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Biographical Information

Maria Sulimma is an American Studies scholar working in the intersecting areas of literary and cultural studies, urban studies, and feminist media studies. She is the Postdoctoral Researcher of the Research Group “Scripts for Postindustrial Urban Futures” (www.cityscripts.de) and the author of Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Her current project carries the working title “Trivial Pursuits: Literature, Gentrification, and the Politics of Prioritization in Postindustrial Cities.”

She completed her M.A. at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in 2012 with majors in English Philology and Political Science. She received her doctorate in North American Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2018. Before joining the Department of Anglophone Studies, Maria Sulimma was the administrator (wissenschaftliche Koordinatorin) of the Popular Seriality Research Unit (DFG-FOR 1091: “Populäre Serialität: Ästhetik und Praxis”) and a faculty member of the Department of Culture at the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies (Freie Universität Berlin). Alongside her work in academia, Maria has served as Equal Rights Representative (Gleichstellungsbeauftragte) and public educator with a thematic focus on Gender Roles, Gender and Media, Beauty Norms, Sexual Orientation, Critical Whiteness, Diversity, Intersectionality, Anti-Discrimination, Women’s Suffrage, etc.

Research Interests

• American Literature and Culture
• Feminist Media Studies
• Gender Studies
• Television Studies
• Seriality and Popular Culture
• Politics and/in Media
• Urban Studies
• Gentrification in Literature
• The City in Literature of the 19^th century
• Science Fiction and Afrofuturism
• Climate Fiction and Environmental Humanities

Publications

Monographs

Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television. Edinburgh: University Press, 2021.

Die anderen Ministerpräsidenten – Geschlecht in der printmedialen Berichterstattung über Berufspolitik. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2014. [Review by Simone Winkens: Portal für Politikwissenschaft: http://pw-portal.de/rezension/37821-die-anderen-ministerpraesidenten-44901 (2014)]

Articles

"Needs to Be More Explicit about the Methodologies…: Reluctance, Collaboration, and Vulnerability in Research Processes." Dossier "Method as Practice." Eds. Ilka Brasch and Alexander Starre. Amerikastudien / American Studies 67.1 (2022): 14-16.

"Recursive Cities: Seriality and Literary Urban Studies." In: Companion of Literary Urban Studies. Ed. Lieven Ameel, Routledge (in preparation).

"Wieviel Hitze verträgt ein Trinkwasserspender? Zur gegenderter Kanonbildung, Legitimität und einer kritischen Sphäre des Fernsehens.“ In: Realität in Serie: Realitätsbehauptungen und -effekte in Fernsehserien. Eds. Katja Kanzler, Stefan Schubert, and Sophie Spieler. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2022. 105-127.

"Sorting through Feminist Cabinets with Clare Hemmings’s Why Stories Matter (2011)." In: Culture^2: Theorizing Theory for the Twenty-First Century, Vol.. Eds. Frank Kelleter and Alexander Starre. Bielefeld: transcript, 2022. 127-142. Open Access here.

"Surviving the City: Zombies, Run! and the Horrors of Urban Exercise." In: Playing the Field II: American Studies, Video Games, and Space. Ed. Dietmar Meinel. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. 223-240.

"The Plane, the City, the Chase: Killing Eve and European Aviation Culture." Dossier "Contemporary US Television and/in the Banal Anthropocene. " Eds. Diane Negra and Julia Leyda. Screen 62.1 (2021): 107-115.

"Scripting Urbanity through Intertextuality in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became: I’m Really Going to Have to Watch Some Better Movies about New York." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (2021). DOI: 10.1080/00111619.2020.1865866

“Defined by Distance: The Roadtrip and Queer Love in Alice Isn’t Dead.” Ed. Julia Hoydis. Gender Forum 77 (2020), Special Issue: Feminism, Gender, and Podcast Studies: 69-89. (access at http://genderforum.org/)

"’Sir, she can hear you’: The Mute White Woman as Cinematic Meditation on Gender, Communication, and Heterosexual Romance." In American Counter/Publics. Eds. Ulla Haselstein, Frank Kelleter, Alexander Starre and Birte Wege. Heidelberg: Winter, 2019, 325-341.

with Julia Havas. "Through the Gaps of my Fingers: Genre, Femininity, and Cringe Aesthetics in Dramedy Television." Television & New Media, June 2018, doi.org/10.1177/1527476418777838.

