Anna-Maria Senuysal is joining the Umwelt Center as a Post Doctoral Scholar after graduating from the dual PhD program at the Universities of Cincinnati and Duisburg-Essen in the summer of 2024. Her research focuses on three material-discursive, non-human agents – mushrooms, stones, and stars – and inquires to what extent they inspire a critique of Enlightenment ideas (particularly by Kant and Descartes). She examines these three agents as theoretical objects as well as their appearances in German-speaking art, film and literature from the late-eighteenth to the twenty-first century, and ultimately conceives them as instigators for non-anthropocentric, relational onto-/epistemological modi of existence. In her work, she engages cultural productions from the German-speaking world in dialog with contemporary theorists like Leo Bersani, Karen Barad and Elizabeth Povinelli.
Her broader interests include the relationship between the Anthropocene and the Enlightenment, questions of (im-)materiality, and the intersection of ecology with post- and neocolonialism. Aside from working on her first monograph, she is currently co-editing a comprehensive volume on the work of Swiss theater and film director Milo Rau, titled The Theater of Milo Rau: Aesthetics – Ethics – Politics (Fink 2025) together with Teresa Kovacs and Tanja Nusser.
