Prof. Dr. Stefanie Schäfer

She studied English and French Philologies at the University of Trier and at the University of Minnesota and received her state teacher’s degree and MA in 2005. In 2009, she received her PhD in English from the University of Heidelberg and moved to the University of Jena, where she worked as a postdoctoral researcher and completed her habilitation with a venia legendi in North American Literature and Culture in 2017. She was a visiting professor of American Studies (Lehrstuhlvertretung) at the Universities of Erlangen and Augsburg and visiting professor of North American and British Media Studies at the University of Marburg. From 2020 to 2023, she was a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at the University of Vienna, Austria and in 2024, was named professor and chair of American Studies (Literature and Culture) at the University of Mannheim.

Member, Editorial Board Amerikastudien/American Studies (2024-)

Executive Director, Zentrum für Kanada-Studien, Universität Wien (2020–2023)

Co-Organisor, European Summer School in Canadian Studies, 2022 (Wien, Innsbruck)

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien (DGfA)

Gesellschaft für Kanada-Studien (GKS)

Bayerische Amerika-Akademie (BAA)

“Research Platform Mobile Cultures and Societies”, Universität Wien

“The Global Sentimentality Project“, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Stefanie Schäfer as a scholar of North American Studies is interested in the nexus between Literary, Feminist and Gender Studies, Visual and Popular Culture, and Mobility Studies. Her research clusters around figurations of the national, with current research projects on First Ladies, on the European Western Myths and Cowgirls, and on populism and celebrity culture in US politics, past and present. Stefanie’s second book, Yankee Yarns. Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in 19th-Century US Culture was published with Edinburgh University Press’ “Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Culture” series in 2021. Her recent and forthcoming publications include, among others, the edited volume Ladies in Arms. Women, Guns, and Feminisms in Contemporary Populare Culture (transcript, 2024, open access, co-ed. with Teresa Hiergeist), two articles on Greta Gerwig’s 2024 movie Barbie (with Katharina Gerund, 2025), and a contribution to the volume Teaching Canada II Identities, Cultures, Regions, entitled “A Home Where the Buffalo Roam? Teaching and Challenging the Canadian West” (with Alisa Preusser, 2025). Stefanie proudly hosts the podcast “LadyFiction”, based at Amerikazentrum Hamburg (https://amerikazentrum.de/podcasts/)

• Lecture American Literature and Culture
• PS CanLit or Can’tLit? The Contemporary Canadian Novel
• PS/HS First Ladies in American Literature and Culture
• HS The Western/Der Western (together with Prof. Dr. Thomas Wortmann)
• Reserach Colloquium American Studies