Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schmidt

Research Interests

• 19th and 20th century North American literature and culture
• Modern/postmodern American drama and theater
• Ethnic literatures in the US and Canada
• Diaspora studies
• Visual culture studies/documentary photography
• Media theory/radio culture
• Theories of space/place in literature, photography, and architecture

Doctoral Candidates Supervised

Current Students

• Fabian Ebeling, “Créer la Création – Aesthetics, Responsiveness, and Mediality as Modes of Inquiry into the Dispositif of Smart Cities”
• Gustavo Adolfo Gutierrez Hernandez, “Writing Caribbean Pluralities”
• Johanna Lederer, “Making Place for Indigeneity: Imaginative Practices in Speculative Fiction and Art”
• Fritz Bommas, “What’s Real in the Capitalocene: Realist Form, Crisis, and Consensus in Contemporary North American Novels”
• Sophia Hörl, “Of Shamescapes and Otherwheres: Imagined Spaces of (In)justice in African American Fiction, Art, and Urban Design since the 1960s”

Past Students

• Sabine Aretz, “(Re-)Placing the #MeToo Movement: Power, Shame, and Autobiographical Narratives”
• Julia Rössler, “Drama after Postmodernism: New Aesthetics of Mimesis on the Contemporary Stage”
• Nathalie Aghoro, “Sounding the American Novel: Voice in Twenty-First Century Fiction”
• Nicole Schneider, “Visual Protest, Viral Images, and Virtual Participation: Protest and Photography in the Contemporary Movement for Black Lives”
• Ulla Stackmann, “The Sonic Realness of Postwar Audiopoetry: Practices and Cultural Contexts of Poetry on Sound Carriers (c. 1950s—1980s)”