1. Disney Cities: From Epcot to Val d’Europe (Florian Freitag, Universitat Duisburg-Essen) 
This lecture employs literary and field research to examine city of Val d’Europe (France), its history as part of the “ville nouvelle” of Marne-la-Vallée, its development as a collaboration of public planning agency EPAFrance and The Walt Disney Company, and especially its relationship to the neighboring Disneyland Paris theme park resort. Using the examples of the city’s Lakeside and Studios District, the essay argues that the theme park and the city are related not only via the technique of theming but, more specifically, by the choice of theme or architectural styles, with the result that the line between private leisure space and public urban space becomes blurred. The lecture also suggests analyzing Val d’Europe in the larger context of “Disney Cities,” a concept that encompasses Disney’s theme parks and resorts in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, particularly the (past and present) three-dimensional depictions of urbanity contained therein, as well as Disney’s various (realized and unrealized) urban development projects, both within and outside its resorts.

2. Dark, Dark Stories: Racial and Gender Transcendence in Little Miss Consequence (1858?) (Elena Furlanetto, Universitat Duisburg-Essen)
“The Girl who Inked Herself and Her Books, and How it Ended” is a poem for children published in Little Miss Consequence, an illustrated collection tentatively dated between 1858 and 1863. Miss Mopsa, the protagonist, likes to play with ink: she spills it all over her books, sucks her pen, smears her face and clothes until, one day, her skin turns black. As a consequence of this unexpected racial transformation, Mopsa's parents stop loving her and sell her to a toy shop, where she is hung on a hook and put on display. This text is illustrative of the overarching thesis driving my current book project (tentatively titled "Racial Transcendence"), according to which racial passing in 19th century American literature hardly ever appears in isolation, but in combination with other metamorphoses -- most significantly
cross-dressing and transgressing. In other words, the book aims to recast passing and comparable instances of racial metamorphosis as decidedly intersectional phenomena. This tryptic of movements – passing, cross-dressing, and transgressing – is indicative of the widespread poetics of ambiguity found in much 19th century American literature, where fluid, transgressive selves who pass between races, blur gender boundaries, or challenge the law are ambiguated on the level of language as well as on the level of self. Meant as a cautionary tale for girls, "The Girl who Inked Herself" mobilizes both race and gender to warn girls of the horrific consequences of transgressing the dictates of the True Woman doctrine, which not only enforced submissive ladylike behaviors, but discouraged women from indulging in creative uses of ink.