Elisabeth Schoppelrei

Elizabeth Schoppelrei’s research focusses on global queer and trans* cultures, combining literary, media, and cultural studies with approaches from queer theory, trans studies, Black feminist thought, and the environmental humanities. Their profile is characterized by the analysis of texts, images, and media that make queer and trans* lives visible, link historical and contemporary communities, and thus open up new forms of solidarity and belonging. Furthermore, their research addresses the political significance of queer and trans* media in times of fascism, authoritarianism, and social backlash. By comparing historical contexts such as the Weimar Republic with current struggles in Europe and the United States, they illustrate how cultural production is both subject to attacks on marginalized groups and enables resistance, visibility, and collective hope.
With their interdisciplinary approach, Schoppelrei contributes to the deconstruction of normative ways of knowing and develops new perspectives on the role of literature and media in the formation of transtemporal, transnational, and more-than-human communities.

Speculative Formations: Trans and Queer Communities in the Long Twentieth Century

In her 1919 novel Der Skorpion (The Scorpion), Anna Weirauch portrays the growing love and attraction between Olga and Mette. In this lesbian novel, advertised by German queer magazines well into the 1930s, Olga envies people who create, as they can “greet those who come after us”. She goes on to say, “And if in their own lifetimes they have never found anyone – perhaps in a hundred years, or maybe two hundred, somebody will be born who will love them as they desired to be loved. Who will understand them as they desire to be understood.” Olga’s statement imagines a kind of love and caring that is not unidirectional, but rather criss-crosses past, present, and future.
These transtemporal loves, crucially, are transmitted through texts and creative production. Such works thus become the basis for recognition, for the formation of queer/trans connection, and for speculative communities that cluster around terms and shared queer/trans experiences. That someone might recognize another person and understand them in a century or two, however, implies legibility – frequently mediated by taxonomies of identity and histories of sexological thought. In my project, I expand upon speculative community formations as sites of (un)belonging. My aim is to develop an understanding of queer/trans communities as textually based, transtemporal, speculative, and, importantly, negotiated through media representations.

2023 PhD Comparative Literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, United States
2018 MA Comparative Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, United States
2016 BA Spanish, Wright State University, Fairborn, Ohio, United States

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Society for the Humanities and Department of German Studies, Cornell University

“Speculative Formations: Trans Poetry, Taxonomies, and Communities in the Lesbian Magazine Die Freundin (1924–1933)”. In Reading Queer Media in the German Speaking World. Edited by C. Ewing and S. Tremblay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.
“It’s not a Universe: Kinships, Bodies, and Ecologies in the Speculative”. In Queer Kinship and Comparative Literature. Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference. Edited by A. Sathi and A. Ferrebe. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.
“99 Years Ago, a Queer/Trans Magazine Was Born – Nine Years Later, Fascism Killed It”. Autostraddle, 4 August 2023.