Academic Appointments

2024

John F. Kennedy-Institute of the Freie Universitaet Berlin, Full Professor and Chair, North American Literature.

 

2022

Guest professorship at the Jakob-Fugger-Center, Augsburg.

 

2018-2020

Deputy Chair of American Studies (W3, Vertretungsprofessur) at Westfaelische Wilhelms-University, Muenster.

 

2017-2018

Visiting Fellow (AvH Foundation), John-F.-Kennedy-Institute, Freie Universität, Berlin.

 

2016-2017

Assistant Professor (Wiss. Mitarbeiterin), Institute for English and American Studies, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main.

 

2014-2016

Feodor Lynen Fellow (AvH Foundation), English Department, University of California, Irvine, CA.

 

2010-2011

Visiting Fellow, African American Studies Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

 

2007-2014

Assistant Professor (Wiss. Mitarbeiterin), Institute for English and American Studies, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main.

 

Academic Degrees

 

2018

Habilitation in American Studies, Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main.

The Corporation in the American Imagination, 1819-1904 (post-doctoral thesis)

 

2011

Dr. phil. in American Studies, Goethe- Universität, Frankfurt am Main.

The Presence of the Past in the Novels of Toni Morrison

 

2000-2006

Magister Artium in American and English Studies, Goethe- Universität, Frankfurt am Main.

 

Fellowships, Awards, Grants (selection)

 

2020   

Volkswagen Symposia Grant (with PD Dr. Simone Knewitz) for Symposium “Corporations, Communities, Crowds: The Aesthetics of Collective Agency in 21st Century Culture,” Volkswagen Foundation, Hannover.

 

2019   

Best Article Award 2017 for special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies (with Dr. Birte Christ), German Association for American Studies.

 

2017   

Return Fellowship for Feodor Lynen Fellows, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn.

 

2015   

Finalist of “The Toni Morrison Society Book Prize 2012-2015.”

 

2014-2016

Feodor Lynen Fellowship, Humboldt Foundation, Bonn.

 

 

University Service (Selection)

 

2018-2020      Professorial member of the Executive Board of the English Department, WWU Muenster.

2013-2014     

Women’s Representative, Dpt. for English and American Studies, Frankfurt am Main.

 

2011- 2014

Coordinator for the design and implementation of the American Studies MA-program, Dpt. for English and American Studies, Frankfurt am Main.

           

2008-2012

Elected member, Executive Board, Dpt. for English and American Studies, Frankfurt am Main.

 

2009-2010

Elected member, Executive Board, Faculty of Modern Languages, Frankfurt am Main.

 

Courses at the JFKI

Winter Semester 2024/25

Lecturer Bachelor/Master Course: The American Renaissance Reconsidered, Wednesdays, 8.00-10:00, R340

Lecturer Master Course: The Affects of Climate Change, Thursdays, 10:00-12:00, R201

Lecturer Master Course: History and Memory in 20th and 21st Century African American Literature, Thursdays, 8:00-10:00, R319

Lecturer Bachelor Course, B.A. Colloquium Literature/Culture, Tuesdays, 14:00-16:00, R340

Scale in Environmental Literatures

My project on the climate crisis in North American literature and media is about the narrative and formal-aesthetic possibilities of different genres for making the climate crisis tangible, especially with regard to their temporal and spatial scales. It is thus also dedicated to questions of environmental justice and the transformation of genre traditions and concepts. A particular focus of the project is on the significance and narratability of the scales of climate change, by which previous research has almost exclusively meant particularly large (space) and particularly long scales (time), as well as, in some cases, collectivity. While the project builds on this scholarship, it also seeks to expand the research by understanding "scale" as a significant category when it comes to the narration of individual and local perceptions and experiences of climate change, or even the conditions of perception itself.

The Legal Grounds of Contemporary Indigenous and Native American Poetry

In recent years, indigenous protests in the US and Canada made a broader public aware of the fact that settler colonialism is an ongoing phenomenon in North America. What the "Idle No More" movement in Canada and the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Thirty-Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea in the United States had in common was that their struggles to protect indigenous territories were fundamentally struggles in defense of indigenous sovereignty. Although they were often portrayed  primarily as struggles for environmental justice, the rights of Native Americans, First Nations and Native Hawaiians to land and self-determination were at stake. In this project, I explore this connection between land and self-determination in contemporary poetry and through poetry's engagement with law. The legal foundations of my title thus refer to land in a material and symbolic sense: They refer to land as more than a territorial basis for the "collective continued existence" of Native peoples and as such as a site of sovereignty as lived experience and everyday practice (Whyte); and they refer to land as the object of a settler-colonialist legal framework whose reduction of land to property and territory discursively precludes the possibility of "land as a meaning-making process" and as such as a basis for "cultural and intellectual sovereignty" (Goeman). I argue that both senses are relevant to understanding contemporary Indigenous and Native American poetry's engagement with land, and that by exploring land and self-determination in this way, poetry also ultimately contributes to the indigenization of the lyrical conventions of nature poetry in the United States.

 

Model/ling Collectives

This research is situated in the economic humanities and builds on my previous work on corporations, corporate storytelling, and modeling in economic discourse. The aim is to explore the concept of modeling as it is used in economic theory from a literary studies perspective and to examine the literary modeling of collectives and collective agency. The project thus partly ties in with questions that I also investigate in my project on the climate crisis in literatureand in my project on sovereignty, in particular questions of representability/narratability and the function of aesthetic forms in non-literary genres. In this sense, I am also planning a literary-theoretical examination of the concept of "scenario thinking", which has taken on an increasingly central role in the ecological discourse of recent years.

 

a. Monographs


The Corporation in the Nineteenth-Century American Imagination. Edinburgh University Press, 2023.

