Index

Vanessa Hardinger

Vanessa received her BA in English Literature with a minor in Communication Studies from the
University of Nevada, Reno and her MA in English Studies from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität
Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her research interests include Romantic and Victorian literature, gothic and
horror studies, gender studies, popular media and culture, narratology and genre theory.

Project: Heartache Horror: Home, Family, and Generational Trauma in the Sentimental Horror of
Mike Flanagan’s Television Series

This project focuses on modern popular horror which explores personal and cultural generational trauma through the use of the home and family as a site of both sentimentality and horror. Drawing on the tropes and traditions of Gothic literature, much of contemporary horror explores the haunting nature of the past through its lingering griefs, traumas, and injustices, which, failing to have been properly confronted and rectified, continue to antagonize the present. This project will explore the combination of horror and sentimentality and how it creates a space for richly textured stories which explore the emotional depths of both the personal and cultural traumas of a given society. A cultural reading of popular modern horror, such as thetelevision works of director Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and The Fall of the House of Usher) aims to question how sentimentality operates as a mode of storytelling within horror, as well as contribute to the discussion of how sentimentality may exist as horror as well.

Anne Bertram

Anne holds a BA in British Studies as well as a BA and MA in American Studies from the University of Leipzig. During her studies she received funding from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, worked as an instructor and research assistant at the Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, and as a social media manager for the German-American Institute Saxony. Her research interests are located in the realm of popular culture and film studies, predominantly centering on displays of femininity and contemporary renditions of regional Gothic.

Project: Imaginings of White Femininity in Contemporary Iterations of Sentimental Southern Gothic Visual Culture (WT)

Recent years have seen an increase and revival of a Southern Gothic aesthetic on social media platforms and in US film. At the core of this visual culture is the commodified staging of untouched nature, abandoned buildings, Christian symbolism, and young white women. In my dissertation project, I explore how this aesthetic is permeated by the sentimental and which dominant myths about US-American society are reproduced and worked through in these cultural products. My aim is to develop the concept of a ‘sentimental Southern Gothic’ which is centered around the therein contained narratives and imaginings of white femininity. On a theoretical level, the intricacies and the tying together of research on the sentimental as well as the Gothic mode is decisive and further intertwined with perspectives from regionalism, affect, hauntology and nostalgia studies. The cultural work of the ’sentimental Southern Gothic‘ is then to be captured and decoded through a discourse analysis of social media content and film. By uncovering how products of this specific visual culture construct and promote an image of a supposedly apolitical and ahistorical US South, my dissertation project seeks to make a critical contribution to existing understandings of the sentimental as an aesthetic narrative strategy.

Publications

Bertram, Anne I., “The Spatial Rhetorics of the American Home as a Site of Imprisoned Teenage Femininity in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999).” In Progress: A Graduate Journal of North American Studies, vol. 3, no.1, 2025.

Bertram, Anne I., “The Parody Within: The Employment of the Parodic Mode in The Addams Family (1991).” aspeers: emerging voices in american studies, vol. 17, 2024, pp. 25-42.

With Demirkaya, N. Selin, et al., editors: “American Apocalypses.” aspeers: emerging voices in american studies, vol. 16, 2023, pp.1-9.

Talks

“Imaginings of White Femininity in Contemporary Iterations of Sentimental Southern Gothic Visual Culture: A Case Study of Sharp Objects (2018).” 35th Annual Conference of the Postgraduate Forum (PGF) of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA/GAAS). Leipzig, November 7, 2025.

“Imaginings of White Femininity in Contemporary Iterations of Sentimental Southern Gothic Visual Culture.” 13^th International BAA (Bavarian American Academy) Summer Academy. Montreal, July 20, 2025.

“Native American Women’s Writing: Decoding Sophia A. Callahan’s Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891).” Anglophonia (International Student Conference in English Studies). Zagreb, May 17, 2024.

“Sophia A. Callahans Wynema: A Child of the Forest—Eine Gratwanderung des Sentimentalismus.” 9. Vortragsreihe des JFL (Junges Forum Literaturwissenschaft). Leipzig, December 5, 2023.

Teaching

Literature and Culture I (Winter Term 2023/24; 2024/25) at Leipzig University

Jacob Hovde

Ege A. Özbek

Ege A. Özbek holds a double master’s degree in English and American Studies from University of Graz and Université Paris Cité. He earned his BA in American Culture and Literature with a minor in Art History from Hacettepe University. His master’s thesis focused on contemporary American eco-documentary. His research interests include visual culture, film studies, photography, intermediality, and sentimentality.

Project: The Manifestations of the Sentimental in Contemporary Political Documentary

This project explores sentimentality as both an aesthetic mode and a communicative code in contemporary political documentaries. It investigates how political emotions are mobilized to forge collective identification and inspire political engagement, through what Rebecca Wanzo terms “sentimental political storytelling” to articulate resistance and build affective agency. This study develops a theoretical framework around emotional truth, generated by aesthetic and narrative strategies, to analyze how these films mediate epistemic knowledge into doxastic common sense, thereby translating data and evidence into authentic, urgent experience. The initial selection of documentaries includes Powerlands (2022), Union (2024), and No Other Land (2024). This project analyzes these films not as isolated texts but as part of a social change process that, as Angela Aguayo argues, begins before a film is made and lingers long after. Blending “on-screen” cinematic artistry with “off-screen” participatory integrity, these documentaries challenge dominant media narratives and address the systemic injustices of neoliberalism, environmental racism, and colonialism. The central question guiding this study is: What are the manifestations of the sentimental mode as aesthetics and sentimental code as discourse, and how do they function to create this emotional truth?

Publications:

Özbek, Ege A. “Fatherhood in the Wilderness: Postfeminism and Masculinity in Leave No Trace (2018).” Diversity: Linguistic, Cultural and Literary Perspectives. Conference Proceedings, edited by Susan Brähler and Kerstin-Anja Münderlein, Bamberg University Press, forthcoming 2025.

Özbek, Ege A. “Narrative, Stasis, and Intermediality in the Photography of Gregory Crewdson.” Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research, vol. 11, no. 2, 2023, https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/jaclr/article/view/22909.

Conference Talks:

“Eco-Documentary as a Space of Resistance: Environmental Activism in Powerlands (2022) and Wrenched (2014).” Conference: “Environment(s): Literary, Cultural and Linguistic Perspectives,” Fifth Student and Alumni Conference of the European Joint Master’s Programme in English and American Studies May 8, 2025, University of Pécs [Online].

“Cinematic Diversity: Postfeminism, Masculinity, and Leave No Trace (2018).” Conference: “Diversity: Linguistic, Cultural and Literary Perspectives,” Fourth Student and Alumni Conference of the European Joint Master’s Programme in English and American Studies, April 25, 2024, University of Bamberg.

“Fatherhood in the Wilderness: The Father-Daughter Relationship in Leave No Trace (2018).” Conference: 50^th International Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies, October 20, 2023, University of Klagenfurt.