"Lena Dunham: Cringe Comedy and Body Politics." In Hysterical! Women in American Comedy. Eds. Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. 379-401.

"Simultaneous Seriality: On the Crossmedia Relationship of Television Narratives." In Serial Narratives. Ed. Dr. Kathleen Loock. Special Issue of Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (2014): 127-143.

with Bettina Soller. "'It's a great time to be a woman in politics!' - Serielle Verhandlungen von Politikerinnen als Protagonistinnen von US-Fernsehserien." Indes – Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft 4 (2014): 78-88.

"'Did you shoot the girl in the street?' – On the Digital Seriality of The Walking Dead." Digital Seriality. Special Issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture. Eludamos 8 (2014): 83-100. http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/issue/view/vol8no1/showToc

with Bettina Soller. "'I can't identify myself as a woman! People can't know that!' – Female Protagonists in Current Political Drama and Comedy". Theme Week "Representing Democracy." In Media Res, 04. Nov. 2014. http://mediacommons.org/imr/2014/10/27/i-cant-identify-myself-woman-people-cant-know-female-protagonists-current-political-drama

"The Fanboy next Door: Whedon and his Appeal to self-professed Geeks." Theme Week "Much Ado About Joss Whedon." In Media Res, 02 Oct. 2013 (re-published on 30. Dec. 2013 as Retrospective Staff Selection for 2013). http://mediacommons.org/imr/2013/09/23/fanboy-next-door-whedon-and-his-appeal-self-professed-geeks

"Ein Aufschrei ohne Konsequenzen? " Blog contribution for the Göttinger Institut für Demokratieforschung. Crosspost: Cicero Online – Magazine für politische Kultur. March 8, 2013. Published: Politische Kultur in der Krise. Jahrbuch des Göttinger Instituts für Demokratieforschung 2013. Eds. Alexander Hensel, Roland Hiemann, Daniela Kallnich, Robert Lorenz, Katharina Rahlf. ibidem: Stuttgart 2014. 275-277. http://www.demokratie-goettingen.de/blog/ein-aufschrei-ohne-konsequenzen

Reviews

Schubert, Stefan. Narrative Instability: Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary Popular Culture. Heidelberg: Winter, 2019. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (forthcoming).

Cenamor, Rubén, and Stefan Brandt, eds. Ecomasculinities: Negotiating Male Gender Identity in U.S. Fiction. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. Anglia - Journal of English Philology 138.1 (2020): 207-211.

Kohlenberger, Judith. The New Formula For Cool: Science, Technology, and the Popular in The American Imagination. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 65.2 (2017): 231-234.

Lotz, Amanda. Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century, Amanda Lotz. In: Serial Narratives/Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 47.1-2 (2014): 212-213.

Podcast Review Cable Guys: Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century, Amanda Lotz. Critical Studies in Media Communication Podcast Series, März 2015. Link: https://audioboom.com/boos/2944592-cable-guys-television-and-masculinities-in-the-21st-century

Conference Report "'Popular Seriality' – Internationale Konferenz der DFG Forschergruppe 'Ästhetik und Praxis populärer Serialität', 6.-8.6.2013." Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft Online (Aug. 2013): www.zfmedienwissenschaft.de/index.php?TID=93

Bach, Annika and Katharina Fritsche, Margreth Lünenborg. Migrantinnen in den Medien -Darstellungen in der Presse und ihre Rezeption. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Femina Politica – Zeitschrift für feministische Politikwissenschaft 2/2012 198-200.

In the Press

Interview by Anne Lenhardt. Die Rhein Pfalz Zeitung. Jan. 6, 2018.  "Lange von Weißen Männern geprägt: Mediathek-Interview mit Maria Sulimma."

