Degrees 

• 2020 “Habilitation” (post-doctoral degree) in American Studies, thesis: “Disruptive Relationality: U.S. Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Life Writing”, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz
• 2010 PhD in American literary and cultural studies, thesis: “Revising and Remembering (after) the End: Post-Apocalyptic American Poetry since 1945 from Ginsberg to Forché”, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen
• 2005 First State Exam in English and German, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg

Appointments

• Since 04/2026 Professor of American Studies, University of Rostock
• 10/2022 - 03/2026 Senior Lecturer in American Studies, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (KU)
• 07/2022 - 09/2022 Academic Coordinator of the DFG Research Training Group "Contradiction Studies, University of Bremen
• 2021 - 2022 Academic Coordinator of the KU Center for Advanced Studies "Dialogical Cultures", Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (KU)
• 2020 - 2021 Adjunct Lecturer at the Department of English-Speaking Cultures, University of Bremen
• 2016 Visiting Scholar at the American Indian Studies Center, UCLA
• 2013 - 2019 DFG Principal investigator of the Project "Biopolitics and Indigenous Life Writing" and lecturer at the Obama Insitute for Transnational American Studies, JGU Mainz
• 2011 - 2013 Lecturer at the American Studies Program, Department of English and Linguistics, JGU Mainz
• 2009 - 2011 Coordinator of the international PhD program "Literary and Cultural Studies," International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, JLU Giessen
• 2006 - 2010 Lecturer and Research Assistant at the Department of English, JLU Giessen

• North American Indigenous Literatures and Cultures
• Indigenous Studies and Settler Colonial Studies
• Environmental Humanities
• Biopolitics
• Modern and Contemporary Poetry
• Autobiography and Life Writing
• Film and T.V. Studies
• The (Post-)Apocalyptic Imagination

Monographs, edited volumes, special issues

Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life: Settler States and Indigenous Presence. Edited with Kerstin Knopf. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023. www.dukeupress.edu/biopolitics-geopolitics-life

Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Lifeways. American Indian Culture and Research Journal special issue. 42.2 (2018).

A History of American Poetry: Contexts-Developments-Readings. Edited with Oliver Scheiding and Clemens Spahr. Trier: WVT (Academic Handbook Series), 2015. 

Revising and Remembering (after) the End: American Post-Apocalyptic Poetry since 1945 from Ginsberg to Forché. Trier: WVT (MOSAIC 45), 2012.

Lost or Found in Translation? Interkulturelle/Internationale Perspektiven der Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften. Edited with Daniel Smilovski and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2011.

Journal articles

“Doing Native and Indigenous Studies in Europe in the 2020s: Changes, Challenges, Dynamics.”Ess J  erasf Transmotion, 10th Anniversary Issue, Forthcoming 2026.

“Introduction: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Lifeways.”American Indian Culture and Research Journal, guest edited special issue. 42.2 (2018): 1-10.

“‘Pando/Pando’ Across the Americas: Transnational Settler Territorialities and Decolonial Pluralities.”Journal of Transnational American Studies 11.1 (2020). Special issue on “American Territorialities,” guest editors Nicole Waller and Jens Temmen. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6g60x78r

“Feeding Ourselves with Stories and the Gift of Having a Body: A Conversation with Deborah A. Miranda.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2018): 103–118.

“The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Disruptive Relationality.”Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies 17.1 (2017), 67-77. Special issue on “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies,” guest editors Aimee Carillo Rowe and Eve Tuck.

“Made to Move, Made of this Place: Into America, Mobility, and the Eco-Logics of Settler Colonialism.”Amerikastudien/American Studies 61.4 (2016): 507-26. Special issue on “Environmental Imagination on the Move: Nature and Mobility in American Literature and Culture,” guest editors Christine Gerhard and Christa Grewe-Volpp. 

“Towards a Poetics of Liminality in ‘this space between spaces’: The Shore Lines of Contemporary American Poetry.”Anglia – Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie/Journal for English Philology, 125.3 (2007): 448-64.

Book chapters

“This Land and All my Relations: Indigenous Podcasting Ecology and Community-Building in the Digital Sphere.” Indigenous Media Ecologies, ed. Jill Doerfler, Cristina Stanciu, Oliver Scheiding. Minnesota State University Press, Forthcoming 2026.

 “Beyond Humanization: Decolonization, Relationality, and 21^st Century Indigenous Literatures.” Cambridge Companion to Race in American Literature, ed. John Ernest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2024, 134-47.

“Introduction: Bio/Geopolitics of Settler States and Indigenous Normativities.”Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life: Settler States and Indigenous Presence. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023, 1-44.

“Embodied Memories: Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Multiple Genealogies in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians. A Tribal Memoir.”Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture, ed. Michael R. Griffiths. Farnham: Ashgate, 2016. 137-52.

“Biopolitics and Indigenous Literary Studies: Settler Colonial Hierarchies, Relational Lives, and the Political Potential of Native Writing in N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain.”Comparative Indigenous Studies, ed. Mita Banerjee. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2016. 57-82.

 “Native American Poetry in the Age of U.S. Expansion: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and John Rollin Ridge/Yellow Bird.’”A History of American Poetry: Contexts-Developments-Readings. Eds. Oliver Scheiding, René Dietrich. Clemens Spahr. Trier: WVT, 2015. 139-156.

