I came to Goethe University in 2024 after a long career as a legal translator. My colleague Tatjana Thomas and I attend to all duties and responsibilities in the office of the American Studies department, such as answering students‘ questions in connection with their studies, affixing stamps to course certificates, replying to e-mails and many many more. I enjoy the friendly atmosphere with professors, tutors, colleagues and students within the department.

Max José Dreysse Passos De Carvalho is a PhD. candidate whose research mainly focuses on (computer) game studies, aesthetics, and critical theory. Other interests include a wide variety of subjects from the broad field of traditional nerd culture, such as pen & paper games, pulp fiction, comics, film, and especially all things horror and H.P. Lovecraft.

He has taught seminars on (computer) games and their aesthetics.

Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. His research focuses on media philosophy, film studies, sound studies, and artistic research. He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster and An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach, and has edited volumes on the work of Gilles Deleuze, ecology, film as philosophy, media philosophy, and various American film directors and composers. He is the (co-)editor of book series such as thinking|media (with Patricia Pisters), Rethinking Education (with Tim Ingold), and the experimental format film|minutes.

He offers hands-on BA seminars in American Studies, covering film theory, sound art, and media philosophy with creative workshop formats.

Tim Lanzendörfer is Heisenberg Research Fellow in Literary Theory, Literary Studies, and Literary Studies Education in the American Studies Department at Goethe University. His research is mainly on literary theory and the question of literary studies public function, but he has a number of sideline interests, including in video game aesthetics, genre fiction, in the affordances of academic forms, and AI and literary studies. His most recent book is AI and the Challenge to Literary Studies, with Palgrave Macmillan. His sometimes-updated blog is Hand Me the Platonic Monkeywrench!

His most recent course in the BA level was a class on Close Reading: History and Method, but he has also taught on Video Games and American Studies.

Marlon Lieber is Assistant Professor of American Studies. He holds degrees in American Studies and Theater, Film, and Media Studies and completed a PhD at Goethe University in 2018. His book Reading Race Relationally, a study of Colson Whitehead’s novels, was published with transcript in 2023. Marlon teaches and writes about U.S. literature and culture—more often than not from a perspective informed by Critical Theory. His current research revolves around the ways in which planning reason and its vicissitudes figure in U.S. literary history. Other ongoing research projects focus on the relationship between postwar U.S. art and art theory and Marxian value-form theory, on settler colonial myths, and on critical theories of technology. In addition to writing academic articles, Marlon fairly regularly contributes articles and book reviews to various German-language publications such as analyse & kritik.

Marlon has recently taught courses on genres such as climate fiction, Gothic literature, zombie narratives, and Western films. For years he has also been teaching the Introduction to American Cultural Studies and he is this close to designing the definitive syllabus.

Magda Majewska is Assistant Professor / Researcher in the American Studies Department. Her research interests are in the fields of the history of sexuality and intimacy (recently with a focus on romantic love), as well as theories of humor and comedy, gender theory, theories of the novel, film theory, and ordinary language philosophy. She has published on postmodernism, the sexual liberation movements of the 1960s, as well as on the works of Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, and Henry James. She is currently working on a book about the Hollywood genre of romantic comedy since its inception in the 1930s to the present.

She has recently taught seminars on the genre of melodrama, on the figure of the “working girl” in American Literature and Popular Culture, and on the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Originally from the United States, Cameron Seglias has lived in Germany since 2012 and is currently Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt. His research interests span three hundred years of American cultural and literary history, from the seventeenth through to the twentieth century. At the earlier end of this time period, his interests include racialized slavery and the people who opposed it; capitalism; and American religious thought. Closer to the present, he is interested in questions of sexuality and gender, especially as they are portrayed in literature and visual art. His first book, published in 2026, looks at the religious, political, and economic reasons behind white writers’ opposition to enslavement and their entanglement with settler colonialism. His second book is a prehistory to contemporary conflicts between religion, ethnonationalism, and sexual and gender autonomy.

In the BA, Cameron has recently taught seminars about Queer literature and culture; American weirdness; and slavery and capitalism.

I have been supporting the American Studies Department for three years no.
Together with my colleague, Uta Breyer, we are running the office and try to be an effective link between the students and the faculty.
It is a pleasure to work in this team, where everyone treats each other with kindness and respect.

Johannes Völz is Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics. His research and teaching combine literary and cultural studies with intellectual history and political culture.

His seminars in the BA and MA American Studies explore how democracy translates into cultural, literary, and political forms. Students studying with him become familiar with topics such as the history of celebrities in the US, the improvisational aesthetics of American popular music, the polarizing pull of contemporary US mass media, the aesthetics of populism, as well as the literary and philosophical legacies of American Transcendentalism (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman). His teaching interests also include American literary developments of the 20th and 21st centuries. Professor Völz has lived in the US for five years, doing research at Harvard, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.

Email: voelz@em.uni-frankfurt.de

More info and CV here: https://www.fb10.uni-frankfurt.de/42971181/Johannes_Völz

Professor of American Studies

Simon is a historian whose research interests center on the history of the civil rights movement and of U.S. nationalism, racism, gender, memory, and heroism. His focus is on the twentieth century. His first book and several subsequent research projects have concentrated on Black self-defense and the role of violence in the African American freedom struggle. His second book sheds light on the history of the nationalist women’s organization Daughters of the American Revolution and American memory.

He teaches the U.S. history survey as well as a number of undergraduate seminars on the American past, including classes on the Progressive Era and the 1920s, the American Civil War, and the history of heroism in the United States.