NCID-1376
Barbara Buchenau
Professor of North American Cultural Studies
University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Education/Degree:
1 American Studies (University of Göttingen, Germany)
About
After an academic training in American literature and in cultural studies at the University of Goettingen, Germany, a scholarship at Stanford University and an assistant professorship in postcolonial studies at the University of Bern, Switzerland, Dr. Buchenau has been a professor of North American cultural studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany since 2012. She is the author of a book on early US American fiction in transatlantic contexts and the co-editor, with Virginia Richter and Marijke Denger, of Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires (2015). She has co-edited a special issue of Comparative Literature and Culture on the Web on intercultural negotiations in the Americas (2001, with Marietta Messmer), as well as Do the Americas have a Common Literary History? (2002, with Annette Paatz, Rolf Lohse and Marietta Messmer). The latter is the result of a three-year collaborative research project on hemispheric and transatlantic literary transfers and exchanges.
Current Work
Dr. Buchenau's current research focuses on (anti-) urban imaginaries and their reverberation with conceptualizations of inclusion, justice, and sustainability as much as with the naturalization of difference and segregation. She asks how today's faith in and fear of global urbanization reframes older narratives of empire, settlement and creolization, religious hermeneutics, and ethnoracial stereotyping. A book manuscript on a rather painful form of epistemological and cultural mobility is in the making: it will investigate the colonial and early national figuration of Iroquoia into an emblem of anti-urban North America.
Research Area Keyword(s)
Racial hermeneutics, Settler-colonialism, stereotype, typology, urbanity