PD Dr. Nadja Gernalzick

At the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Mainz University, 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 studying and researching at San Jose State University in California and Columbia University, New York, I completed 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.

In my research and publications, I practice approaches from various fields. I published monographs on economy in the grammatology of Jacques Derrida and on filmic autobiography and temporality. In presentations, 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 angles of literary and media theory.

I enjoy the pursuit of postdisciplinary perspectives and the negotiation of methodological nationalisms. The comparativist discussion on world literature in postcolonialism and decoloniality studies as much as applications of Anthropocene studies, posthumanism, and Earth system theory in the study of literature and media appeal to me greatly. A graduate seminar paper I wrote at the University of Mainz sometime in the mid-1990s used Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s biological theory of autopoiesis for the study of literature. Currently, my research mainly concerns material entanglement theories and semiotics in the blue humanities.

I supervise thesis papers and dissertations in American Studies and Comparative Literature, and generally in literary, media, and cultural studies and theory.