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Institute of English and American Studies
Institute of English and American Studies

Photo: WordShore (Flickr)

Research areas

The IAA is able to offer a wide variety of research subjects to its students and its researchers due to different foci in research projects run at the institute.

In the following, current research projects of professors and research associates of the IAA are listed.

Please find further information on research projects on the personal pages of the staff members.

American Studies

Prof. Dr. Astrid Böger

  • Media culture and cultural studies
  • Visual culture; Popular culture
  • Gender studies and theories
  • Transnational cultures; global culture

Prof. Dr. Susanne Rohr

  • Literature and cultural theory
  • Semiotics
  • American Pragmatism
  • international depictions of the Holocaust at the end of the 20th century

JProf. Dr. Dustin Breitenwischer

  • African American and African Atlantic Literatures and Cultures
  • Aesthetics, Hermeneutics, Pragmatism
  • Hip-Hop and Popular Culture
  • Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Art and Visual Culture
  • Narratology, Paratextology, and Media Aesthetics    

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Adelt (interim professorship for Prof. Rohr in winter term 2022/ 23)

  • tba

British Studies

Prof. Dr. Ute Berns

  • British literature and culture of the twentieth century
  • Literature and culture of the romantic period
  • Theory of literature and culture
  • Performance, Performativity
  • Discourses of science, politics and gender in literature and culture
  • Literature and nature
  • Early modern subjectivity and interiority

Prof. Dr. Susanne Rupp

  • British literature and culture 1500-1800
  • Comparative studies: music and literature
  • early modern religious and theological discourses
  • Classicism in England

    - currently, she is Vice President of Universität Hamburg -

PD Dr. Julia Boll (current substitute of Prof. Rupp

  • Medieval, Early Modern, Modern and Contemporary Drama (Britain, Ireland, North America)
  • Ancient and Contemporary Theatre (Europe)
  • Performance Studies
  • War Studies
  • Ethics in Literature and Theatre
  • Literature and Science
  • The Contemporary Verse Novel
  • Early English Culture and Nostalgic Nationalism

JProf. Dr. Stephan Karschay

  • Gothic fiction, film and media from the 18th to the 21st century
  • Literature and the natural sciences in the 19th century
  • Literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siècle
  • Representations of Otherness
  • Scandal studies

Linguistics

Prof. Dr. Thomas Berg

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Phonology
  • Contrastive Linguistics
  • Morphology

Prof. Dr. Peter Siemund

  • Multilingualism
  • Third Language Acquisition
  • Varieties of English

JProf. Dr. Eva Berlage

  • Language variation and language change in English
  • Semantic and syntactic changes
  • Syntactic complexity
  • Corpus analysis
  • Regional variation
  • Lexicalisation, delexicalisation, and grammaticalisation

JProf. Dr. Robert Fuchs

  • Language variation and change