Prof. Dr. Timo Müller

Urban Traffic and the Question of Sustainability in the Early Automobile Novel
Guest lecture at the IZKT, University of Stuttgart, 21 Nov 2023

Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility
Research project founded by an ERC Consolidator Grant; Principal Investigator; 2023-2027

Transforming Infrastructure. Cultural Perspectives
Multidisciplinary research project; core team member

Postcolonial Infrastructure
Annual GAPS Conference, 17-20 May 2023; co-organizer

Metzler Amerikanische Literaturgeschichte
Fourth, revised edition of the standard German-language history of American literature, forthcoming 2023; co-editor and contributor

Timo Müller is Professor of American Studies at the University of Konstanz. His main research areas are modernism, Black literature, and the Environmental Humanities. His work has appeared in journals including American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He has edited several textbooks and written two monographs, The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction (2010) and The African American Sonnet: A Literary History (2018), which is now available in paperback from the University of Mississippi Press. He has held visiting fellowships at the British Library, Harvard, and Yale. He currently serves as president of the German Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS). From 2023 to 2027 he is directing the ERC-funded research project “Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility.”

Academic Positions

^{since 2018}
Professor of American Studies, University of Konstanz

^2016-2018 
Interim Professor of American Studies, University of Regensburg

^2015-2016 
Interim Professor of Anglophone Literatures, University of Greifswald

^2013-2015 
Senior Lecturer in American Studies, University of Augsburg

^2012-2013 
Research Fellow, African American Studies, Harvard University

^2006-2012 
Lecturer in American Studies, University of Augsburg

Education

²⁰¹⁴
Habilitation, University of Augsburg

²⁰⁰⁹
Dr. phil., University of Augsburg

²⁰⁰⁶
M.A., University of Augsburg / Brandeis University

 

Awards and Grants

²⁰²²
ERC Consolidator Grant

^2012-13
Thyssen Foundation Grant for Research Fellowship at Harvard University

²⁰¹¹
Best Dissertation Award, Bavarian American Academy

²⁰¹¹
Donald C. Gallup Fellowship in American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University

²⁰¹¹
Eccles Centre Visiting European Fellowship in North American Studies, British Library

North American Literatures and Cultures, especially:
  –  Transatlantic Modernism
 ­ –  Environmental Humanities
  –  African American Studies
  –  Postcolonial Studies

Books

• The African American Sonnet: A Literary History. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. _{^{[more]
  Reviewed in: ALH Online Review, Amerikastudien/American Studies, Anglia, Journal of Ethnic American Literature, ZAA}}
• The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. ^{_{[more]
  Reviewed in: Anglia, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Henry James Review}}

Book Series

• American Studies: A Monograph Series (with Astrid Franke).  ^_[more]

Edited Collections

• Hip Hop Ecologies (with Alain-Philippe Durand). Special issue of Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 13.1 (2022): 1-105. ^{_{[read online]}}
• Elemental Agency: American Culture and the Politics of Matter (with Moritz Ingwersen). Special issue of ZAA 70.1 (2022). ^_[more]
• Our Shared Planet: The Climate Issue (with Michelle Yates). Special issue of American Studies (AMSJ) 60.3-4 (2021). ^_[more]
• Poem Unlimited: New Perspectives on Poetry and Genre (with David Kerler). Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019. ^{_{[more]
  Reviewed in: Anglia}} 
• Representing Climate: Global to Local. Spec. section of Open Library of Humanities. 2018-2019. ^{_{[read online]}}
• Chinese Literature and Ecocriticism [Zhongguo Wenxue yu Shengtai Piping] (with Chang Liu). Spec. cluster of Chinese Culture Forum 13.1 (2018): 367-406.
• The American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Handbooks of English and American Studies 4. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017.  _{^{[contents] [more]
  Reviewed in: Anglia}} 
• English and American Studies: Theory and Practice (with Martin Middeke, Christina Wald, and Hubert Zapf). Stuttgart: Metzler, 2012. _{^{[more]
  Reviewed in: Anglia}} 
• Literature, Ecology, Ethics: Recent Trends in Ecocriticism (with Michael Sauter). Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. ^{_{[more]
  Reviewed in: Anglia}} 

