Members

Heike Paul is Professor of American Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. She is recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2018) and currently serves as the director of the Bavarian American Academy in Munich.  Heike Paul is an authority on American myths (The Myths That Made America, 2014), popular culture and Americanization, and part of the interdisciplinary DFG-project “Reeducation Revisited”. Among her research interests are tacit knowledge, mobility studies, public feeling and sentimentality, and African American and Afro-Canadian studies. Her current research focuses on global sentimentality and she is co-editing a volume on “The Comeback of Populism”.

 

 

 

 

 

Katharina Gerund is senior lecturer (associate professor) in American Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. She is the author of Transatlantic Cultural Exchange (2013) and has published on issues such as cultural mobility, tacit knowledge, and popular culture, as well as questions of affect, race, and gender in the transatlantic world. Presently, she is involved in an interdisciplinary DFG-project entitled “Reeducation Revisited” and she is working on a book that examines the cultural ideal of military spouses in the 21^st century as “happy home front heroines” and explores its various functions in the cultural imaginary of the US.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jana Aresin is a PhD candidate and Research Associate at the chair of American Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. She is a member of the interdisciplinary research project „Reeducation Revisited“ and currently working on her dissertation on gender and democracy in Cold War US and Japanese women’s magazines. Her research interests include democratization and reeducation narratives, Cold War feminism and the relation of mass media, nationalism, and gender.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Claudia Breger

Claudia Breger is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Having received her PhD and Habilitation from Humboldt University, Berlin, she previously taught at the University of Paderborn, Germany, and Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research and teaching span the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries, with a focus on modern and contemporary culture, and emphases on film, performance, literature, and literary and cultural theory, as well as the intersections of gender, sexuality and race. More recent book publications include An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature and Film in Contemporary Germany. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012 and the short volume Nach dem Sex? Sexualwissenschaft und Affect Studies. Hirschfeld-Lectures. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2014. Her new book, Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press (2020).

 

Elisabeth Bronfen

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zürich and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She is an authority on 19^th and 20^th century literature and visual culture and has published on a diverse array of topics. Hollywood, especially its role in war and military conflict, has been a recurring focus of Professor Bronfen’s work. Her current research projects include a book entitled Serial Shakespeare: The Survival and Return of the Bard in American Film and TV.

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Demmelhuber is Professor of Middle East Politics and Society at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Before he was Assistant Professor for Political Science at the University of Hildesheim (2012-2015). His PhD in 2008 on EU-Egyptian relations was awarded with the German Middle East Studies Association’s dissertation prize for best PhD in Middle Eastern studies. Demmelhuber’s research focuses on state, power and politics in the Middle East from a comparative perspective including international actors such as the European Union.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Axelle Germanaz is a PhD candidate and Research Associate at the chair of American Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. She is currently working on a dissertation focused on white supremacist movements and American myths. Her research interests include theories of race and racism, popular culture, reeducation and Americanization, American myths, affect theory, and public feeling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marius Henderson

Marius Henderson is Postdoctoral Fellow at the chair of American Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. His dissertation is entitled “Writing during the Disasters: Modes of Rendering Suffering in Contemporary North American Experimental Poetry” (submitted in 2018) and he is the editor (with Julia Lange) of Entangled Memories: Remembering the Holocaust in a Global Age (2017). Among his research interests are trauma theory, affect and public feeling, Black diasporic theory, gender studies, poetry, and experimental literature and art. He is currently working on a new project exploring the entwinement of abstraction and abjection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kay Kirchmann is Professor of Media Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. He has published on issues of temporality, historicity and film, and media theory. He is the co-editor of (Extra)Ordinary Presence: Social Configurations and Cultural Repertoires (2017) and the author of Licht-Zeiten – Licht-Räume. Das Licht als symbolische Form im Theater der Neuzeit (2000).  His current project is situated in the field of production studies and explores the legacy of TV producer Wolfgang Rademann, creator of the successful German television series Das Traumschiff and Die Schwarzwald-Klinik.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Christian Krug is senior lecturer (associate professor) in English Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. His research and teaching focusses on the historicity of popular culture and the ideological uses of popular icons (ed. The Cultures of James Bond, 2011). He has worked on popular theatre (a monograph on 19^th-century British melodrama was published in 2001) and, at the University of Münster, on the “Interactivity of Digital Texts”. Currently, he is working on ideology and libidinal investments in British popular culture since the 19^th century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mirja Lecke

Mirja Lecke is chair of Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Regensburg. Her academic interests include Russian literature of the imperial and post-soviet periods in postcolonial perspective, as well as the Polish literature of the enlightenment and post-communist eras. She published a monograph about the representation of the Western borderlands in Russian imperial literature: Westland. Polen und die Ukraine in der russischen Literatur von Puškin bis Babel (2015) and co-edited a volume on Russian-Georgian literary relations of the post-Soviet era with Elena Chkhaidze (Rossia – Gruzija after Empire; 2018). In 2020 she convened a workshop at the Israel Institue for Advances Studies (Jerusalem) with Efraim Sicher on „Cosmopolitanism in Urban Space: A Case Study of Odessa 1884-1925).

