Supervisor's Main Web Page 

Academic Background

Prof. Dr. Dirk Wiemann is the spokesperson of the Research Unit 'Collaborations: Assemblages, Articulations, Alliances'. He started his academic career at Oldenburg University and in 1998 received his PhD in Comparative Literature. With funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), he 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. He also held positions as Assistant Professor at the University of Magdeburg, wher he completed his habilitation thesis on contemporary Anglophone Indian novels, and the University of Tübigen before joining the English and American Studies Department at Potsdam University in 2008. From 2016 to 2020 he acted as the director of the bilateral research and exchange network "Writing the Cosmopolitan Imagination: Genre Transactions in World-Literary Space" with the University of Delhi.

Research Interests

• world literary forms beyond the novel 
• South Asia studies
• theories and practices of cosmopolitanism
• Berlin in post-1989 Anglophone fiction
• English renaissance republicanism in literature, politics and aesthetics
• literature and the British Empire 
• cultural and literary theory
• postcolonialism

Select Research Projects

• co-founding member and former spokesperson of the Research Training Group "minoir cosmopolitanisms"
• director of research project and exchange program "Writing the Cosmopolitan Imagination: Genre Transactions in World-Literary Space"

Select Publications

• Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts: Postcolonial Literature and the Politics of Gaps. New York (Bloomsbury Academic) 2023. 
• "Segments of a Larger Narrative: Political Formalism and Working-Class Story Cycles". The Political Uses of Literature: Global Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, 1920-2020 . Ed. Benjamin Kohlmann and Ivana Perica. New York (Bloomsbury Academic) 2024, 232-249.
• "Time of the Seasons: Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet as Crisis Literature". Temporalities in/of Crisis. Ed. Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann. London and New York (Routledge) 2023, 25-40.
• "Capitalist Realism | Network Realism". Realism: Origins, Challenges and Politics. Ed. Jens Elze. New York (Bloomsbury Academic) 2022, 209-227.
• Postcolonial World Literatures.  Special Issue Thesis Eleven 162.1. Ed. with Ira Raja and Shaswati Mazumdar. Melbourne (Sage) 2021.
• Postcolonial Studies: An Introduction. With Anke Bartels, Lars Eckstein and Nicole Waller. Stuttgart (Metzler Publishers) 2019.
• Genres of Modernity: Contemporary Indian Novels in English. Amsterdam and New York (Brill) 2008.