PD Dr. Simone Knewitz
© Simone Knewitz

PD Dr. Simone Knewitz

Deputy Chair of American Studies

Phone: +49 251 83-24296
Johannisstraße 12-20, Room 228
48143 Münster
Mail: sknewitz@uni-muenster.de

Office Hours:
Thursdays, 2:00 – 3:00, via Zoom
Please register at americanstudies@wwu.de


  • Research interests

    I am currently pursuing research projects which focus on the aesthetics of collective agency in American poetry, populism and online culture, and whiteness in twenty-first century representations and discourses.

    My work is generally interested in cultural rhetoric and aesthetics, the intersections of literature, culture, and the economy, as well as television and digital media. In the past, I have focused especially on the poetry and poetics of modernism, on property discourses in U.S.-American culture, and on nostalgia in literary and media representations.

  • CV

    Education and grants

    July 2018 Habilitation, Bonn University, venia legendi: Anglistik/Amerikanistik: Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft
    September 2013 - June 2014 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, DAAD
    June 2011 Fulbright American Studies Fellowship 2011-12, awarded by the German-American Fulbright Commission and the German Association for American Studies
    2010 Ph.D., American Studies, Bonn University, Dissertation: "'A poet is flesh and blood as well as brain': Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and the Modernist Poetics of the Material Body"
    2006 - 2008 Dissertation Grant, State of North Rhine-Westphalia
    July - Oct. 2007 Research Stay at Harvard University, funded by the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the German Academic Exchange Service
    May 2005 M.A. degree from Bonn University. M.A. Thesis: "Making Progress: Pragmatism and Utopia in the Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and John Dewey"
    2002 - 2003 Studies at University of Missouri-St. Louis, USA, direct exchange program with Bonn University
    1999 - 2005 Studies at Bonn University. Major: North American Studies, Minors: Philosophy, Political Science

    Professional experience

    Winter term 20-21 Deputy Chair of American Studies, WWU Münster
    as of Oct 2018
    (on leave during the winter term 20-21)
    		 Senior Lecturer (Akademische Oberrätin auf Zeit) at the North American Studies Program, Department of English, American and Celtic Studies, Bonn University
    Dec 2008 - Sep 2018 Lecturer (wiss. Mitarbeiterin) at the North American Studies Program, Department of English, American and Celtic Studies, Bonn University
    Sep 2013 - June 2014 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at George Washington University, Washington, DC
    Feb-Apr and Aug-Sep 2012 Fulbright American Studies Fellow at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
    Fall 2008/09 and 2006/07, Spring 2006 Lecturer, Department of English, American and Celtic Studies, Bonn University
    June - Sep 2006 Lecturer (wiss. Mitarbeiterin) at the North American Studies Program, Department of English, American and Celtic Studies, Bonn University
    2005 - 2010 Lector for netzwelt.de, German online magazine for IT and Consumer Electronics
    Sep 2002 - May 2003 Assistant, German Culture Center, University of Missouri-St. Louis, USA


  • Publications

    Monographs and Editions

    • The Politics of Private Property: Contested Claims to Ownership in U.S. Cultural Discourse. Lexington Books, forthcoming 2021.

    • Knowledge Landscapes North America. Ed. Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz, and Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016.
    • Modernist Authenticities: The Material Body and the Poetics of Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014.
    • Beyond 9/11: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Twenty-First Century U.S. American Culture. Ed. Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz, and Sabine Sielke. Frankfurt: Lang, 2013.

    • Making Progress: Pragmatism and Utopia in the Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and John Dewey. London: Turnshare, 2006.

