Julia Sattler has completed her PhD thesis focusing on “Family Secrets: Roots, Memory and Mixed Heritage in the contemporary United States” at TU Dortmund University (Germany) in 2012. Her research interests include the literature and culture of the U.S. South, African American Studies and Urban Cultural Studies.

She is currently the academic coordinator of an international PhD program focusing on “Urban Transformations in the United States” at the University Alliance Ruhr. In her postdoctoral work she examines the narrative dimensions of urban transformation processes in Detroit, Michigan, and in Germany’s Ruhr Valley in dialogue. She has worked on multiple urban redevelopment projects in the Ruhr and curated a photographic exhibit focusing on abandoned industrial spaces in 2012. Julia Sattler has been a visiting scholar to the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning in 2013.