Prof. Dr. Sabine Sielke

Director of the North American Studies Program

Institutional Mailing Address
Institut für Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Keltologie
Nordamerikastudienprogramm
Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
Regina-Pacis-Weg 5
53113 Bonn

Office Phone & E-Mail
Phone: 0228 – 737664 and 73-9676
Fax: 0228 – 737948 and 73-9674
E-Mail: officenap-uni-bonn.de

Office Hours
Day/Time: by appointment only


Education

• 1999 Habilitation (postdoctoral degree), Freie Universität Berlin, Venia legendi "Amerikanische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft"
• 1992 Dr. phil., American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin
• 1985 Erstes Staatsexamen in English and Biology
• 1978-1985 Studies of English and Biology, Freie Universität Berlin and Duke University (Durham, North Carolina)

Professional Experience, Teaching Positions, Fellowships (selection)

• since 2008, Deputy Spokesperson, Zentrum für Kulturwissenschaft | Cultural Studies
• since 2005, Board, Zentrum für Kulturwissenschaft | Cultural Studies
• since 2004, Director, Forum Women and Gender Studies
• since September 2001, Professor (C 4, Chair), North American Literature and Culture, Department of English, American and Celtic Studies, and Director of the North American Studies Program and the German-Canadian-Centre, Universität Bonn
• 2005 to 4/2009 Non-Resident Fellow, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Studies, Harvard University
• summer term 2001, Professor (C 3), Englisches Seminar, Universität Freiburg
• 9/1999 to 9/2000-2001, Associate Professor, Seminar für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin
• 2-8/1999, Senior Lecturer, American Institute, Universität Lódz
• 10/1997-3/1998: Associate, Department of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University
• 10-12/1998 and 10/1996-3/1998 Habilitandenstipendium, German Research Council
• winter term 1995-1996, guest professor (C 2), Seminar für Englische Sprache und Kultur, Universität Hamburg
• 1994-95, Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies und the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University
• 1992-98, Assistant Professor, John F. Kennedy-Institut
• 1987-88 Scholarship, German Academic Exchange Service and Brandeis University, post-graduate studies and dissertation research
• 1986-87, Lecturer, John F. Kennedy-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
• 1982-2002, editing and technical assistant, Sender Freies Berlin
• 1982-92, International Office, Freie Universität Berlin

Miscellaneous

• since 1/2003 Member of the Editorial Board of Amerikastudien/American Studies
• since 2004 Director, Forum Women and Gender Studies, Universität Bonn
• since 8/2004 Series Editor, Transcription: Cultures – Concepts – Controversies (Frankfurt: Lang)

Research Interests and Teaching

19th- and 20th-century American literature and culture, with focus on poetry and poetics, modernist and postmodernist cultures, literary and cultural theory, gender studies, cultural studies, African American studies, 20th century art, popular culture, and dialogues between cultural studies and the natural sciences.


Current Research Projects

• Memory, Mediation, Seriality: Re-cognizing Literary and Cultural Studies, Re-membering the Subject
  
  Taking off from three central concepts of cultural analysis – memory, mediation, and seriality – the project interfaces methods and research questions of cultural studies and the cognitive sciences and explores the potential of such transdisciplinary dialogue for our sense of cultural practice. What issues relevant to current cultural studies can be interrogated at the crossroads with the cognitive sciences? And in what ways can cultural analysis and cognition research be mutually instrumental?
  
  Since both constructivism (which relegates the materiality of the body and cognition to the periphery of its perspectives) and current brain research (which cannot adequately account for consciousness and individual experience by way of neurophysiology) position the subject as nodal point and blind spot of their inquiries conceptions of subjectivity are central to my study. After all, both the subject and modes of perception are continuously being redesigned by a complex ever-shifting media ecology. My analyses therefore focus on phenomena such as cinematic adaptations of literary texts, advertisements, and computer tomography which, as transformations of canonized late 19 th- and early 20 th-century cultural practices, mediate new processes of perception rather than modes of cultural memory. What, however, would it mean for cultural studies to acknowledge and “re-member” the subject as an agent whose main faculty is to transform fragmented experiences into coherence?
  The project is funded by the German Research Council.
• "Science into Narrative" explores how contemporary US-American fiction, including novels by Michael Crichton, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Richard Powers, among others, translates science into narrative and thereby foregrounds how some scientific endeavors are continuous with literary discourse while others, clearly resisting narrative, are not. In this way American literature calls for more radically transdisciplinary readings while also exposing the limits of transdisciplinarity.

