Prof. Dr. Sascha Pöhlmann

Employment

since 2023: Professor of American Literature and Culture, TU Dortmund University

2021-2023: Guest professor of North American Literature and Culture, University of Innsbruck
2018-2021: Professor of North American Literature and Culture, University of Konstanz
2014-2018: Associate professor, American Literary History, LMU Munich
2011: Bavarian American Academy Research Fellow, Kluge Center, Library of Congress
2009-2012: Member of the DFG research group "Anfänge (in) der Moderne: Theoretische Konzepte, literarische Figurationen, historische Konstruktionen"
2007-2009: Assistant professor, American Literary History, LMU Munich
2004-2007: Lecturer in American Studies, University of Bayreuth

Education

2014: Habilitation, LMU Munich
2008: Dr. phil, LMU Munich
2004: M.A., University of Bayreuth / Trinity College Dublin

Follow this link for more information on the monographs and edited volumes. If you are interested in any of these texts but cannot access them, send me a message any time.

Monographs

• Vote with a Bullet: Assassination in American Fiction. Camden House, 2021.
• Stadt und Straße: Anfangsorte in der amerikanischen Literatur. transcript, 2018.
• Future-Founding Poetry: Topographies of Beginnings from Whitman to the Twenty-First Century. Camden House, 2015.
• Pynchon's Postnational Imagination. Winter, 2010.

Edited volumes

• (Re)Imagining Flyover Fictions (with Cornelia Klecker). Special issue of the Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, 2024. https://jaaas.eu/jaaas/issue/view/17
• The Politics of Transparency in Modern American Fiction: Fear, Secrecy, and Exposure (with Paula Martín Salván). Camden House, 2024.
• Americana: Aesthetics, Authenticity, and Performance in US Popular Music (with Knut Holtsträter). Waxmann, 2023.
• Special issue on Percival Everett (with Martin Paul Eve). Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 2023. https://orbit.openlibhums.org/issue/900/info/
• Special issue on Mark Z. Danielewski's The Familiar. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 2022. https://orbit.openlibhums.org/issue/840/info/
• Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies. De Gruyter, 2019. (Download the introduction here.)
• Unpopular Culture. Co-editor with Martin Lüthe. Amsterdam University Press, 2016. (Download the introduction here.)
• America and the Musical Unconscious. Co-editor with Julius Greve. Atropos, 2015. (Download the book here.)
• Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice. Co-editor with Georgiana Banita. Winter, 2015.
• Gründungsorte der Moderne: Von St. Petersburg bis Occupy Wall Street. Co-editor with Maha El Hissy. Wilhelm Fink, 2014.
• Revolutionary Leaves: The Fiction of Mark Z. Danielewski. Editor. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. (Download the book here.)
• Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon's Counternarratives. Editor. Rodopi, 2010. (Download the introduction here.)
• Co-editor (with Torsten Kathke). Current Objectives in Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 11, 2010. http://www-copas.uni-regensburg.de/articles/issue_11/ 11_00_contents.php

Other editorial work

• editor of the book series European Studies in North American Literature and Culture at Camden House (https://boydellandbrewer.com/european-studies-in-north-american-literature-and-culture/)
• co-editor of the book series Video Games and the Humanities at De Gruyter (https://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/VGH-B)
• co-editor of the open access e-journal Orbit: A Journal of American Literature (https://orbit.openlibhums.org/)

