Professor Dr. Ulfried Reichardt holds the Chair of American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Mannheim since 2001. His research interests include the consequences of digitization, globalization, and recent life sciences for subjectivity, the individual, and especially for human knowledge, the conception of the individual in comparative perspective, music-literature-knowledge and especially the authors William Faulkner and Richard Powers.

He studied at the Universities of Heidelberg, Cornell and the Freie Universität Berlin, was a university assistant at the University of Hamburg and held a substitute professorship at the University of Cologne. Research stays at Columbia University, New York, the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, York University and the University of California Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara, among others. Doctorate 1988 at the FU Berlin (Interior Views of Postmodernism, 1991) and Habilitation 1998 at the University of Hamburg (Alterity and History: Functions of Slavery in the American Novel). Other publications include Engendering Men, Time and the African American Experience, Measuring Globalization and Globalization: Literatures and Cultures of the Global, Network Theory and American Studies, as well as essays on the dimension of time in literature and culture, American pragmatism, music in America, diaspora culture, and various American authors of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Founder and speaker of the doctoral program “Formations of the Global” (2004–2009), member of the board of IASA (International American Studies Association, 2011–2015) and Principal Investigator of the DFG-funded research project “Probing the Limits of the Quantified Self: Human Agency and Knowledge in the Information Age” (2015–2018).

His teaching includes lectures that survey American literary and cultural history, seminars on literature and economics or finance, the contemporary novel, American poetry, Americanization and global culture, “Writing Pop: Journalistic Approaches to Popular Culture,” the American thought tradition of transcendentalism and pragmatism, gender construction, and literary theory.