Research Group Members
Prof. Dr. Kerstin Knopf
Kerstin Knopf is full professor for North American and Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Bremen in Germany and director of the Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS) and the Bremen Institute for Canada and Quebéc Studies (BICQS). She hails from Northern East Germany, growing up in a fishing and coastal culture, and spending much time on the water sailing and paddling her SUB. Her main research interests are Blue Humanities, North American sea novels, postcolonial and Indigenous marine literatures, German colonialism in the Pacific, Indigenous and postcolonial film and literature focusing on North America and the Pacific region, epistemological power relations and postcolonial knowledge systems, and American and Canadian romantic literature.
+49 (0)421 218-68330
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Secretary: Susanne Mindermann
+49 (0)421 218-68052
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Dr. phil. Paula von Gleich
Paula von Gleich is lecturer with senior track at the department of Linguistics and Literary Studies, University of Bremen, where she teaches and researches English-Speaking cultures and the blue humanities with a focus on North America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic. Her first monograph was published by De Gruyter in 2022. Entitled The Black Border and Fugitive Narration in Black American Literature, it analyzes concepts of fugitivity and captivity in Black North American and Black Atlantic narratives and Afro-pessimist and Black feminist theory. Her work also appeared in the Atlantic Studies and Current Objectives in Postgraduate American Studies journals and in various edited volumes, most recently in Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations (Temple University Press 2024).
+49 (0)421 218-68185
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Prof. Dr. Norbert Schaffeld
Norbert Schaffeld was born in Rees on the Rhine, Germany. He took his A-levels at the long-standing Municipal Grammar School of Emmerich. He then studied English and North American Literature, History, Philosophy, and Pedagogy at the Universities of Wuppertal and Exeter. It was also at the University of Wuppertal that he did his state examinations, completed his PhD thesis as well as his postdoctoral thesis. Norbert Schaffeld held the chair of English Literature and Culture at the University of Bremen until 2024. He previously taught at the universities of Wuppertal, Essen, Leipzig, and Jena. He also conducted research at Australian and Canadian universities, including: The University of Sydney, The University of Toronto, and The University of Guelph. His main fields of research are coastal cultures, the science novel, math movies, TV serials about physicists, Shakespeare adaptations, and film studies.
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Dr. phil. Mohammed Muharamm
Mohammed Muharram is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Thamar University in Yemen. In 2021, Muharram was awarded the prestigious Philipp Schwartz Initiative Fellowship sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany to work as a postdoctoral researcher in the area of English-Speaking cultures at the University of Bremen where he is currently based. He was recently awarded a two-year scholarship by the Funding Initiative for Threatened Scholars and Refugees of the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Hailing from the postcolonial maritime Yemen, Muharram’s main interests include postcolonial Blue Humanities with specific reference to Arabic literature and culture. Issues of water scarcity, economic inequality, and climate change in the Arab world and how these issues are represented in literature and culture is of prime interest to him. He is co-editing TheBloomsbury Handbook to the Blue Humanities with Steve Mentz, Serpil Oppermann, and Sandra Young.
+49 (0)421 218-68132
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