Essays

• "(Re)Imagining Flyover: An Introduction" (with Cornelia Klecker). Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2024, pp. 1-19, https://jaaas.eu/jaaas/article/view/220/229.
• "Crashing in Flyover Country: Metaregionalism in Far Cry 5." Gaming and Geography: A Multi-perspective Approach to Understanding the Impacts on Geography, edited by Michael Morawski and Sebastian Wolff-Seidel, Springer, 2024, pp. 199-217, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42260-7_10.
• "The End of Everything." End-Game: Apocalyptic Video Games, Contemporary Society,and Digital Media Culture, edited by Lorenzo DiTommaso, James Crossley, Alastair Lockhartand Rachel Wagner, De Gruyter, 2024, pp. 319-37, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110752809-019.
• "Urbanity, Biopolitics, and Race in Whitman’s "Manly Health and Training.'" The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman, edited by Kenneth M. Price and  Stefan Schöberlein, Oxford UP, 2024, pp. 243–57.
• "Making Americana. Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Dialectics of Performance and Authenticity" (with Dietmar Elflein). Americana: Aesthetics, Authenticity, and Performance in US Popular Music, edited by Knut Holtsträter and Sascha Pöhlmann, Waxmann, 2023, pp. 75-107.
• "Putting the American in American Music" (with Knut Holtsträter). Americana: Aesthetics, Authenticity, and Performance in US Popular Music, edited by Knut Holtsträter and Sascha Pöhlmann, Waxmann, 2023, pp. 7-17.
• "Internal Hinterland: Post-Racial Geography in Paul Beatty's The Sellout." Literary and Cultural Representations of the Hinterlands, edited by Ewa Kębłowska-Ławniczak et al, Routledge, 2023, pp. 242-59.
• "Introduction: Playing Metafictional Games with Percival Everett." Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, vol. 11, no. 1, 2023, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.11250.
• "(Write it!) Like Disaster: Precarious Futures in North American Poetry." University of Bucharest Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 2022, https://ubr.rev.unibuc.ro/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Pohlmann.pdf
• "Introduction: Becoming Familiar with The Familiar, or, The Imaginary Novel and the Imagination." Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, vol. 10, no. 2, 2022, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.8645.
• "Individual and Social Failure in CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience." Perspectives on Homelessness, edited by Anna Flügge and Giorgia Tommasi, Winter, 2022, pp. 299-324.
• "Multimodality as a Limit of Narrative in Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar." Beyond Narrative: Literature, Culture, and the Borderlands of Narrativity, edited by Sebastian M. Herrmann, Katja Kanzler, and Stefan Schubert, transcript, 2022, pp. 145-60, https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-6130-9/beyond-narrative/?c=313000018.
• "Thereness: Video Game Mountains as Limits of Interactivity." Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies vol. 2, no. 2, 2021, pp. 213–45, DOI: https://doi.org/10.47060/jaaas.v2i2.101.
• "Donald Barthelme." Handbook of the American Short Story, edited by Erik Redling and Oliver Scheiding, De Gruyter, 2021, pp. 461-75.
• "Ludic Populism and its Unpopular Subversion." Video Games and/in American Studies: Politics, Popular Culture, and Populism, edited by Mahshid Mayar and Stefan Schubert. European Journal of American Studies, vol. 16,  no. 3, Summer 2021. https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.17249
• "Exotics on Earth in Allen Ginsberg’s 'Poem in the Form of a Snake That Bites Its Tail.'" College Literature, vol. 48, no. 2, Spring 2021, pp. 314-35.
• "Multimodalität als Grenzgang des Narrativen im Romanwerk Mark Z. Danielewskis." META-Fiktionen. Der experimentelle Roman seit den 60er-Jahren, edited by Wilhelm Haefs and Stefan Brückl, text + kritik, 2021, pp. 260-97.
• "'Names by themselves may be empty': Pynchons sprechende Namen." Poetica,vol. 50, no. 1-2, February 2020, pp. 119-30.
• "Pynchon's Wardrobe of Weirdness: The Style of Subversive Garments." Revisiting Style in Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Jasmin Herrmann, Moritz Ingwersen, Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank, and Olga Tarapata, Peter Lang, 2020, pp. 383-99.
