American Studies investigates how different forms of literary and cultural expression from early colonization to the present have contributed to the manifold narratives and images that shape contested understandings of “America”: as a diverse society, a global power, and a fraught democracy, but also as a racial-capitalist and heteropatriarchal state and a settler-colonial empire of dispossession and extraction.

In addition to tracing how canonized texts and media negotiate dominant national narratives, American Studies is particularly interested in highlighting how groups that have been historically marginalized enter, disrupt, and change conversations in the literary, cultural, and socio-political spheres around national belonging, liberation, self-determination, and relations to the nonhuman world.

American Studies as practiced at the University of Rostock is thus closely aligned with the fields of Indigenous Studies, Black and Ethnic Studies, Feminist and Queer Studies, Environmental Humanities, Disability Studies, and Decolonial Studies. In research and teaching, the American Studies faculty at Rostock seeks, in analytical and creative ways, to explore, question, and expand what the field can offer to better understand “America” in its multifaceted, uneven, and contradictory formations.