Research Projects

My second research project with the tentative title “Mapping Out: Visions and Technologies in 19^th Century Urban and Rural Spaces,” will conceptually be located at the intersection of urban studies, environmental humanities, and media/ literary studies. In this project I set out to work on cultural and societal representations and negotiations of regional change. Maps, sketches, and new technologies such as photography captured and enhanced the drastic growth of cities, as well as the encounter with and development of rural spaces in 19^th century United States. Thereby, the transformation of living space was not one-dimensional as there was a keen interest to not only expand cities by cultivating and urbanizing rural areas, but also to make cities greener: City planners, landscape gardeners, and affluent white merchants shaped cities by, for example, developing public parks. New York City’s Central Park is only one very prominent example which represents people’s early desire to get ‘nature back into the city.’ While the goal to make cities greener is reasonable and, from a contemporary ecological perspective even laudable, the planning, building, and realization of such parks never happened outside of power structures: Seneca Village, a village inhabited predominantly by African Americans, was torn down in 1857 to make space for Central Park – a leisure place which from its inception was dedicated to Manhattan’s largely white upper-middle class. Racially and class motivated processes of city development and regional change permeated the transformation of landscapes and urban spaces in 19^th-century United States.

The transformation of urban and rural spaces is one of the most crucial and pivotal tasks of the 21^st century, as we are facing the consequences of the climate crisis and its ensuing catastrophic effects on human-inhabited spaces. While my project has a historical focus on the 19^th-century and focuses on cities in the United States, it enables contemporary discourses and discusses by this project’s historical and regional specificity. Power dynamics that inform processes of transformation are consistent throughout the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st century. My project offers an analysis of archives that would allow us to trace traditions, dynamics, and trends that have always reshaped the re-making of cities and their surrounding regions.

I have concluded my doctoral studies with summa cum laude in April 2024.

In my dissertation I examined and discussed the three contemporary novels The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), by Junot Díaz, Ghana Must Go (2013), by Taiye Selasi, and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2018), by Ocean Vuong. All three texts are considered immigrant literature and portray the lives of families who migrated from the Dominican Republic, Ghana, and Vietnam to the United States. In my thesis I argued that through an affective response, which I call weirdness, these novels challenge constructions of whiteness, irritate white readers, and thereby ultimately disrupt notions of postrace happiness. While weirdness does resonate with concepts such as Robin DiAngelo’s ‘white fragility,’ it goes beyond mere discomfort and irritation, and offers moments of alternative alliances and solidary bonds. Weirdness encourages white people to sit with their discomfort, or as Donna Haraway put it, to stay ‘with the trouble,’ as a means to work through their uncomfortable feelings themselves, instead of shifting emotional labor to people of color and Black people.

In Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, with its strong narrator figure, suggests to follow Western traditions of historiography which relies on unambiguity and ‘truthfulness.’ However, the narrator ‘fails to adhere to these expectations and instead constantly calls white readers out on their white ignorance. To allow these calling-out to happen enables readers to engage in a non-white historiography of US imperialism and white supremacy, which does not claim to be complete, but truthful. Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, as what Linda Williams framed ‘racial melodrama,’ invites readers, regardless of positionality, to follow the characters through their often painful and highly emotional experiences. While the novel stages feelings as ‘universal,’ readers are time and again reminded that some experiences and affective realities are racially specific and that we engage in affective realities never outside an existing racial power structure, in which Black suffering is conditional for the white readers’ redemption. In his debut novel Briefly Gorgeous Ocean Vuong alludes to the tradition of Asian American Bildungsroman, as coined by Pamela Chu, which bases on the assumption that the Asian immigrant, often through a white mentor, willfully wants to assimilate into white society. Vuong, however, portrays a whiteness that is sick, addicted, destructive, and stricken by toxic masculinity and can therefore never function as a coherent, let alone, desirable social body.

By discussing how ‘our’ academic practices, too, follow Western/ white promises to be rational, unique, overarching, and universal the thesis self-reflectively expands the mode of weirdness onto non-literary fields. It thereby contributes to a discourse of critical whiteness studies and affect studies that aims to decenter whiteness in order, as Linda Martín Alcoff put it, to make whiteness ‘more bearable.’