Dr. Mahshid Mayar
DFG-Funded Postdoctoral Researcher
North American Studies
Department of English, American, and Celtic Studies
University of Bonn
Office Hours: [via zoom]: with prior appointment
E-Mail: mmayar[at]uni-bonn.de
Dr. Mahshid Mayar
Currently, I work on my second-book Erasure: Poetics, Politics, Performance (working
title) at the North American Studies section of the Department of English, American, and
Celtic Studies, University of Bonn, Germany. This postdoctoral research position is
funded by a 3-year research grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG). My current
research interests lie in the crossover between 21st-century Asian-American and
Indigenous protest poetry and documents of war, critical sound studies (incl. the study
of silence and noise), new empire studies, historical childhood studies, 19th-century
cultural geography of the U.S., and history of race and racialization.
Winner of the 2022 Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies (awarded by the American Studies Association), my first book, Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire , has been published by the University of North Carolina Press. Together with Marion Schulte (Universität Rostock), I have co-edited Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations across Disciplines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), an essay collection that offers a cross-disciplinary survey of silence and silencing across the humanities.
I currently work on three book projects:
- Erasure: Poetics, Politics, Performance [working title] interrogates the politics and poetics of silence and silencing in a book project that attends to the political, the historical, and the aesthetic in contemporary U.S. erasure poetry.
- Noises of America [working title]: Invested in sound studies, Mahshid Mayar currently works with Sabine N. Meyer (Universität Bonn) and Stefan Benz (Universität Bonn) on an essay collection that re-visits "noise" as a generative, cross-disciplinary analytics in American literary and cultural studies.
- History of the US Empire: A Handbook [working title] is a volume in the de Gruyter book series “Empires through the Ages in Global Perspective" that I co-edit with Mischa Honeck (Universität Kassel).
I have held fellowships at Amherst College, Massachusetts, University of Georgetown, Washington D.C., and the International Youth Library, Munich.