PhD students 3rd cohort

Andrin Albrecht, M.A.

Andrin Albrecht, M.A.
andrin.albrecht@uni-jena.de

Curriculum Vitae

2014-2018 Bachelor of Arts in English language and literature, and history, at the University of Zurich

2016 ISEP exchange semester at Colorado Mesa University, Grand Junction, USA

2018-2020 Master of Arts in English language and literature, and modern history, at the University of Zurich, MA thesis supervised by Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Bronfen

2019 Exchange semester at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

2019-2020 Research assistant at the University of Zurich for the Lehrkredit: Audiovisual Essays

2020-2021 Curator and web designer for the online exhibition “Black Matters” in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Ana Sobral

10/2021-09/2024 PhD fellow in the DFG Graduate College “Modell Romantik” at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany

July-October 2024 Internship in Public Diplomacy at the Embassy of the United States, Berlin

10/2024-03/2025 Research Assistant at FSU Jena

Teaching

  • “Language and Literature: Do Androids Dream of Us? Artificial Intelligence in Literature and Beyond.” MA-Seminar. University of Jena (winter semester 2024/25).
  • “Interdisciplinary Perspectives: Music in American Literature.” MA-Seminar. University of Jena (summer semester 2024).
  • Übersetzung und Autorschaft. Vladimir Nabokovs Zascita Luzina / The Defense. MA-Seminar. With Prof. Dr. Andrea Meyer-Fraatz, University of Jena (winter semester 2023/24).
  • Categories and Conventions: Moby Dick and Its Reverberations. MA-Seminar. With Prof. Dr. Caroline Rosenthal, University of Jena (summer semester 2023).
  • “Workshop: Wissenschaft und Kreatives Schreiben.” With Andrew Wildermuth, DFG-Graduiertenkolleg Modell Romantik, University of Jena (10 February 2022).

Incurred Funding

August 2024-July 2025 LIBERTY Connect Fund in Jena, Germany, to develop the project “Romantic Currents: Water Narratives between American Romanticism and a Transnational Present” together with Prof. Dr. Caroline Rosenthal (19,926€)

Invited Talks

  • “Short Film: Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow.” In the BA-seminar Shorts: Executing Brief Forms in American Culture by Can Aydin, TU Dresden, 27 May 2024.
  • “White Whales, White Pools: An Aquatic Crossmapping of Emma Cline’s The Guest (2023) and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851).” Part of the lecture series Ways of Water: Aquatic Poetics and Politics in North American Literature, org. Prof. Dr. Caroline Rosenthal and Prof. Dr. Kerstin Knopf, University of Bremen, 22 May 2024.
  • “Postcolonial Criticism: At a Glance.” In the BA-seminar Demystifying Literary Theory by Amanda Halter, University of Jena, 11 January 2024.
  • “Music and Its Others: An Approach to Songs as Multimedial Poetry.” Invited by Dr. Mahshid Mayar, English department of the University of Mannheim, 21 November 2023.
  • “Is It Alright if I Don’t Sing Tonight? Romance, Romanticism, and Climate Grief in Contemporary Popular Music.” Part of the international guest lecture series Contemporary Contexts and Debates: 21st Century Literatures and Cultures in English, National University “Yuri Kondratyuk Poltava Polytechnic” (Ukraine), 4 October 2023. Virtual.
  • “Over the Garden Wall: Real Fairytales and Imaginary Presents.” In the MA-seminar Impossible Worlds: Various Versions of the Fantastic by Prof. Dr. Dirk Vanderbeke, University of Jena, 15 June 2022.

Memberships and Honorary Positions

  • Head of section Literature, Philosophy, and Language at Swiss Youth in Science (Schweizer Jugend Forscht)
  • Ecocriticism Research Collective, University of Jena
  • German Association for American Studies (DGFA)
  • Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS)
  • British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS)
  • Co-founder, treasurer, and musical director at Copper Tongues Theater

PhD Project

Romantic Authorships and White Male Genius in the Wake of Moby-Dick

In my project, I examine how conceptions of creative genius that flourished in Romanticism continue shaping a particular strand of American fiction in to the 20th century and beyond. In that, I am particularly interested in the paradigmatic intertwinement of genius, difficulty, Whiteness, and masculinity, from which results a cultural reflex that—simply put—states “the harder something is to understand, the more brilliant it must be.” I venture that Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which has been canonized as the epitome of the Great American Model, constitutes a lastingly influential model of this paradigm, since it not only informed is reception particularly in the 20th century, but is also among the novel’s own key interests: In essence, Moby-Dick narrates the fate of a variety of characters engaged in a contest of penetrative reading, of confronting the inscrutable sublime with the force of their minds, eyes, and harpoons to derive artistic prestige from it. Thus, the novel both thematizes and embodies a dynamic of genius as performance, as something that is established in interaction and confrontation with other creatives, the Romantic sublime and, most importantly, the reader. This performance of genius—not of the empirical author but, rather, of a collectively constructed author imago—lies at the heart of my analysis.

