Speaker Bios
Alexander
Dunst (Nottingham)
Alexander
Dunst holds a Mag. Phil. in English and American literature from Vienna
University and is a PhD student at the Department of Cultural Studies, The
University of Nottingham, where he will be teaching a module on
postmodernism from January 2008. He is the co-founder of the university’s
Karl Marx Reading Group and before coming to the UK was a staff writer at “Profil,”
Austria’s leading political magazine. His writing has appeared in Textual
Practice, and he is a contributor to the Annotated Bibliography of
English Studies (ABES), published by Routledge.
Eva
Gruber (Konstanz)
Eva Gruber studied English and Biology at the University of Heidelberg, the University of Guelph, Ontario, and the University of Constance. Her PhD thesis, for which she conducted research at the University of Arizona, Tucson, will be published in 2008 under the title Humor in Contemporary Native North American Literature: Reimagining Nativeness. She has been teaching at the University of Constance since 2004 and currently works there as an assistant professor at the Department of American Studies. Her research interests include Native North American writing and conceptualizations of 'race' in 20th- and 21st-century American literature. She has published on Thomas King's short fiction, on Native literature in translation, on humor and identity politics in Native North American writing, on Native oral traditions, and on the road movie. Currently, she is working on a new project on race in the American novel after 2000.
Dennis Kersten (Nijmegen)
Dennis
Kersten, M.A. (1976) reads English Language and Literature at Nijmegen and
Liverpool, with a special interest in Victorian literature (his M.A. thesis
was about the primacy of speech in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins). He
is currently writing a dissertation on the depiction of three
nineteenth-century authors in neo-Victorian fiction at Radboud University
Nijmegen. He also teaches courses that are part of the curriculum of the
department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature.
Sirkka Knuuttila (Helsinki)
Dr. Sirkka
Knuuttila is a literary researcher, medical doctor, and advanced cognitive
therapist, who is writing her dissertation in Comparative Literature for the
University of Helsinki on Marguerite Duras’s India Cycle as trauma fiction.
She has given lectures in the University of Joensuu, Tampere, Helsinki, and
Alberta, as her main topics feminist literary theory, narratology of trauma
fiction, and the semiotics of medical narratives. She has published a number
of articles on Duras’s aesthetics, questions of trauma fiction, and emotion
in literary semiotics. She is currently lecturing in Helsinki on Roland
Barthes’s writings on visual image and subjectivity. She has also translated
and published the poems of Mayröcker into Finnish, later to be extended into
a collection.
Katy Massey (Newcastle)
Katy
Massey is a second year Phd candidate on the Creative Writing programme at
Newcastle University, England. Her academic focus is the theoretical
challenges presented by mixed-race literature. She is writing a family
memoir as an accompanying work to her thesis. Before returning to study she
worked as a national newspaper and magazine journalist for twelve years. She
has recently had a pamphlet of poetry published and has contributed to
anthologies, performed her creative work at literary festivals and readings
and has been awarded several commissions, most recently for a poem
celebrating the bi-centenary of the end of slavery in British territories.
Hanna
Meretoja (Turku)
Hanna
Meretoja, Phil. Lic., is a Research Fellow at the Department of Comparative
Literature, University of Turku, Finland. She is currently completing her
doctoral thesis on the problematics of subjectivity and narrativity in the
French postwar novel, focusing on novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel
Tournier and relating them to such central twentieth-century philosophical
traditions as phenomenology, existentialism, (post)structuralism and
hermeneutics, as well as to the postwar social and cultural situation. She
has also pursued doctoral studies in the universities of Tübingen (Germany)
and Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III). She has published several articles and
book chapters in international publications (e.g. ”The Ethical Ambiguity of
the Monster: Good and Evil as Human Possibilities in Michel Tournier’s Le
Roi des Aulnes” in Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of
Enduring Evil, ed. P. L. Yoder & P. M. Kreuter. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary
Press, 2004; “On the Ethical Significance of Encountering the Otherness of
Literary Worlds” in Chiasmatic Encounters. Textures:
Philosophy/Literature/Culture Series, ed. Hugh J. Silverman, Lexington
Books, 2007; “Hermeneutics of Narrative Identity in Michel Tournier’s The
Erl-King” in Narrative and Identities, ed. Ansgar Nünning, Trier: WVT, 2008;
”Alain Robbe-Grillet and Phenomenology” in Phenomenology and Modernism, ed.