• "Fictions of the Internet and Transmedial Storytelling in the Digital Age: Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013) and Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar (2015-)." The American Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts - Literary Developments - Critical Analyses, edited by Michael Basseler and Ansger Nünning, WVT, 2019, pp. 359-70.
• Guest editor of the first “International Forum“ in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists with four guest essays and the introduction "Amerikastudien; Or, American Studies in Germany." J19, vol. 7, no. 2, Fall 2019, pp. 329-33.
• "Missing the People: Populist Aesthetics and Unpopular Resistance." The Comeback of Populism, edited by Heike Paul, Ursula Prutsch, and Jürgen Gebhardt, Winter, 2019, pp. 215-34.
• "Introduction: Video Games and American Studies." Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies, edited by Sascha Pöhlmann, De Gruyter, 2019, pp. 1-19. (Download here.)
• "Geographies and Mapping." Thomas Pynchon in Context, edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp.67-73.
• "Video Games and American Studies: An Introduction." U.S. Studies Online. Forum for New Writing. 14 June 2019. http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/vg-amstud-intro/
• "Pynchon and Post-postmodernism." The New Pynchon Studies, edited by Joanna Freer, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 17-32.
• "Whitman and Everything: Playing with the Poetics of Scale." Revisiting Walt Whitman: On the Occasion of his 200th Birthday, edited by Winfried Herget, Peter Lang, 2019, pp. 55-80. Download.
• "Whitman’s Influence in the United States." Walt Whitman in Context, edited by Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 374-82.
• "International Summer School on the Contemporary Canadian Novel, LMU Munich, August 2016." Introduction to Verbatim: A Novel by Jeff Bursey, Verbivoracious Press, 2018, pp. vii-xvi.
• "Die Metarealität des Geldes in Thomas Pynchons Roman Bleeding Edge." Geld: Wert und Werte, edited by Annika Schlitte, Alexander Denzler, and Franziska Huditz, Königshausen & Neumann, 2017, pp. 137-58.
• "Canon Fodder: Thomas Pynchon, Unpopular Culture, and the Invention of Postmodernism." Reading the Canon: Literary History in the 21st Century, edited by Philipp Löffler, Winter, 2017. 167-85.
• "Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)." Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, edited by Timo Müller, De Gruyter, 2017, pp. 322-36.
• "Introduction: What is Unpopular Culture?" (with Martin Lüthe). Unpopular Culture, edited by Martin Lüthe and Sascha Pöhlmann, Amsterdam University Press, 2016, pp. 7-29. Download.
• "Walt Whitman's Politics of Nature and the Poetic Performance of the Future in 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.'" America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment, edited by Catrin Gersdorf and Juliane Braun, Winter, 2016, pp. 121-42.
• "'I Just Look at Books': Reading the Monetary Metareality of Bleeding Edge." Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, vol.4, no. 1, 2016, pp.1-37. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16995/orbit.189
• "Whitman's Compost: The Romantic Posthuman Futures of Cascadian Black Metal." Sounds of the Future: Musical and Sonic Anticipation in American Culture, edited by Jeanne Cortiel and Christian Schmidt, ACT: Zeitschrift für Musik und Performance, vol. 6, December 2015. http://www.act.uni-bayreuth.de/de/archiv/201506/02_Poehlmann/index.html
• "Introduction: What is the Musical Unconscious?" (with Julius Greve). America and the Musical Unconscious, edited by Julius Greve and Sascha Pöhlmann, Atropos, 2015, pp. 7-50. Download.
• "Starting the Future from Paumanok: Whitman’s Emplaced Beginnings." New Perspectives on American Poetry: From Walt Whitman to the Present, edited by Jiri Flajsar and Pavlina Flajsarova, Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2015, pp. 7–22.
• "Vote With a Bullet: The Aesthetics of Assassination in Stephen King's The Dead Zone and 11/22/63." Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice, edited by Georgiana Banita and Sascha Pöhlmann, Winter, 2015, pp. 69-97.
