Andrea Zittlau is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in North American Studies at the University of Rostock. Her doctoral thesis focused on ethnographic museums and theories of display treating exhibitions as haunting performances. Andrea’s current work focusses on community outreach and the role of poetry in special movements and activist contexts. Her publications include the edited volume (with Anna Kerchy) Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freakshows and Enfreakment (2012) and the monograph Curious Exotica (Ink on Paper) (2015). From her work with the incarcerated, the elderly and other disadvantaged communities frequently derive publications of creative texts of different Genres.

Books: 

(Ed.) Inselwahn. Gedichte aus der JVA Bützow. Pink Gorilla Institute, 2022.

(Ed.) Vogelfrei. Gedichte aus der JVA Bützow. Pink Gorilla Institute 2021.

Edited with Christoph Behrens. Queer-Feministische Perspektiven auf Wissen(schaft). Open Access, 2017.

Edited with Jayne Thompson. N.I.G.H.T. Poetry by Incarcerated Men. Pink Gorilla Press, 2016.

Curious Exotica (Ink on Paper). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016.

with Anna Kerchy (eds.). Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freak Shows and Enfreakment. Newcastle upon Tyne:Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2012.


Articles: 

Zittlau, Andrea, és Lili Szonda. 2023. „Hamupipőke”. Társadalmi Nemek Tudománya Interdiszciplináris eFolyóirat 13 (2):151-81. ojs.bibl.u-szeged.hu/index.php/tntef/article/view/45009.

“’Inside many of us / is a small old man’ – Age/ing in Anne Sexton's Transformations. A Community Discussion” In “Fantastic Age” Special Issue of Frontiers of Narrative Studies. 9 (2023) Edited by Heike Hartung and Sarah Falcus. pp.54-68.

“Absence and Cracks in Erica Mott’s Technopera 3 Singers” In American Cultures as Transnational Performance. Edited by Katrin Horn, Leopold Lippert, Ilka Saal and Pia Wiegmink. New York: Routledge, 2022. 53-63.

“Radical Time Travel. An Interview with Denise Uyehara” mit Pia Wiegmink. In American Cultures as Transnational Performance. Edited by Katrin Horn, Leopold Lippert, Ilka Saal and Pia Wiegmink. New York: Routledge, 2022. 129-144.

“Border Movement …: Transnational Performance in Practice.” Mit Marina Barsy Janer, Caro Ley, Denise Uyehara und Pia Wiegmink. In American Cultures as Transnational Performance. Edited by Katrin Horn, Leopold Lippert, Ilka Saal and Pia Wiegmink. New York: Routledge, 2022. 85-99.

“Jenny Lind. Tracing the Sound of the Nightingale” with Anne Harley. In Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens. Special Issue Sounds Victorian: Acoustic Experience in 19th Century Britain 94 (2021). Open Access: journals.openedition.org/cve/10190.

“Dust on Dust: Performing Selk’nam Visions, Tracing Absent Bodies” In Post-Conflict Memorialization. Mission Memorials, Absent Bodies. Edited by Luisa Gandolfo, Olivette Otele, Yoav Galai. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 55-74.

“Kockáztatni és késznek lenni sebezhetővé válni” Interjú Andrea Zittlau feminista performanszművész kultúrantropológussal. Interview. In TNTeF (2019) 9.2: 137-145.

“Staged Otherness in American Academia. A Reading” In Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 64:1 (June 2019): 19-37.

“Fragmented Visions of Control. Franci Duran’s Cinema of Cuts and Puzzles” In: Other Places. Reflections on Media Arts in Canada. Edited by Deanna Bowen. Toronto: Media Arts Network Ontario, 2019.

“Deb Adair”, “Stacey Snider”, “Juliet Taylor”. In: Hollywood Heroines: The Most Influential Women in Film History. Edited by Laura L.S. Bauer. ABC-CLIO, 2019.

“Million Followers. Pop-Feminismus und Online Kunst.” Kunstforum International 257: Die vierte Welle? Feminismus heute. Nov.-Dez. 2018., 100-107.

“The Freak-Show Act. Science and Spectacle in the Nineteenth Century” In The Routledge History of Disability, edited by Roy Hanes, Ivan Brown, Nancy E. Hansen. London and New York: Routledge 2017. 381-393.

“Ein Museum auf der Flucht. Die Danziger Judaica Sammlung und die Heterotopie als Ort des Vergessens.“ In Länder der Verheißung, Verpflanzte Nachbarschaften und Andere Räume: Migration und die Kunst ihrer Darstellung, 1920-1950, edited by Susanne Marten-Finnis, Malgorzata Maksymiakund Michael Nagel. Bremen: edition lumiére, 2016. 179-196. 