Articles

• “Infrastrukturelle Ästhetik: Zur Plausibilisierung ökologischer Transformation in der literarischen Moderne.” Vorläufige Gewissheiten: Plausibilität als soziokulturelle Praxis. Ed. Thomas Kirsch and Christina Wald. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2024. 299-317. ^{_{[read online]}}
• Travel / Escape: Hip Hop’s Transatlantic Mobilities.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 68.3 (2023): 385-406. ^{_{[read online]}}
• “Infrastructural Poetics.” Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities. Ed. Aaron Pinnix et al. Bielefeld: transcript, 2023. 183-190. ^{[_{read online]}}
• “Sonnets into the American: Translation and Transnation in the Harlem Renaissance.” The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays. Ed. Dora Malech and Laura T. Smith. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2022. 170-176. ^_[more]
• (with Hubert Zapf) “Ecology in American Literature.” The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science. Ed. Hank Shugart. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. ^_[more]
• (with Alain-Philippe Durand) “Hip Hop Ecologies: Mapping the Field(s).” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 13.1 (2022): 1-7. ^{_{[read online]}}
• (with Moritz Ingwersen) “The Aesthetics and Politics of Elemental Agency.” ZAA 70.1 (2022): 3-22. ^_[more]
• “William Faulkner (1897-1962).” Handbook of the American Short Story. Ed. Erik Redling and Oliver Scheiding. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022. 343-60. ^_[more]
• “The Sonnet and Black Transnationalism in the 1930s.” Journal of Transnational American Studies 12.2 (2021). ^{_{[read online]}}
• (with Michelle Yates) “Introduction: The Climate Issue.” Our Shared Planet: The Climate Issue. Ed. Timo Müller and Michelle Yates. Special issue of American Studies (AMSJ) 60.3-4 (2021). ^_[more]
• “Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1894).” Handbook of the English Novel, 1830-1900. Ed. Martin Middeke and Monika Pietrzak-Franger. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020. 581-95. ^_[more]
• “Poetry to Music: Gil Scott-Heron’s Intermedial Performance Aesthetics.” Poem Unlimited: New Perspectives on Poetry and Genre. Ed. David Kerler and Timo Müller. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019. 227-38. ^_[more]
• “‘What’s the Position You Hold?’: Bourdieu and Rap Music.” Power Relations in Black Lives: Reading African American Literature and Culture with Bourdieu and Elias. Ed. Christa Buschendorf. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018. 165-82. ^_[preview]
• “Too Much Liberty in the Garrison? Closed and Open Spaces in the Canadian Sonnet.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 34.1 (2018): 250-71. ^{_{[read online]}}
• “Hip-Hop und Literatur.” Literatur und die anderen Künste. Theorien der Literatur 7. Ed. Günter Butzer and Hubert Zapf. Tübingen: Narr, 2018. 127-42.
• “Framing the Romantic Artist: Goethe’s Torquato Tasso and James’s Roderick Hudson.” Anglia 136.4 (2018): 687-704. _{^{[read online]}}
• “Ecocriticism and the Frankfurt School.” Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture. Ed. Gabriele Dürbeck et al. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017. 91-100.
• “The Road in the Garden: Pastoral Environments in the Post-War Caribbean Novel.” Ecocriticism: Environments in Anglophone Literatures. Ed. Sonja Frenzel and Birgit Neumann. Heidelberg: Winter, 2017. 107-128.
• “Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927).” Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Ed. Christoph Reinfandt. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017. 195-212. ^_[more]
• “Ernest Hemingway, Schnee auf dem Kilimandscharo / The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Große Werke der Literatur. Vol. 14. Ed. Günter Butzer and Hubert Zapf. Tübingen: Narr, 2017. 157-72.
• Introduction. Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Ed. Timo Müller. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017. 1-18. _^[more]
• “Forms of Exile: Experimental Self-Positioning in Postcolonial Caribbean Poetry.” Atlantic Studies 13.4 (2016): 457-71. ^_[more]
• “Short Short Stories: Literary Perspectives.” Shorties: Flash Fiction in English Language Teaching. Ed. Engelbert Thaler. Tübingen: Narr, 2016. 29-40. ^_[more]
