About

Focusing on Turtle Island, my PhD project joins critiques of settler colonialism as producing so-called wasted lives and places. I read contemporary Indigenous literary and cultural texts as interventions into forms of waste colonialism in different contexts, from contaminated landscapes to museum spaces. My project speaks to a larger research interest as to how societies narrate themselves through their relations to what and whom they position as waste. It is thus centrally concerned with relations between literature, culture and socio-ecological in/justices. A literary and cultural studies scholar by training, I am interested in conversations between and across discard studies, literary studies and cultural studies and how these may inform an anti-colonial critique of waste colonialism from my own situated reading position as white German scholar engaging with Indigenous creative and critical voices.  

I am an associate fellow of the DFG-funded Research Training Group Minor Cosmopolitanisms at the University of Potsdam, where I also hold a position as a PhD researcher and lecturer in American Studies. I have previously worked as a research assistant and lecturer at the University of Münster (from which I hold a Master of Arts in British, American and Postcolonial Studies and a Master of Education) and the University of Augsburg. I am co-spokesperson of the Emerging Scholars Forum of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries (GKS).

Research Interests

• Indigenous literatures and theories
• Urban literatures
• Ecocriticism, waste and discard studies
• Anti-colonial, decolonial, postcolonial and settler-colonial studies
• Kinship studies
• Museum studies

Publications

Preusser, Alisa, and Stefanie Schäfer. "A Home Where the Buffalo Roam? Teaching and Challenging the 'Canadian West.'" Teaching Canada 2: Identities, Cultures, Regions, edited by Geneviève Susemihl and Grit Alter, Winter Verlag, 2025, pp. 123-50. Forthcoming.

Preusser, Alisa. "Poetic Reconfigurations and Reclamations of the Wasteland in Craig Santos Perez’s Habitat Threshold." Postcolonial Text, vol. 19, no. 1-2, Double Special Issue: Ecological Solidarities across Post/Colonial Worlds, Ed. Jennifer Leetsch, 2024.

---. "New Ways of Telling True Stories: Reflections on Ecological Solidarities across Post/Colonial Worlds." Jennifer Leetsch, Arunima Bhattacharya, Trang Dang, Baldeep Kaur, Hannah Nelson-Teutsch, Alisa Preusser, Peri Sipahi and Christina Slopek-Hauff. Postcolonial Text, vol. 19, no. 1-2, Double Special Issue: Ecological Solidarities across Post/Colonial Worlds, Ed. Jennifer Leetsch, 2024.

---. “Performing the Nation in Thomas King’s Short Fiction.” Zeitschrift für Kanadastudien, vol. 41, 2021, pp. 152-74.

Events Organized

Discard Studies reading group, ongoing. 

Conference panel “Research in Dialogue: Thinking with ‘Objects’” at the Annual Conference of the German Association for Postcolonial Studies (GAPS) on “Post/Colonial Environments,” University of Zurich, May 9-11, 2024. 

Emerging scholars' colloquium and panel at the Annual Conference of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries  (GKS), Grainau, February 16-18, 2024. Co-organized with Isis Luxenburger.

First online “Canadian Studies Colloquium,” Emerging Scholars Forum (ESF) of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries  (GKS), November 16, 2023. Co-organized with Florian Wagner.

Conference panel “Thinking through and against Post/Colonial Hydro-Infrastructures” at the Annual Conference of the German Association for Postcolonial Studies (GAPS) on “Postcolonial Infrastructure,” University of Konstanz, May 18-20, 2023. Co-organized with Baldeep Kaur.

Lecture series “How Do We Think (in) the ‚We‘? Human/ities, Relationality, Incompleteness and Indebtedness,” RTG “Minor Cosmopolitanisms,” University of Potsdam, Summer term 2023. Co-organized with third-generation RTG fellows.

Online workshop “Studying Indigenous Literatures and Cultures of Turtle Island in Europe: Questions of Methodology, Positionality, Accountability, and Research Ethics,” Emerging Scholars Forum (ESF) of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries  (GKS), May 5-6, 2022. Co-organized with Atalie Gerhard, Johanna Lederer and Manuel Sousa Oliveira.

Presentations

"'Ts’uu – Cedar:' Unsettling Museal Encounters." 34th Annual Conference of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS) "Post/Colonial Environments." University of Zurich, May 2024.

"Refusing Arctic Borders: Sovereignty, Care and Form in Chantal Bilodeau’s Sila." 45th annual conference of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries "Borders – Migration – Mobility." Grainau. February 2024.

"Against the Necropolitics of Settler Colonialism: Literary Kin- & World-Making in the Ruins." Postcolonial Narrations 2022 “Postcolonial Matters of Life and Death”. Universität Bonn. October 2022. 

"Poetic Reclamations and Reconfigurations of the WasteLands in Indigenous Literatures." Workshop "Cultural Memory and Literature: Research in Dialogue," Graduiertenkolleg Practicing Place: Soziokulturelle Praktiken und epistemische Konfigurationen, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. July 2022.

"'Is It a Climate Change Crisis or Is It a Kinship Crisis?' Environmental In/Justice and Solidarity in the WasteLands." 32nd Annual Conference of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS) "Contested Solidarities: Agency and Victimhood in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures." Goethe Universität Frankfurt. May 2022.

"Resisting Waste Colonialism: Indigenous Literary Interventions." 34th European Association for American Studies (EAAS) Conference: Wastelands. University of Madrid. April 2022.

“Waste Matters: Tracing the Politics of Waste in Thomas King’s Novels.” 42. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Kanada-Studien in deutschsprachigen Ländern (GKS) “Ecologies – Environments – Ethics.” Grainau. February 2022.

“Sila’s Arctic: Transnational Relations under Contestation.” 31st Annual Conference for the Postgraduate Forum (PGF) of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA) “Transnational Relations: Past, Present and Future.” Universität Stuttgart. December 2021.

“Navigating Water Boundaries in Thomas King’s Truth & Bright Water.” 41. American Indian Workshop “Indigenous Shapes of Water.” Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. November 2020.

“Performing the Nation in Thomas King’s Short Fiction.” 41. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Kanada-Studien in deutschsprachigen Ländern (GKS) “Political Orders.” Grainau. February 2020.

“‘The Woman Who Fell from the Sky’ – Eine indigene Schöpfungsgeschichte als Intervention in dominante Umweltdiskurse.” Konfliktnarrative: Bürgerkriege, Generationenkonflikte, identitätspolitische Auseinandersetzungen. Universität Augsburg. February 2020.

“Stuck in the Borderlands: Crossing the 49th Parallel in Thomas King's ‘Borders.’” Borders and Crossings 2019: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Travel and Travel Writing. University of Leicester. July 2019.

“A Cyborg Reading of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist.” Fantastic Beasts, Monstrous Cyborgs, Aliens and Other Spectres: Exploring Alterity in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Universität Freiburg. October 2018.

“Moving across Borders in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony.” Moving Centres & Traveling Cultures. Postgraduate Forum “Postcolonial Narrations,” Goethe Universität Frankfurt. October 2018.