“The Distortion of Climate Activism in The Telegraph: ‘[T]he anarchy and unreason of Just Stop Oil’.” Conference: Third Student Conference of the European Joint Master’s Programme in English and American Studies, May 11, 2023, Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

Yuling Shi

Yuling Shi received her Bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature, with a minor in English Language and Literature, in China. After working as an English teacher for three years, she moved to Germany for further studies. She completed her master degree in English and American Studies at the University of Bamberg. Her research interests include Chinese literature, martial arts fiction and popular culture, memory studies, and narratology.

Project: Knightly Bones, Tender Heart: The Sentimental in Chinese Knight-Errant

As a long celebrated literal and cultural symbol, the Chinese knight-errant has captivated the hearts and minds of generations of Chinese people transcending the limitations of time, space and ideologies. What intrinsic qualities have established the knight-errant as one of the most beloved icons in Chinese culture? What does the popularity of the knight-errant reveal about the evolution of Chinese cultural identity? My project seeks to answer these questions by proposing that Chinese knight-errant is, at its core, a sentimental subject—an autonomous moral agent unbound by external authorities or principles. Moreover, the shifting sentimental dimensions in the portrayal of knights-errant serve as an elaborate footnote to the genealogy of sentimentality in China. The project examines the sentimental dimension of the knight-errant figure in Chinese martial arts fiction and its interconnectedness with the evolution of Chinese sentimentality. My methodology is genealogical, focusing on specific, pivotal moments in the development of knight-errantry, which also informs my selection of primary texts. The research covers the martial arts fiction from the middle to late Tang Dynasty, the work of Wang Dulu in the early 20th century, and the work of Jin Yong in the latter half of the century, through both textual and contextual historical analysis. By doing so, this research aspires to offer a fresh lens through which to analyze the intricate connections between knight-errantry and Chinese sentimentality, and to uncover new dimensions for interpreting Chinese cultural and social dynamics.

Chan Wai Charles Wong

Charles holds a BA in English from the University of London and a MA in English Studies
from Freie Universität Berlin. Before joining the Research Training Group at FAU
Erlangen-Nürnberg, he had doctoral proposals accepted at the University of York and at
Freie Universität Berlin, where he was also awarded the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium.

Project: Affective Alienation: Crises, Disaffection, & Contemporary Fictions

This project turns to 21^st-century Anglophone fictions to look at disaffection as an affective mode of crisis management opposed to empathy and nostalgia, two sentimental modes which have become mainstream and ubiquitous in recent cultural and sociopolitical discourse amidst crises. While empathy and nostalgia can be broadly characterized by a respective attachment to utopic (forward-looking) and retrotopic (backward-looking) impulses, disaffection is counter-positioned as a form of detachment. Its refusal to commit to a direction other than to immerse in a general state of dissatisfaction or discontent with the current situation can be described as heterotopic in gesture, since it opts to remain at the present site of incompatibility (Foucault 1984; Berlant 2021), the same spot of bother causing the unhappiness in the first place. By refusing codified forms of sentiments however, I argue that disaffection allows for a different set of feelings to emerge, one that may help us to feel the structural contours of contemporary crises instead of veiling them with derivative platitudes. In gesturing towards the ambivalent and the unfeeling, I thus also seek to push the boundaries of what sentimentality entails, hoping to open up new affective grounds for sentimental literature beyond immediate identification and pathos.

Conference Talks

“Crises on the Margins: Situational Genres in Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World (2017).” 35th Postgraduate Forum (PGF) of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS), “Crisis & Resilience in American Literature, Culture, History, and Politics.” Leipzig University, Germany, 08 November 2025.

“On the Inconvenience of Contemporary Literary Disaffection.” 13th Summer Academy of the Bavarian American Academy (BAA), “North American Narratives of Crisis & Repair, Past & Present.” Goethe-Institute Montréal, Canada, 18 July 2025.

“‘Floating Sideways:’ Lateral Aesthetics & Post-Neoliberal Subjects in Anglo-American Millennial Novels.” The British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies “What Happens Now” (BACLS-WHN) Biennial Conference. University of Stirling, United Kingdom, 12 June 2025.

Academic Activities & Workshops

• Presented PhD chapter at the Research Colloquium of Prof. Dr. Sabine Schülting (English Philology: Cultural Studies). Free University of Berlin, Germany, 07 January 2026.
• Chair of Panel “Disrupting the Genre and Conventions of the Novel” at the 52nd Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies (AAAS), “Ruptures, Fractures, Discontinuities: Troubling American Studies.” University of Vienna, Austria, 04 October 2025.
• Presented PhD project at the Research Colloquium of Prof. Dr. Sabine Schülting (English Philology: Cultural Studies). Free University of Berlin, Germany, 25 June 2025.
• Chair of Panel “Uncertain Affects” at The British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies “What Happens Now” (BACLS-WHN) Biennial Conference. University of Stirling, United Kingdom, 11 June 2025.

Isabelle Brandis

Isabelle Brandis studied English and American Studies as well as Scandinavian Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. She holds a master’s degree in North American Studies: Culture and Literature. Due to her vast interest in languages, she acquired basic knowledge of Spanish and Korean through language courses and self-study, and is furthermore fluent in English, Swedish and Danish. Her research interests focus on representations of race, class, gender and sexuality in popular culture and literature.

Project: Unraveling the Sentimental: Girlhood, Home, and Family Bonds in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Lucy Maud Mongomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Their Screen Adaptations

Children have always been at the center of sentimental discourse as almost nothing is more deeply rooted in sentimentalization than the depiction of a child and the process of coming-of-age. Childhoods and the relationships to family and kin provide a broad playing field for sentimental discourse and are often expressed in a sentimental code that can be well analyzed in literary texts and media representation. Anne of Green Gables (1908) by Lucy Maud Montgomery and Little Women (1868/69) by Louisa May Alcott are among the most beloved North American (children’s) classics, which still enjoy great popularity internationally since their publication, not least also thanks to their well-known adaptations. In my PhD project I will thus examine the complex portrayals of affective intensity as part of the Little Women and Anne of Green Gables narratives and consider changes in the characters’ identity constructions and interpersonal relationships throughout their various adaptational interpretations over the years. Further attention will be paid to the adoption or rejection of the narratives’ historically sentimentalized notions of marriage and female domesticity with a special focus on the significance that is ascribed to the concepts of family, the creation of kinship and community within the construction of home and a place of belonging. The planned research aims to demonstrate the nuances within the sentimental representations of nineteenth-century girlhood and familial bonds in a comparative juxtaposition of the original texts and their selected adaptations.

Second Cohort

Anne holds a BA in British Studies as well as a BA and MA in American Studies from the University of Leipzig. During her studies she received funding from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, worked as an instructor and research assistant at the Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, and as a social media manager for the German-American Institute Saxony. Her research interests are located in the realm of popular culture and film studies, predominantly centering on displays of femininity and contemporary renditions of regional Gothic.

