Dr. Sina Schuhmaier

Dr Sina Schuhmaier’s research spans the fields of postcolonial studies, cultural studies, material ecocriticism, and the medical humanities. Her postdoctoral research project investigates representations of contagious disease in the context of the British empire. She is currently studying depictions of disease during the transatlantic slave trade, literary and non-fictional, and she acquired funding to conduct archival research in different archives in London in the summer of 2025. Her article “Subject Formation in the Early Black Atlantic: Disease Narratives of the Middle Passage” (PDF) was awarded the 2025 BSLS and JLS essay prize.

Her first monograph Changing the Record: Englishness, Popular Music, and the Song Lyric in the 21st Century, to be published with Routledge, examines contemporary British song lyrics, bringing into dialogue the fields of literary studies and popular music studies. Against the backdrop of the dominant discourse of the nation in the age of Brexit, the book sheds light on the cultural functioning of the song lyric and contributes to the growing field of critical Englishness studies.

Further research interests include: 

- British landscape representations, contemporary nature writing, and the pastoral (see here for the 2024 “Re-Reading Landscapes” conference)

- Black British literature 

- literary critiques of capitalism and neoliberalism (see here for the co-edited collection Literarische Perspektiven auf den Kapitalismus)

Dr Sina Schuhmaier is an academic staff member at the Chair of English Literary and Cultural Studies (A II). She studied English studies at the Universities of Heidelberg and Nottingham and completed the Master programme “Modern Literature, Media, and Culture” at the University of Mannheim in 2017. She submitted her PhD thesis on “Dominant and Dissonant Discourses of the Nation: Pop Music, the Song Lyric, and Englishness in the 21st Century” in September 2023. In spring 2022, she spent a three-month research visit as a PhD student at the University of Bristol. Since 2023, Sina has been co-coordinating the “Reading List 2.0.” 

Dr Sina Schuhmaier’s teaching comprises Anglophone literature from different periods, with a focus on contemporary British literature and postcolonial literature. Her courses cover novels, short stories, and poetry, as well as multimedial forms such as the song lyric or the TV series. Students acquire an understanding of literature as a medium of cultural self-reflection, which negotiates, amongst other things, discourses of the body, nation, empire, and identity.