Janine Schwarz is a PhD candidate and assistant professor in American Studies at the University of Tübingen. In her PhD project, tentatively titled “‘There’s No Place Like Home’: The ‘Double Entanglement’ of Domestic Noir,” she investigates the construction of this contemporary sub-genre in crime fiction. More specifically, she investigates how the novels’ paratexts delineate a corpus of texts, their shared genre markers, and the ideological messages sent by these texts with a specific focus on feminism, femininity, and motherhood. Previously, she has worked as Grant Manager and Project Administrator of the EU COST Action “Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories (COMPACT)” and as a research assistant at the American Studies department. She completed her state examination in English and Latin in October 2017 and April 2018, respectively, with her final thesis titled ““John Adams in a New Light? The Representation of the Second President in Poetry of the Early American Republic and the Eponymous HBO Series.” Her research interests include American literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present, crime fiction, film and television studies, including reality TV studies, popular culture, and feminist studies.
Current Project
“There’s No Place Like Home”: Domestic Noir Fiction (working title, PhD-thesis)
"You Never Forget Your First: Representations of George Washington in American Literature and Culture (winter term 2023/2024)
“Introduction to Cultural Studies” (summer term 2023)
“Introduction to Literary Studies” (winter term 2022/23)
“Introduction to Literary Studies” (summer term 2022)
“Menstruation in American Literature and Culture” (winter term 2021/22)
"Southern Gothic" (summer term 2021)
“American Poetry from Wheatley to Whitman” (winter term 2020/2021)
“Crime Fiction” (summer term 2020)
“Hollywood Cinema” (winter term 2019/2020)
“Representations of John Adams” (summer term 2019)
“Introduction to Literary Studies” (winter term 2018/2019)
Publications
“Blaming the Mother: New Momism and Failed Matriarchy in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects.” Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities: Proceedings of the Eighth Captivating Criminality Conference, edited by Kerstin-Anja Münderlein, U of Bamberg P, 2024, pp. 56–71. FIS Universität Bamberg, fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/92502.
Conference Presentations and Talks
2022
“‘Read This Diary Like It’s Some Sort of Gothic Tragedy’: Revising Genre and Gender Tropes in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012)” (PhD Workshop, Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, Middelburg, The Netherlands, 8 Dec. 2022)
“Blaming the Mother: New Momism and Failed Matriarchy in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects.” Captivating Criminality 8: “Crime Fiction, Femininities and Masculinities,” University of Bamberg, 2 July 2022.
