Current Projects

Modernism in American Centuries: Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, James Baldwin

Monography / Habilitation Manuscript

In 1941, the publicist Henry Robinson Luce famously declared the twentieth century to be the "American Century." How could it be otherwise, Luce claimed, when "American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patents, are in fact the only thing that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognize in common." The assertion is undeniably arrogant and its pronouncement particularly bold in the midst of military conflicts that made it unlikely for either Hamburg or the British protectorate of Zanzibar to identify itself primarily with the popular cultures of the United States. It is, moreover, hardly an original claim. Luce does not invent, but rather summarizes longer-running discourses concerning the "Americanization of the World," which the British publicist and cultural commentator William T. Stead already deemed "the Trend of the Twentieth Century" in 1902: a good four decades ahead of Luce.

Modernism in American Centuries revisits these discussions of Americanization, understanding this term along with the cosmopolitan as proto-vocabularies for what we now discuss as globalization. Yet more particularly, however, the study considers how US authors traveled with and tactically utilized the flows of American music, film, language, industry, and invention in the period to forge their international careers. The four sections of the study consider the "affordances" of Americanization for Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, and James Baldwin as a means to more closely analyze their creative productions, on the one hand, and more broadly illuminate the frameworks of globalizing modernity that they navigated in the service of that creative work, on the other.

A Cultural History of Solitude in the USA

Solitude, the quality or state of being alone or remote from society, is an international and transhistorical phenomenon, which has continually prompted popular and artistic treatment. Cultures of solitude in the USA are of particular interest, since the related concepts of individualism and freedom are at the core of American national history and identity. The project traces American cultures of solitude from the colonial era to the present time. It probes into the ways in which individual identities are developed and shaped by life in loneliness and isolation and studies cultural representations of hermits, solitaries, and recluses whose examples negotiate and question accepted social and cultural practices. A profounder understanding of this anthropological constant heightens the awareness for contemporary discourses on pressing social challenges and popular lifestyle trends such as privacy, surveillance, new technology, fundamentalism, poverty, illness, old age, simplification, anti-consumerism, and ecocriticism. Solitaries can be read as trailblazers for an alternative future or as symptoms of a pathological society.

European Entanglements in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery in the Americas as Ideological Preparations for Colonial Endeavors in Africa and Asia

(ERC Grant proposal 2019)

Framing Migration in Visual Art 

(part of a research project with the Center for International and Transnational Area Studies (CITAS), University Regensburg, Germany)

The Horrification of Queerness, the Queerification of Horror: Intersections of Film, Form, and Theory (Working Title)

Dissertation Project

• Erstbetreuerin: Prof. Dr. MaryAnn Snyder-Körber
• Zweitbetreuende: Prof. Dr. Catrin Gersdorf, Prof. Dr. Ralph Poole (Univ. Salzburg)

Graduiertenschule für die Geisteswissenschaften, Klasse "Philosophie, Sprachen, Künste"

For full information visit:
https://www.graduateschools.uni-wuerzburg.de/humanities/personen/promovierende/hellmuth-lukas/

The Unalienable Right of Life: Multispecies Democracy and Speculative Writing

Dissertation Project

• Erstbetreuerin: Prof. Dr. Catrin Gersdorf
• Zweitbetreuerinnen: Prof. Dr. MaryAnn Snyder-Körber, Prof. Dr. Ursula Heise (UCLA)

Graduiertenschule für die Geisteswissenschaften, Klasse "Environmental Humanities"

For full information visit:
https://www.graduateschools.uni-wuerzburg.de/humanities/personen/promovierende/klingler-molina/

Member of the DFG research network “The Failure of Knowledge – Knowledges of Failure”

Environmentalism and Manifest[o] Knowledge: the Speculative “Eco-Manifesto” Calls for Action

This project explores the notions of knowledge and failure in the context of the contemporary “eco-manifesto.” It analyzes the emergence and the poetics of manifesto writing. Often read as minority writing, manifestos serve as vehicles for “subjugated knowledges” (Foucault). Can the “surge” of eco-manifesto writing in contemporary times be understood as a symptom of the failure of knowledge, or rather as a failure of knowledge transmission in times of environmental crises? Does the eco-manifesto also act as a site of knowledge production? Positioning itself as a political statement about the past and the present, the speculative eco-manifesto becomes a performative call for action to shape the future. Situated in the discourse of critical posthumanism and the larger context of the environmental humanities, the project also addresses topics such as human exceptionalism.