Project: Imaginings of White Femininity in Contemporary Iterations of Sentimental Southern Gothic Visual Culture (WT)

Recent years have seen an increase and revival of a Southern Gothic aesthetic on social media platforms and in US film. At the core of this visual culture is the commodified staging of untouched nature, abandoned buildings, Christian symbolism, and young white women. In my dissertation project, I explore how this aesthetic is permeated by the sentimental and which dominant myths about US-American society are reproduced and worked through in these cultural products. My aim is to develop the concept of a ‘sentimental Southern Gothic’ which is centered around the therein contained narratives and imaginings of white femininity. On a theoretical level, the intricacies and the tying together of research on the sentimental as well as the Gothic mode is decisive and further intertwined with perspectives from regionalism, affect, hauntology and nostalgia studies. The cultural work of the ’sentimental Southern Gothic‘ is then to be captured and decoded through a discourse analysis of social media content and film. By uncovering how products of this specific visual culture construct and promote an image of a supposedly apolitical and ahistorical US South, my dissertation project seeks to make a critical contribution to existing understandings of the sentimental as an aesthetic narrative strategy.

Isabelle Brandis studied English and American Studies as well as Scandinavian Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. She holds a master’s degree in North American Studies: Culture and Literature. Due to her vast interest in languages, she acquired basic knowledge of Spanish and Korean through language courses and self-study, and is furthermore fluent in English, Swedish and Danish. Her research interests focus on representations of race, class, gender and sexuality in popular culture and literature.

Project: Unraveling the Sentimental: Girlhood, Home, and Family Bonds in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Lucy Maud Mongomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Their Screen Adaptations

Children have always been at the center of sentimental discourse as almost nothing is more deeply rooted in sentimentalization than the depiction of a child and the process of coming-of-age. Childhoods and the relationships to family and kin provide a broad playing field for sentimental discourse and are often expressed in a sentimental code that can be well analyzed in literary texts and media representation. Anne of Green Gables (1908) by Lucy Maud Montgomery and Little Women (1868/69) by Louisa May Alcott are among the most beloved North American (children’s) classics, which still enjoy great popularity internationally since their publication, not least also thanks to their well-known adaptations. In my PhD project I will thus examine the complex portrayals of affective intensity as part of the Little Women and Anne of Green Gables narratives and consider changes in the characters’ identity constructions and interpersonal relationships throughout their various adaptational interpretations over the years. Further attention will be paid to the adoption or rejection of the narratives’ historically sentimentalized notions of marriage and female domesticity with a special focus on the significance that is ascribed to the concepts of family, the creation of kinship and community within the construction of home and a place of belonging. The planned research aims to demonstrate the nuances within the sentimental representations of nineteenth-century girlhood and familial bonds in a comparative juxtaposition of the original texts and their selected adaptations.

Zeyu Du holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Sichuan University and a master’s degree in Modern Chinese History from Renmin University of China. Before joining the Research Training Group at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, he spent one year as a doctoral student in the university’s Sinology Department. His research interests include modern Chinese intellectual history, Chinese diaspora studies, and Hong Kong history.

A Sentimental History of Chinese Exiled Intellectuals During the Cold War, 1949-1989

The year 1949 witnessed the largest wave of intellectuals choosing exile in modern Chinese history following the establishment of the communist regime. This project undertakes a sentimental history of this diasporic group. Despite their dispersion across Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States, this study investigates how they formed a cohesive “emotional community,” forged through transnational networks of correspondence, shared periodicals, and the circulation of key individuals. The central aim is to analyze this community’s “structure of feelings,” exploring how sentiments such as nostalgia, patriotic worry, grief, and hope were shaped by their experiences of displacement, historical trauma, and the geopolitical order of the Cold War. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from the history of emotions (Rosenwein), cultural studies (Williams), and modern Chinese literary studies (Wang, Lee), this study positions sentimentality as its core analytical dimension, responding to a tendency in previous scholarship on Chinese exiles to prioritize political or philosophical thought while neglecting this critical aspect. Employing a focused case-study approach on three key intellectual circles, this research traces the shared sentiments that animated their transnational network. By doing so, it aims to uncover new dimensions for understanding the Chinese exiles and to contribute a new perspective to the intersection of Chinese studies, diaspora studies, and sentimental studies.

Sandra holds a Master’s degree in Sociology from Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. After graduating, she engaged in ethnographic research projects centred on the subject of digitalisation. Her research is driven by the question of why we believe what we believe and how social reality is created. Since April 2025, she has been doing her doctorate as part of the DFG Research Training Group “The Sentimental in Literature, Culture and Politics”.

Project: The Influence of Sentimental Narratives on Collective Identity Formation in Spiritual Volunteering

The research project investigates how emotionalized narratives and sentimentally framed experiences contribute to the creation of belonging and identity in the context of spiritual volunteering. The focus is on the question of how longing, nostalgia and affective connectedness are staged, experienced and negotiated in ritualized practices and communal communication. Spiritual volunteering – for example in yoga retreats or ashrams – offers an exemplary experiential space in which romanticized notions of closeness to nature, inner authenticity and transcendent community are cultivated. The project pursues a sociology of knowledge and symbolic-interactionist approach in order to analyze the performative power of feelings and sentimentality in these social processes. Through ethnographic fieldwork and the evaluation of affectively charged interactions, the aim is to show how emotional experiences are collectively interpreted, shared and condensed into an element of identity-forming community. The focus is particularly on the social practices and narratives through which spirituality is experienced and embodied as a perceived truth.

Vanessa received her BA in English Literature with a minor in Communication Studies from the
University of Nevada, Reno and her MA in English Studies from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität
Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her research interests include Romantic and Victorian literature, gothic and
horror studies, gender studies, popular media and culture, narratology and genre theory.

Project: Heartache Horror: Home, Family, and Generational Trauma in the Sentimental Horror of
Mike Flanagan’s Television Series

This project focuses on modern popular horror which explores personal and cultural generational trauma through the use of the home and family as a site of both sentimentality and horror. Drawing on the tropes and traditions of Gothic literature, much of contemporary horror explores the haunting nature of the past through its lingering griefs, traumas, and injustices, which, failing to have been properly confronted and rectified, continue to antagonize the present. This project will explore the combination of horror and sentimentality and how it creates a space for richly textured stories which explore the emotional depths of both the personal and cultural traumas of a given society. A cultural reading of popular modern horror, such as thetelevision works of director Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, Midnight Mass, The Midnight Club, and The Fall of the House of Usher) aims to question how sentimentality operates as a mode of storytelling within horror, as well as contribute to the discussion of how sentimentality may exist as horror as well.

