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Teaching

  • American Poetry
  • American Popular Culture
  • Speculative Fiction and TV
  • Literature, Culture, and the Environment
  • Mobilities in Literature and Culture
  • Intersectional Approaches to American Culture

Research Interests

  • Contemporary American Poetry
  • Single-Sex Societies in American Culture
  • Cultural Violence Studies
  • Ecocriticism and Mobility Studies
  • Critical Environmental Education
  • Gender and Queer Studies

Upcoming Talks

  • 2023/09: “Speculative History, Human Exceptionalism, and Graphic Violence in the Comic Series Manifest Destiny," Panel on Green Popular Culture Studies: (In)Visibility, Affordances, Affects” at the 8th Annual Conference of the Kulturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft (KWG) on Popular Cultures, U of the Saarland
  • 2023/08: "Single-Sex Societies in Pulp Era American Science Fiction and the Im/Possibility of Disruption," Disruptive Imaginations: Joint Annual Conference of the SFRA and GfF, TU Dresden
  • 2023/06: "History, Violence, and Progress: Single-Sex Societies in Pulp Era American Science Fiction," Invited Lecture, American Studies Section, Augsburg University

Recent Talks

  • 2022/11: "Ecopoetries of Migration," 13th German-Israeli Frontiers of Humanities Symposium (GISFOH): “Agency and global crises: environment, inequality, borders” (Jerusalem, Israel); funded by the Humboldt Foundation
  • 2022/10: "Gemeinwohl und Staatsgewalt in amerikanischer Spekulativer Fiktion," DFG Tagung "Umkämpftes Gemeinwohl: Deutungen im Streit um das gemeinsame Wohl" (University of Rostock)
  • 2022/06: “Imagining Future Pedagogies: Representations of Formal Education in American Speculative Fiction," Workshop "Critical Future Studies: SF as Pedagogy between Imagination and Activism," at the Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), Tübingen
  • 2022/07: "Collective Agency, Individual Responsibility, and the Poetics of Dis/Entanglement in Contemporary Ecopoetry about Hawai’i" Conference," Corporations/ Communities/ Crowds" (Volkswagenstiftung, Hannover)
  • 2022/05: "Where are the Men? Single-Sex Societies in American Literature," Podcast The Trans-Atlanticist, Gespräch mit PD. Dr.' Stefanie Schäfer, Universität Wien
  • 2022/02: "Fictions of a (Non-)Violent State: Technoscience, Origin Myths, and Single-Sex Societies in American Culture," invited talk at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin
  • 2021/12: "Of Birds, Bulldozers, and Boeings: Nature and Mobility in the Poetry of Juliana Spahr," invited talk at the Chair of North American Literature and Culture, University of Bielefeld
  • 2021/10: "Precarious Indigenous Knowledges and Participatory Reading: Teaching Pacific Islander Poetry about Environmental Displacement," Workshop "Narrating Environmental Displacements," University of Augsburg
  • 2021/06: “Creating Space(s) for Complexity: Teaching American Popular Culture and the Environment,” Panel “Participation in/ through Language, Literature and Culture (Education),” DGfA Conference 2021
  • 2021/05: “She who laughs last: Satirical Dystopias by Women and the Ends of Parody,” Symposium “Funny Women” (Bavarian-American Academy, Munich)
  • 2021/05: „(Un)Radical Feminism: Witchcraft, Militarism, and the Limits of Female Empowerment in Motherland: Fort Salem (2020-),” invited talk, Institute for the Study of Film, Theater, Media and Culture, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
  • 2021/04: “Sentimental Ecologies: Negotiating Landownership, Citizenship, and Affect in Maria Ruíz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885) and S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema (1891),” with Linda Hess; virtual EAAS Conference 2021

Research Groups and Academic Associations (selection)

  • MeMo: Zentrum für Medienwissenschaften und Moderneforschung at the University of Cologne
  • GeStiK: Gender Studies in Cologne
  • DGfA/GAAS: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien/ German Association for American Studies
  • EASLCE: European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment
  • GfF: Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung e.V.
  • SFRA: Science Fiction Research Association