Research

Research and teaching in the North American Studies Program engages North American literature and culture from its colonial beginnings to post-modernist cultural practices and recent phenomena like the internet and the repercussions of 9/11 in current US-American fiction. While our projects do interrogate 18th- and 19th-century American literary and visual cultures there is a strong focus on modernism and postmodernism, poetry and poetics, gender studies, African American studies, popular culture and cultural studies as well as on issues of method and theory, particularly on feminist critique and gender studies, poststructuralism, pragmatism, narratology and film theory as well as on theories of North American studies. In general our research projects take transdisciplinary, transatlantic, and comparative perspectives, including Canadian cultures, explore the crossroads between North American studies and media studies and engage in dialogues between cultural studies and the sciences.

For more details on specific projects please consult the information provided by our individual faculty members.