Associate Researchers

Dennis Henneböhl is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in English Literature and Culture at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He received his PhD from Paderborn University for his dissertation published by Brill | Fink under the title ‘Taking Back Control’ of the Nation and Its History? Contemporary Fiction’s Engagement with Nostalgia in Brexit Britain. In his postdoc project, he investigates the scientist as a social figure in Victorian literature and culture. Among his other key research areas are the BrexLit genre, historical fiction, political rhetoric, as well as contemporary (Northern) Irish literature and culture.

Isabel Kalous is a lecturer and researcher and at the Chair of American Studies: Culture and Literature at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. She holds an MA in International Cultural and Business Studies from the University of Passau and a PhD in English and American Literature from JLU Giessen. Her research interests include eco-fiction, environmental sentimentality, cultural mobility studies, African American literature, and travel writing. She is the author of Black Travel Writing: Contemporary Narratives of Travel to Africa by African American and Black British Authors (transcript, 2021). Her current research project examines representations of non-motherhood and voluntary childlessness in American literature and culture across historical periods.

Anthony J. Obst

Anthony Obst is a doctoral candidate at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Graduate School of North American Studies. His dissertation draws on W. E. B. Du Bois’s „Black Reconstruction“ to theorize abolition democracy as a structure of feeling in the 1930s, arguing that other Black radical writers and activists at the time thought and felt similarly about the unfinished work of abolition and how it related to the ongoing crisis of democracy in their present. In 2022, Anthony was a visiting research scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center. His work as a culture journalist has appeared in Berliner Zeitung, Spex, and taz, among others.

PD Dr. Larissa Pfaller

Larissa Pfaller is sociologist (Research Associate) at FAU Erlangen-Nuernberg. Her research interests focus on qualitative social research, methodology, and cultural sociology. She has co-authored an introduction to the method of metaphor analysis and published on topics like anti-aging medicine, successful aging, and organ donation. Larissa Pfaller’s current research project „Das Imaginäre an den Grenzen des Sozialen“ (DFG) focuses on the social imaginary of the forth age and post-mortem organ donation.

Stefanie Schaller

Stefanie Schaller studied sinology and political science at the University of Hamburg with terms abroad at Beijing Normal University and Zhejiang University. In her dissertation project, she examines how state memorial sites in the People’s Republic of China portray the time since
the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Among other sources, the results of her work are based on a field study she conducted during a two-year research stay at Fudan University. One of the general assumptions in her work is that the research on these sites requires a close look at the methods Chinese curators apply to emotionalize depictions of history.

 Katerina Steffan

After having completed her vocational training as women’s tailor and fashion designer, Katerina Steffan worked as a fashion designer in Hannover for three and a half years. She then started studying at the Leibniz Universität Hannover beginning with English and History (fächerübergreifender Bachelor). While continuing her teacher training in her masters she also studied Advanced Anglophone Studies and graduated in October 2021. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Leibniz Universität Hannover, working on her dissertation entitled “Vulnerable Bodies: Anger and Sorrow in New England Puritanism” which is supported with a fellowship by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Katerina is a member of the DFG-funded early Americanist network “Voices and Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600–1865.”