• "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of the Presidency: Elections and American Culture" (with Georgiana Banita). Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice, edited by Georgiana Banita and Sascha Pöhlmann, Winter, 2015, pp. 7-28.
• "Walt Whitmans unfertige Stadt: Washington, D.C. als Anfangsort." Gründungsorte der Moderne: Von St. Petersburg bis Occupy Wall Street, edited by Maha El Hissy and Sascha Pöhlmann, Wilhelm Fink, 2014, pp. 117-43.
• "Queer Time & Space in Matthew Barneys Cremaster Cycle." Cremaster Anatomies: Beiträge zu Matthew Barneys CREMASTER Cycle aus den Wissenschaften von Kunst, Theater und Literatur, edited by Christiane Hille and Julia Stenzel, transcript, 2014, pp. 205-22.
• "Pynchon's Games." Thomas Pynchon and the (De)vices of Global (Post)modernity, edited by Zofia Kolbuszewska, Wydawnictwo KUL, 2012, pp. 251-75.
• "Future-Founding Poetry after 9/11." Beyond 9/11: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Twenty-First Century U.S. American Culture, edited by Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz, and Sabine Sielke, Peter Lang, 2013, pp. 359-82.
• "Imagining 18th-Century Globalization: Transatlantic and Transnational Phenomena in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon." Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, vol. 17, no.1, 2013, pp. 21-37.
• "The Democracy of Two: Whitmanian Politics in Only Revolutions." Revolutionary Leaves: The Fiction of Mark Z. Danielewski, edited by Sascha Pöhlmann, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012, pp. 1-32. Download.
• "Silences and Worlds: Wittgenstein and Pynchon." Pynchon Notes, vol. 56-57, 2009, pp. 158-80. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/pn.12
• "Green is the New Black (Metal): Wolves in the Throne Room, die amerikanische Romantik und Ecocriticism." Metal Matters: Heavy Metal als Kultur und Welt, edited by Rolf Nohr and Herbert Schwaab, LIT, 2011, pp. 263-77.
• "Cosmographic Metafiction in Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex." Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 55, no. 2, 2010, pp. 223-48.
• "Collapsing Identities: The Representation and Imagination of the Terrorist in Falling Man." Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives on Don DeLillo, edited by Peter Schneck and Philipp Schweighauser, Continuum, 2010, pp. 51-64.
• "The Complex Text." Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon's Counternarratives, edited by Sascha Pöhlmann, Rodopi, 2010, pp. 9-34.
• "Editorial" (with Torsten Kathke). Current Objectives in Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 11, 2010. http://www-copas.uni-regensburg.de/articles/issue_11/11_00_editorial.php
• "The Liberation from Narrative: Poetry and 9/11." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 58, no. 1, 2010, pp. 5-21.
• "Shining on the Nothing New: Re-Making the World in Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions." R/Evolutions: Mapping Culture, Community and Change, edited by Jennifer Craig and Warren Steele, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, pp. 64-82. Download.
• "Queer Postnationalism in Breakfast On Pluto." InterAlia, vol. 3, 2008/2009. http://www.interalia.org.pl/en/artykuly/20082009_3/05_queer_postnationalism_in_breakfast_on_pluto.htm
• "Clean Hands and Dirty Hands: Colonial Violence in The Proposition." Weber: The Contemporary West, vol. 25, no. 2, 2008, pp. 90-111.
• "Der komplexe Text: Das mathematische Spiel der Welten in Thomas Pynchons Roman Against the Day." Review essay on Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon. Literaturkritik.de, vol. 9, September 2008. http://www.literaturkritik.de/public/rezension.php?rez_id=12272
• "How the Other Half Dies: Narrating Identities in Shelley Jackson's Half Life." Current Objectives in Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 9, 2008. http://www-copas.uni-regensburg.de/articles/issue_09/09_00_contents.php; featured article at the American Studies Association's website of American Studies journals: http://www.theasa.net/journals/featured_articles/
• "Gravity's Rainbow." The Literary Encyclopedia. 24 Oct. 2006. The Literary Dictionary Company. http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4900
• "Thomas Pynchon." The Literary Encyclopedia. 18 Feb. 2006. The Literary Dictionary Company. http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3673