Ariane Mildenberg & Carole Bourne-Taylor, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008).
Markus M. Müller
(Trier)
Dr. Markus
M. Müller studied creative writing at the University of Manitoba (1992/93),
was a research visitor at the University of Ottawa's Institute for Canadian
Studies (1997/98) and joined the Department of English Studies at the
University of Trier in 1999. Since 2000, he has also been teaching at the
Summer (or Spring) Schools on the New Literatures in English at Kiel,
Berlin, and Frankfurt. He has published and lectured mostly on Canadian
writing (and, on the internet, on other literatures and on pop music),
edited a poetic journal (Dennis Cooley, Passwords; 1996 and 1999)
and, together with David Parris and Robert C. Thomsen, a collection of
essays (Passages to
Canada;
2002). His post-doctoral thesis (Habilitation) is a comparative study
entitled "Sixty & Beyond? Old Age and Aging in Current Canadian and American
Novels." Other interests in teaching and research are modern North American
literature and mythologies; gender and (trans)cultural studies;
historiographies; fairy tales; freaks; poetry and/as music.
Anja
Müller-Wood (Mainz)
Anja
Müller-Wood is Professor of English Literature and Anglophone Cultures
at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Germany). Her fields of
research, in which she has published widely, are early modern English
and twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone cultures and literatures.
The author of Angela Carter: Identity Constructed/Deconstructed
(1997) and The Theatre of Civilised Excess: New Interpretations
of Jacobean Tragedy (2007), she has also co-edited two essay
collections on teaching literature in the secondary and tertiary
sector. She is currently working on a study about contemporary confessional
literature.
Sascha Pöhlmann (München)
Sascha
Pöhlmann, M.A., studied English literature, linguistics and philosophy at
the University of Bayreuth and Trinity College Dublin. Having graduated in
2004 with a thesis on identity and self in Ulysses and Gravity's
Rainbow, he moved on to work as a lecturer in Bayreuth, at Weber State
University in Ogden, Utah, and currently at the
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. He has just finished his
dissertation entitled "Pynchon's Postnational Imagination," and is
organizing the 2008 International Pynchon week.
Nicole Schröder (Paderborn)
Studies of
English, American, and German language and literature and history of art at
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Duke University, NC, and the
University of California, Davis.
1999: 1.
Staatsexamen in English and German
1999-2004:
teaching assistant and lecturer in the American Studies Department,
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
2002: DAAD
fellow, visiting scholar, Comparative Literature Department, Stanford
University
2004: PhD
in American Studies with a thesis on Spatial Concepts and 20th Century
American Literature
2005: 2.
Staatsexamen in English and German
2005-2007: assistant
professor, American Studies Department, Heinrich-Heine-Universität
Düsseldorf
2007:
visiting scholar, Charles Warren Center, Harvard University
Since
October 2007: assistant professor, English and American Studies Department,
Universität Paderborn.
Research
and teaching interests lie in the area of 19th and 20th century
American literature, space theory (space, place, landscape),space and
gender, cultural studies, regionalism and film. Publications include books
and articles on postcolonial concepts, culture and Native American
literature, space and gender as well as on transatlantic dialogues in
literature and art and Hollywood movies. A current project involves reading
practices in 19th century American literature and culture.
Pieter Vermeulen (Leuven)
Pieter
Vermeulen is a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of literary
studies at the university of Leuven, Belgium. He has published numerous
articles on critical theory (especially on the work of Geoffrey Hartman and
Erich Auerbach) and on contemporary literature (especially J.M. Coetzee).
Current research projects are an investigation of the relation between
materiality and the aesthetic in literary studies and a critique of the
melancholic constitution of recent novelistic and theoretical discourse.
Eva Zehelein
(Frankfurt)
Dr.
Eva-Sabine Zehelein teaches American literature and history at the Johann
Wolfgang Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main. She received her PhD in 2003 with
a study on John Updike’s Rabbit novels (“’Space as Symbol’: John
Updikes “country of ideas” in den Rabbit Romanen.” Die Blaue Eule, Essen,
2003). She is currently working on her second book, dealing with science and
theater. She has published e.g. on Johnny Cash, Carl Djerassi, T.C. Boyle
and Siri Hustvedt. |