 

 

 

Kathleen Loock

Kathleen Loock is Junior Professor of American Studies and Media Studies at Leibniz University Hannover and director of the research group „Hollywood Memories: Cinematic Remaking and the Construction of Global Movie Generations“ (funded by the DFG). Her research focuses on film remakes, sequels, and reboots, seriality in film and television, and the role memory and cultural repetition perform on the levels of identity formation and for the maintenance of imagined communities. She is the author of Kolumbus in den USA (2014), co-editor of Film Remakes, Adapations, and Fan Productions (with Constantine Verevis, 2012), and has edited several special issues: Serial Narratives (LWU: Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 2014), Exploring Film Seriality (with Frank Krutnik, Film Studies, 2017), and American TV Series Revivals (Television & New Media, 2018). Her video essay on Blade Runner 2049 was published in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Image Studies (2019), screened at international festivals and shortlisted for the Adelio Ferrero Award. She is currently finishing her book Hollywood Remaking.

 

Ana M. López

Ana M. López is a Professor in the Department of Communication, Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs and Director of the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute at Tulane University.  Her research is focused on Latin American and Latino film and cultural studies. She is co-editor (with Marvin D’Lugo and Laura Podalsky) of The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema (2017) and the editor in chief of the journal Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. She is also the author of the essay collection Hollywood, Nuestra América y los Latinos (2012) and co-editor of three collections of essays on Latin American cinema.  She has published more than three dozen essays and book chapters, addressing topics that range from melodrama and performance in the Golden Age Cinemas of Latin America, early silent cinema and modernity, and documentary to telenovelas, Cuban American media, and intermediality. She is currently working to establish a transnational research network focused on “On/Off Screen Cultures in Latin America” and on various projects reassessing melodrama in Latin America in the 21^st century.

 

 

 

Sarah Marak

Sarah Marak is a PhD candidate and Research Associate at the chair of American Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. She is currently working on a dissertation on eco-terrorism and environmental activism in US culture. Her research interests include critical terrorism studies, popular culture, history in fiction and film, nostalgia and sentimentality, and ecocriticism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marc Matten is Professor for Sinology at the department of Languages and Cultures of the Middle East and East Asia at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. His most recent book is titled Imagining a Postnational World – Hegemony and Space in Modern China (2016). His research interests include knowledge transfer during the Cold War, nationalism, and questions of national identity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Annika McPherson

Annika McPherson is Professor for New English Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Augsburg, Germany. She studied at the Universities of Bremen and Victoria, B.C., Canada, previously taught British and Global Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg and has been a guest lecturer at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her research and teaching areas include postcolonial studies; theories, policies and representations of cultural diversity in comparative perspective; Caribbean, West African, South African, Indian and Canadian literatures in English as well as diaspora studies and popular culture analysis. She served as President of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS) and is an associate of the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is currently developing a cooperative research project on „The Pleasures and Politics of Postcolonial Popular Cultures“ with a focus on global streaming media.

 

 

 

Peter J. Maurits is a postdoctoral fellow at the chair of American Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. Focusing on mainly African literature, from the perspective of world-literature and postcolonial studies, he is interested in how cultural forms move, interact, and take shape, especially in the Africa-Europe-US-America triangle. His research project is titled “A Typology of African Science Fiction” and connects to his interest in science fiction, utopia, and genre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Donald E. Pease

Donald E. Pease is Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. He is an authority on 19^th and 20^th century American literature and literary theory and is the founding director of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College. Among his most recent book publications are the biography Theodor Seuss Geisel (2010) and The New American Exceptionalism (2009). In 2012 he was awarded the American Studies Association’s Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for life-long service to American Studies. Currently Donald E. Pease is working on a book project entitled American Studies after the New Americanists and research projects concerned with transnational American Studies and the Korean War.