The Ethics of 'Nature' and 'Environment' in the Literary and Scientific Discourse of the Anthropocene" (Working Title)

Dissertation Project

• Erstbetreuerin: Prof. Dr. Catrin Gersdorf
• Zweitbetreuende: Prof. Dr. MaryAnn Snyder-Körber, Prof. Dr. Hannes Bergthaller (National Chung Hsing University)

Graduiertenschule für die Geisteswissenschaften, Klasse "Environmental Humanities"

For full information visit:
https://www.graduateschools.uni-wuerzburg.de/humanities/personen/promovierende/pfeifer-lena/

From Beneath Us It Devours: The Meaning and Making of Apocalyptic Landscape in America

Dissertation Project

• Erstbetreuerin: Prof. Dr. MaryAnn Snyder-Körber
• Zweitbetreuerinnen: Prof. Dr. Catrin Gersdorf, Prof. Dr. Michaela Fenske

Graduiertenschule für die Geisteswissenschaften, Klasse "Environmental Humanities"

For full information visit:
https://www.graduateschools.uni-wuerzburg.de/humanities/personen/promovierende/nelson-teutsch-hannah/

In the year 1500 Christopher Columbus declared to the Court of Spain that “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of St. John, and he showed me the spot where to find it.” From the Columbian arrival onwards, the intertwining of apocalyptic and landscape have been fundamental to imagining and transforming America. And yet, more than five centuries of scholarship have yielded not one single publication dedicated to the study of apocalyptic landscape in America. I propose to begin the work of unearthing the many ways in which American territory has become apocalyptic landscape, and how the unique material and discursive figuration of these spaces informs the ways in which apocalyptic landscapes are understood, accessed, and managed.

Politics of Dissent: The Theater of Naomi Wallace, Tony Kushner, and Christopher Shinn

Dissertation Project

• Erstbetreuer: Prof. Dr. Jochen Achilles

The Representations of Savannah in the Francophone and Anglophone Literature in West Africa

Dissertation Project

• Erstbetreuerin: Prof. Dr. Catrin Gersdorf
• Zweitbetreuende: Prof. Dr. Zeno Ackermann, Dr. Julien Bobineau, PD Dr. Heike Raphael-Hernandez

Graduiertenschule für die Geisteswissenschaften, Klasse "Environmental Humanities"

For full information visit:
https://www.graduateschools.uni-wuerzburg.de/humanities/personen/promovierende/lavoix-camille/

Blue Prints and Counter Space(s): A Cultural History and Artistic Renegotiation of the Americanized Home (Working Title)

Dissertation Project

• Erstbetreuerin: Prof. Dr. MaryAnn Snyder-Körber
• Zweitbetreuerinnen: Prof. Dr. Catrin Gersdorf, Prof. Dr. Ina Bergmann

Graduiertenschule für die Geisteswissenschaften, Klasse "Philosophie, Sprachen, Künste"

For full information visit:
https://www.graduateschools.uni-wuerzburg.de/humanities/personen/promovierende/renninger-sophie/

"Never-ending Remembrance": The Gothic and Cultural Memory Making

Dissertation Project

• Erstbetreuerin: Prof. Dr. MaryAnn Snyder-Körber
• Zweitbetreuerinnen: Prof. Dr. Ina Bergmann, PD Dr. Miriam Wallraven

Graduiertenschule für die Geisteswissenschaften, Klasse "Philosophie, Sprachen, Künste"

For full information visit:
https://www.graduateschools.uni-wuerzburg.de/humanities/personen/promovierende/schmitz-caterina/