Short Biography

Thomas Ernst was born in 1974 in Germany. He studied literature, linguistics and philosophy at the universities of Duisburg, Bochum, Berlin in Germany and Leuven in Belgium. He published the monographs Popliteratur (2001/2005), Politisches Schreiben in der Gegenwart (2008/2013), the volumes Wissenschaft und Macht (ed., 2004), SUBversionen (ed., 2007), Verortungen der Interkulturalität (ed., 2012) and the literary anthologies Europa erlesen: Ruhrgebiet (ed., 2009) and Das Ruhrgebiet in der Gegenwartsliteratur (ed., 2010). He taught at the universities of Duisburg-Essen, Trier, at the Pop Academy Baden-Württemberg in Mannheim and at the universities of Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Leuven (Belgium) and Luxembourg. In 2005, he worked as a visiting scholar at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures of the Columbia University of New York. In 2008, his PhD-thesis on Subversive Concepts of Contemporary German Prose was accepted by the University of Trier, from 2008 to 2010, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg on a project on multilingual literatures in the BeNeLux and Germany. Since 2010, he is working as an assistant professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen (literature and media studies) and he is currently writing on his research project on the history of intellectual property.

Selected Texts in English

Pop vs. Plagiarism. Popliterary Intertextuality, Staged Authorship and the Disappearance of Originality in Helene Hegemann. In: Margaret McCarthy (ed.): German Pop Literature: Contemporary Perspectives. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014 (Companions to Contemporary German Culture; paper accepted, tbp).

Brussels is Europe. Koen Peeters’ Grote Europese Roman as Multilingual Literature. In: Till Dembeck/Liesbeth Minnaard (eds.): Beyond the Myth of Monolingualism. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2014 (Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race; paper accepted, tbp).

Multiculturalism and Multilingualism in Contemporary Prose in Flanders: The Writings by Chika Unigwe, Koen Peeters and
Benno Barnard (in collaboration with Sarah De Mul). In: Wolfgang Behschnitt/Sarah De Mul/Liesbeth Minnaard (eds.): Literature, Language, and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2013 (Textxet. Studies in comparative literature, nr. 71), S. 283-313.

From Avant-Garde Guerillas to Capitalistic Teamwork? Concepts of Collective Creative Writing Between Subversion and Submission. In: Gerhard Fischer/Florian Vaßen (eds.): Collective Creativity. Collaborative Work in Literature, the Sciences and the Arts. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2011 (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und zur Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, nr. 148), p. 229-241.

‘Kanak Sprak’ and Union Suspecte. Scandals Around Hybrid and Multilingual Literature in Germany and Belgium. In: Mirjam Gebauer/Pia Schwarz Lausten (Hg.): Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe. München 2010, p. 243-258.

Conference report ‚Collective Creativity’. 23.07.2009-26.07.2009, Sydney. In: H-Soz-u-Kult, 23.09.2009, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=2784 (by Anna König, in collaboration with Ned Curthoys, Thomas Ernst, Andrew McNamara and Ralf Rauker).

German pop literature and cultural globalisation. In: Stuart Taberner (ed.): German literature in the age of globalisation. Birmingham 2004 (The New Germany in Context), p. 169-188.