Annika Thiem is a PhD candidate and assistant professor at the American Studies Program, University of Tübingen. She studied English and American Studies at the University of Tübingen and San Francisco State University, California, and received her MA in American Studies form the University of Tübingen in 2018. In summer 2022, she was a participant of the Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law (OSI), “No Trespassing?: Property/Theory between the Disciplines.” In fall 2022, she was a visiting professor at the University of Maryland’s English Department and Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Maryland’s Honors College, teaching classes for both the English Department and Honors Humanities Program. Previously, she worked as grant manager and project administrator of the EU-COST Action “Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories,” an international and interdisciplinary research project.
In her PhD project, tentatively titled “Subverting Hegemonic Epistemology and Power: Ghosts and Spirits in American Women’s Writings,” she puts ghost stories by white middle-class women from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries into dialogue with contemporary novels by ethnic authors. More specifically, her dissertation examines the subversive potential of the ghost trope and the ways in which it is used by women writers to criticize epistemic injustice and epistemic violence against women and People of Color.
Her other research interests include Puritanism, American Gothic fiction, 19th-century women’s literature, ethnic literatures in the US, post-/decolonial studies, gender studies, feminist studies, law and literature, as well as film and television studies.