Project: Bridging the Sentimental Gap: Climate Change Cinema and Attuning to Hyperobjects 

Following decades of climate change communication, the information deficit – once identified as the primary roadblock to collective awareness and subsequent action – has largely been addressed. Yet, green initiatives are losing the momentum that reactionary political movements, which ignore or actively reverse climate mitigation efforts, are simultaneously gaining. This dynamic coincides with and is fueled by a public sentiment displaying growing levels of inertia towards the crisis. Unsurprisingly so, when considering research from environmental humanities suggesting that hard data lacks the cultural response to adequately embed its information. Especially when this data is introduced into an environmental ontology informed by Cartesian dualist notions of the human as an entity distinct from a culturally constructed notion of ‘nature.’ This dissertation argues that sentimental forms of cinema can elicit emotional responses that align with the spatiotemporal and affective dimensions of hyperobjects, fostering deeper audience engagement with the complexities of global warming. It aims to contribute to efforts seeking to address the „crisis of imagination“ identified by Amitav Ghosh and elaborated by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Bruno Latour. Drawing from Morton’s concept of hyperobjects, as well as the growing research on the affective dimensions of visual representations, the study seeks to identify sentimental aesthetic strategies that enable audiences to emotionally connect with the hyperobject of climate change. Close readings of selected cinematic texts will be employed to infer a grammar of environmental sentimentality ­– a set of aesthetic and narrative guidelines informing emotionally resonant environmental representations that weaken the felt disconnection from the phenomenon and, in the long term, inspire meaningful action in the face of the climate crisis.

Charlotte holds a BA in Political Science as well as a MA in Sociology from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Before joining the Research Training Group at FAU she worked as a research associate at SHARE (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe), where she applied qualitative methodology to improvement questionnaire design. Her research interest include gender studies, care (work), and theories of social inequality.

Project: „Warm-hearted compassionate care – tailored to your family’s needs“ – Sentimental Framings in the Provision of Live-In Care

This research project examines the symbolic and emotional framings of paid care work in the context of transnational live-in care arrangements. Focusing on the websites of commercial placement agencies, the project investigates how these actors construct, market, and legitimize care services through sentimental codes, such as “loving support,” “dedication,” or “warm-hearted assistance”, that emotionally charge and morally elevate a highly precarious field of labour.

While research on live-in care has emphasised issues of migration, inequality, and labour precarity, this project addresses the symbolic dimension of how care work is represented and commodified. To do so it employs the concept of sentimentality as a socially structured communicative code that shapes how emotions are expressed, read, and regulated in public discourse.

Using Grounded Theory Methodology, the analysis traces the sentimental narratives, visual strategies, and semantic patterns through which agencies present care as both intimate and professional, familial yet marketable. The project explores how narratives of emotional proximity, moral worth, and idealised family relations are mobilised to stabilise and naturalise market-based care arrangements. It further examines how these sentimental framings contribute to the depoliticization of precarious labour arrangements and the consolidation of gendered, class-based, and migration-related structural inequalities in the care sector.

Ege A. Özbek holds a double master’s degree in English and American Studies from University of Graz and Université Paris Cité. He earned his BA in American Culture and Literature with a minor in Art History from Hacettepe University. His master’s thesis focused on contemporary American eco-documentary. His research interests include visual culture, film studies, photography, intermediality, and sentimentality.

Project: The Manifestations of the Sentimental in Contemporary Political Documentary

This project explores sentimentality as both an aesthetic mode and a communicative code in contemporary political documentaries. It investigates how political emotions are mobilized to forge collective identification and inspire political engagement, through what Rebecca Wanzo terms “sentimental political storytelling” to articulate resistance and build affective agency. This study develops a theoretical framework around emotional truth, generated by aesthetic and narrative strategies, to analyze how these films mediate epistemic knowledge into doxastic common sense, thereby translating data and evidence into authentic, urgent experience. The initial selection of documentaries includes Powerlands (2022), Union (2024), and No Other Land (2024). This project analyzes these films not as isolated texts but as part of a social change process that, as Angela Aguayo argues, begins before a film is made and lingers long after. Blending “on-screen” cinematic artistry with “off-screen” participatory integrity, these documentaries challenge dominant media narratives and address the systemic injustices of neoliberalism, environmental racism, and colonialism. The central question guiding this study is: What are the manifestations of the sentimental mode as aesthetics and sentimental code as discourse, and how do they function to create this emotional truth?

Yuling Shi received her Bachelor’s degree in Chinese Language and Literature, with a minor in English Language and Literature, in China. After working as an English teacher for three years, she moved to Germany for further studies. She completed her master degree in English and American Studies at the University of Bamberg. Her research interests include Chinese literature, martial arts fiction and popular culture, memory studies, and narratology.

Project: Knightly Bones, Tender Heart: The Sentimental in Chinese Knight-Errant

As a long celebrated literal and cultural symbol, the Chinese knight-errant has captivated the hearts and minds of generations of Chinese people transcending the limitations of time, space and ideologies. What intrinsic qualities have established the knight-errant as one of the most beloved icons in Chinese culture? What does the popularity of the knight-errant reveal about the evolution of Chinese cultural identity? My project seeks to answer these questions by proposing that Chinese knight-errant is, at its core, a sentimental subject—an autonomous moral agent unbound by external authorities or principles. Moreover, the shifting sentimental dimensions in the portrayal of knights-errant serve as an elaborate footnote to the genealogy of sentimentality in China. The project examines the sentimental dimension of the knight-errant figure in Chinese martial arts fiction and its interconnectedness with the evolution of Chinese sentimentality. My methodology is genealogical, focusing on specific, pivotal moments in the development of knight-errantry, which also informs my selection of primary texts. The research covers the martial arts fiction from the middle to late Tang Dynasty, the work of Wang Dulu in the early 20th century, and the work of Jin Yong in the latter half of the century, through both textual and contextual historical analysis. By doing so, this research aspires to offer a fresh lens through which to analyze the intricate connections between knight-errantry and Chinese sentimentality, and to uncover new dimensions for interpreting Chinese cultural and social dynamics.

Ronja completed her bachelor’s degree at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg with a major in Scandinavian Studies and a minor in English and American Studies, including two semesters at Háskóli Íslands in Reykjavík. She continued her studies at FAU, receiving her master’s degree in English Studies with a focus on literature and culture. During her time at FAU, she was actively involved in student representation and community activities. Her academic interests include popular contemporary fantasy and science fiction, historical fiction, gender and representation, intermediality, aesthetic strategies, and narratology.

Project: Silent Tears and Steady Thrones: Navigating Change Through Sentimental Narratives of Family, Identity, and Duty in the British Period Dramas The Crown and Downton Abbey

My thesis explores how The Crown and Downton Abbey construct sentimental narratives of family, identity, and duty to navigate and emotionally mediate moments of historical and cultural transition. It investigates how both series employ emotionally resonant character arcs alongside aesthetic strategies (such as music, symbolism, and visual spectacle) to portray political and societal transformation. By grounding these shifts in private, intimate storytelling, the series offer audiences a way to process contemporary anxieties surrounding identity, continuity, and belonging. It also engages with paratextual contexts, such as podcasts, tourism, and media discourse, to show how these narratives extend their cultural influence beyond the screen, reinforcing collective imaginaries of British heritage in a post-imperial, post-Brexit cultural landscape.

