ASSOCIATED PhD STUDENTS
Parisa Arasteh
Gulsin Ciftci
Su Kolsal
Estelle Krewiss
Michael Aaron Mason
Alma Topalli
Parisa Arasteh
2014: Master of Arts: English Literature, Universität Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran
2011: Bachelor of Arts: English Literature, Universität Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran
Working Title of Thesis:
Pomegranate Fiction: Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Arab American Novels
Abstract:
The “transnational turn” in American literary studies has generated enormous literary analysis and debates on American literature’s encounter with and integration into transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. Writers from various marginal ethnicities have had their voices heard; one of the emergent literary groups involved in this transnational turn is Arab American Literature. The present research argues that Arab American writings strive for change in mainstream cultural and social assumptions of ethnicities and minorities, promoting a more plural and cosmopolitan perspective, or what cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “cosmopolitan contamination.” The study attempts to make a contribution to Arab American studies by analyzing selected novels’ engagement with cosmopolitanism and delineating how they contribute to current understandings of cosmopolitanism in literature as well.
Gulsin Ciftci
2020: Master of Arts, American Studies/English Philology, University of Göttingen
2017: Bachelor of Arts, English Language and Literature, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart Üniversitesi, Turkey
Working Title of Thesis:
Piecing Together the Fragmented: Towards a Poetics of Sexual Trauma
Yagmur Su Kolsal
Y. Su Kolsal received her Master of Arts degree in English Literature in 2023 and her Bachelor's in English Language Teaching in 2020 from Middle East Technical University, Turkey.
Working Title of Thesis:
“A Morbid Longing for the Picturesque”: Aesthetic Engagements with Higher Education in Crisis in Dark Academia
Abstract:
While dark academia's emergence can be traced back to the reception of Donna Tartt’s 1992 debut The Secret History and of other texts and media associated with it on online platforms in early 2010s, soon after, the term has gained a second meaning as a digital subculture that venerates various cultural elements associated with the literary formation on an atmospheric basis. This study argues that this dual existence is a result of dark academia's affective potential as an object of attachment for readers who are interested in the aestheticization of study.
In addition to offering a descriptive account of the emergence and development of dark academia as a still-developing literary phenomenon, this project positions dark academia and responses to it as forms of affective and ideological engagements that reflect educational anxieties. In this study, the centrality of nostalgic depictions of higher education to the atmosphere that constitutes dark academia is not viewed separately from the cultural elements that make dark academia both relevant and popular. Rather, the problems of the contemporary corporate university are explored as socio-cultural factors that necessitate fictional engagements with universities, and in addition, influence the formation of affective attachments to these works and to the alternative their nostalgic atmosphere offers.
Estelle Krewiss
Estelle Krewiss recently joined the Graduate School Practices of Literature at the University of Münster as a PhD student in English Studies. She earned her MA in English literature from the Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle’s Monde Anglophone in 2023. Her master’s thesis explored the relationship between women and water in two works of creative nonfiction, examining how the shore favors interconnectedness. Currently, Estelle’s research focuses on the blue humanities and ecocriticism in North American literature. She explores the shore as a site of entanglements and loss, encompassing themes such as kinship, grief, and climate change in creative nonfiction.
In the summer of 2023, Estelle did an internship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, where she contributed editorial work and participated in events. This experience further deepened her passion for the environmental humanities.
In her free time, Estelle enjoys swimming, taking long walks in parks, and drawing. She also loves baking and listening to jazz on Sunday mornings.
Working Title of Thesis:
Loss, Entanglement, and Discovery: Writing the Shore in Contemporary North American Fiction
Michael Aaron Mason
Education:
2012: Master of Arts, American Literature, University of South Alabama
2009: Bachelor of Arts, Double major: Psychology/English, University of South Alabama
Bio:
From the US Gulf Coast, Michael received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of South Alabama. His bachelor’s focused on biopsychology, the history of speech therapy, and English creative writing. His master’s in American literature focused on ecological systems theories in post-postmodern US fiction. Bridging the gap between the life sciences and the humanities, Michael’s current doctoral research for the Graduate School Practices of Literature explores the cultural history of neuroscience as it appears in US experimental novels in the millennial era. Michael is currently working in university accreditation, developing curricula for universities in Canada’s Maritime provinces. At the University of Münster, Michael taught in the English department, was a co-organizer of two GSPoL conferences (“Silence – Catastrophe – Crisis” and “Summer School 2022: Tacet ad Libitum! Towards a Poetics and Politics of Silence”), chaired a panel for NeMLA in 2023, and served on the editorial board of Textpraxis: Digital Journal for Philology.
