Johannes Maria Krickl is a doctoral researcher of the UA Ruhr graduate research group “Scripts for Postindustrial Urban Futures: American Models, Transatlantic Interventions.” He holds a B.A. in Anglophone Studies and Scandinavian Studies and an M.A. in American Studies from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. A thesis on the essayist and cultural radical Randolph S. Bourne has spawned Johannes’s interest in transatlantic urban studies and the American intellectual history behind it. Further topics he’s researched are the American Lyrical Left, Literary Nonfiction, James Fenimore Cooper, and 19^th and 20^th century American intellectual history.

Johannes’s current project, Waterfront Reconquista: Conflicting Scripts for Waterfront and Port Developments in Inland Harbor Cities, investigates and compares the scribal logic of postindustrial urban change in the US Rust Belt and the German Ruhr Valley from the 1980s onward. Detecting a difference in the space making practices of the operating container harbor and the revitalized inner-city waterfront, this project tries in synthesis to disclose the hegemonic narratives responsible for materializing the urban realities of the postindustrial inland harbor city.

Contact: johannes.krickl@uaruhr.de