PD Dr. Nadja Gernalzick

At the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the University of Mainz, I teach as private lecturer and member of the adjunct faculty, and as senior research fellow I am associated with the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna. After undergraduate studies at San Jose State University in California and later postgraduate studies and research at Columbia University, New York, I completed MA, PhD, and habilitation degrees in comparative literature and American studies at Mainz University, and have held professorial and lecturing positions in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Canada since 1998.

As a researcher, I practice various approaches from semiotics and media theory. I published monographs on economy and money in the grammatology of Jacques Derrida and in postmodern and American literary theory, and on filmic autobiography and temporality. Currently, I am working on a narratological and intersectional study of the mother in Anthropocene theory (forthcoming 2025, Palgrave Macmillan). I am co-editing the collection Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics (forthcoming 2025, Routledge) and also initiated and co-edited the recently published collection Semiotiken in den Kulturwissenschaften/Semiotics in Cultural Studies (De Gruyter, 2024). In many presentations at international conferences, in articles, and as a co-editor, I have treated works of literature and the arts from a range of periods and genres and involving diverse methods of literary and media theory. I pursue transdisciplinary perspectives and the negotiation of methodological nationalisms,  the comparativist discussion on world literature in postcolonialism and Decoloniality Studies, and applications of Anthropocene Studies, posthumanism, and Earth system theory. My upcoming research mainly concerns material engagement theories and semiotics in the Ocean Humanities.

A graduate seminar paper I wrote at the University of Mainz sometime in the mid-1990s, for example, used Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s biological theory of autopoiesis for the study of literature. The collection The Mediality of Sugar that I initiated and co-edited treats aspects of material culture studies and art history (Brill, 2022). In 2001, I presented the project ARMY STORE/ARMY STORY with extensive documentary film footage collecting autobiographical voices of Mainz citizens and U.S. Army members on their lives with the U.S. Army. The documentary material and objects were shown in a multimedia installation at the former U.S. Army tank repair plant in Mainz. The final editing of this material into an experimental documentary film is one of my tasks in the next couple of years. Regarding practical textual and compositional work, I am also involved in the transcription from longhand of the multilingual diaries of Heinrich Schliemann for a multi-volume scholarly edition and have taken up a new project on a double biography of two recently deceased visual artists.

I supervise work on thesis papers and dissertations in American studies and comparative literature, and generally in literary, media, and cultural studies and theory.