Luiza studied political science and economics at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. She also completed her Master’s degree in Political Science at FAU. Her master thesis focused on Antifeminism of the New Right in Germany. Her research interests include gender studies, postcolonialism and eastern europe.

Project: Form and function of the sentimental in the negotiation process of gender relations in Ukraine after the Russian invasion

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 marks a profound social turning point that is also significantly changing gender relations. This research project examines this change from the perspective of sentimentality as a discursive and social phenomenon. While classic role patterns dominated at the beginning of the war – women and children fleeing, men fighting – an increasing questioning of traditional gender roles became apparent as the war progressed. The focus is on Ukrainian discourse, which is characterized on the one hand by the construction of national identity and on the other by a conscious differentiation from Russian values. The latter favors progressive developments, such as the growing social acceptance of the LGBTQ+ movement. The sentimental dimension proves to be a central means of interpreting and controlling social change. Using critical discourse analysis, the project analyzes the role of sentimentality in the context of war, identity and gender. The aim is to open up new perspectives for interdisciplinary gender studies and to shed new light on the historical tension between the national question and the question of women.

Charles holds a BA in English from the University of London and a MA in English Studies
from Freie Universität Berlin. Before joining the Research Training Group at FAU
Erlangen-Nürnberg, he had doctoral proposals accepted at the University of York and at
Freie Universität Berlin, where he was also awarded the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium.

Project: Affective Alienation: Crises, Disaffection, & Contemporary Fictions

This project turns to 21^st-century Anglophone fictions to look at disaffection as an affective mode of crisis management opposed to empathy and nostalgia, two sentimental modes which have become mainstream and ubiquitous in recent cultural and sociopolitical discourse amidst crises. While empathy and nostalgia can be broadly characterized by a respective attachment to utopic (forward-looking) and retrotopic (backward-looking) impulses, disaffection is counter-positioned as a form of detachment. Its refusal to commit to a direction other than to immerse in a general state of dissatisfaction or discontent with the current situation can be described as heterotopic in gesture, since it opts to remain at the present site of incompatibility (Foucault 1984; Berlant 2021), the same spot of bother causing the unhappiness in the first place. By refusing codified forms of sentiments however, I argue that disaffection allows for a different set of feelings to emerge, one that may help us to feel the structural contours of contemporary crises instead of veiling them with derivative platitudes. In gesturing towards the ambivalent and the unfeeling, I thus also seek to push the boundaries of what sentimentality entails, hoping to open up new affective grounds for sentimental literature beyond immediate identification and pathos.

First Cohort

Yajing Cao

• Email: yajing.y.cao@fau.de

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in English, Yajing worked as a teacher in China. In 2016, she obtained the chance to study in the U.S. and Germany. With a strong interest toward languages and cultures, she joined an interdisciplinary master’s program in Luxembourg. In 2022 she joined the Research Training Group at FAU.

Project: Kite without the Line: Sentimental Analysis of the Overseas Chinese Elite Students and Intellectuals from the 1910s to the 1980s in Europe and North America (WT)

Yajing’s research aims to explore the feelings and the inner world of the overseas Chinese elite students and intellectuals from the 1910s to the 1980s in Europe and North America. During their stay in the west, some of these students and intellectuals recorded their feelings and life stories in a variety of texts such as letters, diaries, poems, memoirs, and articles, which are the fundamental research sources for this study. By analyzing these texts, their feelings and the inner world during their stay aboard can be revisited.

Sofie Fingado

• Email: sofie.fingado@fau.de

Sofie Fingado completed her B.A. in Cultural History and Theory and Social Sciences as well as her M.A. in Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-University zu Berlin, with two study semesters abroad, at the Tel Aviv University in Israel and the Københavns Universitet in Denmark. At Humboldt-Universität she has been working as a student assistant at the chair for Kulturwissenschaftliche Ästhetik und Kulturtheorie as well as an academic tutor for the introductory course Einführung in das Kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten. After her graduation, she received funding from the Humboldt Graduate School.

Project:

As war against a feeling, the „War on Terror“ is to be thought of not only as a caesura in terms of affective (wartime) politics but also with regard to the US penal system. At the same time, the global detention system and the internment practices of the US border regime which are being intensified after 9/11 are interwoven with the prison Industrial complex within the national borders of the US. In my project I wish to understand these democratically legitimated incarcerations and detentions as operating with a conceptualization of „single beings“, of individuated and singular persons. Following this assumption, I wish to understand the penal violence as directed against affective ties, intersubjective interdependence, and related/kinship subjectivity and as violent „family seperation“– and to shift attention to the ways in which the ones detained/incarcerated are imagining and (re)building a notion of self which is always already related and affectively entangled.
Here, children and other „minor figures“ are of specific interest, whose presence in sites of incarceration is activating and intensifying sentimental abolitionist politics on the one hand – and whose identity as being vulnerable and worthy of protection is becoming the site of negotiations on the other hand.

Germanaz, Axelle

• Email: axelle.germanaz@fau.de

Axelle Germanaz is a doctoral researcher in American Studies at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. She is currently working on a dissertation with the working title “Inside the Environmental Imaginary and Cultural Spaces of the White Power Movement in the United States.” Her research examines the instrumentalization of environmentalism and the deployment of sentimentality by US far-right groups in an era of climate emergency.

Project: “Inside the Environmental Imaginary and Cultural Spaces of the White Power Movement in the United States”

My doctoral thesis examines the use of environmental rhetoric, imagery, and themes in contemporary US far-right ideology and culture. I analyze the ways adherents deploy environmentalism to naturalize and legitimize white supremacism as a viable solution to the ongoing climate crisis. In this context, I further argue that the movement is relying on sentimental aesthetics and politics to disseminate its propaganda. Members tend to deploy sentimental narratives and tropes to produce strong emotional responses from their audiences and to mobilize them toward illiberal actions. My project uses an interdisciplinary methodology and a transnational approach. I rely on various fields of research –from cultural studies, affect theory, and ecocriticism, to political science, sociology, and history– to survey the intersections between environmentalism, sentimentality, and contemporary reactionary politics in the United States. Following an approach of ideology critique, I examine the multifaceted conceptualizations and representations of the environment and climate change in the cultural products disseminated by the US white power movement between the 1980s and today.

Raimund Held

• Email: raimund.held@fau.de

Raimund Held studied Theatre- and Media Studies as well as Sociology at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and Multimedia at the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg and MultimediaArt at the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg. He is a Research Fellow in Media Studies and is currently working on a dissertation focused on smart technologies. His research interests include theories of social media, user experience design, surveillance studies, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and Film studies.

