Areas of Expertise
- Late 18th to early 19th century German literature
- Contemporary German Nature Writing
- Anthropocene Studies / Postanthropocentrism
- Material Ecocriticism
After receiving her dual PhD from the Universities of Cincinnati and Duisburg-Essen in the Summer of 2024, Anna-Maria Senuysal joined the Umwelt Center for Germanic Studies & Environmental Humanities at the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures as a Postdoctoral Scholar. She is currently preparing her first monograph, Of Mushrooms, Stones, and Stars: Post-Anthropocentrism and Enlightenment Critique in 21st Century Literature, Theory, and Art. The project connects Enlightenment thought to the 21st century polycrisis and provides a material-ecocritical criticism of anthropos-centric, Enlightenment ideas (particularly by Kant and Descartes) by focusing on three material-discursive, non-human agents – mushrooms, stones, and stars. She examines these three agents as theoretical and material 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 ontological and epistemological figurations.
Anna has great interest in fungi and is particularly interested in the process of de- and recomposition. Currently, the Umwelt Center is preparing an edited volume titled Decomposition and Recomposition – Processes of Decay, Collapse, and Reorganization in German Literature, Art, and Thought, and she has also begun working on a second monograph exploring the material processes of de- and recomposition as a transformational metaphor and worldmaking-model, tentatively titled Un/Making Worlds – Decomposition and the Poetics of Transformation in German Thought and Cultural Production since 1750.
Her broader interests include the relationship between the Anthropocene and the Enlightenment, questions of (im-)materiality, fungal ontology and worldmaking, and the intersection of ecology with post- and neocolonialism. Furthermore, she is currently preparing the first 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, Tanja Nusser, and Nicole Rizzo.