Florian Deckers is a research associate in the department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen and is part of the UA Ruhr graduate research group Scripts for Postindustrial Urban Futures: American Models, Transatlantic Interventions. His dissertation project “Raising Latinx Voices” investigates contemporary approaches of Latinx artists in New York that rescript the urban space as well as the identity of the fastest growing minority in the US.

Between December 2019 and March 2020, Florian Deckers was in New York City doing field research and working for the UA Ruhr Liaison Office support in their mission to promote academic exchange between North America and the Ruhr region. In June of 2022, he was able to revisit NY and continue his research on public wall art in the neighborhoods of Spanish Harlem and Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Florian holds a combined BA in German Language and Literature and Anglophone Studies and a combined MA in American Studies and Literature and Media Practice. In 2018, he completed the MA program with his thesis on transnational automobile advertising in Germany and the US and its reconstruction as well as commodification of national images.