• Erasure: Poetics, Politics, Performance: As part of her scholarly investment in the cross-over between poetry and politics, Mahshid Mayar's current second-book/Habilitation research project, Erasure: Poetics, Politics, Performance [working title], focuses on the political, the historical, and the aesthetic in contemporary US erasure poetry. In this project, she examines protest poetry by a wide number of 21st-century US-American poets, including Solmaz sharif, Philip Metres, Nick Flynn, Janet Holmes, and Niina Pollari.
• American Studies and Noise: Invested in sound studies, Mahshid Mayar currently collaborates with Sabine N. Meyer (Universität Bonn) and Stefan Benz (Universität Bonn) on an essay collection that re-visits “noise” as a generative, cross-disciplinary analytics within American literary / cultural studies.
• Silence(s) and Silencing in US Literature and Culture: Mahshid Mayar has an ongoing interest in the study of silence(s) and silencing within the broader field of sound studies. Together with Marion Schulte (Universität Rostock), Mahshid Mayar has co-edited Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations across Disciplines, an edited interdisciplinary volume, including 16 essays by scholars from across the globe, which was published in summer 2022 with Palgrave Macmillan.
• Companion to US Empire: Part of her long-standing interest in the question of empire in the US context, and together with Mischa Honeck (Universität Kassel), Mahshid Mayar co-edits Companion to US Empire [working title]. A volume in the de Gruyter book series “Empires through the Ages in Global Perspective” (under contract), this book project will launch by an international workshop scheduled to take place at Universität Kassel in summer 2023. 

I am an assistant professor of American Literature and Culture at Anglistik III, University of Mannheim, where I teach and conduct research with focus on transnational / Asian-American Studies. My current research interests lie in the crossover between 21st-century Asian-American and Indigenous protest poetry and documents of war, critical sound studies (incl. the study of silence and noise), new empire studies, historical childhood studies, 19th-century cultural geography of the U.S., and history of race and racialization.

Winner of the 2022 Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies (awarded by the American Studies Association), my first book, Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire , has been published by the University of North Carolina Press. Together with Marion Schulte (Universität Rostock), I have co-edited Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations across Disciplines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), an essay collection that offers a cross-disciplinary survey of silence and silencing across the humanities.

Teaching and Research Interests

• Asian-American and Indigenous Documental Protest Poetry
• Sound, Silence, Noise in Contemporary U.S. Literature
• Transnational American Studies (emphasis on Race & Racialization)
• 19^th-Century US Empire | Cartographies of Empire
• Childhood Studies | History of Education | Imperial Pedagogies
• Archives and Politics of Archiving | Archival Silences