Teaching
Summer Semester 2025
"borderless and brazen": Aesthetics, Politics, and History of Black German Poetry in English
In the introduction to the collection Arriving in the Future: stories of home and exile (2014), Philipp Khabo Koepsell traces a history of Black writing in Germany across the 20th and 21st centuries. He catalogues both well-known examples such as Audre Lorde’s poetry and the anthology Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (1986) edited by May Ayim and Katharina Oguntoye, as well as lesser known texts such as Dualla Misipo’s autobiographical novel Der Junge aus Duala: Ein Regierungsschüler erzählt (1961) or Sylvie Kumah’s bilingual poetry collection Facing I: Sieh das Ich (1980). Throughout the introduction, Koepsell repeatedly calls for further academic research, particularly on publications from before 1986 and argues that “a paradigm shift towards a more inclusive approach on the concept of Black history [and literature] in Germany is needed” (“Literature and Activism” 44).
In engaging with this premise and drawing inspiration from both Christina Sharpe and Fatima El-Tayeb’s reflections on “undisciplining” Black studies as well as May Ayim’s poem “grenzenlos und unverschämt”/“borderless and brazen,” this seminar explores the possibilities of shifting paradigms, of undisciplining, and of border crossing in the study of 20th-21st century Black diasporic literatures. Particularly attuned to poetry produced by Black authors in Germany in English, the seminar will broadly orient itself around the following questions: What are the “multiple layered and translucent categories” (Koepsell, “Literature and Activism” 44) within Black German writing? How is Black German poetry situated within wider Black diasporic discourses and traditions? In what ways can we contextualize our readings of Black German poetry (aesthetically, historically, politically, discursively, etc.)? What formal, thematic, and aesthetic characteristics distinguish English-language Black German poetry?
With a particular focus on developing and practicing a collaborative and respectful discussion culture, the seminar will prepare students to analyze poetry both orally and in writing. Active participation in class sessions and discussions is both encouraged and expected. Throughout the semester, students will learn to conduct, distinguish, and combine aesthetic as well as socio-political readings of Black German poetry in English, including texts by May Ayim, Njideka Iroh, Philipp Khabo Koepsell, Sylvie Kumah, Audre Lorde, Musa Okwonga, and SchwarzRund. All readings will be provided on Learnweb. The course will include a visit to the play “May Landschaften” by Penda Diouf at Theater Münster (date and logistics to be discussed in class) as well as to the event “Polyphonie-Abend. Schwarze deutschsprachige Autor*innen im Austausch” at the Studiobühne on April 16.
Summer Semester 2024
Museum Interventions (with guided tour of "das ist kolonial." exhibition at LWL-Museum Zeche Zollern in Dortmund)
On March 10, 1914, Mary Richardson broke the glass of and repeatedly slashed the painting “Rokeby Venus” at the National Gallery in London, an act she later explained by saying “I care more for justice than I do for art, and I firmly believe that when the nation shuts its eyes to justice and prefers to have women who are not only denied justice but who are ill treated and tortured, then I say that this action of mine should be understandable.” This intervention into the museum space was part of a larger movement of suffragette action under the Women’s Social and Political Union to demand rights for women in the first decades of the twentieth century. Richardson’s intervention clearly demonstrates how museums have been a site of social and political critique in the modern era. Indeed, in an attempt to welcome, if not in fact mitigate, critiques of the institution, museums are increasingly inviting guest curators and artistic interventions which comment on the politics of power and belonging within their institutions. Interventions, whether curated or uninvited, draw attention to the rules which inform museum spaces and expose the cultural and historical narratives created by museums to be less authoritative than they may appear at first glance. In engaging with this premise, the seminar will broadly orient itself around the following questions: How do museum spaces function? What constitutes a museum intervention? And how are museums used to make social and political critiques through various forms of interventions? We will look in particular at ways the museum itself can be read as an intervention (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture), at invited queer feminist interventions in the museum space (“To Be Seen, Queer Lives 1900-1950” special exhibit at the NS Dokumentationszentrum Munich, Sonia Boyce’s “Six Acts” at the Manchester Art Gallery), at curated decolonial interventions (“Wayward Dust” performance at the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, “Das ist kolonial” exhibition at LWL Museum Zeche-Zollern Dortmund, “Collecting and Empire Trail” at the British Museum London), and at the recent series of uninvited climate activist interventions in European museums. Students will familiarize themselves with key concepts and secondary texts within the fields of museum studies and cultural studies, develop the ability to close read and critically evaluate exhibitions/interventions, as well as engage with contemporary debates on the functions of and challenges facing museums as cultural institutions. In examining both museums within anglophone contexts as well as paying particular attention to local museums in North Rhine-Westphalia and Germany more broadly, the course highlights the national and transnational contexts in which museums interventions are embedded.
