Teaching
- 21C Protest Poetry
- Intersections of Literature and History
- Silence and Silencing
- Cultural History of the US
- History of US Empire
- Language and Power
- Historical Childhood Studies
- History of Race and Racialization
Research Interests
- Intersections of Literature and History | Documental Poetry
- Silence and Silencing in Contemporary U.S. Literature
- Archives and Politics of Archiving | Archival Silences
- Historical Childhood Studies | History of Education
- 19C US Empire | History of Geography and Geopolitics
Keynote Lectures & Invited Talks
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2023/10 "Erase Till You Arrive: A Study of the U.S. through Poetry," keynote lecture at 50th Austrian American Studies Association Conference 2023, Klagenfurt, Austria.
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2023/05 "Erasure as Seriality – A Study of Contemporary Print Culture in A Humument and
Tree Of Codes" [working title], invited talk at "Serial Circulation: Print Cultures and Periodical Modernities," Universität Siegen. -
2023/04 "The World in Pieces: Home, Empire, and Childhood in the 1890s," invited talk at "Forschungskolloquium Kultur/Literatur," invited talk at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin.
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2022/11 “Citizens and Rulers of the World? National Questions and Transnational Concerns,” award acceptance talk at 2022 Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize Award Ceremony, Duke Kunshan Humanities Research Center, Duke University.
Recent and Forthcoming Publications
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Mayar, Mahshid. “Sand Opera: Imperial Scripts of Crisis and Intergeneric Fields of Erasure in Philip Metres’ Poetry of Erasure.” Amerikastudien (accepted, forthcoming 2023).
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Mayar, Mahshid. “‘Playes print the letter.’ Childhood, Temporality, and Archival Work.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Johns Hopkins University Press (accepted, forthcoming 2023).
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Mayar, Mahshid. Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022.
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Mayar, Mahshid, and Marion Schulte, eds. Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations Across Disciplines. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
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Mayar, Mahshid and Marion Schulte. “Silences in History, Linguistics, and Literature: An Introduction.” Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations across Disciplines, edited by Mahshid Mayar and Marion Schulte. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
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Mayar, Mahshid. “Children, Childhood, and Empire.” Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies, edited by Heather Montgomery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
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Mayar, Mahshid. “Silence as Masquerade: Punctuation, Prosody, and Performance in ‘A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease’.” Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations across Disciplines, edited by Mahshid Mayar and Marion Schulte. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
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Mayar, Mahshid. “From Unquestioned Obedience to Disintegrating Abeyance: Children’s Toys and U.S.’s Racial Order in the Late 19th Century,” Apr. 2022, for UNC Press Blog.
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Mayar, Mahshid, and Stefan Schubert, eds. “American Video Games and the Politics of Popular Culture.” European Journal of American Studies 16.3 (2021).
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Mayar, Mahshid, and Stefan Schubert. “Joystick in the Garden,” introduction to Special Issue American Video Games and the Politics of Popular Culture.” European Journal of American Studies 16.3 (2021).
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Mayar, Mahshid. “Feasts of Indifference: Racialization, Affect, and Necropolitics in 1X War Games.” European Journal of American Studies 16.3 (2021).
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Mayar, Mahshid, ed. “Spaces of Empire.” U.S. Studies Online (USSO), British Association for American Studies, 2020.
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Mayar, Mahshid. “Spaces and Spatialities of Empire: An Introduction,” introduction to “Spaces of Empire” Essay Series, U.S. Studies Online, British Association for American Studies (2020).
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Mayar, Mahshid. “What on earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy.” European Journal of American Studies 15.2 (2020): 1-19.
Current Research Projects
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Erasure: Poetics, Politics, Performance: As part of her scholarly investment in the cross-over between poetry and politics, Mahshid Mayar's current second-book/Habilitation research project, Erasure: Poetics, Politics, Performance [working title], focuses on the political, the historical, and the aesthetic in contemporary US erasure poetry. In this project, she examines protest poetry by a wide number of 21st-century US-American poets, including Solmaz sharif, Philip Metres, Nick Flynn, Janet Holmes, and Niina Pollari.
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American Studies and Noise: Invested in sound studies, Mahshid Mayar currently collaborates with Sabine N. Meyer (Universität Bonn) and Stefan Benz (Universität Bonn) on an essay collection that re-visits "noise" as a generative, cross-disciplinary analytics within American literary / cultural studies.
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Silence(s) and Silencing in US Literature and Culture: Mahshid Mayar has an ongoing interest in the study of silence(s) and silencing within the broader field of sound studies. Together with Marion Schulte (Universität Rostock), Mahshid Mayar has co-edited Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations across Disciplines, an edited interdisciplinary volume, including 16 essays by scholars from across the globe, which was published in summer 2022 with Palgrave Macmillan.
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Companion to US Empire: Part of her long-standing interest in the question of empire in the US context, and together with Mischa Honeck (Universität Kassel), Mahshid Mayar co-edits Companion to US Empire [working title]. A volume in the de Gruyter book series “Empires through the Ages in Global Perspective,” this book project will launch by an international workshop scheduled to take place at Universität Kassel in summer 2023.
Research Groups & Professional Affiliations
- DFG Network “The Cultural Politics of Reconciliation”
- DGfA: German Association for American Studies
- ASA: American Studies Association
- BAAS: British Association for American Studies
- MLA: Modern Language Association
- GAPS: Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies
- ENIUGH: European Network in Universal and Global History