Profile
Abstract
After completing a translator’s degree in English and Spanish (Diploma) from Leipzig University I did my doctoral dissertation on literary translations of Stephen Crane stories, a project at the intersection of literary studies, cultural studies and translation studies. My Habilitation project investigated Mexican American border cultures and their role in redefining concepts of nation and national culture. Following teaching positions and research fellowships at the universities of Göttingen, Bielefeld, Bayreuth, Stanford, and Groningen, I was appointed as the professor for American Studies and Minority Studies at American Studies Leipzig in 2010.
My research focuses mainly on the transnational, hemispheric and global contexts of U.S. culture. I am interested in the historical and cultural connections between different spaces in the Americas and their discursive representations in fiction and other texts. Since 2016 I have been principal investigator in the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199 “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition” ( https://research.uni-leipzig.de/~sfb1199/). In the first phase we have investigated literary representations of peripheral regions of the United States in the antebellum period (Spatial Fictions: (Re)Imaginations of Nationality in the Southern and Western Peripheries of the 19th-century United States). In the current phase we are exploring the imagination of space in US literature in the period of imperialist expansion to the Pacific and the Caribbean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Phase II: Imperialist Geographies: The Transpacific and Circum-Caribbean Space in US Literature in the Period from 1880 to 1940).
I teach American literature and culture from the 17th through the 20th century with a wide range of topics on both introductory and specialist levels. A specific focus of my courses is the role of race and ethnicity in US culture and the way these concepts have been defined and redefined. In many of my classes we discuss texts related to issues of migration, borders, mobility and the imagination of space.