The Presence of the Past in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Universitätsverlag

Winter, 2013.

 

b. Edited Volumes

The Aesthetics of Collective Agency: Corporations, Communities and Crowds in the Twenty-First Century. Co-edited with Simone Knewitz. Transcript Verlag (in preparation).

Reading the Social in American Studies. Co-edited with Astrid Franke and Katja Sarkowsky. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

Financial Times: Competing Temporalities in the Age of Financial Capitalism. Co-edited with Christian Kloeckner. Special Issue. Finance & Society, 4.1 (2018).

Poetry and Law. Co-edited with Birte Christ. Amerikastudien/American Studies: A Quarterly. Special Issue. 62.2 (Summer 2017).

Violence and Open Spaces: The Subversion of Boundaries and the Transformation of the Western Genre. Co-edited with Christa Buschendorf and Katja Sarkowsky. Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017.

 

c. Articles


“Sketches of Salt-Water Poetry: Herman Melville’s ‘The Encantadas, or The Enchanted Isles.’” ASNEL Papers. (forthcoming)

“Citizenship and the Posthuman Corporation in US Poetry.” Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism, Special Issue Posthuman Economies: Literary and Cultural Perspectives, Vol. 2 No.1, (Spring 2023), 10-23.

“Archipelagic Aesthetics in Craig Santos Perez’ from unincorporated territory,” Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies (10.2, January 2023).

“Legal and Poetic Figurations of Wholeness in from unincorporated territory and the Insular Cases.” Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics. Ed. Franziska Quabeck. Special Issue “Law and Literature,” 20 (2021). (doi.org/10.1515/9783110756456-006)

“A Connexionist Bartleby? A Melvillean Reading of Luc Boltanski’s and Éve Chiapello’s The Spirit of the New Capitalism.” Frank Kelleter and Alexander Starre, eds. Culture2: Key Works for the 21st Century. Transcript Verlag, 2022. (doi.org/10.14361/9783839457870-015)

“’No more little boxes’ – Poetic Positionings in the Literary Field” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 69.1 (2021): 91-104. (https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2020-2031)

“‘To Be Reckoned in the Gross’: Corporate Storytelling and Quantified Selves in Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End.” Laboring Bodies and the Quantified Self. Regina Schober and Ulf Reichardt, eds. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2020. 61-80. (doi.org/10.14361/9783839449219-004)

“The Silence of the Soulless Corporation: Corporate Agency in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo.” Law & Literature (2020) (doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2020.1754022)

“Financial Times: Competing Temporalities in the Age of Financial Capitalism. An Introduction.” (co-authored with Christian Kloeckner). Financial Times: Competing Temporalities in the Age of Financial Capitalism. Co-edited with Christian Kloeckner. Special Issue. Finance & Society, 4.1 (2018): 1-14.

“An Aesthetics of Resolution and the Figure of the Renegade: A Conversation.” Interview with Gerald Nestler (with Christian Kloeckner). Financial Times: Competing Temporalities in the Age of Financial Capitalism. Co-edited with Christian Kloeckner. Special Issue. Finance & Society, 4.1 (2018): 126-43.

“Black Women’s Business: Female Entrepreneurship and Economic Agency in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child.” Power Relations in Black Lives: Reading African American Literature and Culture with Bourdieu and Elias. Christa Buschendorf, ed. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018. 145-165.

“Exceeding Determinacy in the Language of Personhood: Citizens United, Corporations, and the Poetry of Timothy Donnelly and Thomas Sayers Ellis.” Poetry and Law. Birte Christ und Stefanie Mueller, eds. Amerikastudien/American Studies: A Quarterly. Special Issue. 62.2. Summer 2017. 301-322.

“Towards a Legal Poetics.” (Introduction, co-authored) Poetry and Law. Birte Christ und Stefanie Mueller, eds. Amerikastudien/American Studies: A Quarterly. Special Issue. 62.2. Summer 2017. 149-168.

“National and Economic Incorporation in HBO’s Deadwood.” Christa Buschendorf, Stefanie Mueller and Katja Sarkowsky, eds. Violence and Open Spaces: The Subversion of Boundaries and the Transformation of the Western Genre. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017. 167-186.

“Violence and Space in the Post-Western.” (Introduction, co-authored) Christa Buschendorf, Stefanie Mueller and Katja Sarkowsky, eds. Violence and Open Spaces: The Subversion of Boundaries and the Transformation of the Western Genre. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2017. 7-30.

“State, Law, and Violence in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition.” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South, 24.1 (2017): 51-75.

“House of Lies and the Management of Emotions.” Sieglinde Lemke and Wibke Schniedermann, eds. Class Divisions in Serial Television. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 143-158.

“’A man is whatever room he’s in’ – Identity, Home, and Nostalgia in AMC’s Mad Men.” Caroline Rosenthal, Stefanie Schäfer, eds. Fake Identity? The Impostor Narrative in North American Culture. Campus Verlag, 2014. 192-209.

“’Standing Up To Words’ – Writing and Resistance in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.” Black Studies Papers (May 2014): n.p.

“Corporate Power and the Public Good in Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” COPAS Vol. 14, 2013: n.p.

“The State Nobility? The Power of the Academic Elite in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” Laurenz Volkmann, ed. Education and the USA. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011.133-141.

 

d. Reviews

“Book Review: Nan Goodman and Simon Stern, eds. The Routledge Research Companion to Law and Humanities in Nineteenth-Century America” Amerikastudien/American Studies (forthcoming).

“Book Review: Johannes Riquet, The Aesthetics of Island Space.” Symbolism 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110716962-015

“Book Review: Stephanie Li, Playing in the Dark.” ZAA - Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 65.2 (2017): n.p.

“Book review: Anne Mihan, Undoing Difference?” ANGLIA 132/4 (2014): n.p.