Ian Afflerbach is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of North Georgia. He teaches and researches in Modern American Fiction, periodical studies, African American literature, genre fiction, and the history of ideas. His work has appeared in journals like PMLA, Modernism/modernity, ELH, and Studies in the Novel, as well as public forums like Public Books, The Conversation, Podcast Review, and The Bias. He is author of Making Liberalism New (JHUP, 2021) and Sellouts! The Story of an American Insult, as well as co-editor of Bad Art (UGAP, 2027).

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Corinna Norrick-Rühl is Professor of Book Studies at the University of Münster. She has written widely on twentieth- and twenty-first century publishing and reading cultures, with a special interest in popular series and book clubs, mass-market genres, and celebrity book culture. Recent publications include “Genre, Diversity, and Metanarrative in Reese’s Book Club,” published in Contemporary Literature (co-authored with Alexander Starre) and “Moving Memoir Across Markets and Media: A Study of Popular Memoir and Its Genre Effects,” published in Book History (co-authored with Danielle Fuller).

Silvia Schultermandl is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the University of Münster. She is the author of Transnational Matrilineage: Mother-Daughter Conflicts in Asian American Literature (2009) and Ambivalent Transnational Belonging in American Literature (2021) and co-editor of eleven collections of essays and special journal issues which explore various themes in transnational studies, American literature and culture, as well as critical kinship studies. Her articles have appeared in the following journals, among others: Meridians, Atlantic Studies, Interactions, Journal of Transnational American Studies, and Journal of American Culture. Her areas of interest include affect theory, literary theory, critical race theory, queer theory, aesthetics, and transnational feminism. She is currently developing the Palgrave Series in Kinship, Representation, and Difference and is completing a book project on kinship and archives.

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Jannis Buschky’s research focuses on oil in American fiction from the beginning of the twentieth century. He examines the ways in which early imaginaries of oil render extraction zones at the periphery of an emerging fossil fuel-based economy. In his dissertation, The Regional Imaginations of the Early American Oil Extraction Novel, 1900-1945, he inspects how novels register the environmental and social changes around extraction sites in distinct regions. He is part of the ERC-funded research project “Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility.”

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During the magazine revolution of the 1890s, in which new business and marketing strategies triggered an explosion in the American print-marketplace, several magazine entrepreneurs tested out new forms and formats for literary writing that led to unique inter-institutional constellations. At Cosmopolitan magazine, editor John Brisben Walker hatched a plan to turn the magazine itself into a new type of American university—a democratic-minded institution that would facilitate modern education with a pragmatic view of literature’s place in it. Elsewhere in the booming magazine market, Frank Munsey and S. S. McClure offered up the pages of their periodicals to novel forms of literary discourse, expressed in recurring columns such as “Literary Chat” and “Human Documents.” Surveying roughly a decade worth of “Literary Chat” installments from Munsey’s Magazine (1893-1903), I aim to show how such formats produced proto-sociological knowledge about the actors and institutions that dominated the US literary scene. The talk also develops the notion of “epistemic style” to reframe the years around 1900 as an experimental phase regarding the place of literary culture within a capitalist knowledge economy.

This talk presents preliminary results of the DFG-funded project “From Patronage to the Mass Market: Institutionalizing Literary Knowledge Cultures in the 19th-Century United States,” collaboratively undertaken by the John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (FU Berlin) and the English Department at the University of Heidelberg.

Alexander Starre is assistant professor (wiss. Mitarbeiter) of North American culture at the John F. Kennedy Institute at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. He is a former Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellow and has previously taught at the Universities of Göttingen, Münster, and Duisburg-Essen, as well as at Brown University. His research interests include American cultural history, knowledge production, media theory, literary institutions, and print culture. He is the author of Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Print Culture after Digitization (2015) and co-editor of several essay collections and special issues, among them The Printed Book in Contemporary American Culture: Medium, Object, Metaphor (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Culture²: Theorizing Theory for the Twenty-First Century (transcript, 2022), and American Literary Institutions around 1900 (special issue of College Literature, 2025). He is currently finishing a book on knowledge institutions and epistemic styles in the United States around 1900.

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