. American Studies, at its best, demands we ask how American ideas and institutions have been formed, challenged, and transformed through global connections — including diasporic and transnational perspectives that mainstream narratives too often ignore. 

AU joined the Transatlantic Symposium in 2024, and in three years it has become a meaningful space for intellectual exchange, community-building, and the cross-cultural dialogue that shapes scholarly careers. Students leave with lasting international networks and a broadened sense of what American Studies can do. 

The partnership between AU, Humboldt University, and the University of Warsaw continues — with next year’s symposium topic still to be announced.