Project:

With the increasing spread of social media and the enormous involvement of mobile smart devices in people’s everyday life and the living environment, different new situational or habitual media practices have evolved in the course of the 21st century. On the medial level, this development profoundly changed  self- and world-relationships between the medium and the user. At the same time, it can be observed how these practices are more and more intertwined with neoliberal capitalism and how they create new ways of self-marketing rooted in consumption within an economy of affect and attention. Especially the smartphone, as a digital self- and nearbody-technology with countless apps and techological functions, and as a spatial medium for appropriation, self-representation as well as location-based orientation, supports this development as it is ideally suited to promote the entrepreneurial „digital-self“ in a competitive manner. The focus of this research project are digital dating apps and their emotional-affective network effects during the digital flirting and matching process. In this project dating apps are understood as powerful, AI-supported entities, that are based on autonomous metrication processes, which function and operate as a reward-, feedback- and reaction-system between users. The project aims to find out how the technology of the dating app structures and modifies the communicative and relationship-forming code between users and which socio-cultural media practices are suggested, reinforced and normalized through the technology. Additionally, the research also focuses on analyzing the technologically induced effects within the interaction between the structure of the app, the device, and the user as „systems of intimacy“.

Khushboo Jain

• Email: khushboo.jain@fau.de

Khushboo Jain has worked extensively towards securing rights of children in contact with railways in India including through a petition in the Delhi High Court. She is the Founding member of the All India Working Group for Rights of Children (AIWGRC), an alliance founded in June 2014 with an objective to empower children through facilitating child participation in legal reforms. Her PhD research, Home-making on the Streets of Delhi, offers a critique of the narratives of homelessness through ethnographically rich research on the practices of home-making on the streets.

Project: Home-making on the Streets of Delhi‘

‘Home-making on the Streets of Delhi’ is a deep ethnographic study of the everyday home-making practices of the street dwellers in the capital city of Delhi, India. Home-making on the streets is infused by the moral sentiment of an international narrative of home and homelessness and vexed political motivations of clean urban streets. And between these extremes lie the everyday negotiation of practices of home-making on urban streets. By exploring street dwelling in three different kinds of space – of worship, market and a railway station, this dissertation examines how different street spaces become home for its inhabitants, how the material and social space aid in the processes of home-making, and how street dwellers add to the character and the economy of these spaces. It further evaluates how the street as a space of home-making is understood in policies and interventions for street-dwellers as a way to deepen the critique of the narratives of homelessness.

Andrea Klinger

• Email: andrea.klinger@fau.de

Andrea Klinger studied German-French Studies, a binational bachelor program of the German-French University, at the Universities of Regensburg and Nice. After completing her Master’s degree in Intercultural European Studies at the University of Regensburg, she taught German for one year at the renowned Grande École École normale supérieure de Lyon (ENS de Lyon) and worked at the University of Trier as a research project assistant in the field of transnational European education. Her research interests primarily focus on French political culture, democracy studies as well as European integration.

Project: Politics, Language, and Emotions: French Democracy Between Governmental Crisis, Affective Polarization, and the Appeal of Sentimentality

Andrea’s research project examines the use of sentimental codes in political discourse in France, analyzing and contextualizing their forms and functions against the background of political polarization and the narrowing of the political center in the country. Her research project aims to contribute to the current state of research on the erosion of liberal democracy and, with its focus on the political language of influential political actors, offers an in-depth discourse-analytical investigation of different sentimentally coded affirmative strategies, understood as possible explanatory factors for the strengthening of the political fringes and the phenomenon of affective polarization in France. The project hence aims to identify and examine sentimentally coded stimuli in political rhetoric by also focusing on affectively charged founding myths, ideologically underpinned narratives of national and collective identities as well as cultural heritage. It aims to assess the impact of such (re-)constructions and (re-)contextualizations of national and collective memory practices, especially with regard to their mobilizing function when activating emotional knowledge.

Annika Kraftzyk

• Email: annika.kraftzyk@fau.de

Annika holds a master’s degree in English and American Studies from Bamberg University. She is a PhD candidate in American Studies and is currently working on a dissertation focused on sentimentality and eating disorders in US culture. Her research interests include theories of race and racism, affect theory, gender and body studies, and popular culture.

Project:

The construction of different racialized bodies, such as the fragile, thin, white female body as opposed to the non-white, voluptuous and sexually threatening female body, is a dominant trope in 18^th and 19^th century sentimental novel. In my doctoral thesis, I regard these different constructions of the female body as a sentimental code that promotes certain racial stereotypes and sentiments. I will, therefore, investigate how sentimental tropes such as the construction of white and non-white female bodies in British and American sentimental fiction from the 18th and 19th century contribute to the construction of modern body images in contemporary American fiction and movies about eating disorders. Moreover, I aim at exploring the impact these thus constructed and coded body images have on both white and non-white women, starting with the emotions these body images evoke up to more severe social and political consequences. The research topic is situated in different discourses, including Affect Theory, Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, Body Studies, and Foucauldian discourse analysis.

Zixiong Lin

• Email: zixiong.lin@fau.de

LIN Zixiong holds an MA in History and Politics of the 20th Century from Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena. He also studied Modern Chinese Studies at the University of Freiburg and holds a BA in History from Heilongjiang University. His research interests primarily focus on Chinese social, political and intellectual history in the Maoist era.

Project: Emotions in Maoist China: State Mobilization and Local Response in the Socialist Education Campaign (1962-1966)

The massive mobilization of emotions plays a decisive role in the Communists’ revolutionary victory. Mao Zedong attached great importance to emotional works and intended to ignite the passion of Chinese ordinary popularity to serve the revolutionary purpose by launching a succession of massive campaigns. This project selects the Socialist Education Campaign (SEC) as the case for illustration. By drawing “history of emotions” as a theoretical approach I envisage developing a sketch of the CCP’s emotional regime and evaluating its influence on reshaping the state of emotions among normal Chinese people. To carry out this study, I plan to collect resources from two domains: institutional archives and ego-documents focusing on personal letters and diaries to reveal the sentimental interaction between the regime and the popularities.

Charleena Schweda

• Email: charleena.schweda@fau.de

Charleena Schweda holds a B.A. and M.A. in English and American Studies and General and Comparative Literature. Having studied at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and the University of Limerick, Ireland (UL), she joined the research training group as a doctoral researcher in English Studies in 2022. Aside from her position at the RTG, she works as a research assistant at the Chair of American Studies: Culture and Literature and as a lecturer at the Chair of English Studies: Culture and Literature.

In her research, she studies anglophone culture, literature, and film, particularly around the turn of the millennium and in the Victorian era. She specialises in Gender Studies, Queer Studies and popular culture, with a focus on representations of womanhood, girlhood, and queerness in horror and monster texts. During her studies she worked as both a journalist and an editor and functioned as a student representative for the Department of General and Comparative Literature. She interned at the Goethe-Institut Irland and the Nuremberg International Human Rights Film Festival, among others.