• “The Ecology of Literary Chronotopes.” Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. Ed. Hubert Zapf. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016. 590-604. _^[more]
• “The New Narrative Movement, the Sonnet Sequence, and African American Postmodernism.” New Perspectives on American Poetry: From Walt Whitman to the Present. Ed. Jiri Flajsar and Paulina Flajsarova. Olomuc: Palacky University, 2015. 123-42.
• “Kritische Theorie und Ecocriticism.” Ecocriticism: Eine Einführung. Ed. Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe. Cologne: Böhlau, 2015. 160-71_{. [more]}
• “Headnotes and Endnotes in the African American Sonnet.” Symbolism 15 (2015): 37-55. ^_[more]
• “The Bonds of Empire: (Post-)Imperial Negotiations in the 007 Film Series.” Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires. Ed. Barbara Buchenau and Virginia Richter. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2015. 305-26. _^[preview]
• “The Vernacular Sonnet and the Resurgence of Afro-Modernism in the 1940s.” American Literature 87.2 (2015): 253-73. ^_[more]
• “Postcolonial Pursuits in African American Studies: The Later Poems of Claude McKay.” Postcolonial Studies Across the Disciplines. Ed. Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grünkemeier. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. 131-49. ^_[preview]
• “‘The Short Cut to Posterity’: Authority and Representation in Henry James’s Literary Tales.” Intellectual Authority and Literary Culture in the US, 1790–1900. Ed. Günter Leypoldt. Heidelberg: Winter, 2013. 245-58.
• “James Weldon Johnson and the Genteel Tradition.” Arizona Quarterly 69.2 (2013): 85-102. _^[preview]
• “Theorien des Sonetts.” Theorien der Literatur: Grundlagen und Perspektiven. Vol. 6. Ed. Günter Butzer and Hubert Zapf. Tübingen: Francke, 2013. 101-20.
• “Detective James Bond: From British Gentleman to Hard-Boiled American.” Detective Fiction and Popular Visual Culture. Ed. Cecile Sandten, Gunter Süß, and Melanie Graichen. Trier: WVT, 2013. 169-80.
• “Transnationalism in Contemporary Black Poetry: Derek Walcott, Rita Dove, and the Sonnet Form.” Transnational American Studies. Ed. Udo J. Hebel. Heidelberg: Winter, 2012. 249-68.
• “From Literary Anthropology to Cultural Ecology: German Ecocritical Theory Since Wolfgang Iser.” Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches. Ed. Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. 71-83. ^_[jstor]
• (with Christina Caupert) “The Ecological Function of Imaginative Texts: A Recent Model in Theory and Practice.” The Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizons. Ed. Serpil Oppermann et al. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2011. 268-78. _^[abstract]
• “Between Poststructuralism and the Natural Sciences: Models and Strategies of Recent Cultural Ecology.” Anglistik 21.1 (2010): 175-91.
• “Von der Determination zur Performanz: Der Bastard als moderne Identitätskonzeption bei Henry James.” Bastard: Figurationen des Hybriden zwischen Ausgrenzung und Entgrenzung. Ed. Andrea Bartl and Stephanie Catani. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. 111-24.
• “‘Idendifine the Individuone’: Joyce’s Instable Selves in Finnegans Wake.” Redefining Modernism and Postmodernism. Ed. Sebnem Toplu and Hubert Zapf. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 166-73.
• “Notes Toward an Ecological Conception of Bakhtin’s ‘Chronotope.’” Ecozon@ 1.1 (2010): 98-102. ^{_{[read online]}}
• “Gerty MacDowell, Poetess: Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey and the Nausicaa Episode of Ulysses.” Twentieth-Century Literature 55.3 (2009): 378-92. _^[jstor]
• “The Uses of Authenticity: Hemingway and the Literary Field, 1926-1936.” Journal of Modern Literature 33.1 (2009): 28-42. _^[jstor]
• “The Fragmented Self: Re-Reading Dubliners as Autobiographical Fiction.” Joyce in Progress: Proceedings of the 2008 James Joyce Graduate Conference in Rome. Ed. Franca Ruggieri, John McCourt, and Enrico Terrinoni. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 2-13. ^_[preview]
• “Formen kulturökologischen Erzählens von Dickens bis Ishiguro.” Kulturökologie und Literatur: Beiträge zu einem transdisziplinären Paradigma der Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Hubert Zapf. Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. 59-74.
• “‘The Poet’s Voice’: Dialogicity and Cultural Regeneration in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” Anglia 126.3 (2008): 503-19. ^{_{[more][read online]}}

