Dr. Antonia Purk

Antonia Purk is a postdoctoral researcher at the chair of American Literary and Cultural Studies.

Her current research project “Realist Disruptions: Reconfigurations of American Literary Realism in the Long Nineteenth Century” considers American literary realism as a dynamic and contested mode rather than a coherent aesthetic tradition. Focusing on women writers and writers of color, the project investigates how realist texts reflect on the possibilities and limits of realist representation and how moments of aesthetic disruption—through sentimentalism, orientalism, or the fantastic—reshape realism from within. By treating formal inconsistencies and generic hybridity as meaningful aesthetic and political interventions rather than flaws, the project offers a perspective on realism as a self-reflexive mode that negotiates questions of representation, identity, and cultural authority.

In her previous project (doctoral thesis) she attended to the works of Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid and how the fictional and non-fictional texts not only speak to the personal pasts of the author and her literary figures, but how they also perform memory work with regard to a collective Afro-Caribbean history. Focusing on the interplay of the media text, photography, and the human body, the project highlighted the poetic aspects of Kincaid's works in producing new knowledges of the past where previously there were none, as predominant forms of historiography were (and still are) dominated by the mechanisms of colonialism which eclipsed all other versions of history but that of the West, and to respond to the continuing effects of traumatic history on contemporary lives. Antonia Purk’s monograph Jamaica Kincaid’s Writings of History. A Poetics of Impermanence was published by De Gruyter in 2023. Open Access: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111027500/html?lang=de

Antonia Purk received a doctoral degree in American Literature from the University of Erfurt in 2021. She had previously studied American Literature, Comparative Literature, and German and British Literature at the Universities of Bayreuth, Erfurt, and Austin, TX. She was a visiting scholar at the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and Its Diasporas, York University, Toronto, Kanada (2014) and visited the archives of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA, as Christoph-Daniel-Ebeling Fellow (2022). She was a lecturer and researcher (American Literature) at the University of Erfurt from 2017 to 2021 and academic coordinator of the research group “Praxeologies of Truth” (U of Erfurt) from 2021 to 2025.

Teaching topics include autobiographical writing, literature and knowledge, anglophone Caribbean literature, postcolonial studies, American realism and regionalism, American Gothic, food in literature, and visual forms of narrative, such as graphic novels.