Reviews

• Review of Virtuelle Wirklichkeiten: Atmosphärisches Vergangenheitserleben im Digitalen Spiel, by Felix Zimmermann. Paidia: Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung, 16 June 2023. Web.
• Review of Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature, by John Hay. American Literary History Review Series XIX (2019). Web.
• Review of Understanding Counterplay in Video Games, by Alan F. Meades. Kritikon Litterarum 46.3–4 (2019), 306-11.
• Review of Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics, by Nina Engelhardt. Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, vol. 30, no. 1, 2019, pp. 186-88. Web.
• Review of Wo sich Amerika erfand: Große Erinnerungsorte in Neuengland, by Arno Heller. Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 61, no. 3, 2016, p. 405. Web.
• Review of Stories of Survival: John Edgar Wideman's Representations of History, by Ulrich Eschborn. Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, vol. 24, no. 1, March 2013, pp. 208-11.
• Review of Pynchon and Relativity, by Simon de Bourcier. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012. Web.
• Review of Interfaces of Fiction: Initial Framings in the American Novel from 1790 to 1900, by Christian Quendler. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 36, no. 1, 2011, pp. 88-91.
• Review of Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry, by John Wrighton. Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, vol. 128, no. 2, December 2010, pp. 351-55.
• "The Word on Politics." Review of Verbatim: A Novel, by Jeff Bursey. American Book Review, vol. 31, no. 6, 2010, pp. 21-22.
• Review of Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in the Culture of the United States, edited by Antonis Balasopoulos, Gesa Mackenthun, and Theodora Tsimpouki. Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, 2009, pp. 523-25.
• Review of Peeling the Onion, by Günter Grass. American Book Review, vol. 29, no. 3, March/April 2008. americanbookreview.org. Reprinted in "Best of LineOnLine," American Book Review, vol. 31, no. 5, July/August 2010, p. 20.
• "The Eternal Hourglass of Existence." Rev. of Nietzsche's Kisses, by Lance Olsen. electronic book review. 20 Oct. 2006. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/resisting
• Review of Triangulating Thomas Pynchon's Eighteenth-Century World: Theory, Structure, and Paranoia in “Mason & Dixon”, by Manfred Kopp. Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 51, no. 1, 2006, pp. 129-31.

Translations

• Latour, Bruno. "Ein Versuch, das 'Kompositionistische Manifest' zu schreiben." Telepolis vol. 11, Feb. 2010. http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/32/32069/1.html
• Mitchell, W.J.T. "Bildwissenschaft." Frosch und Frankenstein: Bilder als Medium der Popularisierung von Wissenschaft, edited by Bernd Hüppauf and Peter Weingart, transcript, 2009.
• Clarke, Bruce. "Der selbstreferenzielle Wissenschaftler: Erzählung, Medien und Metamorphose in Cronenbergs Die Fliege." Hüppauf and Weingart.
• Cartwright, Lisa, and Morana Alač. "Imagination, Multimodalität und Verkörperte Interaktion: Eine Erörterung von Lauten und Bewegung in zwei Fallstudien der Kernspintomografie in Labor und Klinik." Hüppauf and Weingart.
• Co-translator of David P. Boder's I Did Not Interview the Dead (1949), published as Die Toten habe ich nicht befragt, edited by Werner Sollors, Winter, 2011.
• Translation and transcription work for the Voices of the Holocaust project (Illinois Institute of Technology & Galvin Library) http://voices.iit.edu/

