Research profiles in the Department of English and American Studies

Professor Katharina Boehm

Professorship in English Literature and Culture

Focal points of our research are the literature and culture of the eighteenth century, the long nineteenth century, and the present. Projects pursued by members of the team deal with themes such as media history, literature and ecology, the cultural history of science, gender, and the history of the book.

Professor Lucia Krämer

Professorship in English Studies / Cultural and Media Studies

The professorship's research focuses on phenomena of productive reception. We deal with theories of adaptation, but also with concrete forms of adaptation: in addition to literary adaptations for film, we focus in particular on fan fiction, remakes, and historical and biographical fiction in various media. Other important areas of research for the professorship include (trans)gender studies, British heritage cultures, Bollywood as a cultural phenomenon, and British late Victorianism (especially Oscar Wilde) as a focus of literary and cultural history.

Professor Karsten Fitz

Professorship in American Studies/Cultural and Media Studies

The focus of our academic work, which has a clear cultural studies and interdisciplinary orientation, lies in the areas of Native American Studies, theories of cultural encounters, cultural memory, Visual Culture Studies, political culture, and concepts for teaching America-related topics in English lessons.

Professor Daniela Wawra

Chair of English Language and Culture

Our research aims to contribute to a better understanding of language – as a system of signs, a means of communication, a cognitive medium and a social institution. We focus on the development and variation of the English language, its functions in social, (inter)cultural and media contexts, and multimodal forms of meaning construction.

Our research covers a broad spectrum – from sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and discourse analysis to text linguistics, pragmatics and comparative cultural studies. Thematically, we focus in particular on economic, political and media-related discourse, digital and intercultural communication, and questions of (informational) privacy in cultural comparison.