(Post)Doctoral Candidates

Current (Post)Doctoral Candidates

At American Studies Leipzig, the following scholars currently work on dissertations, postdoctoral theses, and other research projects through external funding:

Dissertations

• Sophia Cosby: “Sympathy for the Rich: Suffering and Class in Contemporary US Literature”
• Ella Ernst: “Enfreakment in the Superhero Genre” as part of the DFG Research Project “Enfreakment as an Invective Mode in US-American Popular Culture”
• Konstantin Gross: “Collective Nature Perceptions in the USA in the 1970s to 1990s: A Discourse-Historical Investigation of Nature-Culture Conflicts in US-American Blockbuster Movies”
• Leonie M. J. Kratzenstein: “Affective Rites: Ritual in 21st-Century Queer Conversion Therapy Narratives”
• Anne Krenz: "The Poetics and Politics of the Invective Mode in Contemporary US-American Television: The Makeover Show" as part of the Collaborative Research Center 1285 "Invectivity: Constella­tions and Dynamics of Disparagement"
• Milo Miller: "Haunted Technology and Corrupted Nostalgia: Affect and Reality in New Media Horror"
• Claudia Müller: “The Cultural Image of the Fat Poor in Contemporary American Literature and Culture”
• Christoph Nostitz: “Dangerous Spaces – Narratives of Securitization in Post-9-11 US Literature and Culture”
• Laura Pröger: “Enfreakment in the Genre of Regional Exploitation” as part of the DFG Research Project “Enfreakment as an Invective Mode in US-American Popular Culture”
• Samir Taher: “Liminalities of Symbolic Forms in Right-Wing Conspiracism in the US”
• Peter Hintz: “Soft Bodies: Historicizing Care in the Cinema of Emerging Neoliberalism”
• Parker Billinghurst: “Organized Sport and Discourses of Democracy During the Late Cold War – (East and West) Germany and the United States”
• Daniele Puccio: “Culturalism and the Ideological Reproduction of Capitalist Social Relations”

Habilitationen (Postdoctoral Projects)

• Dr. Steffen Wöll: "The Space Between Oceans: Mobilizing America’s Transhemispheric Empire" as part of the Collaborative Research Center 1199 "Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition"
• Seth Rogoff: “The Decade – A Cultural History of the 1980s NBA”

Associated Research Fellows

Completed Dissertations and Habilitations

The following dissertations and Habilitationen (postdoctoral projects) have been completed at American Studies Leipzig in the past:

2023

• Mascha Helene Lange: "Transmedia Negotiations of Gendered Violence in Contemporary US-American Literature and Culture" (Dissertation)

2022

• Thorsten Burkhardt: "Gothic Realism as Political Fiction in Contemporary American Novels about the Small Town" (Dissertation)
• Katja Schulze: "The Poetics and Politics of Invective Humor: Textual Strategies of Disparagement in Contemporary US Sitcoms" (Dissertation)

2021

• Alyn Euritt: "Podcasting Intimacy: Community and the Sound of Closeness" (Dissertation)
• Sebastian M. Herrmann: "Data Imaginary: Literature, Data, and the Contours of Literariness in Nineteenth-Century US Culture" (Habiliation)

2020

• Deniz Bozkurt-Pekár: "Imaging Southern Spaces: Hemispheric and Transatlantic Souths in Antebellum US Writings" (Dissertation)
• Steffen Wöll: "The West and the Word: Imagining, Formatting, and Ordering the American West in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Discourse" (Dissertation)

2019

• Diana Labisch: "From Critical Race Theory to Critical Religion Theory: An Adaption for In-Country Struggles based on Race, Religion, Skin Color, and Capitals. A Globalized Cultural, Social, Political, Educational, Historical, and Contemporary „East versus West“ Crisis." (Dissertation)
• Eleonora Ravizza: "The Fifties in Contemporary US Popular Culture: Self-Reflexivity, Melodrama, and Nostalgia" (Dissertation)

2018

• Stefan Schubert: "Narrative Instability in Contemporary American Popular Culture" (Dissertation)

2016

• Anja Eifert: "Crafting an Effective US Public Diplomacy Strategy for Indonesia: An Analysis for Theorists and Practitioners" (Dissertation)

2015

• Florian Bast: "Agency in Works by Octavia E. Butler" (Dissertation)
• Franziska Kloth: "The Deconstruction of Good and Evil in Contemporary American Crime Series" (Dissertation)

2012

• Sebastian M. Herrmann: "Presidential Unrealities: Epistemic Panic, CUltural WOrk and the US Presidency" (Dissertation)
• Marie-Luise Löffler: "When the Margins Bite Back: Fantastic Re-conceptualizations of Interracial Relationships in Contemporary African American Women's Fiction" (Dissertation)
• Dominik Pütz: "Qualified Welcome: The American Response to Human Displacement and the Discourse on Refugeehood in the 21st Century" (Dissertation)

2010

• Zoe Antonia Kusmierz: "Charmed Worlds. Reading the American Shopping Mall from Texture to Text" (Dissertation)
• Frank Usbeck: "Fellow Peoples. The Influence of the German Image of Indians on German National Identity and its Appropriation by National Socialism in German Periodicals 1925-1945" (Dissertation)

2009

• Carsten Haake: "Watching America. The Significance of the Frontier in American Television" (Dissertation)
• Katja Kanzler: "Unseparate Spheres: Gender and Class in Antebellum Writing of the Kitchen and the Factory" (Habilitation)
• Lidia Martínez Murillo: "Mexican Competitiveness in the U.S. Furniture Market versus China" (Dissertation)

2008

• Katja Schmieder: "Reconciling the 'Two Cultures' - Science in Contemporary American Crime Fiction" (Dissertation)

2006

• Anja Becker: "For the Sake of Old Leipzig Days. Academic Networks of American Students at a German University, 1781-1914" (Dissertation)

2004

• Catrin Gersdorf: "The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the (Re-)Construction of America" (Habilitation)
• Heike Paul: "Kulturkontakt und Racial Presences: Afro-Amerikaner und die deutsche Amerika-Literatur, 1815-1914" (Habilitation)
• Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez: "MexAmerica: Genealogien und Analysen postnationaler Diskurse in der kulturellen Produktion von Chicanos/as" (Habilitation)

2003

• Änne Troester: "A Momentary Stay Against Confusion: Selfhood and Authorship in the Work of Paul Auster" (Dissertation)

2002

• Katja Kanzler: "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations: The Multicultural Evolution of Star Trek" (Dissertation)

2000

• Martin Öfele: "'I do not wish to take the field with any better men': Deutschsprachige Einwanderer als Offiziere afro-amerikanischer Truppen im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg" (Dissertation)

1997

• Heike Paul: "Mapping Migration: Women’s Writing and the American Immigrant Experience" (Dissertation)

For more information on some of these dissertations and Habilitationen, please also see our page on Research Projects.