Book: Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry (Complete)

Ecopoetic Place-Making analyzes contemporary American ecooetries of migration, arguing that they function as a vital source of environmental insight for our current age of mass mobility and global ecological crisis. Drawing from ecocriticism and mobility studies, Ecopoetic Place-Making focuses on American ecopoetries of migration invested in rethinking mobile subjects’ relationships to the more-than-human world. The human-nature relationships of displaced and mobile peoples of various backgrounds are complex, these poets suggest, due to experiences and histories of racial, settler colonial, and environmental violence. By creatively reimagining such relationships, a process I refer to as “ecopoetic place-making,” their texts challenge exclusive notions of belonging and purely localized forms of place-attachment and thus testify to the potential of poetry as a means of theorizing alternative environmental imaginaries for our contemporary world on the move.

Link to the publisher's page: Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry. (Available via Open Access)

Essay Project: Energy Failures in North American Speculative TV

Part of ongoing conversations in the DFG-funded interdisciplinary research network 'Energy and Literature: Texts, Theories, and Methods,' organized by Victoria Herche (U of Cologne), Dr. Antonia Villinger (U of Erlangen), and David Kern (U of Cologne), this essay project explores energy failures in North American Speculative TV, focusing especially on the implications that these energy failures have for the im/mobility of materials and human as well as nonhuman beings in (seemingly) closed-off spaces with (seemingly) independent energy systems such as spaceships, space stations, and bunkers.

Book Project: Fictions of a (Non-)Violent State: Single-Sex Societies in American Culture (In Progress)

This project examines representations of single-sex societies in American culture from the 19^th-century to the present that rely on biological definitions of sexual difference and narratives of gender segregation or gender elimination to explore the relationship between human nature, culture, sociality, and governance. In depicting all-male, all-female, or androgynous communities larger than a single town or village, the novels, short stories, films, TV series and episodes, and comics selected for analysis speculate about alternative forms of social organization and about alternative ways of organizing formal and informal political communities. Representations of single-sex societies are state fictions concerned with the future as well as with the past. While they examine the effects of cultural, scientific, and technological progress on the individual as well as society, they also address (imaginary) histories of (non-)violence and the many forms that (state-)violence can take. In doing so, these speculative texts, which include works of utopia, dystopia, science fiction, fantasy, weird fiction and film, and horror amongst others, have thus each responded to and participated in larger cultural and political debates of their time about which kinds of change promised by technoscience society it should embrace and which ones it should resist.

Essay Project: Witchcraft and Warfare: Institutionalized Violence and (Un-)Radical Feminism in Motherland: Fort Salem (In Progress)

This essay explores the depiction of institutionalized violence and female empowerment in the speculative TV series Motherland: Fort Salem (2020-2022).

Editing Project: Two-Part Special Issue on Gender, Violence, and the State in Contemporary Speculative Fiction (Complete)

Undertaken together with Dr. Martha Usiekniewicz (U of Warsaw), this editing project produced a two-part special issue of gender forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies on Gender, Violence, and the State in Contemporary Speculative Fiction:

gender forum 80 (2021):

• Melodie Roschman: Gender, Bodies, and American Christian Nationalism in Naomi Alderman's The Power

• Stefan Schubert: Playing as/against Violent Women: Imagining Gender in the Postapocalyptic Landscape of The Last of Us Part II

• Ina Batzke & Linda M. Hess: Gender and Violence in Pandemic The Tiger Flu

• Sascha Klein: Outlaw Territories: Negotiations of Gender and Race on the American Inner-City Frontier

gender forum 82 (2022):

• Michaela Keck: Women’s Complicity, Resistance, and Moral Agency: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments

• Sladja Blazan: “Something Beyond Pain”: Race, Gender, and Hyperempathy in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

• Tram Nguyen: Feminist Memorializations in Marge Piercy and Rafael Carter

• Stina Novak and Corina Wieser-Cox: “This is the World We Made”: Queer Allegory, Neo-Colonial Militarization and Scientific Ethics in The Old Guard (2020)

Collaboration: Future Infrastructures and Eco-Social Change in Speculative Fiction
With Dr. Nora Castle (U of Warwick) and Dr. Des. Burak Sezer (U of Cologne, MESH)

This collaborative project investigates the role of infrastructures and institutions (soft infrastructures) in works of speculative fiction about social and environmental change. Starting from the premise that the current environmental crisis not only challenges social and political institutions—along with the infrastructures these institutions build and maintain—but in fact also demands a reconfiguration of these institutions and a reconstruction of local and global infrastructures, this project examines how speculative fiction imagines future infrastructures and eco-social change. By reading works of dystopia, utopia, fantasy, and science fiction, it asks what kinds of actions and conditions SFF texts from different historical periods view as either beneficial for or detrimental to the establishment of sustainable societies and viable political systems in times of eco-social crisis. It also asks what a sustainable society and viable political system looks like in the respective texts, including what infrastructural and institutional means come into play in order to bring it about or maintain such a society, and whether the political systems depicted manage to ensure the survival, if not the thriving of the many, rather than just of the most privileged or the lucky few.

Essay Project: "Grit in the Machine: Multinational Institutions, Rogue Geoengineering, and the Future of Global Infrastructure in American Science Fiction." GRIT: Resilience, Resistance, and other Infrastructural Interventions. Edited by Alexandra Campbell, Kylie Crane, and Katie Ritson. Spec.Issue of EJES: European Journal of English Studies (28). [2024] (Submitted)

Workshop Series: "Local Practices - Transatlantic Conversations: Critical Environmental Education and American Popular Culture"

Bringing together researchers from Germany and the United States, this workshop series invites participants to share their ideas about how to use American popular culture and cultural studies methodologies as a means to teach environmental as well as civic literacy in ways that are accessible to students of a variety of backgrounds. By initiating a discussion between scholars whose research and teaching focuses on environmental issues and critical pedagogies, the series of workshops is organized to generate new ideas for critical environmental education. As socially engaged critical practices, both American cultural studies and critical environmental pedagogies must respond to the many challenges that the current global environmental crisis poses to societies everywhere. At the same time, they must account for the many different shapes this crisis takes in different places due to historical and persistent social inequalities.