Fellow 2023-2024
With her focus on African American literature and political movements, Verena Adamik intervenes into dominant patterns of knowledge and into a present characterized by anti-Black violence. Her research interests are in utopian studies, political participation, African American nationalism, Afrofuturism and fantasy, and Gothic and horror literature. Having researched communalism in 19th-century literature, Verena Adamik's new project is on conspiracy theories in the wake of Black civil rights movements in the U.S. between 1899 and 1945. She has also launched the “Talking American Studies” podcast series, in which she and various guests discuss new developments in the field of American studies and contemporary politics in the U.S.
Abstract
Conspiracy from the Margins: Black Revolutions in the USA (1899–1945)
At the emergence of the twentieth century, multiple African American authors – such as Arna Bontemps, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sutton E. Griggs, Pauline Hopkins, Edward A. Johnson, and George Schuyler – wrote narratives describing Black conspiracies that resulted in uprisings, from local revolts to continental empires. Today, these stories are largely sidelined and/or forgotten as they challenge a well-established narrative of White political superiority. Embedding a literary analysis of these stories within interdisciplinary fields such as critical race theory, democracy studies, and conspiracy studies, my project helps to put these texts back into the academic conversation and open a pathway to tackle issues regarding the interplay of dominant political discourses and marginalized positionalities.
Education
2018 PhD English Literature, University of Potsdam
2013 MA English Literature, University of Würzburg
Most Recent Academic Position
Research and teaching assistant at the Institute for English and American Studies, University of Potsdam
Most Recent Publications
“In Search of the Utopian States of America: Intentional Communities in Novels of the Long Nineteenth Century." London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. german edition: dt.: "Auf der Suche nach den Utopischen Staaten von Amerika. Intentionale Gemeinschaften in Romanen des langen neunzehnten Jahrhunderts." Cham: J.B. Metzler, 2023
“Making Worlds from Literature: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess.” “Thesis Eleven” 162, no. 1 (February 2021): 105–20.
“Alien Horrors: Lovecraft and the Racialized Underclass in the Age of Trump.” In “The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor,” edited by Geoffroy de Laforcade, Daniel Stein and Cathy C. Waegner, 113–134. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2022.