“Secret Spheres from Breaking Bad to The Americans: The Politics of Secrecy, Masculinity, and Transgression in 21st-Century U.S. Television Drama.” Transgressive Television, eds. Birgit Däwes, Alexandra Ganser, and Nicole Poppenhagen. Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2015. 195-216.

(Together with Oliver Scheiding and Clemens Spahr). “To the Reader.’” A History of American Poetry: Contexts-Developments-Reading. Eds. Oliver Scheiding, René Dietrich. Clemens Spahr. Trier: WVT, 2015. 1-8.

„The Inclusive Exclusion of Native Americans: Indigenous Life Writing and the Threat to US-Nationhood in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller.”Transnational American Studies. Ed. Udo Hebel. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. 305-22. 

 “The Dead shall inherit the Dead”: After Life and Beyond Catastrophe in Mark Strand’s Post-Apocalyptic Poetry.”The Cultural Life of Catastrophes and Crises. Eds. Carsten Meiner, Kristin Veel. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2012. 203-212.

(Together with Mirjam Horn). “Experimental Short Fictions of the 1960s: Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Entropy’ and Robert Coover’s ‘The Babysitter’.”A History of the American Short Story: Genres – Develoments – Model Interpretations Eds. Michael Basseler, Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2011. 323-340. 

„Vom Ende der Geschichten – Amerika und seine Apokalypsen.“Kulturwissenschaften exemplarisch: Giessener Forschungsbeiträge zu acht Kernkonzepten. Eds. Horst Carl, Janine Hauthal Martin Zierold. Trier: WVT, 2011. 23-46. 

(Together with Daniel Smilovski and Ansgar Nünning). „Einleitung: Interkulturelle/ Internationale Multiperspektivität und die Herausforderungen kultureller Übersetzung in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften.“ Dietrich/Smilovski/Nünning, 2010. 1-36. 

 „Entwicklungen der US-amerikanischen Gegenwartslyrik – Self-Writing, Re-Writing, Performing.“Schlüsselthemen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik/Key Topics in English and American Studies. Eds Wolfgang Hallet, Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2010. 93-120. 

“Seeing a World Unmade, and Making a World (Out) of Remains: The Post-Apocalyptic Re-Visions of W.S. Merwin and Carolyn Forché.”CulturalWays of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives. Eds. Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, Birgit Neumann. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2010. 329-354. 

„Postmoderne Grenzräume und Endräume in der Gegenwartslyrik: Bewegungen ins Dazwischen und ins Nichts in Frank Bidarts ‚The War of Vaslav Nijinsky’.“Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur: Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn. Eds. Wolfgang Hallet, Birgit Neumann. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. 355-370. 

“‘A Love of a … Un-i-mag-in-able Kind’: Von der Farce zur Tragödie in Edward Albees The Goat or Who is Sylvia? “Das neuere amerikanische Drama: Autoren – Entwicklungen – Interpretationen. Eds. Herbert Grabes, Klaus Schwank. Trier: WVT, 2009. 269-284. 

“‘Today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on’: Narrative Non-Identity in Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.”Narrative and Identity: Theoretical Approaches and Critical Analyses. Eds. Nünning, Ansgar und Bo Petterson. Trier: WVT, 2008. 219-232. 

„’Welcome Home, Memory’: Zur zeitgenössischen amerikanischen Erinnerungslyrik.“Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte. Eds. Marion Gymnich, Birgit Neumann, Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2007. 253-72. 

2025

“Beyond Colonial Death Worlds: Jennifer Foerster’s Indigenous Necropoetics of the Anthropocene”
Anthropocene Necropoetics: Empire, Violence, and Ecological Ruin in US Poetry, Cologne

“Ice to Water: dg nanouk okpik’s Poetic Cartographies of a Shifting Arctic”
Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies, Siegen

2024 

„Forms of Citizenship in Present-Day North American Indigenous Literature” 
The Indian Citzenship Act at 100, Conference at the  Université de Bordeaux-Montaigne

“Here not Here”: Arctic Time-Spaces and Shifting Poetics in dg nanouk okpik’s Poetry”
Annual Conference of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Assocation, Bodo, Norway

“Sovereign Voices and Intimate Relations: Indigenous Podcasts in the 21st Century Media Ecology"
Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies, Oldenburg

“Can Race Ever Be Represented? Race in American Literature”
Biannual Concerence of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Pasedena, Roundtable

2023

 “Beyond Humanization: Decolonization, Relationality, and 21^st Century Indigenous Literatures.” 
 Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies, Rostock

2022

„Podcasts and the Indigenous Digital Mediascape.” 
Indigenous Print Cultures, Media, and Literatures, Conference at the Obama Institute, JGU Mainz

“Beyond Humanization: Decolonization, Relationality, and 21^st Century Indigenous Literatures.” 
IPP 20^th Anniversary Keynote Lecture Series, JLU Giessen

• European Association of American Studies, Board Member
• German Association of American Studies, Board Member and International Delegate
• American Studies Association
• Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
• Network for Teaching Indigenous Studies in Europe