    Essays

    • “Modernist Materialities: Objects in Poetry.” Handbook of American Poetry. Ed. by Sabine Sielke. De Gruyter, forthcoming 2021.
    • “Life on the Collar Line: Discontent, Nostalgia, and the Professional-Managerial Class in 1950s Fiction.” Fictions of Management: Efficiency and Control in American Literature and Culture. Ed. by James Dorson and Jasper Verlinden. Heidelberg: Winter, 2019. 189-212.
    • “Creating an Ownership Society? Social Security Reform and the Temporalities of Libertarian Rhetoric.” Finance and Society 4.1 (2018): 60-75.
    • “White Middle-Class Homelessness: Nostalgia from Babbitt to Mad Men.” Nostalgie/Nostalgia: Imaginierte Zeit-Räume in globalen Medienkulturen/Imagined Time-Spaces in Global Media Cultures. Ed. by. Sabine Sielke. Frankfurt: Lang, 2017. 85-104.
    • mit Sabine Sielke und Christian Kloeckner. “Knowledge Landscapes North America: Introduction.” Knowledge Landscapes North America. Ed. by. Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz und Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 7-19.
    • "American Modernist Poetry: Wallace Stevens's 'High-Toned Old Christian Woman' and William Carlos Williams's 'The Red Wheelbarrow." A History of American Poetry: Contexts - Developments - Readings. Ed. by Oliver Scheiding, Clemens Spahr, and René Dietrich. Trier, WVT, 2015.
    • "'The fading memory of those flowers': Metaphorical Lineages and Poetic Selves in William Carlos Williams’s Later Poetry." Recovery and Transgression: Memory in American Poetry. Ed. by Kornelia Freitag. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2014.
    • "The Aesthetics and Economics of Television Series in the Age of Digital Media" Media Economies: A Reader. Ed. By Marcel Hartwig and Gunter Süß. Trier: WVT, 2014. 27-42.
    • "'Try My Tivoli': Conspicuous Consumption in William Dean Howells's A Modern Instance." Literature and Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America. Ed. by Nicole Maruo-Schröder and Christoph Ribbat. Heidelberg: Winter, 2014. 133-52.
    • mit Sabine Sielke und Christian Kloeckner, “Introduction.” Beyond 9/11: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Twenty-First Century U.S. American Culture. Ed. by Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz and Sabine Sielke. Frankfurt: Lang, 2013. 13-25.
    • "9/11 and the Literature Industry." Beyond 9/11: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Twenty-First Century U.S. American Culture. Ed. Christian Klöckner, Simone Knewitz, and Sabine Sielke. Frankfurt: Lang, 2013. 153-68.
    • "God Hates Fangs? Morality, Ideology, and the Domesticated Vampire in American Culture." Collisions of Reality: Establishing Research on the Fantastic in Europe. Ed. By Lars Schmeink and Astrid Böger. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012. 119-37.
    • "Black Bodies, White Subjects: Modernist Authenticities and Anxieties in the Avant-Garde Film Borderline." Forum 12 (2011).
    • "Poetics of an Enclosed Garden: The Orient in Amy Lowell's Pictures of the Floating World." Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry and Poetics. Ed. by Sabine Sielke and Christian Klöckner. Frankfurt: Lang, 2009. 167-87.
    • "Spoken Art: Amy Lowell's Dramatic Poetry and Early Twentieth-Century Expressive Culture." Current Objectives in Postgraduate American Studies 9 (2008).

    Encyclopedia Articles

    • “Alternative Right.” Political Violence in America: Historical Flashpoints and Modern-Day Trends. Ed. by Lori Cox Han and Tomislav Han. ABC-CLIO, forthcoming 2021.
    • "Jean Toomer." Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. 2015.

    Reviews

    • Rev. of A Poetics of Global Solidarity: Modern American Poetry and Social Movements, von Clemens Spahr. Anglia 135.3 (2017): 608-11.
    • Rev. of Future-Founding Poetry: Topographies of Beginnings from Whitman to the Twenty-First Century, von Sascha Pöhlmann. Amerikastudien/American Studies 62.2 (2017).
    • Rev. of Unexpected Chords: Musico-Poetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell's Poetry and Poetics, von Regina Schober. Amerikastudien/American Studies 58.2 (2013): 316-18.
    • Rev. of American Economies, hg. v. Eva Boesenberg, Martin Klepper und Reinhard Isensee. Anglia 131.2-3 (2013): 463-67.
    • Rev. of Pursue the Illusion: Problems of Public Poetry in America, von Astrid Franke. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 64.2 (2011): 201-03

  • Conference and workshops

    06/2021 Workshop “Not Me. Us: Imagined Collectives in US Literature, Culture, and Politics” (with PD Dr. Stefanie Müller), Annual Convention of the German Association for American Studies 2021 (postponed from 2020)
    05/2015 Annual Convention of the German Association of American Studies on the topic “Knowledge Landscapes North America” (with Prof. Dr. Sabine Sielke and colleagues from the North American Studies Program at the University of Bonn)
    08/2011 Conference: “9/11 – Ten Years After, Looking Ahead”, University of Bonn (with Prof. Dr. Sabine Sielke and Dr. Christian Kloeckner)

  • Guest Lectures and Conference Talks (Selection)

    Invited Talks

    • „Recycling the Past: Nostalgia and Retro Aesthetics in American Popular Culture.” Universität Wuppertal, 16. Januar 2019.
    • „Black Power, Black Capitalism? Challenging the Possessive Investment in Whiteness in the 1960s.“ Universität Mannheim, 8. November 2018.
    • “Challenging the Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Black Power and Property Discourse in the 1960s.” Universität zu Köln, 15. November 2016.

