Speakers
Keynote Speakers
Walburga Hülk-Althoff is a professor of French and Italian Literary Studies in the department of Romance Languages at the University of Siegen. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg with a dissertation on Eugène Sue. Throughout her career, she has been a visiting researcher in Paris and Florence, as well as an interim assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include literary and media anthropology as well as the intersectionality of humanities and the natural sciences. Hülk-Althoff has published extensively on a variety of subjects in the field of Romance Languages and is currently working on "Pomp and Prose: Literature and the World of Napoleon III," an upcoming book on the second French Empire.
Mark Turner is a Professor of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature at King’s College, London. His research interests include the relationship between literature, media and culture since the 19th century, and Anglo-American queer studies. Turner has published widely on various aspects of literature, journalism, photography, film, painting and popular culture and is currently co-editing a major new edition of Oscar Wilde’s journalism for Oxford University Press. Recent projects include an article on Derek Jarman and London in the 1980s as well as one on the idea of ‘zigzagging’ in the modern city. Additionally, Turner is working on a piece about literature and global movement in the 19th century and developing a new project about the American gallerist Betty Parsons and her queer artists.
Norbert Bachleitner is a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. Throughout his career, he has held visiting professorships in France, Ireland, Slovenia, and Greece. He has functioned as editor for a variety of magazines in the Romance Language Literary Studies and published extensively in several languages, in addition to reviewing a number of academic publications. His research interests include Translation Studies, the relationship between German and French literature from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, as well as the Feuilleton genre.
Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray are authorities in the field of antebellum literary culture and readership studies. Ronald J. Zboray is a Professor of Communication and Director of the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies as well as Affiliate Faculty in Cultural Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh where Mary Saracino Zboray functions as a visiting scholar in Communication. The duo has authored several books and articles, including Voices without Votes: Women and Politics in Antebellum New England (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2010); Everyday Ideas: Socio-Literary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006); Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book (New York: Routledge, 2005) and “The Mysteries of New England: Eugene Sue’s American ‘Imitators,’ 1844” in Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22:3 (Sept. 2000). The Zborays are currently co-editing U.S. Popular Print Culture to 1860, volume 5 in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2018). The volume’s forty essays contributed by scholars in several fields, including American Studies, Communication, History, and Literature, will cover a range of topics that express the full diversity popular print culture—through its producers, disseminators, and consumers—from its colonial beginnings to the American Civil War. They are also completing a book project entitled “The Bullet in the Book: Volumes that Saved Civil War Soldiers’ Lives.” The two have received a number of prizes for their books in addition to being awarded various fellowships and honors by national professional associations.
Workshop Participants
Ricarda Musser studied Portuguese, Psychology and Library and Information Science at Humboldt-University Berlin. She holds a Ph.D. with a thesis entitled “Libraries and Librarianship in Portugal”. Presently, she works at the Ibero-American Institute Berlin and is director of the Media Department and Bibliographer for Brazil, Chile and Portugal. She coordinates the project “Latin American Cultural Magazines” (funded by the DFG). Her main research interests are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel literature, Latin American popular culture and literature, as well as German emigration to Latin America, especially to Brazil.
Raphaela Averkorn holds a chair of Medieval and Modern History and a Jean Monnet chair 'ad personam' (European Integration History) in the Department of History at the University of Siegen. She studied History and Romance Languages and Literature at the Universities of Münster, Germany and the Bordeaux 3 (Michel de Montaigne) in France. She reiceived her Ph.D. from the Westfälische Wilhelms University (Münster) and her post-doctorate degree (Habilitation) from the Leibniz University of Hannover. She has been a visiting professor at various universities (e.g. Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the United States). Her research interests include the history of integration, the history of the Mediterranean, the history of the Iberian Peninsula, French history, social history, cultural history, the history of mentalities and gender history.
Gunter Süß is Academic Assistant at Mittweida University of Applied Sciences. From 2000-2012 he was Assistant Professor of American Studies at Chemnitz University of Technology. He studied at Dresden University of Technology and Belmont University, Nashville. Suess received his Master’s degree from Dresden University in 2000 and his Ph.D. from Chemnitz University in 2005 for a dissertation on the aural in film and computer games (Sound Subjects: Zur Rolle des Tons in Film und Computerspiel, Trier: WVT, 2006). His research interests include cultural theory, film and TV studies, and popular culture. He completed his second book project (Habilitation) on American cultures of the mid-19th-century (‘Laute Texte’: Diskurse des Konflikts in der Kultur des antebellum) in 2015. Süß is co-editor of the anthologies Media Economies (2014, with Marcel Hartwig and Evelyne Keitel), Industrialization, Industrial Heritage, De-Industrialization (2009, with Evelyne Keitel and Cecile Sandten), Intermedialities (2007, with Evelyne Keitel and Werner Huber), and HipHop Meets Academia (2007, with Stefan Meier and Karin Bock).
