Laura Hartrampf, M.A.

Laura Hartrampf holds a Master’s degree in Gender Studies and English and American Studies from Ruhr University Bochum and is currently a doctoral research associate in American Studies at the University of Münster. Her research moves between literary studies, feminist and queer theory, and cultural analysis, with an interest in how questions of gender, sexuality, power, and marginalization travel across literary periods.

In her dissertation project, Dangerous Desires: Gender, Power, and the Afterlives of the Female Gothic in Contemporary Dark Romance, she reads Dark Romance fiction as part of a longer literary genealogy that reaches back to the Female Gothic. Her project examines how narratives of danger and desire are reframed within postfeminist and neoliberal contexts and reshaped by digital reading cultures. Questions of genre, cultural discourse, and representation also informed her Master’s thesis, Intersecting Voices: Diversifying Queer Narratives in LGBTQIA+ YA Novels, in which she explored how recent LGBTQIA+ YA fiction negotiates intersectional queer identities and challenges homonormative models of representation.

From 2022 to 2025, Laura worked as a research assistant in the DFG-funded research group “Ambiguity and Difference: Historical-Cultural Dynamics” at the University of Duisburg-Essen. There, she supported the sub-project “The Ambiguous Century: Gender, ‘Movements,’ and Ambiguity Aesthetics in 19th-Century American Literature” in research and editorial work as well as the production of the C19 Podcast episode “Undomesticated: Nonhuman Animals and Queer Resistance in Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman.”