    Conference Talks

    • “War of Memes: The Alt-Right, Donald Trump, and Online Populism in the U.S.” 12. Jahrestagung der AG Populärkultur und Medien in der Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft, Bonn, 6.-8. Februar 2020.
    • “Alt-Knowledge: The Aesthetics of Appropriation and Transgression in Right-Wing Social Media Culture.” Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien, Hamburg, 13.-15. Juni 2019.
    • “‘The Past Is a Life Sentence, a Blunt Instrument Aimed at Tomorrow’? Confronting Whiteness in Contemporary American Literature and Culture.” Tagung der Nordic Association for American Studies, Bergen, 25.-27. April 2019.
    • “Radical Yearning: Populism and the Politics of Nostalgia.” Tagung der Swedish Association for American Studies, Stockholm, 28.-30. September 2018.
    • “Materiality, Performativity, Authenticity: The Body and Modernist Poetics.“ Tagung der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft, Gent, 16.-18. November 2017.
    • “(Privat-)Eigentum als Idee, Institution und kulturelle Praxis in den USA.” Workshop “Das Material der Kulturwissenschaften”, Sektion Materielle Kultur der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft, Zürich, 16.-17. Juni 2016.
    • “Agrarian Justice: Conceptions of Property in James Fenimore Cooper’s Littlepage Manuscripts.” Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien, Osnabrück, 19.-22. Mai 2016.
    • „Debating Property and Personhood: Slavery and the Rhetoric of Ownership in Antebellum America.“ Jahrestagung der Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, Washington, DC, 6.-7. März 2015.
    • „A ‚monstrous cheat’: Paper Money, Land Speculation, and the Antebellum National Reform Movement.“ Konferenz „Financial Times: Economic Temporalities in U.S. Culture,“ Universität Frankfurt, 26.-28. März 2015.
    • „ ‚A man’s home is his castle’: The Struggle over Eminent Domain and the Rise of the Property Rights Movement in the United States.“ Jahrestagung der Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 10.-11. März 2014.
    • „In Pursuit of Property: Homeownership and the Material Practices of Finance after World War I.“ Jahrestagung der American Studies Association, Washington, DC, 21.-24. November 2013.
    • “William Carlos Williams’s Transnational Poetics.” Konferenz “Memory, the United States, and Transnational Poetics,” Universität Bochum, 29.-30. Juni 2012.
    • “The Public and Its Problems: Conspicuous Consumption in William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instance.” Konferenz “Buying America: Literature and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century.” Universität Paderborn, 12.-13. Juni, 2012.
    • “Mad Men, Nostalgia, and the Aesthetics of Consumption, or: Don Draper Gets an iPhone.” Konferenz “Fiction, Fact, and the Real: Contemporary American Television Series,” Université Paris-Didérot, 5.-7. Mai 2011.
    • “God Hates Fangs? Morality, Ideology, and the Domesticated Vampire in Contemporary American Culture.” Konferenz: “Strange Worlds – Paths and Spaces of the Fantastic in the 21st Century,” Universität Hamburg, 30. September – 3. Oktober 2010.
    • “‘a real piece of progress’: Feminist Economic Reformism in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s What Diantha Did.” Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, 27.-30. Mai 2010.
    • “Poetry and the Politics of Performative Language.” Konferenz: “Kritische Perspektiven: ‘Turns,’ Trends und Theorien,” Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 20.-22. November 2009.
    • “The ‘Elimination of Corsets’? Modernist Formal Innovation and the Desire for New Forms in Early Twentieth-Century American Culture.” Konferenz “Metre Matters: New Approaches to Prosody, 1780-1914,” University of Exeter, 3.-5. Juli 2008.