Bickert

• Ecocriticism and Eco-fiction
• Speculative Fiction
• Nineteenth-Century American Poetry
• American Women's Poetry
• Latinx Literature
• Gender Studies
• American Drama and Musical Theather
• Teaching with Musical Theater

Thinking in Conversation: Musical Theater in English Teaching and Learning

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Maria Eisenmann (JMU), Prof. Dr. Ina Bergmann (JMU), Prof. Dr. Theresa Summer (Universität Bamberg)

Existing research on music and theater in EFL and native-speaker classrooms highlights the beneficiary effects of teaching both. Yet, a genre that combines these benefits—the musical—remains almost entirely unexplored in the TEFL world. This postdoctoral project argues that thinking in conversation with the text emerges as a productive teaching and learning strategy that both validates students as diverse individual learners and allows them to holistically work with a text beyond the communicative boundaries created by the idea of English as a foreign language. I propose the musical as a genre-crossing and multimedia text type to move towards a culturally sensitive and conversational approach to TEFL. Not only does musical theater provide ample opportunity for training both the receptive and productive skills through audio-visual, reading, and (re-)writing activities. Musicals also foster literary and musical appreciation as well as intercultural learning in a highly motivating manner. As learners engage in manifold conversations with these texts, relating to US-American narratives but also to transcultural experiences of marginalization and connection in a contemporary globalized world, classrooms become cultural and linguistic safe spaces for the various ways of speaking in and about English as a world language.

2026

Bickert, L. (2026). “The Journalist as Bystander in American AIDS Theater” in Journalists and Journalism in Fiction. Freiburg University Publishing. (in preparation)

2022

Bickert, L. (2022). Hoping for Cyborgs: Odd Kinships, Cyborg Heroes, and Hopeful Heroics in the Compost Pile of Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans. HJEAS.

2020

Bickert, L. (2020). Heroes in Body Bags: Renegotiating Heroism in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning. In Hauke, A., Huber, B. & Stelzl, T. (Eds.). Current Objectives in Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS), 21(1), 7–24.

2024

"'We're all impossible': The Zombie as Eco-Scientist in Daryl Gregory's Raising Stony Mayhall (2011)" Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg. January 2024.

2022

"Longing for Home in the Undersea: Geographies of Grief in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven." 13th Anniversary of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung: Fantastische Geographien, TU. Dortmund. September 2022. 

"More-Than-Individual Zombie-EcoHeroism in Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall." Summer Institute Non/Humanity: Revisioning the Centrality of the Human in the Humanities, Bucknell Humanities Center, US. Online. June 2022.

2021

"Heroic Bodies Underwater: Aquatic Eco-Heroism in Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986)." Summer Institute Water Ecologies: Interdisciplinary Currents in the Humanities, Bucknell Humanities Center, US. Online. June–July 2021.

2020

"Re-building the American Hero’s Body: Cyborg Heroes in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans." X Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture: Ecoculture. Online. July 2020.

2019

"Heroes in Body Bags: Renegotiating Heroism in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning." PGF Conference Challenges of the Post-Truth Era in American Studies (Postgraduate Forum der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien, DGfA), Universität Passau. December 2019.

• Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien, e.V. 
• Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung, e.V.