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.

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.

At the MA level, he leads advanced courses on media philosophy, film aesthetics, and interdisciplinary and creative approaches like his Theory into Practice intensive courses in Olomouc/Czech Republic.

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 on the MA level was class on Adaptation and H.P. Lovecraft.

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.

At the MA level, he has taught courses on critiques of reason in Frankfurt School Critical Theory and Cold War Liberalism, on proletarian cultural politics in the 1930s, and on the Great American Novel, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

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 depiction of male friendships in American Literature from the 19th century to the present, on the notion of the “ordinary” in contemporary critical debates on aesthetics and language, and on the impact of psychoanalysis on postwar US culture.

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 MA, Cameron has recently taught seminars about the writer James Baldwin; American religion, Queer literature and culture; and poetry.

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.

Simon’s graduate courses put emphasis on how historians debate about and try to contribute to particular historiographies. Students are encouraged to think of themselves as scholars who can participate in those debates. His seminars tend to be connected to his research interests and cover topics such as Malcolm X, memory in American history, and scholarship on the history of gender in the United States.