Prof. Dr. Heike Paul

Prof. Dr. Heike Paul

Department of English and American Studies
Chair of American Studies (Prof. Dr. Paul)

Room: Room C 403
Bismarckstr. 1
91054 Erlangen

Office hours


by appointment

Please click here for Prof. Paul’s personal page: https://www.heikepaul.com/

Research Interests

Global Sentimentality
American Myths
Feminist Studies and Gender Studies
African American and Afro-Canadian Studies
Popular Culture and Americanization, Reeducation after 1945
Cultural Mobility and Mobility Studies
Tacit Knowledge

Research Projects

  • The Global Sentimentality Project
  • Research Training Group (GRK 2726) “The Sentimental in Literature, Culture, and Politics” (Spokesperson)
  • Mapping Multi-Perspectival Memory Cultures in the U.S. (in cooperation with Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung)
  • Doing without: Re-Shaping the Cultural Imaginary of the Affluent Society
  • “Reeducation Revisited: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives on the Post-World War II Period in the US, Japan, and Deutschland” (with Katharina Gerund and Fabian Schäfer, funded by the DFG 2018-2022)
  • Decolonial American Studies (book project)

Education

Habilitation in American Studies, Leipzig University (2004)
Dr. phil. in American Studies, Leipzig University (1998, summa cum laude)
M.A. in American Studies, English Studies, and Political Science, Goethe-University Frankfurt (1994)

Employment

  • 2004-present: chair of American Studies, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
  • 2017: chair of American Literary Studies, Leipzig University (offer rejected)
  • 2003: professor of American Studies, Humboldt-University Berlin (offer rejected)
  • 1997-2004: assistant professor at the American Studies Institute, Leipzig University
  • 1994-1997: lecturer at the American Studies Institute, Leipzig University
  • 1992-1994: tutor (Women’s Studies) at the Institute for English and American Studies, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt/Main
  • 1990/91: teaching assistant (German Studies) at the University of Washington, Seattle

Fellowships, Grants & Awards

  • 2021: “Maximiliansorden für Wissenschaft und Kunst”
  • 2021: Fellowship at the Thomas Mann House, Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles (continued)
  • 2020/21: Senior Fellowship at the Elisabeth List-Program for Gender Studies, University of Graz, Austria
  • 2020: Fellowship at the Thomas Mann House, Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles
  • 2019: Member of the Bavarian Academy for the Sciences and Humanities
  • 2019: Villa Vigoni Dialogue on “Civil Religion and Civil Sentimentalism: Cultural and Political Imaginaries of Order and Belonging”
  • 2018: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize
  • 2018: Fellowship of the International Forum for US Studies (IFUSS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • 2014, 2017: Harris Distinguished Professorship, Dartmouth College
  • 2012-2018: DFG-funded Research Training Group 1718 “Presence and Tacit Knowledge,” spokesperson, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
  • 2009, 2011, 2015, 2019: Funding by the German Academic Exchange Service for Summer School Program “Transatlantic American Studies” at the Bavarian American Academy
  • 2010: Conference and publication funding by the Vinzl Foundation, the American Consulate in Munich, the German-American Institute Nuremberg, and the Unibund e.V. for “German-American Encounters after 1945” (organized with Katharina Gerund)
  • 2009: Conference and publication funding by the Thyssen Foundation for “Pirates, Drifters, Fugitives: Figures of Mobility in the US and Beyond” (organized/edited with Alexandra Ganser and Katharina Gerund)
  • 2008, 2010: Faculty Enrichment Grant (FEG) and Faculty Research Grant (FRG), research fellow at the University of Toronto, York University, and Chatham Historical Society
  • 2005-2010: DFG-funded Research Training Group “Cultural Hermeneutics Difference and Transdifference,” deputy spokesperson (2nd funding phase), FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
  • 2003-2004: Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Wissenschaftskolleg), Berlin
  • 1999: DAAD one-year postdoctoral fellowship, Visiting Fellow at Harvard University
  • 1995, 1998: Travel and Research Grants by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the German Research Foundation (DFG)
  • 1997: Library Fellowship at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Berlin
  • 1995-1997: Doctoral Fellowship at the DFG-funded Research Training Group “Gender Difference and Literature” at LMU Munich
  • 1990-1991: Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies, University of Washington, Seattle (German Academic Exchange Service)

