Sections
Teaching and research at the Department for English and American Studies is made up of the four sections:
Medieval English Literature and Historical Linguistics Literary Studies: American Literature and Culture, Modern English Literature, Anglophone Literatures and Literary Translation, and Comparative Literature English Language and Linguistics Language Skills.
Medieval English Literature and Historical Linguistics
The English Middle Ages (c.500-c.1500) are not dark; rather, they are bright, colourful and extremely complex. The Department of Medieval English Literature and Historical Linguistics teaches students the philological, literary and linguistic skills that enable them to better understand modern cultural and linguistic phenomena by interpreting the differences between this historically distant era and the present day.
The history of the English language and literature is shaped by intercultural and intertextual traditions. Latin, Scandinavian and French influences are also constitutive of modern cultural artefacts. Accordingly, the precise synchronic analysis of medieval texts is of equal importance to diachronic comparative-contrastive questions, the answers to which require cultural studies knowledge, precise analytical procedures and critical-theoretical reflection on one's own actions.
American Studies
The courses and research activities at the Department of American Studies cover a broad range of US-American literature and culture, stretching from the early American (colonial) period to contemporary culture. We connect perspectives from literary studies, cultural studies, and media studies. A wide definition of ‘text’, which includes written, spoken, audiovisual, and digital forms of cultural expression, helps us to explore the manifold forms and functions of culture in exchange with their socio-historic, economic, political, and technological contexts. Traditionally, American Studies has embraced a broad concept of culture, including popular culture and new media. We examine literary genres such as narrative, poetry, and drama in different material manifestations.
We regard US-American literature as embedded in evolving networks of transnational, intermedial, and socio-political processes and discourses. Literature, in this sense, shapes and is shaped by diverse cultural and social figurations as well as systems of meaning-making, from formations of identity to power relations in increasingly digital environments. The research foci of the department include literature and culture of the 19th-21st century, critical digital studies, literature and science studies, intermediality, transnational studies, gender studies, African American literature, and literature and the economy.
English Language and Linguistics
The Department of English and American Studies has two professorships in linguistics, held by Kevin Tang and Ingo Plag. Kevin Tang's main areas of expertise are phonetics, phonology and morphology, while Ingo Plag is best known for his research in the fields of morphology and creolistics.
Professor Ingo Plag about English Linguistics at HHU
Professor Kevin Tang about English Lingustics at HHU
Modern English Literature
Research and teaching at our department cover the entire historical spectrum of British literature: from Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett to Sarah Kane; from William Wordsworth to T.S. Eliot to Jackie Kay; from Mary Shelley to James Joyce to Irvine Welsh; from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf to Zadie Smith.
We are committed to practice-based research and research-based teaching. Learn more about ‘research-as-practice’ and ‘practice-by-research’.
Anglophon Literature / Literary Translation
The department studies Anglophone literatures in our transculturally networked world. The central focus is on Caribbean, Indian, African and Australian literatures in English. We are interested in processes of exchange, interrelationships and local differences between these literatures. Memory and transculturality, cosmopolitanism and gender, postcolonial justice and ethics, visuality and visibility in postcolonial cultures, queerness and sexuality, and human-environment relations are some of the topics we focus on in teaching and research. We always take into account the English language as the language of imperialism and globalisation.
Postcolonial studies, transcultural studies, theories of world literature, translation theories, gender studies and environmental studies are some of the approaches we work with. When dealing with literature, we are concerned with both aesthetic and socio-political questions: What literary techniques do texts use to construct imaginative worlds, and what socio-political potential do these strategies have, e.g. for modelling community and human-environment relationships? In answering these questions, we take into account the embedding of literature in the international book market.
Comparative Literature
How do literary texts interact with one another, with other art forms, modes of thought and discourse, and with the world that surrounds them in all its complexity and uncertainty?
The Department of Comparative Literature introduces students to textual processes that cross linguistic as well as culturally and historically constructed boundaries. We invite students to explore literary texts in their rich and unique capacity to evoke the heterogeneous contexts from which they emerge, and which they in turn shape, articulate, render intelligible.
An ongoing engagement with these cultural practices challenges us to become—and remain—wide and close readers as well as critical and imaginative thinkers.