“Nora Naranjo-Morse’s Always Becoming. Enacting Indigenous Identity on a Museum Stage” in Recasting Commodity and Spectacle in the Indigenous Americas. Edited by Charlotte Glehorn and Helen Glibert. London: School of Advanced Study, 2014. pp.97-111.

“Pathologizing Bodies: Medical Portrait Photography in Nineteenth-Century America ” In Iconographies of the Calamitous in American Visual Culture. Special issue of Amerikastudien 58:4 (2013), edited by Ingrid Gessner and Susanne Leikam. pp.543-558.

“Introduction.” In Making Monstrosity: Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freak Shows and 'Enfreakment,' edited by Anna Kerchy and Andrea Zittlau. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2012. 1-19.

“Enfreakment and German Medical Collections,” In Making Monstrosity: Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freak Shows and 'Enfreakment,' edited by Anna Kerchy and Andrea Zittlau. Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2012. 150-168.

“Nutrition and the Indigenous Body. A Genetic Concept of Food.” In Biomapping – Indigenous Peoples: Towards an Understanding of the Issue, edited by Susanne Berthier-Foglar, Sheila Collingwood-Whittick and Sandrine Tolazzi. New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 275-293.

“The Several Narrative Entanglements of the Feejee Mermaid displayed at Phineas Taylor Barnum’s AmericanMuseum from 1842 until 1856.” In The Museal Turn, edited by Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Douglas Brown. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. 221-234.

“Im Namen des Großvaters – Erinnerung und Identität in Jonathan Safran Foers Everything is Illuminated.” In Gender, Generation, Aging. edited by Hella Ehlers, Gabriele Linke, Beate Rudlof, and Heike Trappe. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011. 149-163.

“Dreamlands of Culture: Ethnographic Dioramas and their Prospects.” In Embodiments of Cultural Contact, edited by Sebastian Jobs & Gesa Mackenthun. Münster: Waxmann, 2011. 161-179.

“Museum Lessons.” In anglistik & englischunterricht, edited by Gabriele Linke. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 2011. 271-289.

“Native Souvenirs and Shop-Windows: Museum Displays in an Age of Commodity. The Example of the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D. C.” In Native Americans and First Nations: A Transnational Challenge, edited by Waldemar Zacharasiewicz & Christian Feest. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009. 177-187.

“George Gustav Heye and the National Museum of the American Indian – Collecting the Collector.” COPAS 8 (2007).

“The Boxes on Display. Collections of Anatomy and Ethnic Shows.” Contentious Collections in Central and Eastern Europe: The Legacy of Ethnographic Shows and Beyond, 26-27 October 2023, Riga.

“Unlocking Creative Writing Skills in the DOC” Pennsylvania Prison and Parole Podcast, September 27 2023. https://podcast.cor.pa.gov/2023/09/26/unlocking-creative-writing-skills-in-the-doc/?fbclid=IwAR1UqmQeHm0iRvxYP9C1LleKOXQZBX7t_XdD3gnmvawNbcuCNhUV6QSkQpA

“Fruits of Memory” Workshop Uninhabitations. University Rostock, 23-25 June 2022.

“’Need to give you a sign of life’ Lost voices from the people with disabilities persecuted and killed in Nazi-Germany (Keynote) World Disability and Rehabilitation Conference. 11-12 November 2021. Online.

“The Memory Project” Remembrance and Generation Z, 26. October 2021. Conjoined event ASU and University of Regensburg.

“Community Writing and Challenge of Outreach” with Jayne Thompson. Community Writing Conference, Oct. 21-23 2021. Online.

“Feminism and Poetic Leadership. A Workshop”. Liberal Leadership Summit, Human Rights pillar for the topic on Gender, Racial discrimination, and Unequal Representation. De La Salle University, Manila. September 21, 2021. Online.

“The Fruits of Memory. Discussing Apple Chutney and an Overgrown Former Concentration Camp Site.” Think Tank, Regensburg. 17.06.2021.

“Aging Behind Bars: The Senior Center in the SCI Chester and Stories of Masculinities” MasculinitiesAging between Cultures-Workshop Rostock April 22-24, 2021.

“Queer Performance Art“ University of Bochum, 1.7.2019.

„Jenny Lind. Of Lost Voices, the Archives and theFreak Show.“ 14^th ESSE Conference. Brno, Czech Republic, 29.08.-02.09.2018.

