Doctoral Projects
Below you will find a summary of the chair's ongoing PhD projects.
In his project, Rafael Alves Azevedo links the resurgence of unabashed joy, colorful costumes, and clear-cut heroism in 1990s superhero comics to the then burgeoning New Sincerity movement. Coinciding with David Foster Wallace’s call for post-irony in American fiction, the mid-90s partly eschewed the postmodern deconstruction in superhero comics that had been so prevalent since 1986 when Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns were published. Instead, titles like Marvels (1994), Kingdom Come (1996), JLA (1997-2000), and Astro City (1995-96) created an osmosis of the artistic and literary innovations of postmodernism and a renewed call for Silver Age sensibilities that aimed to capture the perceived childhood innocence of simpler times in comic book history. How was this movement – in superhero comics and American culture, more generally – related to the end of the Cold War and the election of a young, Saxophone-playing president? Which role did fan conventions and the emerging direct market play on this development? And what was the trajectory of this movement after its initial heyday in the mid- to late-90s?
In my dissertation I analyze how contemporary narratives of anger are practiced and theorized through queer-feminist manifestos in the context of the cultural politics of the emotion. A new turning point in the cultural narrative of gendered anger is apparent in feminist discourse with and within the current upsurge of the manifesto form. In the US, but also transnationally, a rise in manifesto publications can be observed since 2016, which is constructively representative of the transformation in the discourse landscape of current US politics. Hegemonic narratives of anger are based on patriarchal normativity, therefore changing narratives have the potential to reshape politics as well. My methodology is rooted in Judith Roof’s approach to narrative as a system, producing variations within and through nodal points on a meta-level of self-referentiality, Linda Åhäll’s affect as methodology, as well as Caroline Levine’s conceptions of literary and political forms. The corpus includes manifestos that seem to centralize anger such as Jessa Crispin’s Why I am Not A Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto (2017) or Michelle Bowdler’s Is Rape a Crime? A Memoir, an Investigation, a Manifesto (2020), but also those which feature anger in a smaller way to pinpoint the role anger plays in the imagining social change within a maxim not or less focused on the affective. Furthermore, three recent popular non-fiction books that manifest a certain narrative of feminist anger, but do not claim the label manifesto, are also included: Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger (2018), Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (2018) by Brittney Cooper, and Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger (2018). My project attempts to map what seems to be a new genre era of the manifesto while reorienting the political momentum of queer-feminist anger.
Musical aptitude was regarded a central ornament of feminine decorum for upper-class women throughout the American Civil War, particularly in the South’s culture of gentility. As such, numerous Confederate women recorded expressive accounts of their musical engagements—whether it be their own music making or commenting on that of others—in their wartime diaries and memoirs. This project studies 60 of those texts, tracing patterns of musical references through the lenses of race, class, gender, and nation. In a textual analysis, it thus examines how elite women from different parts of the Confederacy used the predominantly feminine vocabulary of music-making to position themselves in relation to their own performances of feminine conduct, their status as ladies, their identity as subjects of a new nation, and their pronounced whiteness. Considering the transformative nature of war, the focus on wartime life writing is established to explore women’s musically framed responses at a time when previously ingrained notions began to crumble and lines between prescribed behavioral expressions were blurred. Only somewhat recently have historians begun to engage with the aurality of the past. Just as music had to be deliberately performed to allow for its reception—at a time of widespread musical activity, yet just predating recording technologies—so did these women purposefully reflect on their engagement with the aural aspects of their existence during wartime induced social and cultural upheaval. Thus, this project’s analysis aims not only to grasp the experiential musical dimension of the war as experienced by certain white Confederate women but further to gain an understanding of how they participated in the recalibration and perpetuation of idea(l)s that have persisted beyond their writing, and ultimately, through the height of the Lost Cause narratives, have come to shape how the southern past and its female inhabitants are understood to this day.