In collaboration with the Diversity Roundtable, the executive board has updated the DGfA/GAAS Mentoring Program. Below, please find a list of experienced colleagues – usually full professors – who are available for mentoring. The offer is geared toward PhD candidates and post-doctoral colleagues in German American Studies who have specific questions about their careers, academic publishing, etc. We welcome everyone who would like to become a mentor or mentee, but the GAAS is particularly interested in offering support to scholars who experience marginalization due to race, ethnicity, class, gender and/or sexuality, care responsibilities, and/or disability.
Please note:
- The mentoring conversations should be conducted online or by phone. The Association will consider requests to cover travel expenses if both parties deem an in-person meeting necessary.
- Mentor and mentee can agree to extend their mentoring relation after a first conversation, but the focus of this measure is on short and goal-oriented conversations. Long-term mentoring programs are offered by many foundations and universities (More here: Bildungsserver.de; Arbeiterkind.de).
- Mentees can contact the mentors on the liste below directly. If a mentoring relationship is established, a mutual agreement has to be signed by both parties (see download section at the bottom of this page). All parties have to agree to abide by a code of conduct which will be also made publicly available. Inappropriate requests or interactions should be reported to executive_director@dgfa.de and/or diversity_roundtable@dgfa.de.
Our Mentors (in alphabetical order)
Prof. Dr. Jeanne Cortiel
Universität Bayreuth
Jeanne Cortiel focuses on science fiction/speculative fiction studies, popular culture, and nineteenth-century American literature.
PD Dr. René Dietrich
Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
René Dietrich’s research interests are biopolitics, indigenous culture and literature, American short fiction and poetry.
Prof. Dr. Astrid Fellner
Saarland Universität Saarbrücken
Astrid Fellner’s research focus is on border studies (US-Mexican as well as US-Canada border), U.S. Latinx literature, gender/queer studies, diversity studies, popular culture, and post-revolutionary American literature.
Prof. Dr. Astrid Franke
Universität Tübingen
Astrid Franke’s research is on African American Literature and Culture, the history of American poetry, stereotypes and other problems of representation, literature and social movements, and modern and contemporary novels.
Prof. Dr. Marc Frey
Universität der Bundeswehr München
Marc Frey is a historian working on IR history, US foreign relations, development, imperial and colonial history, military and intelligence history. He has national and international experience as a grant applicant and referee, and in academic management (Dean of Faculty 2020-2024), diversity audit, care responsibilities.
Prof. Dr. Astrid Haas
Universität Bergen (Norwegen)
Astrid Haas focuses on Literary and Cultural Studies of North America. Her research interests include early North American Studies; travel writing, autobiography, and drama; Inter-American and Atlantic Studies; Transnational Migration and Border Studies; The Black and Latinx Diasporas; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Science Studies (especially Medical Humanities.
Prof. Dr. Carsten Junker
TU Dresden
Carsten Junker considers historically situated relationalities between structural inequalities and various genres and media, as well as dynamics of subject and group positioning with respect to diverse, overlapping practices of categorization in North American literatures and cultures, including Canada and the Caribbean, from the seventeenth century to the present.
Prof. Dr. Antje Kley
FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
Antje Kley is working on American Literary Studies (theory, media history and cultural functions of the novel; life writing/confessional culture; Anglophone Caribbean literature) and she is directing a research training group on literature and the public sphere in contemporary differentiated cultures. Furthermore, she is interested in ethics and aesthetics, cultural difference, and gender studies.
Prof. Dr. Nicole Maruo-Schröder
Universität Koblenz
Nicole Maruo-Schröder’s research is on 19th- and 20th-century American literature; Material Culture and Literature (esp. with regard to food, objects, fashion, consumer practices); Travel Writing; Gender Studies; Cultural Studies (esp. Concepts of culture, space, place); Post-colonial studies & multicultural literatures, intersectionality; contemporary American film & fiction (disaster, dystopia, nature); visual culture and ecocriticism.
Prof. Dr. Ruth Mayer
Leibniz Universität Hannover
Ruth Mayer’s research has a focus on modernity, gender, sexuality, and temporality. She directs an international Master’s program of American Studies in Hannover, and would be particulary willing to advise about the process of switching between academic systems and the strange conventions of German academia. She is also open to questions about care responsibilties and the (im)possibility of combining parenting and academic career-planning.
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Piller
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Elisabeth Piller works mostly on North American and transatlantic history in the twentieth century, currently focusing on the relationship between the United States and Europe in the 1940s. Having spent larger parts of her academic career abroad, she is especially suited to mentor PhD or postdoctoral researchers who are new to Germany or are considering a career abroad. She also invites conversations about international peer-review and journal publications.
Prof. Dr. Katja Sarkowsky
Universität Augsburg
Katja Sarkowksy has expertise on life writing, Indigenous literatures, law and literature, literature and the environment.
Prof. Dr. Regina Schober
Universität Düsseldorf
Regina Schober works on network concepts in American literary history, transformations of subjectivity in the information age, posthumanism, the quantified self, media/technology and gender, artificial intelligence, failure and knowledge, and on intermediality.
Prof. Dr. Mary Ann Snyder-Körber
Julian-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
MaryAnn Snyder-Körber is working on intersections of modernization processes with cultural production practices. Her research and teaching look closely at media ecologies and the material forms (print, visual, and digital) that they foster. Her areas of interest include American modernism , the anecdote as a key narrative mode of modernity, networked cultures from the nineteenth century to the present, gender discourses and feminism as well as aesthetics and practices of authorship. She is US-American and has insight into switching between the US and German university systems. Since her doctoral work was in Comparative Literature, and she first began working with a focus in American Studies in her post-doctoral work, she also has experience with switching disciplinary bases in the German system. She has two daughters who were born during her doctoral and post-doctoral qualification phases.
Prof. Dr. Daniel Stein
Universität Siegen
Daniel Stein’s research revolves around U.S. literature (especially African American) and popular culture from the nineteenth-century to the present (city mystery novels, music, comics, film & television). He is particularly interested in the nexus of popular (serial) narrative and cultural history as well as in genre evolution and (digital) media.
Prof. Dr. Miriam Strube
Universität Paderborn
Miriam Strube is working on Black Studies, philosophy, popular culture, modernist poetry/poetics, and environmental studies.
Prof. Dr. Pia Wiegmink
Universität Bonn
Pia Wiegmink is a professor for Slavery and Dependency at Bonn University’s excellence cluster “Beyond Slavery and Freedom”. Her research interests include Antislavery Literature, African American Life Writing, 19th century American Literature, Transnational American Studies, Cultural Heritage, Political Theater and Activism.
Dr. Meike Zwingenberger
Geschäftsführerin Stiftung Bayerisches Amerikahaus gGmbH
Meike Zwingenberger is Executive Director of the foundation Stiftung Bayerisches Amerikahaus gGmbH – Bavarian Center for Transatlantic Relations (Amerikahaus München), the largest institution concerned with transatlantic relations in Germany, and willing to advise on career-planning beyond the classical professorial career.