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Anna-Maria Senuysal

Anna-Maria Senuysal at Ohio State

Anna-Maria Senuysal

Post-Doctoral Scholar

senuysal.1@osu.edu

336 Hagerty Hall

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, Reason and Relation: Proto-Ecological Thought and the Decentering of Anthropos in the German Imagination. 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 processes of decay and emergence. 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 After Form: Decomposition, Disorder, and the Aesthetics of Emergence.

Her broader interests include German literature with foci on the Age of Goethe and the twenty-first century, film and media studies (in particular the works of Milo Rau and Ursula Biemann) and the intersection of ecology with post- and neocolonialism. She recently published 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.