Interview by Verena Fücker. PULS – Das junge Programm des Bayrischen Rundfunks. Apr. 15, 2017. "Spielwiese: Flashbacks auf der Couch: Warum Serien so besessen sind von der Vergangenheit." http://www.ardmediathek.de/radio/Spielwiese/Flashbacks-auf-der-Couch-Warum-Serien-s/PULS/Audio-Podcast?bcastId=5923772&documentId=42170394

Interview by Christian Forberg. Deutschlandfunk Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Mar. 6, 2014. "Schwerpunktthema: Frauen an der Macht." http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/schwerpunktthema-frauen-an-der macht.1148.de.html? dram%3Aarticle_id=279194

Interview by Dorothee Barsch. ER MAG – Geschichten über Männer (Konrad Adenauer Foundation). Nov. 7, 2013 "Besorgte Versorger – die neuen alten TV-Väter." http://ermag.de/

Conference Papers and Invited Talks

"To live in a city is to consume its offerings: Speculative Fiction and Gentrification in Ling Ma’s Severance (2018)." ISSN Narrative Conference in Chichester, UK, June 28-30, 2022.

"Television and Seriality." Department of English and American Studies, University of Paderborn, Dec. 13, 2021.

"Online-Conversation: TV Thursday - Gentrifizierung und Fernsehen" with journalist Vanessa Schneider for Atlantische Akademie Rheinland-Pfalz, Dec. 9, 2021.

(with Hanna Henryson) "Nothing was solved, only accelerated: Gentrification as Apocalypse in Contemporary Dystopian Berlin Novels." Literature Colloquium at the University of Uppsala, Oct. 28, 2021, and Anglophone Studies Colloquium at the University of Essen, Dec. 7, 2021.

"Trivial Pursuits: Literature, Gentrification, and Postindustrial Cities." Collokwium, KWI/ Institute for the Advanced Study, Essen, Nov. 17, 2021.

"Hipsters and Gentrifiers in the Work of Sarah Schulman: A Literary Studies Approach to Gentrification." Lecture Series "Hipsters and Gentrifiers: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Culture," organized by Heike Steinhoff and Maria Sulimma, Bochum and Essen, Nov. 16, 2021.

“AOC plays Among Us: Politik und/als Populärkultur.“ Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut Saarland, Oct. 11, 2021.

Panelist for international Symposium "To Be Continued: Defining, Producing, Performing, Consuming, and Theorizing Serials and Adaptations." University of Delaware, Sept. 23-24, 2021.

“A Portal to a City that No Longer Exists: Drinking Coffee at the Bodega during Gentrification.” Symposium “Transatlantic Rust Belts – Scripting Urban Future(s),” Wayne State University in Detroit (MI), Sept. 10-12, 2021.

“TV Thursday: Good Wives, Witches & Girlbosses - wie Serien Frauen eine Stimme geben.” With Vanessa Schneider. Atlantische Akademie Rheinland-Pfalz, July 15, 2021.

"Needs to Be More Explicit about the Methodologies…: Reluctance, Collaboration, and Vulnerability in Research Processes." To be presented at annual conference of the German American Studies Association/DGfA in Heidelberg, June 2021.

"Where is Everybody?: The Agoraphobic Imagination of Gentrification in Times of COVID-19." To be presented at the international conference "Ecologies of Fear: Spatial Politics and Imaginaries of Crisis and Danger, " KWI Essen, June 17-19, 2021.

"Gentrification in Series:  Television Storytelling from Gentefied to Search Party." To be presented at the international conference "The City, the Media & Gentrification: Actors, Discourses and Representations," Sorbonne Université  Paris, May 28-29, 2021.

"Dilemma as Technique: Gentrifier-Protagonists in Sarah Schulman’s Maggie Terry and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation." To be presented at the international symposium on Gentrification and Literature, Keele University, May 7, 2021.