Before his doctoral work in Münster, Michael developed the academic writing program for an educational institution in Berlin that assists students with learning disabilities and language difficulties. He taught in China for two years in Fuzhou University’s Department of Foreign Languages, and he taught in the English department at the University of South Alabama where he also served on the editorial board of The Oracle: Fine Arts Review. Michael’s research interests include: cognitive historicism, disability studies, medical humanities, philosophy of race, cybernetics, writing pedagogy, non-linearity and hypertexts, and 20th-century and contemporary fiction.
Working Title of Dissertation: “Millennial Hysteria”: American Neuroculture and Its Experimental Fiction
Abstract: My dissertation attempts to chart the interaction between neuroscience and US experimental fiction in the millennial era—broadly the time between the Reagan and Obama administrations—as a pivotal moment for US culture and institutions. As the USSR breathed its final breaths at the cusp of the 1990s, there creeped in an overarching sense of political disappointment (in critic Sara Marcus’s terminology) and “capitalist realism” (coined by critic Mark Fisher): the sense that late capitalism has no viable alternative and that the efficacy of socialist and left wing activism had all but withered. In my project’s historical dimension, I argue that the millennial era saw increased investment in cognitive capitalism (aggressive marketing of psychoactive pharmaceuticals, increased state interest in fMRI and other brainscan technologies in response to the wars on drugs and terror), which culturally cashed out in a fundamental ideological shift where subjects began regarding themselves in terms of their brains, neurological functioning, and a medicalized vision of the self via psychological diagnosis. My project’s literary dimension focuses on four experimental novels: Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988), David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), and Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2003). I argue that these authors utilize “experimentation” in both its literary and scientific senses to (1) delineate the era’s political disappointment in terms of the cognitive and biological constraints endorsed by US neuroculture, and (2) to imagine ways out of these political and institutional enclosures. These works represent a wider cluster of post-postmodern fiction that I’m calling “experimental neurofiction,” which exists in counterpoint to the larger and more visible genre of the neuronovel. Unlike the traditional neuronovel which leans heavily on neurocultural ideologies and a diagnostic conception of selves, works of experimental neurofiction, instead, utilize and interrogate concepts from neuroscience and neurobiology with a political lens. Acker’s novel tackles autism from a neurofeminist perspective, Wallace’s work delves into writing pedagogy via the concept of metacognition, Danielewski’s hypertext interrogates the dissolution of subjectivity through its institutional tracings, and Tomasula’s book art engages the reader’s decision-making processes at the textual level. In short, my project attempts to reveal how these experimental writers negotiate and explode the boundaries of the “Two Cultures” and the “Science Wars,” bringing the life sciences in conversation with the humanities to outline alternatives to the ideologies of late capitalism.
Courses taught at the University of Münster:
▪ Seminar: Experimentation in Black Fiction [095129]
▪ Seminar: Survey of Experimental Fiction [092900]
▪ Reading Course: Jean-Luc Nancy, Poetik der Inoperativität: Zu einer politischen Theorie des Mythos und der Gemeinschaft [093341], taught in collaboration with Hector Feliciano
▪ Seminar: Introduction to Literature of Social Change [090762]
▪ Seminar: Introduction to Psychological Fiction [090763]
▪ Seminar: Introduction to Cognitive Fiction [098681]
Alma Topalli
Alma Topalli received her Master of Arts degree in English Language and Literature in 2021 from AAB College in Prishtine, Kosovo; in 2019 she received her Bachelor's degree in Interior and Furniture Design from the University Prishtins in Ferizaj, Kosovo.
Working Title of Thesis:
Female Central Figures – Gender Representation in six Newbery Award winning books
Abstract:
Since its inception in 1922, the Newbery Award has recognized the author of the most distinguished contributions to American literature to children. Widely available in public and school libraries, Newbery Award-winning books hold a special place in the literary landscape, ensuring widespread exposure among young readers. Several studies starting from the 20th century have shed light on the under representation of female protagonists among the honoured work and less studies have exposed the significant gender imbalance noticed in the books that won this award. This current study builds upon the foundations laid by the early studies of Kinman, Henderson, Powell and other scholars who have emphasized the gender imbalance in Newbery Award winning books since the early '70s, also adding on the latest research on the Newbery Award Winning books and gender roles by Alex Paige Brower in 2017 and Courage, Charm and Compassion by Meredith Jachowicz in 2010.
Taking into consideration the importance of reading at an early age and the huge role the books we read as children play in who we become and how we imagine ourselves, this study embarks on an exploration of prevalent stereotypes conveyed in various books, each featuring a female protagonist. The findings will not only contribute to the field of gender studies but also offer valuable perspectives for educators, authors and readers alike in promoting a more inclusive and equitable literary landscape, shaping a future where all voices are heard and celebrated.