How to Listen. Collecting the Voices of Incarcerated Women. (with Jayne Thompson). Annual conference of the German Association of American Studies. “American Counter/Publics”, Berlin, 24.-27.5.2018.

“Everything will be okay”: Prison Wives' Forms of Resistance in an Era of Mass Incarceration“ Conference of the European Association of American Studies, ”Environment, Place and Protest“, London, April 4-8 2018.

“The Transnational Dimensions of Canadian Experimental Film: Franci Duran, Alyson Mitchell and Gariné Torossian” Vorlesung “Canada at 150” Rostock, 8.12.2017.

“Unasked Questions. De-Americanizing Freakery” Keynote Lecture. Conference “Staged Otherness. Human Oddities in Central and Eastern Europe. 1850-1939,” Warsaw, 25.-27.10.2017.

“Eco-Curious, Eco-Sensual, Eco-Sexual: Annie Sprinkle's and Beth Stephen's Environmental Concern” Workshop “Environment meets Performance,” Regensburg, 28.-29.09.2017.

“Walking in Darkness – On Performance Art and Attentiveness” Interdisciplinary Queer Feminist Lecture Series: Performance-Praxis-Körper (November 2016, Rostock).

“Dust on Dust: Performing Selk’nam Visions, Tracing Absent Bodies.” Conference: Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies. Negotiating Post-conflict Trauma and Memorialization. 20.-21.9.2016 NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam.

“In conversation with Frantz Fanon” Exentrico. Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institue of Performance and Politics. 17.-24. July 2016, Santiago de Chile.

“The Power of Poetic Souls. Prison Poetry and Activism” Annual Meeting of the German Association of American Studies The United States and the Question of Rights. 19.-22. May 2016, Osnabrück, Germany.

“Prison of the Past: How to Commemorate the GDR Secret Police and its Strategies of Incarceration.” 30.09.2015, Widener University, PA.

“Migration, Labor, and Catastrophe. Erica Mott’s techno-opera 3 Singers and the voice of the activist.” 17.6.2015, Universität Wuppertal.

“Performing Genre – Possibilities and Constraints of a Text” Annual Workshop of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis: Politics of Attachment. 25.-27.3.2015, Amsterdam. 

“Queer Activism in Germany” The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 3.2.2015.

“Brain Capacity and Psychological Racism in Nineteenth-century America.” Annual Workshop of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis: Brains, Maps, and Rhythms. Knowledge and Experience in (Bio)political Orders. 16.-18.4.2014, Amsterdam.

“Collecting the Ghosts of Soldiers. The National Museum of Health and Medicine and its Civil War Past.” Biannual Meeting of the European Association of American Studies, America: Justice, Conflict, War. The Hague; Netherlands, 3.4.-6.4.2014.

“The Ethnographic Object” Art Department, Scripps College, Claremont, USA. 12.3.2014.

“Ethnographic Museums and ‘Multiculturalism’ in Germany.” Department for Political Sciences, Scripps College, Calremont, USA, 11.3.2014.

“The Ethnographic Void.” University of California, Santa Cruz, 28.2.2014.

“The Representation of Native America in German Museums” Tourism Studies Working Group, Berkeley, USA, 21.2.2014.

“W.E.B. Du Bois and Medicine. Science, Literature and the Culture of Dissent.” Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, Beyond the Logic of Debt, Toward an Ethics of Collective Dissent. Washington, DC, 21.-24.11.2013.

“A Haunting Presence—Museums and Strategies of Display.” Global Spectralities Seminar, Amsterdam, 23.-24.9.2013.

“Painted Black. Eugenics and the issue of race in a transatlantic perspective.” 24^th International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine. 21.-28.7.2013, Manchester, UK.

“Becoming White. Skin Diseases and the Black Body in the nineteenth century” Somatechnics International Conference Missing Links: The Somatechnics of Decolonization, Linköping, Schweden, 17.-19.6.2013.

“White People on Display. The Poetics and Politics of nineteenth-century Freakshow Photography” Probing the Skin. Cultural Representations of Our Contact Zone, Jena, 24.4.-26.4.2013.

“The Ethnographic Void” Annual Workshop of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis Dislocating Agency, Moving Objects, Amsterdam, 17.-19.4.2013.

“Always Becoming. Enacting Indigenous Identity on a Museum Stage” Recasting Commodity and Spectacle in the Indigenous Americas, London, 22-23 November 2012.

“The Lost Voices: The Museum as Heterotopia” The Experience of Cohabited Space. Representations of contested Areas in Text, cincema and Sound, 1920-1950. Rostock, 15 July 2012.