Dr. Heike Steinhoff is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She is the author of Transforming Bodies: Makeovers and Monstrosities in American Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Queer Buccaneers: (De)Constructing Boundaries in the Pirates of the Caribbean Film Series (Lit, 2011). Her main areas of research are cultural studies, gender studies and body studies. Currently, she is working on a project on discourses of urban sexuality in 19th century American popular culture.
Lisanna Wiele is a research associate and Ph.D. candidate in the sub-project ‘Serial Politicization: On the Cultural Work of American City Mysteries, 1844-1860’ of the DFG-funded Research Unit "Popular Seriality: Aesthetics and Practice" at the University of Siegen. She holds an M.A. in American Studies with a minor in Gender Studies from the University of Göttingen. Her M.A. thesis 'Joan Didion's California in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album, and Where I was From' focused on the myth of the American West and the role of narration in the New Journalism. Her current research interests include 19th century serial narratives and the intersectionality of race, class, and gender in antebellum city spaces.
Florian Groß teaches American Studies at Leibniz Universität Hannover, where he is working on a Ph.D. thesis with the title “Quality. Technology. Creativity. Post-Network Television Series.” Next to American television culture, his research interests include comics and graphic novels, contemporary literature, and the cultural history of New York City. He has published articles on the television series 30 Rock, Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and New York City’s High Line.
Tanja Weber is Lecturer at the department of Media Culture & Theatre at the University of Cologne. One of her main research areas is the medium television. She has published several papers on television viewing practices, TV series and formats, like her dissertation: Kultivierung in Serie. Kulturelle Adaptionsstrategien von fiktionalen Fernsehserien, Marburg 2012. Further research interests are early films, photography history & theory and the representations of organized crime.
Nicola Glaubitz has been a researcher and lecturer in Siegen and Frankfurt and is currently
visiting professor for English Literature at Technical University Darmstadt. Ph.D. on
literature and philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment; habilitation thesis on crime fiction
and normality (Mimicking Normality. Crime, Self and Art in the Novels of Patricia Highsmith
and Other Anglophone Writers), Goethe University, Frankfurt (2014). Key research areas:
literature and sociology, literature and audiovisual media, early modern English drama.
Pia Wiegmink is assistant professor in American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany. From 2011 to 2012, she was visiting scholar at Georgetown University, Washington DC. Pia Wiegmink received her doctorate from the University of Siegen (2010), Germany, and is author of two monographs, Theatralität und Öffentlicher Raum [Theatricality and Public Space], Tectum 2005, and Protest EnACTed, Winter 2011. Her current research project (Habilitation) examines the interdependencies between abolitionist narratives, transnationalism, and conceptions of personhood in nineteenth-century US America. Together with Dr. Birgit M. Bauridl she heads an international research network on "Cultural Performance in Transnational American Studies" which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, 2015-17) and she is currently preparing a special issue on German entanglements with slavery for Atlantic Studies (with Prof. Heike Raphael-Hernandez).
Matthias Göritz is a Frankfurt-based poet, novelist and translator and current William Gass fellow at Washington University, St. Louis. He studied philosophy and literary studies and spent extended periods in Moscow, Paris and Chicago. He was Writer-in-Residence at Bard College, New York, at the “Deutsches Haus” at NYU and guest in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, as well as Max Kade Writer at Washington University, St. Louis. After publications in magazines, his first volume of poetry, “Loops”, was published in 2001. He was awarded a number of writer’s scholarships and prizes, among them the Hamburg Literature Prize and the Mara Cassens Prize for his first novel “The short Dream of Jakob Voss” (Berlin 2005).
Fabian Grumbrecht is a research associate and Ph.D. candidate in the sub-project "Serial Narration in Popular German-Language Periodicals from 1850 to 1890" of the DFG-funded Research Unit "Popular Seriality: Aesthetics and Practice" at the University of Göttingen. His research interests, apart from seriality, include paratextuality, intertextuality, intermediality, narratology, and mass communication.
Tobias Scheidt, M.A. studied cultural history in an international perspective at the University of Siegen, where he is currently employed as research assistant at the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History. His research interests include the history of popular culture, cultural transfer in the modern era, early modern colonialism and regional history.
Ali Serdar graduated from Middle East Technical University, Department of Sociology in 1998. He obtained his M.A. from Bilkent University, Department of Turkish Literature in 2002. He received his Ph.D. in 2007, from Bilkent University, Department of Turkish Literature. Serdar worked as a part time instructor in Department of Turkish Language in İstanbul Bilgi University between 2008-2011. Since 2012 he has been working as instructor in the Department of Turkish Language in Özyeğin University. He is the coordinator of the project “History of Serial Novels in Turkish Literature (1831-1928)” which was started in 2014, and will be finished in 2017.
Reyhan Tutumlu graduated from the Department of Radio-Television-Cinema, Ankara University Faculty of Communication in 1998. She received her M.A and Ph.D. in 2002 and 2007, respectively from the Department of Turkish Literature, Bilkent University. Since 2009 Tutumlu has been working as instructor in the Department of Turkish Language in Sabancı University. She is working in the “History of Serial Novels in Turkish Literature (1831-1928)” project as a researcher since 2014.