Service to the Profession

  • Founding Member and Vice Chairwoman of the Coordination Committee of the “Schelling-Forum” (since 2021)
  • Member of the Advisory Board of the “Deutschlandjahr 2018/19” organized by the Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt), Berlin, in cooperation with the Goethe-Institute and the Federation of German Industry (BDI)
  • Board member (since 2007) and director (since 2017) of the Bavarian American Academy (BAA) in Munich
  • Vice-President of the German Association for American Studies (2014-2017) and co-editor of its monograph series (since 2014); board member of the journal Amerikastudien/American Studies (since 2019)
  • Teacher training seminars (on a regular basis) in Munich, Nuremberg, Dillingen, Würzburg, Bamberg, and Berlin on “Myths that Made America,” “Television Series,” “National Holidays in Popular Culture,” “The American West,” “Constructions of Masculinity,” “Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction,” “Post-Racial America?,” “Populism,” “1968”, etc.
  • Mentoring for Women in the Academy (Ariadne-Program FAU, Christine De Pizan Program, Mainz, and others), since 2012
  • Reviewer (on a regular basis) for the German Research Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, Fulbright, and the Alexander v- Humboldt-Stiftung
  • Member of the evaluation group for English and American Studies of the German Council of Science and Humanities, 2010-2013
  • Board member of the German-American Institute (DAI) and its support association, since 2006
  • Contact/Liaison for the Fulbright Commission, since 2005
  • Peer reviewer for Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2005-2011

Publications

Authored Books

Edited Volumes

Journal Articles

Book Contributions

Miscellaneous

Teaching

  • The Sixties in Retrospect: Civil Rights, the Women’s Movement and the New Left
  • Women’s Writing and the American Dream
  • National Identity and Cultural Memory in American Film
  • Film, Soap, and Gender
  • The Literatures of Asian-America
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Moby Dick: Text and Contexts
  • Growing Up
  • Literature of the Reconstruction Era
  • James Baldwin: Novelist, Essayist, Critic
  • Immigrant Fiction
  • Literarische Neuerscheinungen
  • Campus Novels: Der Literaturwissenschaftler als Romanheld
  • Nobel Prize Winners in American Literature
  • Benjamin Franklin and American Beginnings
  • How to Make a Long Story Short: Readings in an American Genre
  • Modernism in Black and White
  • Transatlantic Love
  • Writing and Re-Writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin
  • American Women Poets
  • Detroit: Film, Fiction, Music of an American City
  • Wissenschaftliche Neuerscheinungen
  • Captivity Narratives Past and Present
  • “Unspeakable Things Spoken:” Representations of Slavery in Film and Fiction
  • The Historical Imagination
  • Jewish American Literature
  • Gender, Memory and the Vietnam War
  • Margaret Atwood
  • Chick Lit in Transatlantic Perspective (with Doris Feldmann)
  • American Popular Culture in the US and in Germany
  • More than Aloha: Hawaii and Euro-American Discourses of Exoticism
  • Canadian Crimes
  • Amerikanisierung und Reeducation nach 1945 in Nürnberg und Berlin
  • American Beginnings / American Foundational Mythology
  • Literary and Cultural Studies of the Americas (with Andrea Pagni)
  • The History, Culture, and Literature of Slavery in/and Canada
  • Amerikanische Fernsehserien (with Christoph Ernst)
  • Conversion, Assimilation, Reeducation (with Alexandra Ganser)
  • Books That Changed America
  • The American Civil War (with Herbert Sirois)
  • Consumer Cultures in America
  • Contemporary Canadian Fiction
  • Präsenzphänomene in der amerikanischen Kultur und Literatur
  • Mythos Cowboy (with Tanja Roppelt)
  • Cold War Culture & Politics (with Herbert Sirois)
  • Transnational American Studies (with Alexandra Ganser)
  • From the Boston Tea Party to the Tea Party Movement (with Herbert Sirois)
  • Rural America: History, Culture, and Literature
  • Der Vietnamkrieg und die amerikanische Gesellschaft (with Herbert Sirois)
  • 19th-Century Popular Culture in Britain and the US (with Doris Feldmann)
  • The American West
  • “The Age of Reform:” Progressivism in America (with Herbert Sirois)
  • Critical Mixed-Race Studies (with Cedric Essi)
  • American Prisons (with Herbert Sirois)
  • Public Feeling in America
  • Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction
  • “Wie aus Feinden Freunde wurden?”: Die deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen seit 1945 im Kontext von Reeducation, Kulturpolitik und Amerikanisierung (with Herbert Sirois)
  • Postracial America?
  • Der “affective turn” in den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften (with Frank Adloff)
  • Washington, D.C. (with Herbert Sirois)
  • Empire Studies (with Herbert Sirois)
  • From the KKK to the Alt-Right: White Supremacy in American Culture (with Katharina Gerund)
  • Sentimentality
  • Hollywood Novels