Chair holder
© Nils Eisfeld
Chair of American Studies with a Focus on Diversity Studies
NameProf. Dr. Carsten Junker
Teaching and Research
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| Since 2019 | University Professor of American Studies with a Focus on Diversity Studies, TU Dresden |
| 2022 | Visiting professor, American Studies Center, University of Warsaw |
| 2018–2019 | John W. Kluge Center German Federal Fellow, Library of Congress |
| 2018–2019 |
Deputy head of chair of North American Literature, TU Dresden |
| 2015–2018 | Acting chair of American Literary Studies, Leipzig University |
| 2015 |
Habilitation, venia legendi for American Literary Studies and Cultural Studies, University of Bremen |
| 2012 | Visiting professor, American Studies Center, University of Warsaw |
| 2011 | Christoph Daniel Ebeling fellow, American Antiquarian Society, Mass. |
| 2009 |
Dr. phil., “summa cum laude,” North American Literature and Culture, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin |
| 2008–2015 | Assistant professor (wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) of English-speaking Cultures/American Studies and research fellow at the Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS), University of Bremen |
| 2003 | M.A., English and American Studies, German Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin |
- North American literatures and cultures (incl. Canada and the Caribbean, 17th century to the present)
- Epistemologies and ethics of difference, diversity, and decoloniality
- Theories and history of authorship, genre and media theory (esp. autobiography, essay, manifesto, interview, social media), narratology
- Critical Race Studies (esp. Critical Whiteness Studies, African American and Black Diaspora Studies)
- Gender and Queer Studies (esp. theories of intersectionality; queer theory)
- Structural violence and its articulations (esp. the history and legacy of transatlantic enslavement, settler colonialism, war in North America)
- North American popular culture, visual culture, music
- Contradiction Studies
The project considers modes of formalizing diversity in structurally dialogic forms such as essay, interview, pamphlet, and manifesto. It examines the potential effects of narrativized dimensions of social tensions, oftentimes violent dissent, as well as agonistic orders of knowledge and the patterns that constitute publics and counter-publics.
Workshop “The Interview: Form, Practice, Epistemology.” TU Dresden, Nov. 2019.
Junker, Carsten. “Of Cross and Crescent: Analogies of Violence and the Topos of ‘Barbary Captivity’ in Samuel Sewall’s The Selling of Joseph (1700), with a Postscript on Benjamin Franklin.” Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature: Captivity Genres from Cervantes to Rousseau, edited by Mario Klarer, Routledge, 2020, pp. 259-76.
Junker, Carsten. “Interrogating the Interview as Genre: Five Cases over Two Hundred Years.” Postcoloniality—Decoloniality—Black Critique: Joints and Fissures, edited by Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker, Campus, 2014, pp. 311-29.
“Essay.” Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht: Kerben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache: Ein kritisches Nachschlagewerk, edited by Susan Arndt and Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, Unrast, 2011, pp. 272-84.
Junker, Carsten. Frames of Friction: Black Genealogies, White Hegemony, and the Essay as Critical Intervention. Campus, 2010. Nordamerikastudien, vol. 27.
The project treats American Studies as a site ideally suited for theorizing and researching the production of knowledge, given the strong impact which the proliferation of categories of analysis has had on American Studies in the wake of social movements and discursive struggles over interpretation. It interrogates the epistemological potentials of difference, decoloniality, and diversity as well as of perspectives related to critiques of hegemony as they become manifest in the history, objects, methodologies, and ethics of the field.
Workshop “Diversity Chic? Popular Culture between Empowerment and Exploitation.” TU Dresden, Nov. 2021.
Junker, Carsten. “Invocations of Indigeneity in the Colonial Red/White/Black Triad.” Indigenous Knowledges in North America, special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, edited by Birgit Däwes and Kerstin Knopf, vol. 68, no. 2, 2020, pp. 145–158, doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2020-0016. Accessed 9 Jun. 2020.
Junker, Carsten, and Julia Roth. “Intersektionalität als diskurskritisches Basiskonzept.” Handbuch Diskurs, edited by Ingo H. Warnke, de Gruyter, 2018, pp. 158-70. Handbücher Sprachwissen, 6.
Junker, Carsten. “The 4D List: Knowledge Production of Difference, Diversity, Decolonization, and Destruction.” Voices from Around the World, no. 1, 2018, http://voices.uni-koeln.de/2018-1/knowledgedestruction. Accessed 6 Nov. 2018.
Junker, Carsten, and Marie-Luise Löffler, editors. Black Studies—Paradigm Shifts, special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, vol. 65, no. 2, 2017.
Junker, Carsten. Patterns of Positioning: On the Poetics of Early Abolition. Winter, 2016. American Studies—A Monograph Series, vol. 271.
Broeck, Sabine, and Carsten Junker, editors. Postcoloniality—Decoloniality—Black Critique: Joints and Fissures. Campus, 2014.
Junker, Carsten, and Julia Roth. Weiß Sehen: Dekoloniale Blickwechsel mit Toni Morrison und Zora Neale Hurston. Helmer, 2010.
This research project aims to recover and review—classify, historicize, and theorize—co-written texts that were published in book form in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present. It seeks to contribute to debates on the nexus of authorship and cultural authority that address the privileging of notions of singular authorship over models of literary collaboration which continue to challenge normative dimensions of singular authorship in fields of literary production.
John W. Kluge Center German Federal Fellowship an der Library of Congress (LoC), jointly awarded by the German Association for American Studies and the LoC (2018-19).
Junker, Carsten. “Vicarious Writing, Or: Going to Write It for You,“ Amerikastudien/American Studies: A Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3, 2020, pp. 325-45, doi.org/10.33675/AMST/2020/3/7.
Junker, Carsten, and Marie-Luise Löffler. “Ghostwriting and Its Contradictions, Or: Meet the Trumps.” Spaces of Dissention: Towards a New Perspective on Contradiction, edited by Julia Lossau, et al., Springer, 2019, pp. 39-66.