 "Online-Conversation: TV Thursday - Serial Politics" with journalist Vanessa Schneider for Atlantische Akademie Rheinland-Pfalz, April 15, 2021.

"The White Postfeminist Trivial of Lena Dunham(, Sylvia Plath, and Philip Roth)." Englisches Seminar, Leibniz University Hannover, Dec. 14, 2020

"Is that how Lovecraftian Horror Works Now?!: On Gentrification, Cultural Homogeneity, and Dichotomies of Consumerism in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became." Presented at Symposium "Representing Urban Change: Gentrification and Displacement in Literature and other Media" at Uppsala University, Aug. 21, 2020. Available online: https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/kanal/697/video/12920.

"Unmittelbare Stadt." Presented in the lecture series "Kernbegriffe für die Stadt der Zukunft" at the TU Braunschweig, July 7, 2020. Available online: https://www.uni-due.de/cityscripts/events

Talk and interview with actor Jasmin Tabatabai for "Focus Feminist Heritage: Bandits (1997)" at the Berlin Feminist Film Week, March 7, 2020.

"Of Trivial Things, Leisure, and Cities. " Presented at Symposium "Spending Time With/In the Nineteenth Century" at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Feb. 3, 2020.

"Killing Eve… and the Planet – One Flight at a Time: Popular Culture and Aviation." Presented in the lecture series "Popular Culture, Media, and Politics in the US" at the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Dec. 11, 2019.

"Seriality and Gender: The Politics and Practices of American Television. " Presented at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg, Oct. 24, 2019.

"Barista, barista, (anti-)capitalista?: White Masculinity, Coffee Connoisseurship, and the Urban Café." Presented at conference “Metropolitan Masculinities: Narratives of Gender and Urban Space” at RUB Bochum, Nov. 29-39, 2019.

“Play by Paratext: Television Narration, Seriality, and Interactivity.” Presented at ISSN Narrative Conference in Pamplona, Spain, June 1, 2019.

“Surviving the City: Zombies, Run! and the Horrors of Urban Exercise.” Presented at conference “Playing the Field II: Video Games, American Studies, and Space” at Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI) and University of Duisburg-Essen, May 17, 2019.

“Simultaneity versus Seriality: The Conflicting Temporality and Locality of Television’s Urban Chase.” Presented at Symposium of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS): “Simultaneity in the City,” University of Duisburg-Essen, Feb. 15, 2019.

"I am. I am. I am." – HBOs Girls zwischen distanzierten Blicken, Qualitätslabels, und geschlechtlicher Universalität." Invited Lecture, Deutschamerikanisches Institut Freiburg on Jan. 31, 2019.

"'You’d be the first to die.' – Death, Gender and Serialized Survivalism in The Walking Dead Franchise." Presented at "Console-ing Passions – International Conference on Television, Video, Audio, New Media and Feminism" at Bournemouth University, UK, July 15, 2018.

"Sir, she can hear you": The Mute Woman in Popular Culture." Presented at annual conference of the German American Studies Association/DGfA in Berlin, May 26, 2018.

"The Ur-Feminist Voice of a Generation?: Reading HBO's Girls and its 'Critical Sphere.'" Presented at "Reading American TV Series: An Interdisciplinary Conference" in Saarbrücken, Oct. 5, 2017.

"Ongoing: Gender and Seriality in Contemporary US-American Television Narratives," Institute of English and American Studies, TU Dresden, Apr. 10, 2017.

"No Place like Home?: The Apartment Shares of Contemporary Female TV Protagonists." Presented at annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies SCMS in Chicago, Mar. 23, 2017.

"Dead yourself?: Serialized Survival and Fanagement in The Walking Dead-Franchise," Seminar of English Studies, University Siegen, Nov. 29, 2016.

"More Cringe than Comedy?  The complicated Humor of HBO's Girls." Presented at annual conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies /AAAS "America Through the Small Screen: Television and Its Transformations" in Innsbruck, Austria, Nov. 12, 2016.