Recent Presentations and Lectures

• Martin Luther King Day Lecture: "The Poetics of Presidency, or: Reading Barack Obama,"
  University of Hamburg, 19 January 2009. ( Lecture | Power Point Presentation)

Selected Publications

Books and Editions

• Orient and Orientalisms in American Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Sabine Sielke and Christian Klöckner. Transcription 4. Frankfurt: Lang, 2009.
• The Body as Interface: Dialogues between the Disciplines. Ed. Sabine Sielke and Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007.
• Gender Talks: Geschlechterforschung an der Universität Bonn. Ed. Sabine Sielke and Anke Ortlepp. Transcription 1. Frankfurt: Lang, 2006.
• Reading Rape: The Rhetoric of Sexual Violence in American Literature and Culture, 1790-1990. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
• Der 11. September 2001: Fragen, Folgen, Hintergründe. Ed. Sabine Sielke. Frankfurt: Lang, 2002.
• Making America: The Cultural Work of Literature. Ed. Susanne Rohr, Peter Schneck and Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000.
• Engendering Manhood. Ed. Ulfried Reichardt and Sabine Sielke. Amerikastudien/American Studies 43.4 (1998).
• Fashioning the Female Subject: The Intertextual Networking of Dickinson, Moore and Rich. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Essays

• "Science into Narrative, or: Novelties of a Cultural Nature." Literatur, Wissenschaft, Wissen seit der Epocheschwelle 1800. Ed. Thomas Klinkert and Monika Neuhofer. Spectrum Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008.
• "'The Brain – is wider than the Sky –' or: Re-Cognizing Emily Dickinson." Emily Dickinson Journal 17.1 (2008): 68-85.
• “'Das Leiden anderer betrachten': Demokratisierungsprozesse, Folter, Fotografie.” Die Unversehrtheit des Körpers: Theorie und Geschichte eines elementaren Menschenrechts. Ed. Sibylle Kalupner and Christoph Menke. Frankfurt: Campus Wissenschaft, 2007. 150-65.
• “Theorizing American Studies: German Contributions to an Ongoing Debate.” Amerikastudien/ American Studies 50.1/2 (2005): 53-98. Repr. European Journal of American Studies (2006). <http://ejas.revues.org/document470.html.>
• "Science/Fiction: The Future of American Studies. European Perspectives." Science, Technology, and the Humanities in Recent American Fiction. Ed. Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris. Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2003. Arbeiten zur Amerikanistik 36. 521-48.
• (co-authored with Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche) "How German Is It? Projektionen des Deutschen in der amerikanischen Kultur“ Deutschlandbilder im Spiegel anderer Nationen. Ed. Klaus Stierstorfer. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2003. 155-91.
• "’The Emphatic Imagination’: an Interview with Yann Martel.“ Canadian Literature 177 (2003): 12-32.
• "Das Ende der Ironie? Zum Verhältnis von Realem und Repräsentation zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts." Der 11. September 2001: Folgen, Fragen, Hintergründe. Ed. Sabine Sielke. Frankfurt: Lang, 2002. 255-73.
• (co-authored with Anne Hofmann). “Serienmörder und andere Killer: Die Endzeitfiktionen von Bret Easton Ellis und Michel Houellebecq.” Anglo-Romanische Kulturkontakte: von Humanismus bis Postkolonialismus. Ed. Andrew Johnston and Ulrike Schneider. Berlin: Dahlem UP, 2002. 283-318.
• “The Discourse of Liberation, the Deployment of Silence, and the 'Liberation' of Discourse.” Black Liberation in the Americas. Ed. Fritz Gysin and Christopher Mulvey. Forecaast 6 (2001) 241-57.
• “Reading Cultural Practices, Re-Reading Race: History, Identity, and the Aesthetics of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.” Cultural Encounters: American Studies in the Age of Multiculturalism. Ed. Sonja Bahn and Mario Klarer. ZAA Studies 11 (2000) 81-102.
• “'Celebrating AIDS': Quilts, Confessions, and Questions of National Identity.” Ceremonies and Spectacles: Performing American Culture. Ed. Teresa Alves, Teresa Cid, and Heinz Ickstadt. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2000. 281-93.

Complete List of Publications [75 KB]