 

 

 

 

 

Larissa Pfaller is sociologist (Research Associate) at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. Her research interests focus on qualitative social research, methodology, and cultural sociology. She has co-authored an introduction to the method of metaphor analysis and published on topics like anti-aging medicine, successful aging, and organ donation. Larissa Pfaller’s current research project „Das Imaginäre an den Grenzen des Sozialen“ (DFG) focuses on the social imaginary of the forth age and post-mortem organ donation.

 

 

 

 

 

E. Deidre Pribram

E. Deidre Pribram is Professor Emerita of the Communications Department, Molloy University, on Long Island, New York.  Her research interests encompass cultural emotion studies, film and television studies, gender, and popular culture.  She is the author of Emotional Expressionism: Television Serialization, The Melodramatic Mode, and Socioemotionality (2023).  Other recent publications include „Ensemble Storytelling,“ in Exploring Seriality on Screen (2020), „Storied Feelings: Emotions, Culture, Media,“ in Emotions in Late Modernity (2019), A Cultural Approach to Emotional Disorders: Psychological and Aesthetic Interpretations (2018), and „Melodrama and the Aesthetics of Emotion,“ in Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures (2018).

 

 

 

 

 

Ursula Prutsch

Ursula Prutsch is Associate Professor for North American Cultural History at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. She teaches US-American as well as Latin American history. Her research is focused on populism in the United States and Latin America, on Inter-American policies, on Brazil and Argentina, as well as on Central European (forced) migration to Latin America. She is co-editor (with Heike Paul and Jürgen Gebhardt) of The Comeback of Populism. Transatlantic Perspectives (2019). She is the author of a book on Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of Inter-American Affairs in Brazil and Argentina (Creating Good Neighbors?, 2008), of the monograph Brasilien. Eine Kulturgeschichte (with Enrique Rodrigues Moura, 2013), the biography Eva Perón. Leben und Sterben einer Legende (2015), as well as of Populismus in den USA und Lateinamerika (2019). She has published dozens of articles on populism, transatlantic transfer of ideas and ideologies, and Inter-American relations from the 19^th to the 21^st century. She is currently working on a biography on Dona Leopoldina of Brazil and her instrumentalization for a politics of sentimentality.

 

Martin Puchner

Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Chair of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His prize-winning books cover subjects from philosophy to the arts, and his six-volume Norton Anthology of World Literature and his HarvardX MOOC (massive open online course) have brought four thousand years of literature to students across the globe. His best-selling book The Written World: The Power of Stories of Shape People, History, and Civilization (2017), which tells the story of literature from the invention of writing to the Internet, is being translated into eighteen languages. He is a member of the European Academy and has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, and the Berlin Prize. He is currently at work on a book about Rotwelsch, a secret language based on Yiddish, Hebrew, and German that has haunted his family for three generations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rama Srinivasan

Rama Srinivasan is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca‘ Foscari University of Venice. She is also affiliated as visiting faculty with the International Institute of Information Technology, India. In 2020, she was awarded the Marie Curie Grant for the project, RE-NUP: Spousal Reunification and Integration Laws in Europe. RE-NUP studies the modes through which immigrant couples and families from South Asia navigate visa/residency processes in Germany, Italy and France. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at Brown University in 2017 and has also been a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. In 2020, her monograph, Courting Desire: Litigating for Love in North India, was published by Rutgers University Press. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, law and society, popular culture, phenomenology, emotions and affect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silke Steets is Professor of Sociology at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. Her research interests include Social Theory as well as the fields of space, popular culture, religion, contemporary art, materiality and the city. In her book Der sinnhafte Aufbau der gebauten Welt (Suhrkamp, 2015), she develops a knowledge-sociological theory of architecture, which extends Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality to the built world. Her current empirical research project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), focuses on “cognitive minorities” in Germany and the USA and compares Evangelicals in secular Leipzig and Unitarians in conservative Dallas, TX.

 

 

 

 

 

Simon Strick

Simon Strick is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin. His dissertation project brought together cultural studies, affect studies, and medicine and was published as American Dolorologies: Pain, Sentimentality, Biopolitics with SUNY Press in 2014. Among his research interests are medical history, media and film studies, disability theory, and popular culture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rebecca Wanzo

Rebecca Wanzo is Associate Professor for women, gender, and sexuality studies and Associate Director of the Center for Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (2009) and is currently working on a new project focused on African American citizenship and graphic storytelling. Moreover, Professor Wanzo’s work also focuses on civil rights sentimental fiction, theories of affect, and feminist and critical race theory.