What inspired you to write this book? Was there a particular moment or event that led you to explore this topic?
“I had the initial idea to write this book in 2007 - can you believe it! I sat at my breakfast table and read an article in Kölner Stadtanzeiger about German women who had started pen friendships with death row inmates in the United States, and some of them had even married them! - I never afterwards really pursued this specific topic or checked on how much truth was in this story about the German letter writers, but that was the moment when I thought: has anyone ever written a book about representations of the death penalty? Of course people had, but not quite with the focus I envisioned...”
What was the most challenging part of writing this monograph - academic or otherwise?
“Honest? I don't like moving images all that much. It stresses me out if I can't choose the pace of things - like when I turn pages in a book (of course you can stop DVDs and streamed movies, but that's not the idea). In other words, I do not particularly LIKE watching movies, and TV series are really the worst for me. The material the book looks at is thus a purely academic, scholarly interest of mine - because of course I realize how important visual culture is! And I want to know about it! But I had a very hard time getting my hands onto the material and really engaging with it.”
How do you see this book being useful for American Studies students?
"The book studies fundamental patterns of gendered and especially racial representation that each student of American literature and culture should know about. My finding, for instance, that the death penalty in film and TV series throughout the twentieth century is whitewashed is paralleled by representations and silencings in many other cultural texts. Moreover, my book offers a methodology for making sense of popular texts, of which there is often an overwhelming mass, and we as cultural studies scholars and students do not know how to "manage" that mass and see structure in it: I discuss textual clusters - i.e. the mass "occurrence" of texts on a specific topic within a specific genre during a short span of time. Clusters, I argue, can be seen as leading the cultural discussion on a specific socia-plitical issue at a given time. This method is one that I would like to see taken up by other scholars and students."
