Affiliation: The Ohio State University
Keywords: Postanthropocentrism - Material Ecocriticism - Postcolonial Studies
Anna-Maria Senuysal received her dual PhD from the dual PhD program at the Universities of Cincinnati and Duisburg-Essen in the summer of 2024 and is currently working on her first monograph, Of Mushrooms, Stones, and Stars: Enlightenment Critique and Post-Anthropocentrism in 21st Century Literature, Theory, and Art. The project focuses on three material-discursive, non-human agents and inquires to what extent they inspire a critique of Enlightenment ideas (particularly by Kant and Descartes) and how this relates to the Anthropocene. 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 worldmaking. 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 recent surge in academic interest in fungi and processes of de- and recomposition, questions of (im-)materiality, and the intersection of ecology with post- and neocolonialism. She is currently preparing a number of articles for publication, including "Mycelial World(s): Fungal Worldmaking in Judith Schalansky's Verzeichnis einiger Verluste", "Fungal Ontologies / After Enlightenment" and "Ecologies of/as Intersectionality: Milo Rau's Antigone in the Amazon and Ursula Biemann's Forest Mind".