Forschungsprojekte
DFG-Forschungsgruppe 'Machbarkeiten des Selbst - Mediale Selbstformungsprozesse in diachroner Perspektive' (FOR 5826/1) - TP5 Algorithmische Selbstformung
Mothering Infrastructures
American culture has repeatedly imagined the future as an act of escape: self-reliant frontier settlers reappear as tech entrepreneurs, promises of digital self-realization echo older promises of salvation, and biotechnological optimism revives older fantasies of controlling reproduction and destiny.
My habilitation project, Mothering Infrastructures in American Literature and Culture, pursues the question of how these visions of autonomy and progress depend on forms of labor that literature and culture register but rarely name. It argues that mothering, in its bodily, social, and material dimensions, constitutes a form of infrastructural care: work that keeps systems, communities, and ways of life running, and that tends to become visible only when it breaks down. While a growing body of scholarship has examined the invisible labor sustaining technological and ecological infrastructures, it has largely overlooked mothering as a distinct, gendered form of this labor, one that differs from care in foregrounding its embodied and reproductive dimensions.
My project traces this argument across U.S. literature and culture from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, from Puritan sermons to memoirs of pregnancies mediated by apps and digital tools, a span that allows the persistence and transformation of this dependency to come into view while showing historical roots of modern arguments, problems, and perceptions. Drawing on feminist theory, the Humanities of the Digital, and Environmental Humanities, I explore how literature and culture reveal the maintenance work that sustains American visions of escape and progress, work that these very visions claim to leave behind.
Algorithmic Self-Formation: Femininity, Visibility, and Identity on TikTok
My dissertation examines how TikTok's algorithmic infrastructures shape the ways femininity is performed, narrated, and made visible on social media. Rather than treating digital identity as solely an expression of individual agency, the project argues that selfhood on TikTok emerges through processes of algorithmic self-formation, in which users continuously negotiate platform affordances, recommendation systems, and audience expectations.
Drawing on feminist media studies, platform studies, and theories of subject formation, the dissertation investigates how algorithmic systems participate in the production of contemporary gender identities. Through qualitative close readings of TikTok content, the project explores three contrasting forms of femininity to analyze how creators strategically construct visibility while responding to the platform's cultural and technical logics.
By conceptualizing algorithms as active participants in identity formation rather than neutral distribution mechanisms, the dissertation contributes to ongoing debates about digital culture, platform governance, gender, and the relationship between technology and the self. Ultimately, the project demonstrates that contemporary femininity on TikTok is not merely represented on the platform but is co-produced through the dynamic interaction between human practices and algorithmic mediation.
Atomistic Being. Solid, Fluid, Gaseous: Late 19th Century Literary Imaginations of (Non-)Human Matter
The late 19th century saw an impressive surge of scientific research into the nature of matter and its atomic structures, which generated a broader public and artistic interest in the material building blocks of life. Literary discourse is one of the realms reflecting this phenomenon. In the context of the US and its cultural self-understanding at a moment of post-war (re-)integration, faced with the pressing question of how to reconcile “the one and the many,” make “one out of many,” the idea of atomistic life struck a chord.
This dissertation project pursues the question of how flourishing research into states and structures of matter resonated in American fiction of the age. It claims that the late 19th century strong scientific interest in and growing understanding of the atom and its composites affected human notions of self and world in a seemingly paradoxical way conflating a sense of anxiety and fascination, separation and relationality, undergirded by a specific atomistic aesthetics. While there is a considerable body of scholarship about the literary renderings of the atom in Renaissance writing, Romantic, or Modernist literature, strangely, the fiction of the final decades of the 19thcentury when atomist research was at a peak, has not received as much attention yet.
As a period of transformation gradually breaking away from earlier self-conceptions still more indebted to the Enlightenment idea of the continuous, integrated self while anticipating the (post-)modernist notion of an incoherent, fragmented, dissolving self, the late 19th century is an especially interesting time to look at. It reveals precisely the brittle moments, the instances of a splintering of the self that make an atomistic-materialist perspective particularly productive. Drawing on new materialist, posthumanist, and ecocritical theory, this dissertation intends to shed light on how late 19th century fiction interacted with scientific discourse and debates to coin a specific image of humans and their environment that has had repercussions up to the present day. Particular attention is given to the female subject as a historically fragile and internally incoherent construct, which functions as a reflective surface for shifting societal norms and cultural anxieties.