I graduated from Oldenburg University where I read English, German, and Political Science. In 1998, I received my PhD in Comparative Literature for a dissertation on Anglophone exilic literature in Great Britain 1933-1945, funded by a grant from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. On behalf of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), I spent three years as a Visiting Lecturer at the English and Foreign Languages University Hyderabad (India) and the University of Delhi, teaching Literature, Media Studies and European Studies. From 2001 to 2006, I worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Magdeburg where I completed my postdoctoral thesis (Habilitation) on contemporary Indian novels in English. Before joining the English and American Studies Department at Potsdam University in 2008, I held a permanent post as an Assistant Professor at the University of Tübingen.

I am spokesperson of the DFG-funded Research Unit (Forschungsgruppe) "Collaborations: Assemblages, Articulations, Alliances" (2025- 2028). Within the Research Unit I am principal investigator of the research project "From Bystander to Actor", which focuses on practices and programmes of literature as collaborative. 

I am also member of the DFG-funded Research Training Group (Graduiertenkolleg) “minor cosmopolitanisms”. 

From 2016 to 2020, I was the director of the bilateral research and exchange network "Writing the Cosmopolitan Imagination: Genre Transactions in World-Literary Space" with the University of Delhi , which was funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and its Indian counterpart, the University Grants Commission.

Information and instruction regarding the International and Research module can be found here or at

www.uni-potsdam.de/en/anglophone-modernities/for-current-students/international-research-and-exchange.

• genre transformations in world literary space
• South Asia studies
• theories and practices of cosmopolitanism
• English renaissance republicanism in literature, politics and aesthetics
• literature and the British Empire 
• cultural and literary theory
• postcolonialism

For an updated list of publications and more information on current projects, please see: https://dirkwiemann.online