• "Obdachlosigkeit im Videospiel zwischen Klischee und Kritik." University of Innsbruck, December 2024.
• "Flyover Fictions." University of Düsseldorf, November 2024.
• "'Haferschleim is better than none'. Übertragung, Witz und der kulturelle Mythos von Gravity's Rainbow." Symposium "Elfriede Jelinek übersetzt Thomas Pynchon." Literaturhaus Dortmund, October 2024.
• "Gaming Climate Change: Environmentalism and the German Video Game Industry." University of Pittsburgh, September 2024.
• "The Private and the Public in Mason & Dixon." Conference "International Pynchon Week 2024." University of Belgrade, June 2024.
• "Current Events Panel." Moderator, 70th Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies, Oldenburg, May 2019.
• "Videospiele in der Amerikanistik." TU Dortmund, April 2024.
• "Obdachlosigkeit in Videospielen zwischen Individuum und Struktur." Conference "Geschichte/n des Wohnens: Kulturen, Krisen, Utopien." University of Innsbruck, January 2024.
• "Video Games in American Studies." University of Duisburg-Essen, January 2024.
• "Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow at Fifty-ish." Roundtable, MLA Convention 2024, Philadelphia, January 2024.
• "Die Werte des Geldes in Thomas Pynchons Bleeding Edge." University of Vienna, November 2023.
• "Thoreau und wie es begann." Stiftung Kunst und Natur, Nantesbuch, October 2023.
• "Pynchon's Names and Naming." University of Alaska Fairbanks, February 2023.
• "Walt Whitman's Poetry of Intimacy." Keynote at the conference "Democracy, Secrecy, and Dissidence in Contemporary Literature in English." University of Cordoba, February 2023.
• "Assassination and Aesthetics in Against the Day." Conference "International Pynchon Week 2022." University of British Columbia, Vancouver, June 2022.
• "(Write it!) Like Disaster: Precarious Futures in North American Poetry." Keynote at the conference "Disaster Discourse: Representations of Catastrophe." University of Bucharest, June 2022.
• "Videospiele in der Amerikanistik." Lecture series "Gaming und Wissenschaft." University of Innsbruck, April 2022.
• "Internal Hinterland: Post-Racial Geography in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout." Conference "Hinterlands: Cultural and Literary Perspectives." University of Wrocław, March 2022.
• "Whitman's Long, Long Poem." Conference "Rethinking the American Long Poem: Matter, Form, Experiment." University of Basel, September 2021.
• "Postnationalism and Gravity's Rainbow." University of Basel, December 2020.
• "With Modernity against Modernity: American Romanticism." University of Bamberg, December 2020.
• "Wordplay: Poetry and Video Games." Conference “New Poetries - New Poetics? Cultural and Aesthetic Transformations of American Poetry.” University of Konstanz, February 2020.
• "Thereness: Video Game Mountains as Limits of Interactivity." Keynote, 46th Annual Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies ("Mediating Mountains"). University of Innsbruck, November 2019.
• "Walt Whitman's Beginnings: 'Song of Myself' (1855)." University of Fribourg, October 2019.
• "Unpopular Culture: Beyond the Populism of High and Popular Culture." University of Edinburgh, October 2019.
• "Ludic Populism and its Unpopular Subversion." Workshop "Video Games and the Politics of Popular Culture." 66th Annual Conference of the German Association for American Studies, Hamburg, June 2019.
• Instructor at International Whitman Week 2019, New York University, May 27 - June 1, 2019 (four plenary presentations, three small-group discussion sessions).
• "Whitman and Everything: Playing with the Poetics of Scale." Poster presentation at Whitman@200 event, Dortmund, May 2019.
• “Populism and Popular Culture.” University of Olomouc, February 2019.
• "Demarcation and Transgression: Making Sense at the Limit." University of Leipzig, October 2018.
• "Play Around to Lose Yourself: David OReilly's Everything." University of Innsbruck, June 2018.
• "Whitman and Everything: Playing with the Poetics of Scale." Symposium “Poets that Came: Walt Whitman's Creative Reception from Paper to Web.” Dortmund, June 2018.
• "'Who touches this touches a man': Walt Whitmans haptische Ästhetik." Workshop "Fingerspitzengefühl: Zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft." Munich, February 2018.
• "Whitman and Everything: Playing with the Poetics of Scale." 44th annual conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies. Salzburg, November 2017.
• "Missing the People: Populist Aesthetics and Unpopular Resistance." "The Comeback of Populism." 17th annual conference of the Bavarian American Academy. Munich, July 2017.
• "Future-Founding Poetry: Topographies of Beginnings from Whitman to the 21st Century." University of Exeter, March 2017.
• "Exotics on Earth in Allen Ginsberg’s 'Poem in the Form of a Snake That Bites Its Tail.'" Conference “The Environment and Human Migration: Rethinking the Politics of Poetry.” University of Bamberg, November 2016.
• "What is Unpopular Culture?" Fulbright Lecture Series, LMU Munich, July 2016.
• Instructor at International Whitman Week 2016, University of Exeter, May 30 - June 4, 2016 (five plenary presentations, four small-group discussion sessions).
• "Walt Whitman’s Poetics of Reconstruction after 1865." University of Tübingen, May 2016.
• "Theorizing Unpopular Culture." Workshop for Ph.D. candidates, International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, University of Gießen, April 2016.
• "'Had the data, yes, but did not know, with senses or heart': Big Data in Thomas Pynchons Gravity’s Rainbow." Workshop "Debating the Quantified Self." University of Mannheim, March 2016.
• "'Names by themselves may be empty, but the act of naming...': Pynchons sprechende Namen." Workshop "Poetik der Namen." Comparative Literary Studies, LMU Munich, February 2016.
