Jessica Sanfilippo Schulz

Alumni M.A. National & Transnational Studies

E-mail:    
jessica_sanfilippo@yahoo.com
j_sch104@uni-muenster.de


Current research project: 

M.A. thesis on
“Judging a Book by its Author: Publishers’ Strategies of Representing Biographical Details of Third Culture Authors”

Until 2010, the term “Third Culture Kids” was only used by sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and cultural educators, but never before by scholars of literary studies. The concept of ‘Third Culture Kids’ is used in sociology to describe the offspring of missionaries, diplomats, the military, and business people who have spent significant parts of their childhood abroad. In 2011, Antje Rauwerda adapted this concept and coined the term ‘Third Culture Literature’ to describe the fictional writings by authors who share a “cultural background of expatriatism”. For Rauwerda, these novelists do not fit “a postcolonial, diasporic or cosmopolitan paradigm” so that an up-to-date classification is needed for this new “subset of international writing”.

The purpose of my thesis is to examine whether publishing houses exploit the transient childhood of ‘Third Culture Authors’. The thesis focuses on eight contemporary well-known authors who have “grown up across worlds” (such as Isabel Allende, Heidi Durrow, Amélie Nothomb and Nicholas Shakespeare) and analyses over thirty biographical details that are offered to readers by publishers in selected editions of their novels. The biographical details I examine are not only distributed in English but also, for example, in Arabic, Danish, German and Spanish.

To critically grasp how these biographical backgrounds are firstly used by publishers as a marketing strategy and, subsequently, consumed by end users, I interview publishers, ‘Third Culture Authors’, and librarians. In a second step, the respective biographies of the selected authors will be contrasted with the ‘bio blurbs’ and biographical notes of these novelists.

Research interests: Born in Liberia to a British mother and an Italian father, I completed my A Levels at the British school of Milano. Having “grown up among worlds’, my current research interests concentrate on ‘Third Culture Kids’ and ‘Third Culture Literature’.

Academic career history: Since October 2012, I have been working as a student research assistant at the Institute of Ethnology (University of Münster). During the winter semester 2011/2012, I taught a literary and cultural studies tutorial for B.A. students.

May 2013