"Some of the Spoilers… will not be Spoilers": Crossmedia Franchises between Simultaneity, Adaptation, and Transmedia Storytelling." Presented in Workshop "New Media Writing," John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin, June 15, 2016.

"Will this Gender ever be Televised? On the Challenges of Seriality and Gender Studies." Presented at conference "Seriality Seriality Seriality: The Many Lives of the Field That Isn't One" in Berlin, June 22-24, 2016.

"2015: Simultaneous Seriality and The Walking Dead." Presented at ISSN Narrative Conference in Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 16-18, 2016.

"Beyond the Double Bind? Professional Femininities and 'Uniform' Desires." Presented at annual conference of the German American Studies Association/DGfA in Osnabrück, May 21, 2016.

"Not That Kind of Girl: Television's Troubled Relationship with Academia and TV Criticism." Presented at biennial conference of the European American Studies Association /EAAS in Constanta, Romania, Apr. 23, 2016.

"Investigating Gender and Seriality in HBO's Girls: The Hauntings of Television's Critical Sphere," Department of Communication Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Dec. 7, 2015.

'I don't WANT to kill any of you' - Gendered Discourses of Authority and Authorization," Project Narrative/Department of English, the Ohio State University, Nov. 23, 2015.

"'She is not your mother anymore': The Walking Dead and the Attraction of Serial Survival." Englisches Seminar, Leibniz Universität Hannover, July 24, 2015.

with Bettina Soller. "'You Know, Government Isn't Just a Boys' Club Anymore:' Female Protagonists in Contemporary US-American Political Drama and Comedy Series." Presented at "Console-ing Passions – International Conference on Television, Video, Audio, New Media and Feminism" in Dublin, Ireland, June 18-20, 2015.

"Quality TV? Die neuen amerikanischen Fernsehserien: The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad: Expertengespräch zum amerikanischen Fernsehen mit Frank Kelleter, Maria Sulimma und Felix Brinker," (Podium Discussion) John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin, June 13, 2015.

"Negotiating Serial Flow: The Walking Dead as Transmedia Phenomenon." Presented at conference "Transmedia Storytelling and Its Reception: Economies and Politics of Participation" in Hanover, Feb. 26, 2015.

"'Everybody Makes it Until They Don't' - Serial Television and Zombies in The Walking Dead," invited lecture at German-American Institute, Tübingen, Dec. 11, 2014.

"Gender and Serial Television Narratives," Department of Communication Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Oct. 3, 2014.

"It happened in Salem, not surprisingly - On (Not) Trying Witches in Buffy the Vampire Slayer," University of Göttingen, Jan. 18, 2014; and University of Konstanz, Feb. 1, 2014.

"Doing Gender in Crossmedia Serial Narratives." Presented at the 11th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore in Tartu, Estonia, July 1, 2013.

with Uta Scheer. "Once Upon a Time... Neue Geschlechterbilder in Polit-Medien und TV-Serien – Wahrheit oder Märchen? " Lecture Series G-Reihe organized by the Equal Opportunity Commissioners of the Faculties of Social Sciences and Humanities (Gleichstellungsbüros der sozialwissenschaftlichen und philosophischen Fakultäten), Göttingen, Jan. 16, 2013.

Organized Conferences

Student symposium. "Postfeminism(s) and Popular Culture" in Berlin, July 6, 2018 (with Dr. Kathleen Loock).

Conference "Seriality, Seriality, Seriality: The Many Lives of a Field that isn't One." John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies, Berlin, June 22-24, 2016 (with Frank Kelleter).

Grants and Research Honors

• Rolf-Kentner-Dissertation Prize in American Studies 2019, awarded by the Heidelberg Center for American Studies
• Scholarship Recipient, Fulbright American Studies Institute: "Love and Rage: The 1960s and Contemporary U.S. Culture and Politics," San Francisco State University, California, 2018.
• Elsa-Neumann-Scholarship of the State of Berlin, 2017-2018.
• DAAD-Travel grant, 2017.
• Travel grant awarded by the Graduate School of Humanities (GSGG), Göttingen, 2013.

Courses Taught