“The Indian on Display. Native Americans and Museums: A Transnational Perspective,” Erlangen, Nordamerika Kolloquium “Transnational American Studies,” 05 July 2012.

“The Medical Gaze. The Image, Medicine, and Disability in 19th Century America” Sensualizing Deformity, Edinburgh, UK, 15 June 2012.

Response to Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Bodies in Movement Seminar Series, University of Edinburgh, 14 June 2012.

“The Freakshow. Representations of Extraordinary Bodies in the 19th Century,” Making America Lecture Series, 03.05.2012, Bamberg.

“The Uncanny Body. Freud, Aesthetic Categories and 19^th Century Body Politics” Seminar Series Sensible Flesh, King’s College, 16.04.2012, London.

“What’s in a name? The Cultural Center and the Museum” 33^rd American Indian Workshop, April 12-15, 2012,  Zurich, Switzerland.

“The Horror of Medicine. Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital and the Medical Grotesque” Conference of the European Association of American Studies,  30.3.- 02.04.2012, Izmir, Turkey.

“Haunted. Museums and Metadiscourses” Annual Workshop of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, March 28-30, 2012, Amsterdam.

“The Eyewitness” International Society for Cultural History annual conference: “History – Memory – Myth. Re-presenting the Past,” August 03-06, 2011, Oslo, Norway.

“The Dirty Work – Theft and the Birth of Anthropology,” 57th Annual Convention of the German Association for American Studies “American Economies,” May 27-30, 2010, Berlin.

“The Thanksgiving Myth: Teaching Native American Culture in a Museum Context,” 31rst American Indian Workshop: “Transformation, Translation, Transgression: Native American Culture in Contact and Context,” March 25-28, 2010, Prague, Czech Republic.

“A Grieving Tourist – Museums that make us Suffer,” Annual International Workshop of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis: “Articulations,” March 22-24, 2010, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

“Im Namen des Großvaters – familiäre Bindungen in Jonathan Safran Foers Romanen,” 2. Interdisziplinäres Kolloquium der Arbeitsgruppe Gender-Forschung: “Gender, Generation, Aging,” November 26-28, 2009, Rostock, Germany.

“The Master of Illusion. P. T. Barnum’s American Museum as an Archive of Popular Stories,” Salzburg Annual Confernece in English Literature and Culture: “Museum Narratives,” November 5-8, 2009 Salzburg, Austria.

“The National Museum of the American Indian and its Performance Approach to the Exhibition of Cultures,” 28th American Indian Workshop: “Premiéres Nations, Collections Royales,” May 10-13, 2007, Paris, France.

“Good Night and Good Luck – A Film Discourse on the McCarthy Era and Beyond,” 8th International Tartu Conference on North-American Studies: “A Return of History?” April 26-28, 2007, Tartu, Estonia.

“The National Museum of the American Indian. A Postmodern Identity Crisis?” Austrian Association for American Studies Conference: “Native Americans and First Nations – A Transnational Challenge,” November 16-19 2006, Vienna, Austria.

“The National Museum of the American Indian. How Objects Represent Culture,” Postgraduate Forum der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien, November 3-5, 2006, Chemnitz, Germany.

“The Great White Shark – Moby Dick Reborn,” Studenten- Symposium: “Melville’s Moby Dick,” July 2004, Rostock.

“Depersonalization in Modern Film Scripts,” Symposium: “Language, People, (De)personalization,” November 2003, Rostock.

WS 2024/25
Grundkurs: Vermittlungskompetenz: Basic Study and Research Skills
Grundkurs: Introduction to Literary Studies
Proseminar Kultur: American Images
Proseminar Literatur: Poetry and Images

SS 2024
Grundkurs: Introduction to Literary Studies
Proseminar Literatur: Native American Literature
Proseminar Literatur: Horror Stories
Proseminar Kultur: On Work(ing)
Hauptseminar Literatur: Poetry and Place

WS 2023/24
Grundkurs Vermittlungskompetenz: Basic Study and Research Skills
Grundkurs Literatur: Einführung in die britische und amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft
Proseminar Literatur: (American) Poetry and Society
Proseminar Kultur: Situation and Becoming: Kenyan Popular Culture
Hauptseminar Kultur: Memory and the Archive

SS 2023
Grundkurs Literatur: Einführung in die britische und amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft
Proseminar Literatur: The Sonnet in American Poetry
Proseminar Kultur: Art, Politics, and Activism in the United States
Hauptseminar Literatur: Myth and Poetry

