Book Project: Fantasies of a (Non-)Violent State: Single-Sex Societies in American Speculative Fiction (In Progress)

This project examines representations of single-sex societies in American culture from the nineteenth 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 single-sex narratives selected for analysis speculate about alternative forms of social organization and about alternative ways of organizing formal and informal communities. Single-sex narratives, this project argues, 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 on 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, and horror amongst others, respond to and participate in larger cultural debates of their time about which kinds of social, political,and technoscientific change society should embrace and which ones it should resist. What is more, they examine what kinds of social institutions would be beneficial for achieving the good life they imagine and what kinds of cultural and political forms are useful to bring them about.

Essay Project: Witchcraft and Warfare: Institutions, Violence, and Female Agency 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)

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

Bringing together researchers from Germany, the United States, and other countries in the world, this workshop series invites participants to share their ideas about how to use (American) popular culture and cultural studies methodologies to rethink environmental issues in connection to matters of civic literacy. As socially engaged critical practices, both the field of (American) cultural studies and the field of critical pedagogy must respond to the many challenges that the current global polycrisis poses to societies everywhere. At the same time, they must account for the many different shapes this polycrisis takes in different places due to historical injustices and the current social inequalities these injustices have produced. By initiating a discussion between scholars whose research and teaching focuses on environmental issues while also engaging with a variety of other topics, the series of workshops hopes to generate new perspectives on the study of (American) popular culture, society, and the environment, as well as new ideas for critical environmental education at the university and beyond.

Collaborative Essay Project: Writing Mourning, Grief, and Territory: Sentimental Environmental Politics in the 19th Century US-Southwest (in preparation)
with Dr. Linda Hess (U of Augsburg)

This project investigates late 19th-century American sentimental writing that questions links between landownership, citizenship, and belonging.

Collaborative Essay Project: Future Infrastructures and Eco-Social Change in Speculative Fiction (Essay under review)
with Dr. Nora Castle (U of Bonn) and Dr. des. Burak Sezer (U of Dortmund)

This project investigates the role of infrastructures and institutions (soft infrastructures) in selected works of speculative fiction about social and environmental change.

Essay Project: Energy Failures in North American Speculative TV (in preparation)

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

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)