Project: “Hell Is a Teenage Girl”: The Sentimental in Female Coming-of-Age Monster Films

Monsters have always roamed the worlds of fiction, mythology, and religion. Ambiguous and multi-coded, they function as playgrounds for discussions on socio-cultural issues. When monsters appear as adolescent girls, these negotiations centralise their gender, focusing on themes such as girlhood, the female body, sexuality, gender roles, and, above all, the experience of coming-of-age as a girl. Monstrosity becomes an allegory for puberty; the ‘horrors’ of coming-of-are are aligned with the horrors of monstrosity.

In this context, my project explores how the sentimental emerges and functions in what I loosely regard to be the subgenre of female coming-of-age monster films: Horror films which explore intimacy, girlhood, and emotionality through the metaphorically charged concept of female monstrosity. Within this specific framework, the sentimental operates as an aesthetic and narrative mode that I call “sentimental monstrosity”. To identify its diverse functions, I explore a range of anglophone horror films from the early 21^st century, combining close readings of these individual films with a comparative approach that regards literary, filmic, and cultural traditions from the early 19^th century until today.

Theresa Siebach

• Email: theresa.siebach@fau.de

Theresa holds a master’s degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Leipzig and worked as a research assistant during her studies. Afterwards she received funding in form of a research proposal scholarship from the Gutenberg Graduate School of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Mainz. Her research interests include cultural sociology, digital media, popular culture, and memory culture.

Project: “Caring for Yourself in Times of Crisis” – Self-Care as a Media Discourse Phenomenon between Affirmation and Social Criticism (WT)

My PhD project seeks to investigate the ambivalent meanings of “self-care” in media discourse, which tend to oscillate between legitimate individual coping-strategy in times of permanent/multiple crisis and critical assumptions about (neoliberal) self-optimization. In doing so, I am interested in how self-care is characterized and problematized in this critical discourse and how in this context, primarily feminist-intended conceptions of self-care are justified and reclaimed as political counter-practice. I will focus on analyzing the specific imaginations and interpretations of “the self” and society that can be found both in general articulations of self-care as necessity and its critical reception, mostly referring to a perceived state of deficit, exhaustion, and collective suffering. Through the lens of the sociology of knowledge and emotion, the project asks how these findings (and feelings) are significantly justified by means of time-diagnostic observation and how sentimental narratives and ideas are effective here.

Vincent Steinbach

• Email: vincent.steinbach@fau.de

Vincent Steinbach studied sociology and German at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. During a stay abroad in Nijmegen, Netherlands, he also studied communication science and sociology at Radboud University. Since April 2019, Vincent Steinbach has been involved in the institutionalization of the Digital Humanities course at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. Vincent has also worked in the training of teachers in the field of politics and society. In addition, Vincent Steinbach has been a researcher with the EFI project Discourses and Practices of Digital Sovereignty since April 2019. Vincent Steinbach has been pursuing his research interests in sociological theory, communication and media sociology as well as digitization since October 2022 as part of the DFG Research Training Group The Sentimental in Literature, Culture and Politics.

Project: „Mama, don’t get vaccinated!“ – Forms and functions of the sentimental in the staging of valid knowledge using the example of the vaccination campaign in Germany

The project focuses on the question of how content in online videos is staged as valid knowledge. That depends on the media used for staging and dissemination. Of particular interest is the role played by affects and especially sentiment when it comes to staging something as valid knowledge in online videos. To do this, the concept of the sentimental must first be translated from the cultural-scientific discourse into the social-theoretical discourse before the forms and functions of the sentimental in the staging can be examined. Different staging strategies are empirically examined using the example of two media-prominent and emotionally charged bodies of knowledge: the debate about the CoVid 19 pandemic and the CoVid 19 vaccine. Specifically, it is about content in online videos. Video analyzes and situation analyzes sensu Adele Clarke are carried out to describe and relate the forms and functions of the sentimental in online videos. To reconstruct the staging strategies, the producers of online videos are interviewed as part of expert interviews.

Antonia Thies

• Email: antonia.thies@fau.de

Antonia studied Economics and Arabic Studies at the University of Applied Sciences of Bremen and at the Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Afterwards, she completed her Master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies with a focus on Political Science at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. She already participated in the research project „Wechselwirkungen“ of EZIRE as well as in the VW project „Global autocratic collaboration in times of COVID19“ under the direction of Thomas Demmelhuber. Antonia is fluent in English and Arabic.

Autocracies, the Temptation of Sentimentality and the Consolidation of Collective Identities in Gulf Monarchies

In her research project, Antonia examined the forms and functions of sentimentality in the consolidation of collective identities, using selected Gulf monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait) as case studies. She analyzed emotions and affects, as well as sentimentality as a relational communicative code that oscillates between past and present. The project investigated affect-driven civic engagement in processes of state transformation in the Gulf in light of multiple global crises like the looming post-oil era. She thus addressed gaps in existing research on the non-material modes of political order and regime survival.

A central focus lay on how memory practices within new cultural heritage projects activate emotional knowledge by drawing on historically shaped repertoires that are pre-structured by social and political norms as well as national ideological markers. Accordingly, the project examined sites of sentimentality in the cultural sector and in the context of national holidays. Emphasizing the reciprocal nature of sentimentality, the study adopted a tentative bottom-up approach by investigating affective responses through affect-ethnographic field research in the respective countries.

Elsa-Margareta Venzmer

• Email: elsa.venzmer@fau.de

Elsa-Margareta holds a master’s degree in Media Studies from the Universität Regensburg. During her studies she worked as a lector for the German online newspaper ShortNews, as a film editor for the website Save.TV and as a freelance author. In 2021 she gained experience as a research fellow at the Institute of Media Studies at Philipps-Universität Marburg. Her research interests include Film Studies, Quality Television and Fan/Cultural Studies.

Project: Ineffable Husbands – Die Inszenierung des Sentimentalen in Buddy-Filmen und -Serien. Versuch einer Systematisierung (WT)

The dissertation project deals with the research desideratum of examining the staging of the sentimental in English-language buddy films and series. The aim of the project is to determine how texts of this genre affect the viewer through their aesthetic design and narrative structures and thus stimulate emotional appropriation processes and participatory culture, especially the writing of fanfictions.The main interest lies in such fanfictions in which fans transform two characters, who in the original texts are linked by a heterosexual friendship (“buddies”), into a homosexual couple and create a love story. The project aims to analyze what prompted fanfiction authors to take this narrative step. However, not only the forms of the sentimental should be examined, but also its functions. The aim is to investigate whether and why media makers use certain aesthetics and narrative strategies in a targeted manner – for example, so that the discussion of their media texts through the creative appropriation processes of the fans continues many years after their release.

