Areas of Expertise
- Late 18th to early 19th century German literature
- Contemporary German Nature Writing
- Anthropocene Studies / Anthropocene and Enlightenment
- Post-&Neocolonialism and Ecology-as-Intersectionality
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. Her main research project focuses on three material-discursive, non-human agents – mushrooms, stones, and stars – and inquires to what extent they inspire a critique of anthropos-centric, Enlightenment ideas (particularly by Kant and Descartes). 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 onto-/epistemological modi of existence.
Her broader interests include the relationship between the Anthropocene and the Enlightenment, questions of (im-)materiality in German art and literature, and the intersection of ecology with post- and neocolonialism. Aside from working on her first monograph, she is currently co-editing 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 and Tanja Nusser.