Übung Theory and Literature: Queer Graphic Diasporas (with reading by Logan February)
The graphic narrative has exhaustively – and convincingly – been theorized as inherently disruptive, not least in the fields of diaspora studies and queer studies. For scholars of diaspora, migration, and of the transnational, graphic novels have become sites of “foregrounding colonial legacies and (re)scripting missing or misrepresented identities” (Mehta and Mukherji 2), often constructing “sophisticated counter-geographies and alternative, cross-national imagined communities” (Davies 127). For scholars of queer studies, graphic narratives have been understood as “a distinctly queer mode of cultural production” (Scott and Fawaz 199) and as a form embedded with “queer temporal openings” which “provide a generative medium for queer world making” (McCullough 377). Against this backdrop, the following course is designed to critically engage with and apply concepts from diaspora studies and queer theory to the reading of select graphic narratives in order to explore how queer diasporic comics disrupt interdependent tensions of gender, sexuality, nation, and belonging. The first part of the course will allow students to work closely with key texts in diaspora studies and queer theory and to think through these concepts by reading several poems from Logan February’s collection Mental Voodoo and engaging with the author during a public reading and discussion. This will be followed by a two-week workshop on how to read and analyze comics. In the second part of the course, students will conduct close readings of select graphic narratives, including Messy Roots by Laura Gao, excerpts from Apsara Engine by Bishakh Som, and excerpts from Beldan Sezen’s Snapshots of a Girl.
Winter Semester 2023/24
Reading Postcolonially: Transit, Mobility, and Empire in Black European Texts (with guest lecture by Brian Quinn)
This seminar will develop a mode of postcolonial reading particularly attuned to movement, borders, place, and traces of empire and colonialism. We will engage closely with the question of how (and why it might be relevant) to apply a postcolonial mode of reading to Black European writing and cultural production and explore how colonial legacies and histories inform mobility and transit in Europe today. Thinking through the intersections of postcolonial studies and mobilities studies, particularly as they apply to contemporary Europe, we will use concepts such as diaspora, waiting, borders, and “contingent belonging” (Espinoza et al. 2019) to analyze selected narratives of mobility and transit. The first several sessions will discuss understandings of the Black diaspora in Europe and construct a mode of postcolonial reading attuned to diaspora and mobility, which will then be applied to a diverse set of texts, including Olumide Popoola’s play Also By Mail (2013), Musa Okwonga’s novella In the End, It Was All About Love (2021), and Johny Pitts’ travelogue Afropean (2019) and photography and essay collection (with Roger Robinson) Home Is Not a Place (2022).
Indigenous Australian Literature: An Introduction
Recently, Wiradjuri scholar and writer Jeanine Leane has drawn attention to the fact that in the Australian context largely white settler critics and academics decide “what is and isn’t Western literature” and that Indigenous writing is still treated as Australian literature’s “poor relation”(“Presencing” in The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel). It is, hence, the objective of this MA-level seminar to read texts by Indigenous Australian authors which use the English language to expand and resist these colonial and imaginative limits. Designed to give students an overview of contemporary Indigenous Australian writing, this course will cover selections of Indigenous poetry, prose, and art ranging across the 20th and 21st centuries. Particular attention will be paid to context and place, acknowledging the diversity and specificity of the First Nations cultures and histories that inform the texts. In addition, three different theoretical lenses will be used to approach the texts, namely 1) “speculative futures” to open questions about genre, its affordances, and the risks of applying western genre categories to Indigenous texts, 2) “revision” to explore how texts and other artistic expressions disrupt and erase the settler colony, 3) “shame, anger, and other colonial affects” as a means of interrogating the affective encounter of reading Indigenous literature from a settler/non-Indigenous positionality and the productivity of shame and anger in thinking through settler colonialism.
Please note that this course is designed as a Blockseminar. It has a separate session at the start of term followed by three full day sessions for intense discussions and group work in the first week after the end of term. There will be sufficient breaks scheduled during the latter. Students should note that this is a reading intensive course and should be ready to approach the texts with curiosity and open-mindedness in order to challenge and rethink their own assumptions, and to engage with each other in a shared process of learning. Students are asked to complete the readings and participate actively in in-class discussions.
Summer Semester 2023
Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies II
This course is designed to introduce second-semester BA students to the concept of genre and to prepare them to work with poetry, narrative, drama, and film in their studies of anglophone literatures and cultures. Primary texts include Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," Tsitsi Dangaremba's Nervous Conditions, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino. The course addresses questions such as: What are the characteristics of a "prototypical" poem/novel/drama/film? How does the form of a text influence content and vice versa? How does the interpretive act of determining a text's genre influence our reading of it?