Reviews

• “The Benefits of Bringing Cognitive Sciences into Ecocriticism.” Rev. of Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative, by Alexa Weik von Mossner. Journal of Literary Theory 12 (2018). Web. _{^{[read online]}}
• Rev. of The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing, by Paul Stephens. Amerikastudien / American Studies 62.2 (2017). Web. ^_[pd­f]
• “Review Essay: Henry James and Transatlantic Modernism.” Rev. of. Travel, Modernism and Modernity, by Robert Burden; Freewomen and Supermen: Edwardian Radicals and Literary Modernism, by Anne Fernihough; Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language, by Megan Quigley. Henry James Review 38.1 (2017): 101-107.
• Rev. of The Cambridge History of American Poetry, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt. Amerikastudien / American Studies 60.2-3 (2015). Web. ^_[pdf]
• Rev. of Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America, by Mike Chasar. Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.1 (2014). Web. ^_[pdf]
• Rev. of Disney: un capitalisme mondial du rêve, by Alexandre Bohas. Vingtième Siècle 120 (2013): 191.
• Rev. of Readings in Performance and Ecology, ed. Wendy Aarons and Theresa J. May. Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 1.2 (2013): 298-301. ^{_{[read online]}}
• “Eco-Shakespeare.” Rev. of Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton, and Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia, by Simon C. Estok. Shakespeare Jahrbuch 149 (2013): 266-68.
• Rev. of Henry James’ Narrative Technique: Consciousness, Perception, and Cognition, by Kristin Boudreau. Henry James Review 33.3 (2012): 293-96.
• Rev. of Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies, by Patrick Murphy.  Anglia 128.2 (2010): 358-60. ^{_{[read online]}}
• Rev. of Short Story: Textsorte und Leseerfahrung, by Renate Brosch. Modern Language Review 104.1 (2009): 146-48.
• Rev. of Schwelle. Passage. Verwandlung: Ein Interpretationsentwurf, by Leo Truchlar. Anglia 126.1 (2008): 197-200. ^{_{[read online]}}
• Rev. of The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism, by Pericles Lewis. Modern Language Review 103.3 (2008): 814-15.

Environmental Aesthetics: History, Theory, Politics
Network "Ideology and Aesthetics", 27 Feb 2023

Klimawandel und Migration in der Literatur
University of Konstanz / VHS, 15 Dec 2022

Habilitation

• Dominik Steinhilber, "Dark Nature: Haunted Ecologies in American Romanticism" (working title)

Doctoral Theses

• Nicole Braden-Johnson, “An Ecocritical Analysis of U.S. Agricultural Literature of the Modernist Era”
• Jannis Buschky, "The Regional Imaginations of the Early American Oil Extraction Novel, 1900 - 1945"
• Haley Culpepper, "The Aesthetics of (Un)Sustainability: Framing Ecotourism in the Sustainability Movement"
• Melanie Frey, "Road Trip as Genre: American Road Narratives between 1900-1930"
• Ashley Moser, "In/Visible Infrasturcture: Public Works and the Public Work of Utopia in  in the Science Fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson" (working title)
• Dominik Sattler, “Transcendentalist Legacies in T. C. Boyle's Novels” (working title)