Englisches Seminar

Annika Thiem, M.A.

Research Fellow

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.


Current Project

“Subverting Hegemonic Epistemology and Power: Ghosts and Spirits in American Women’s Writings” (working title, PhD thesis)

Teaching

  • Screening Law: Legal Film and Television (summer term 2024)
  • Introduction to Literary Studies (winter term 2023/24)
  • ENGL250/WGSS255: Reading Women Writing (winter term 2022, Department of English, University of Maryland, MD, USA)
  • HHUM205: Negotiating (In)Justice through Fiction (winter term 2022, Honors College, Honors Humanities Program, University of Maryland, MD, USA)
  • Negotiating (In)justice Through Fiction (summer term 2022)
  • Epistemic Violence (winter term 2021/2022)
  • 'Scribbling Women:' Nineteenth-Cenury Women's Literature (summer term 2021)
  • “Witches in American Literature and Culture” (winter term 2020/21)
  • “Introduction to Cultural Studies” (summer term 2019; summer term 2020)
  • “The American Ghost Story” (winter term 2019/20)

Publications

  • "True Crime Television as ‘Popular Legality’: Affect, Testimonial Injustice, and the Criminal (In)Justice System in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us." Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/17438721231179183
  • “Conspiracy Theories and Gender and Sexuality.” Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, edited by Michael Butter and Peter Knight, Routledge, 2020, pp. 292-303.

Conference Papers and Talks

  • "Zwischen Fiktion und Wahrheit: True Crime als Instrument der Systemkritik." sITZung. Zimmertheater Tübingen, 10. Januar 2024.
  • “Ghostly Disruptions: Resisting Patriarchal Silencing in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020) and Erika T. Wurth’s White Horse (2022).” Disruptive Imaginations: Joint Annual Meeting of the SFRA & GFF 2023, Technische Universität Dresden, 18 August 2023.
  • "Ownership and Possession of the Past: Haunting History, Racism, and White Ignorance in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing and LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes." America and Ownership: Territory, Slavery, Jubilee: 69th Annual Meeting of the German Association of American Studies, Universität Rostock, 3 June 2023.
  • "From Slavery to Black Lives Matter: Ghosts in African American Literature." As Part of the Lecture Series: "Issues in American Literary & Cultural History IV: From World War II to the Present." Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 2 February 2023.
  • “Ghosts and Epistemic Injustice in American Women’s Fiction.” Local Americanists, Department of English, University of Maryland, College Park, 01. December 2022.
  • "Resisting Colonial Patriarchal Silencing: Women’s Truth and Epistemic Injustice in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman." Embodiments of Truth? An Intersectional Approach. Workshop der Forschungsgruppe "Praxeologien der Wahrheit," Universität Erfurt, 13. Juli 2022.
  • “True Crime Television as Legal-Political Education: Negotiations of Testimonial Injustice in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us.” Political Education and American Studies: 68th Annual Meeting of the German Association of American Studies, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 10. June 2022
  • “The Ghosts of Feminism: American Women’s Ghost Stories in the 19th Century.” As Part of the Lecture Series “American Short Story: Theory, History, Cultural Contexts,” Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 18. December 2019.