The Politics of Popular Forms: Transnational and Intersectional Perspectives in American Studies

01/04/2025 to 31/03/2030

This five-year research plan in the context of a Heisenberg grant comprises three projects, each of which is transnational in scope, employs an intersectional analytical lens, and considers popular literature and other popular forms in addition to canonical ones. The first project considers contemporary multi-medial, fictional and documentary representations of solitary confinement in the US and the UK; the second project explores the construction of a West-German post-war German reading culture through US American novels in translation, especially in the programs of Rowohlt, Bertelsmann Lesering, and Reader's Digest, and takes that perspective into the twenty-frist century and considers global Anglophone popular reading cultures; the third project is a monograph that re-conceptualizes trans-Atlantic Anglophone literary history as a history of popular literatures.