• "'Shit, money, and the Word, the three American Truths': Geld als Metarealität in Thomas Pynchons Bleeding Edge." Lecture series "Geld: Wert und Werte." University of Eichstätt, November 2015.
• "Talking around Orbit." International Pynchon Week 2015. Athens, June 2015.
• "Die Zukunft war früher auch besser: Anfang und Zukunftsimagination in amerikanischer Lyrik." Antrittsvorlesung. LMU Munich, December 2014.
• "Dehumanizing Humanism: Culture and Narrative in David Markson’s Tetralogy." “Disembodied Voices – Unembodied Narration. An Interdisciplinary Workshop.” Freie Universität Berlin, November 2014.
• "Starting the Future from Paumanok: Whitman’s Emplaced Beginnings." “SEFOC: Searching for Culture. International Cultural Studies Conference.” Palacký University Olomouc, October 2014.
• "Der (literarische) Kontext der Postmoderne." "Coen Country: Pfade durch Amerika und die Moderne (in Filmen von Joel & Ethan Coen)." Theodor-Heuss-Akademie, October 2014.
• "Whitman's Futures: Performing Utopia." "America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment." 61st annual convention of the German Association for American Studies. University of Würzburg, June 2014.
• "Future-Founding Poetry: Topographies of Beginnings from Whitman to the 21st Century." John-F.-Kennedy-Institut, FU Berlin, May 2014.
• "Death and Hell: Politisierungen des Black Metal." AJZ Chemnitz, October 2013.
• "From Whitman to 9/11: Future-Founding American Poetry." University of Erlangen, April 2013.
• "Freedom and Technology in American Literature." Theodor-Heuss-Akademie, March 2013.
• "Black Metal: Ästhetik und Politik." Doom over Leipzig Festival, March 2013.
• "From Whitman to 9/11: Future-Founding American Poetry." University of Regensburg, January 2013.
• "Vote With a Bullet: The Aesthetics of Assassination in American Fiction." Conference "Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice." Amerikahaus Munich, November 2012.
• "Entropy and Agency in The Crying of Lot 49." University of Siegen, May 2012.
• "Walt Whitman's Unfinished City: Washington, D.C. as a Place of Beginnings." Conference "Gründungsorte." LMU Munich, May 2012.
• "Walt Whitman's Future-Founding Poetry." The Library of Congress, December 2011.
• "Future-Founding Poetry after 9/11." Conference "9/11 -Ten Years After, Looking Ahead." University of Bonn, September 2011.
• "Imagining 18th-Century Globalization: Transatlantic and Transnational Phenomena in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon." 8th Symbiosis Conference, University of Glasgow, June 2011.
• "Breaking the Monopoly on Community: Postnational Strategies." University of Cordoba, March 2011.
• "The Postnational Space of the Zone in Gravity's Rainbow." University of Antwerp, December 2010.
• "Pynchon's Games." International Pynchon Week 2010, Marie Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, June 2010.
• "Green is the New Black (Metal): Wolves in the Throne Room, Walt Whitman und Environmental Criticism." Conference "Metal Matters." Braunschweig University of Art, June 2010. Video available online.
• "Whitman and the Invention of Mannahatta." University of Southern Denmark, Odense, March 2010.
• "Nation und Narration." Lecture series "Language, Literature, Culture." LMU Munich, January 2010.
• "The Liberation from Narrative: Poetry and 9/11." Conference "9/11 as Catalyst: American and British Cultural Responses." University of Bayreuth, November 2009.
• "Kartographie, Aufklärung und Territorialität: Die Vermessung der Neuen Welt in Thomas Pynchons Mason & Dixon." 32. Annual Conference of the Lichtenberg Society, July 2009.
• "Nation Trouble: Remapping the World in 20th-Century Fiction." University of Wrocław, May 2009.
• "Whitman's Topography of Perpetual Beginnings." University of Wrocław, May 2009.
• "The New Common Ground: Postnational Strategies in Literature, Film, Music, and Fine Art." Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna, Wrocław, May 2009.
• "Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Places of Beginnings." Postgraduate Forum, University of Münster, November 2008.
• "Cosmographic Metafiction in Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex." "The Past and the Present: The American Uses of History." Annual Conference of the Polish Association for American Studies. University of Warsaw, October 2008.
• "'The Solipsist Errs': Narrating I2 in Shelley Jackson's Half Life." Keynote, conference "(Re-)Constructions of Subjectivity in Contemporary Literature and Culture." Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, April 2008
• "Postnationalism and Against the Day." Catholic University of Lublin, March 2008
• "Queering Nationalism in Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto." "The Vagaries of Subjectivity: Queer Perspectives on Subject Formation and the Critique of Identity." Warsaw University, March 2008.
• "How the Other Half Dies: Narrating Identities in Shelley Jackson's Half Life." Postgraduate Forum, University of Erlangen, November 2007.
• "Shining on the Nothing New: Re-Making the World in Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions." Symposium "R/Evolutions." Glasgow University, October 2007.
• "Pynchon's Parageography." Annual Conference of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Tucson, AZ, October 2006.
• "Thomas Pynchon: Postmodernism and Postnationalism." University of Bayreuth, July 2006.
• "Silences and Worlds: Wittgenstein and Pynchon." International Pynchon Week, Universidad de Granada, June 2006.
• "Approaches to Hollowness: Surface, Representation and the Originality of the Forger in The Recognitions and Finnegans Wake." Conference "50 Years The Recognitions." The State University of New York at Buffalo, March 2005.