Winter Semester 22/23
Black German Studies: Transatlantic Perspectives
(co-taught with Eva Tanita Kraaz and Tim Brown)
Michelle M. Wright advocates a conception of Blackness as multidimensional as opposed to one solely tied to the violence and injustice of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in an attempt to give voice to Black discourses of belonging outside of the Americas. Through a transnational approach we seek to highlight this complex exchange as it presents itself in Black German Studies in both theory and literature. In this seminar we explore ways in which linear narratives of Blackness are intertwined with, but also decoupled from, canonical theories from the United States, which then challenge and revise a singular, static conception of Blackness in the world. We will investigate the undeniable intertextualities between Black Studies and literature in the US and that of Germany; however, we place the focus of this seminar on Black German Studies as a mode of cultural expression in its own right. In considering artistic endeavors from various cultural backgrounds and countries of origin, this course will highlight the complexities and benefits of knowledge exchange in identity building inside hegemonic discourses. The transatlantic voices of the Diaspora as they shape the Black German context play an important role in understanding the complexities of the Black/African Diaspora in our current moment. This course therefore seeks to familiarize students with contemporary debates within and about identity and belonging in Black German Studies as well as the vast networks of knowledge and community building within the emerging discipline.
Please note: This course is being offered as a joint block seminar between the German and English departments. Readings will include German and English language texts and the course will be taught in a combination of German and English. Because this class will be taught in the block format, each session will require reading-intensive preparation.
Academic Skills, co-taught with Ryan Durgasingh
This course is designed to introduce first-semester BA students to a range of academic skills to prepare them for their studies at the English department. It covers topics such as academic reading and note-taking strategies, how to conduct academic research, MLA and APA citation styles, how to work with sources in academic writing, as well as presentation skills. In addition, it encourages reflection on reader and research positionality and citational politics.
Summer Semester 2022
Übung Theory and Literature: Contemporary Australian Literature and Culture
(co-designed with Felipe Espinoza Garrido)
This course situates Australia in discourses of transnationalism, migration, Indigenous studies, and Queer studies, thereby contesting any notion of the nation as a stable and homogenous entity in its introduction to contemporary texts and themes emerging from Australia. In engaging with works such as Melissa Lucashenko’s novel Too Much Lip, Shaun Tan’s silent graphic novel The Arrival, Evelyn Araluen’s poetry collection Dropbear, and Sophie Hyde’s film 52 Tuesdays, course participants are exposed to narratives touching on topics of resistance, trauma, colonialism, and gender, and encouraged to situate them in an increasingly complex national framework for Australia. In working with a variety of media, the course places an emphasis on media-specific analysis, introducing students to terminology and methodologies from literary and cultural studies, comic studies, film studies, as well as spoken word and performance studies. These methodologies are paired with numerous theoretical frameworks from disciplines like Queer studies, migration studies, and Indigenous studies, allowing participants to build on and refine their knowledge from the Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies courses as well as set their own foci for written and oral evaluations.
Postgraduate Class II (Literary and Cultural Studies)
(co-taught with Deborah Nyangulu)
Designed as a research colloquium to accompany MA National and Transnational Studies students' independent study module and preparations for the MA thesis, this course offers students a platform to present their research ideas and receive feedback from peers and the instructor. It also offers a space to help students develop their own practical research skills and research interests in the field of literary and cultural studies. Students are introduced to some current approaches/theories in literary and cultural studies, including an overview of literary theories and movements and an introduction to cultural analysis. In addition to reflecting on the concept of interdisciplinarity on the importance of historicizing, contextualizing and positionality in research, students will develop skills in writing annotated bibliographies, citation practices, and research proposals. Each student will document work they complete for Research Module I (Semester 1 & 2) in an academic portfolio to be handed in at the end of the term.
Winter Semester 21/22
Übung Theory and Literature: Multilingualism and Translation in Anglophone Texts
With the motto “There is no such thing as a monolingual text!”, taken from Till Dembeck’s provocative 2017 article promoting a multilingual philology, this course intends to explore different ways that anglophone texts can be multilingual and the impact this has on how they are read and understood from an academic perspective. Through engagement with a wide variety of primary texts consisting of full length novels (Jhumpa Lahiri In Other Words, Ocean Vuong On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous), novel excerpts (Xialou Guo A Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart), essays (Alicia Elliott “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground”), poetry (Ocean Vuong Night Sky With Exit Wounds), and several activist projects (Weiterschreiben.jetzt, macht.sprache), course participants will craft readings of the texts that attend to their multilingual form and content and are informed by a variety of theoretical approaches, including postmonolingualism, postcolonialism, diaspora studies, and translation studies. In doing so, the course will engage with discourses that challenge notions of “the mother tongue”, national literary canons, and translatability, asking time and again whether and how it matters to read a text as “multilingual.”
