Journal Articles & Book Chapters | “‘Holes Swarming with Human Beings’: Racing the Urban Underclass in the Antebellum City Mystery Novel.” The Aliens Within: Danger, Disease, and Displacement in Representations of the Racialized Poor. Ed. Geoffroy de Laforcade, Daniel Stein, and Cathy C. Waegner. Anglia Book Series. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. 45-65.
The Serial Politics of the American City Mystery Novel
Books | The Serial Politics of the American City Mystery Novel, 1844-1860 (monograph, in preparation).
Books | Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s-1860s: Popular Culture – Serial Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. (ed. with Lisanna Wiele)
Journal Articles & Book Chapters | “Slavery as Racial Dis/order in Antebellum American: The Case of the City Mystery Novel.” Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s-1860s: Popular Culture – Serial Culture. Ed. Daniel Stein and Lisanna Wiele. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 287-309.
Journal Articles & Book Chapters | “Serial Politics in Antebellum America: On the Cultural Work of the City-Mystery Genre.” Media of Serial Narrative. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2017. 53-73.
Journal Articles & Book Chapters | “Transatlantic Politics as Serial Networks in the German-American City Mystery Novel, 1850-1855.” Traveling Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Cultural Concepts and Transatlantic Intellectual Networks. Ed. Erik Redling. Berlin: De Gruyter. 2016. 249-267.
Journal Articles & Book Chapters | “Race, Gender, Sex, Class, Nation: Serienpolitik zwischen Sehnsucht und Heimsuchung in Ludwig von Reizensteins Die Geheimnisse von New-Orleans (1854–1855).” Sehnsucht suchen? Amerikanische Topographien aus komparatistischer Perspektive. Ed. Simone Sauer-Kretschmer and Christian A. Bachmann. Berlin: Chr. A. Bachmann Verlag, 2014. 39-69.
Comics and Graphic Narrative
Since the late 2000s I have published extensively on superhero comics, particularly on their serial forms and functions, most prominently in my monograph Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre (Ohio State UP, 2021).
I have also studied adaptations of literature into comics, intermedial and transmedial dynamics, and the pedagogical potentials of the medium. I am currently involved in the joint research project The Serial Politics of Pop Aesthetics: Superhero Comics and Science Fiction Pulp Novels, which I direct together with Niels Werber as part of the Collaborative Research Center 1472 Transformations of the Popular.
Literature and Music
I have long been fascinated with intersections of literature and music. My special focus is jazz autobiographies and other forms of musicians’ memoirs. This interest is at the center of my dissertation about trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong, which eventually became Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz (University of Michigan P, 2012). I have also published essays on the autobiography of Jewish hipster clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow and on country artists Loretta Lynn and Steve Earle, as well as on graphic musical biographies.
African American Literature
I have always been intrigued by African American literature and (popular) culture. Central to this intrigue is my work on Louis Armstrong as a cultural icon and jazz autobiographer, but I have also looked at writers like Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama. Most recently, I have started working on a book about the resurgence of history in recent African American graphic narratives that addresses questions of cultural memory and the archive. Some of this research is affiliated with the African Atlantic Research Group.