WS 2022/23
Grundkurs Vermittlungskompetenz: Basic Study and Research Skills
Grundkurs Literatur: Einführung in die anglistische und amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft
Proseminar Literatur: Filipino American Literature
Proseminar Kultur: From Yellow Fever to HIV AIDS - Diseases in American Culture
Blockveranstaltung Literatur: Introduction to African Literature

SS 2022
Grundkurs Literatur: Einführung in die britische und amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft
Proseminar Literatur: "Dear Angel of Dust" - Contemporary Epistolary Novels
Hauptseminar Literatur: Difficult to Tell: Recent Genre-Crossing Writings
Hauptseminar Kultur: Collecting the Traces, Reconstructing Black Lives

WS 2021/22
Grundkurs Vermittlungskompetenz: Basic Study and Research Skills
Proseminar Literatur: Twentieth Century American Poetry: a Journey
Hauptseminar Kultur: Black Movements in American History
Proseminar Kultur: Ghosts and Phantoms in American Culture

SS 2021
Grundkurs Literatur: Einführung in die britische und amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft
Hauptseminar Literatur: Life Writing: Contemporary Memoirs
Hauptseminar Kultur: Rural America: A Historical Overview
Proseminar Kultur: Graphic Novels. Exploring a Genre

WS 2020/21
Hauptseminar Literatur: Literature and Law
Proseminar Literatur: An Introduction to Contemporary Native American Literature
Proseminar Literatur: Contemporary American Poetry
Hauptseminar Kultur: Water as Social and Cultural Space in the U. S.
Proseminar Kultur: An Introduction to Indigenous Film

SS 2020
Grundkurs Literatur: Einführung in die britische und amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft
Hauptseminar Literatur: The American Prison in Contemporary Literature
Proseminar Kultur: Central Voices of (American) Feminism
Proseminar Kultur: American Photography: Selected Icons
Hauptseminar Kultur: Botanic Visions

WS 2019/20
Grundkurs Literatur: Einführung in die britische und amerikanische Literaturwissenschaft        
Proseminar Literatur: 19th century American Poetry: Walt Whitman       
Proseminar Kultur: Medicine and American Culture: An Introduction        
Hauptseminar Kultur: Living in the Anthropocene. Theories and Discussions           

SS 2019
Proseminar Literatur: The Poetry of Muriel Rukeyser
Proseminar Kultur: American Concepts of Outer Space
Hauptseminar Kultur: Documenting American Wars

WS 2018/19
Proseminar Literatur: Contemporary Testimony Plays
Proseminar Kultur: A Cultural Analysis of Toys

SS 2018
Proseminar Kultur: The Im/migrant and America: An Overview in Fragments

WS 2017/18
Proseminar Kultur: Constructions of Old Age in the United States

SoSe 2017
Proseminar Kultur: Democracy in America

WS 2016/17
Proseminar Kultur: Black America: An Introduction

SoSe 2016
Proseminar Kultur: American Archives

WS 2015/16
Proseminar Kultur: Performance/Art and U.S. Culture

SoSe 2015
Proseminar Kultur: Prisoners and Prisons in the U.S.

WS 2014/15
Proseminar Kultur: An Introduction to American Creative Non-fiction

SoSe 2014
Proseminar Kultur: Black Intellectuals

WS 2013/14
The Concept of Insantiy in 19^th century America

SoSe 2013
American (Cyber)Punk Literature  

WS 2012/2013:
“Pain and Suffering in American Culture”

SoSe 2012:
“Introduction to North American Indigenous Film”

WS 2011/2012
“Consumerism and (Mis)Fortune in American Novels at the Turn of the Century”
"Land of  Desire. Consumerism and Culture in the United States"

SoSe 2010
 “The Representation of the American Indian”

SoSe 2009
“New York in Literary Texts”; “Sport in American Society” (with Pierre Gottschlich, Internationale Politik)

WS 2008/09
“American Photography – A Cultural Studies Perspective”; “Die Präsidentschaftswahl in den USA 2008” (with Pierre Gottschlich, Internationale Politik)

SoSe 2007
“Museums and Their Collections”; “E Pluribus Unum? Aspects of American Society and Culture” (with Pierre Gottschlich, Internationale Politik)

WS 2006/07
 “The Age of McCarthyism” (with Pierre Gottschlich, Internationale Politik)

SoSe 2006
“The Creation of Myth. The Lewis and Clark Expedition and Sacagawea”

WS 2005/06 
“America and the Holocaust. History in Public Discourse”