After discussing Moby-Dick in that light, and contextualizing it in the history of Romantic, pre-Romantic, and Modernist genius discourses, I examine its afterlives in three 20th century ‘Great American Novels,’ all of which both perpetuate and critically engage with genius as competitive performance: Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov (1969), Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973), and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000). Each of these novels is demonstrably modeled after Moby-Dick but puts its own spin on the aesthetics, poetics, and canonical dynamics of Melville’s novel. With Nabokov, I devote particular attention to the direct contest between author and reader on which the novel’s performance is grounded. Pynchon, by contrast, can be read as engaging with the risk of the actual author being taken over by his constructed genius imago and consequently lose control both over his subjectivity and his text. Danielewski, finally, conceives of a form of artistic prestige derived not from absolute control but rather the performance of failure, which does away with some of genius’s most problematic masculinist and White supremacist implications, but at the same time ensures the performance’s long-term survival.

Publications

Articles and Book Chapter

  • “From Europe to America: Vladimir Nabokov & Postmodern Lives.” The De Gruyter Handbook of Life Writing, eds. Alfred Hornung and Helga Schwalm, De Gruyter (forthcoming).
  • “Because You Creatures Had a World: New Formalism, Imaginative Creation, and the Nothing in Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story.” Many Doors to Fantastica: The Neverending Story & the Education of the Imagination, eds. Sean C. Hadley, Joshua Herring, and Jeremy E. Scarbrough, McFarland Press (forthcoming).
  • “Playing in the Snow: Africanism and the Construction of Whiteness in The Shining.” Kubrick and Race, eds. Joy McEntee and Elisa Pezzotta, Liverpool University Press, estimated February 2025 (in print).
  • “A Matter not Yours: Gothic Metalepses and Determinist Horror in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Hearts of Stone.” Games That Haunt Us: Gothic Game Space as a Living Nightmare, ed. Steph Farnsworth, Bloomsbury, estimated December 2024 (in print).
  •  “White Whales, White Pools: An Aquatic Crossmapping of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Emma Cline’s The Guest.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, estimated March 2025 (proofs accepted).
  • “Water and Romanticism: A Conversation with Steve Mentz.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, estimated March 2025 (proofs accepted).
  • “A Dream of Evil Omen: US-Amerikanische Dörflichkeit als Konfliktraum bei Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik, vol. 34, no. 3, summer 2024, https://doi.org/10.3726/92175_610.
  • “White Masculinity and the Performance of Authorial Failure in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” SPELL, vol. 43, Winter Verlag Heidelberg, winter 2023, https://doi.org/10.33675/SPELL/2023/42/10.

Smaller Publications

Short Fiction and Poetry (Selection)

Conference Talks

  • “But We Sing It Anyway: Anaïs Mitchell’s Musical Hadestown and the Circularity of Hope.” SANAS Biennial Conference 2024: American Futurisms, University of Geneva, 7 November 2024.
  • “Romantic Democracy and the Problem of the Awed Gaze in Kentaro Miura’s Berserk.” FRIAS Conference Popular Culture and Democracy: Opportunities, Challenges, and the Way Forward, University of Freiburg, 24 October 2024.
  • “Thomas Pynchon’s Kirghiz I: Performances and Subversions Romantic Authorial Genius in Gravity’s Rainbow.” International Pynchon Week: Global Encounters, University of Belgrade, 19 June 2024.
  • “Tyrannies of the I: Extraction Capitalism and the Hubris of Genius in Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood.” Post/colonial Environments: Annual Conference of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies, University of Zurich, 10 May 2024.
  • “That’s Fucking Dark: Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood as Ecogothic.” Undead Tropes: New Directions in Gothic Studies, org. Evangelia Kindinger and Greta Kaisen, Humboldt University Berlin, 12 January 2024.
  • “Nope: Jordan Peele’s Versioning of the American Spectacle.” With Hannah Schoch. 50th AAAS Conference – Versions of America: Speculative Pasts, Presents, Futures. Universität Klagenfurt, 21 October 2023.
  • “The Loveliest Lies of All: Death, Adolescence, and the Accommodation of Disruption in the Animated Miniseries Over the Garden Wall.” Disruptive Imaginations, TU Dresden, 16 August 2023.
  • “True and Living Prophets of Destruction: Absolute Evil and the Construction of Authorial Purpose in Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy.” GKAT Conference ‘Practicing Trust and Authority’, Heidelberg Center for American Studies, 13 May 2023.
  • “A Dream of Evil Omen: US-Amerikanische Dörflichkeit als Konfliktraum bei Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Rurale Romantik, org. Claudia Stockinger, Humboldt University Berlin, 3 February 2023.
  • “White Masculinity and the Performance of Authorial Failure in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” Who Tells Your Story – SANAS 2022, Université de Fribourg, 19 November 2022.
  • “Climate Grief and Romantic Nescience in Contemporary Popular Music.” New Romanticisms – BARS/NASSR 2022, Edge Hill University, 3 August 2022.
  • “Playing in the Snow: Whiteness and Authorial Reflection in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.” Kubrick and Race, org. Joy McEntee, University of Adelaide, virtual, 13 September 2021.