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Research Interests

  • Ecocriticism and Critical Environmental Education
  • Television and Film Studies
  • Gender Studies and Feminist Criticism
  • African American Studies
  • Modernist Fiction

PhD Project

Crime-cene: Ecocrime in New Golden Age TV

In my project, I investigate New Golden Age crime dramas with regards to their (unconscious) depictions of environmental harm, crime, and in/justice in the Anthropocene. In conceptualizing the interdependences of seriality and Anthropocene ecology, I include an ecocritical reading of the formal aspects of popular (crime) series as serial environments, with special attention to the iconicity of place, and the non-linear temporality of New Golden Age TV series, as well as common motifs and character tropes, such as the figure of the antihero, and their significance in the Crime-cene. The TV shows that I deal with are Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, True Detective, Stranger Things, Too Old to Die Young, and Outer Range. As these series do not necessarily deal with environmental issues on their narrative surface, my approach to these texts is informed by different versions of the Anthropocene, such as Heather Anne Swanson’s Banal Anthropocene, and Julia Leyda’s notion of the Climate Unconscious. I am particularly interested in depictions of waste, toxicity, extractivism, and the historical negotiations of environmental degradation, arguing that the violent crimes in the series have an ecological dimension and find their expression through environmental destruction.

Supervisor: JProf. Dr. Judith Rauscher