Welcome to new members of the department in the summer term 2024
Andreas Blümel is a stand-in professor at the Humboldt University Berlin and affiliated with the University of Göttingen. He works on recent developments of minimalist theorizing (Strong Minimalist Thesis, labeling theory, duality of semantics, etc.) with an eye on syntactic phenomena of German, Slavic and other languages. Among other topics, he has worked on long-distance dependencies, across the board movement, verb second, and the syntax of the nominal domain. He is also interested in morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects of language change.
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Prof. Dr. Mark Schmitt, guest professor for English Cultural Studies
I’ll be joining the Department of English and American Studies as a guest professor for English Cultural Studies in summer 2024. For the past nine years, I’ve been teaching and researching at TU Dortmund, including a position as a Stuart Hall Fellow in cooperation with the Stuart Hall Foundation London from 2016-2019. Before that, I worked at Universität Mannheim and Ruhr-Universität Bochum. I received my doctoral degree at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in 2016 for my dissertation British White Trash: Figurations of Tainted Whiteness in the Novels of Irvine Welsh, Niall Griffiths and John King (published with Transcript in 2018).
My research and teaching cover British and Irish cultural history, literary and film studies, cultural theory, with a focus on the foundational years of British cultural studies, and cultural figurations of class and race. My current research focusses on interdisciplinary futures studies and philosophies of pessimism. My book on the subject, Spectres of Pessimism: A Cultural Logic of the Worst, was published by Palgrave in 2023.
I look forward to joining the department this summer and to meeting colleagues and students.
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Onur Karaköse, M.A. (he/him)
Onur Karaköse is a doctoral candidate at the Department of American Studies, with a master’s degree in English from Ankara University (Turkey). He previously studied Political Science and English (double major) at Yeditepe University, Istanbul. He worked as a lecturer and taught at the Undergraduate Program in American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University, Ankara. His research interests lie primarily in contemporary English theater, graphic novel, masculinity studies, and American conservatism. His dissertation focuses on how American theater responds to the epidemic of mass shootings. Since the summer semester of 2024, he works as a research assistant at the Department of English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.