Hana Vrdoljak

• Email: hana.vrdoljak@fau.de

Hana holds a bachelor’s degree in English and American Studies as well as French Philology. She completed the bilingual master’s program The Americas/Las Américas at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, spending a semester abroad at Universitat de València, Spain. During her studies she worked as a research assistant and tutor. Hana’s primary research interests include hip hop studies, feminist theory, as well as representations of race and gender in (popular) culture and literature of the Americas.

Project:

Although sentimental tropes are commonly used in American music, hip hop culture is still frequently viewed as a non- (or even anti-) sentimental art form. In an attempt to counter this notion, my PhD project sets out to examine the sentimental dimension in hip hop culture. I propose not only that hip hop does, in fact, have sentimental traits, but also that there has been a sentimental turn in its culture in recent years. Most prominently, this phenomenon can be seen in the emergence and growing popularity of the emo-rap subgenre. Moreover, it can also be observed with respect to the ubiquitous nostalgia of contemporary hip hop culture, which is particularly reflected in the romanticization of the movement’s beginnings and the iconization of deceased rappers. Like much activist art, hip hop aims to mobilize compassion among its audience to achieve certain political goals, seeking to humanize marginalized groups by means of popular sentimental tropes. Therefore, the contribution I intend to make with this dissertation is to identify and systematically explore sentimental elements in works by American rappers in order to analyze their forms and function.

Andrew Wildermuth

• Email: andrew.wildermuth@fau.de

Andrew is from Annapolis, Maryland, where he studied at Anne Arundel Community College and St. Mary’s College of Maryland and graduated in 2017. He received an MA in North American studies from FAU in 2021. Since 2022, he has been a research associate in “The Sentimental,” where he submitted his dissertation—“American Malleability: Aesthetics and Politics of Change in U.S. Literature and Print, 1820–1870”—in June 2025. His doctoral work in “The Sentimental” has been supported by research stays as a Packer Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, a Thoreau Society Fellow, and a BAA Postgraduate Fellow at Harvard. His research has been published in Amerikastudien, Iperstoria, and ZAA. He is co-editor of the literary journal The TRIAL and his poems have been published in The Yale Review, Oxford Poetry, and Lana Turner. His new postdoctoral project, “American Primordial,” examines American origin stories from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.

Project: American Malleability: Aesthetics and Politics of Change in U.S. Literature and Print, 1820–1870

Submitted in June 2025, my PhD examines the relation between print and ideology in the United States in the wake of profound transformations to both print technology and political economy in the final years of the 1820s. New people got access to new machines—and new ideas were born, which still stubbornly impact the world we live in. I thus examine the respective engagements of “malleability”—or, the aesthetics and politics of change—in texts by authors including Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, William Apess, and John Rollin Ridge, as well as in newspapers across the middle part of the century. From the Cherokee Nation to California to the countryside of Massachusetts, print texts contest debates over navigating novel political arrangements. In reading these curious texts comparatively, I argue, we might find important origins of the affective arrangements of modern political life.

Andrea Klinger

Andrea Klinger studied German-French Studies, a binational bachelor program of the German-French University, at the Universities of Regensburg and Nice. After completing her Master’s degree in Intercultural European Studies at the University of Regensburg, she taught German for one year at the renowned Grande École École normale supérieure de Lyon (ENS de Lyon) and worked at the University of Trier as a research project assistant in the field of transnational European education. Her research interests primarily focus on French political culture, democracy studies as well as European integration.

Project: Politics, Language, and Emotions: French Democracy Between Governmental Crisis, Affective Polarization, and the Appeal of Sentimentality

Andrea’s research project examines the use of sentimental codes in political discourse in France, analyzing and contextualizing their forms and functions against the background of political polarization and the narrowing of the political center in the country. Her research project aims to contribute to the current state of research on the erosion of liberal democracy and, with its focus on the political language of influential political actors, offers an in-depth discourse-analytical investigation of different sentimentally coded affirmative strategies, understood as possible explanatory factors for the strengthening of the political fringes and the phenomenon of affective polarization in France. The project hence aims to identify and examine sentimentally coded stimuli in political rhetoric by also focusing on affectively charged founding myths, ideologically underpinned narratives of national and collective identities as well as cultural heritage. It aims to assess the impact of such (re-)constructions and (re-)contextualizations of national and collective memory practices, especially with regard to their mobilizing function when activating emotional knowledge.

Podcast Episodes & Science Communication

• 05/2025: „Gefühle und Polarisierung in der französischen Politik“, I Am Scientist, hosted by Daniel Hölle, Philipp Hubert, and Lisa Schmors.
• 04/2024: „The Sentimental from a Sociological Perspective“, Thoughts on Feelings, hosted by the DFG-funded Research Training Group „The Sentimental in Literature, Culture and Politics“, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg (guest: Dr. Larissa Pfaller).
• 11/2022: „Kritische Europabildung in der Forschung und im Unterricht“, hosted by the BMBF-funded research project „Edu.GR – Europalernen in transnationalen Bildungsräumen“, University of Trier (guests: Prof. Dr. Andreas Eis, and Dr. Claire Moulin-Doos).

Talks & Posters

• 12/2025: „Sentimental Populism in France’s Presidential Campaigns (2017 & 2022): Affective Polarization and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy in the Anthropocene“, at the international conference Social Contracts and Democracy in Times of the Anthropocene – Thinking Beyond Crisis, Fulda University of Applied Sciences.
• 09/2023: „Affective Polarization and the Crisis of Democracy in France: Sentimentality, Memories of the Past, and the Populist Right During the 2022 Elections“, at the conference Sentimental State(s): Sentimental Politics of Order and Belonging, DFG-funded Research Training Group „The Sentimental in Literature, Culture and Politics“, FAU Erlangen–Nuremberg.
• 09/2023: „‘Us against Them’ in the Name of the French Nation: Discursive Practices of Affective Polarization during the 2017 and 2022 Election Campaigns and the Temptation of Sentimentality as a Challenge to Liberal Democracy“, at the conference Sentimental State(s): Sentimental Politics of Order and Belonging, DFG-funded Research Training Group „The Sentimental in Literature, Culture and Politics“, FAU Erlangen–Nuremberg. (Poster)

Publications

• Klinger, Andrea. 2022. Transnationale Schulkooperationen als interkulturelle Lerngelegenheit. In mateneen – Praxishefte Demokratische Schulkultur, Schule öffnen und vernetzen (Issue 7), pp. 25 –27.
• Hansen, Klaus P., and Klinger, Andrea. 2020. Interview mit Klaus P. Hansen: Über Kollektive, Pauschalurteile und Stereotype. École normale supérieure (ENS) de Lyon, La clé des langues. http://cle.ens-lyon.fr/allemand/civilisation/civilisation/interview-mit-klaus-p-hansen-uber-kollektiv-pauschalurteile-und-stereotype.

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