Other public talks, interviews, etc.

• "Populism and Popular Culture." FOS Deggendorf, September 2023.
• Interview on Vote with a Bullet for the oral history project of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. April 2021.
• "The Grateful Dead und der Summer of Love". Bayern 2 Wissen. October 2020.
• "From W.E.B. Du Bois to BlackLivesMatter." Talk for high-school students, Gymnasium Seligenthal, October 2020.
• "Populism and Popular Culture." Talk for high-school students, Amerikahaus Munich, February 2020.
• "Populism in US Literature and Culture." Teacher training, Amerikahaus Munich, February 2020.
• "Video Games: Learning to Play, Playing to Learn." Teacher training, Amerikahaus Munich, January 2020.
• "Studying Video Games: Culture, Technology, Ideology." Talk for high-school students, Amerikahaus Munich, January 2020.
• "Populism and Popular Culture." Talk for high-school students, Lion-Feuchtwanger-Gymnasium Munich, November 2019.
• "60 Jahre Naked Lunch." Deutschlandfunk Kultur. August 2019.
• "Video Games: Learning to Play, Playing to Learn." Teacher training, Amerikahaus Munich, March 2019.
• "Populism in US Literature and Culture." Teacher training, Pädagogisches Institut, Munich, March 2019.
• "Unpopular Culture." Unitag der LMU München, November 2017.
• Seminar for Books@Work, Steelcase. Munich, May 2017.
• "Die ganze amerikanische Literatur in 45 Minuten." Stadtbibliothek Grassau, February 2016.
• "Black Metal: Von der Entwicklung eines Genres." Sakona Webzine. November 2013.
• "Friends of the Earth: The American Ecological Novel." Gymnasium Raubling, April 2013.
• "American Fiction in the 20th Century." Talk for high-school students, Amerikahaus Munich, April 2012.
• "American Fiction after 1960." Teacher training, Amerikahaus Munich, March 2012.
• "The Postmodern American Novel." Teacher training, Amerikahaus Munich Februar 2010.
• "Human or Dancer?" Musikexpress, January 2009.
• "American Fiction in the 20th Century." Talk for high-school students, Amerikahaus Munich, Oktober 2009.
• "Zwischen Perfektion und Illusion: Thomas Pynchons Gegenwelten." "Generator", Bayern 2 Radio. July 2008.