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​Julia Sattler is based at TU Dortmund University, where she investigates the intersection of activism and writing from a variety of angles – from questions of citizenship and urban identity to social justice and 20th century female poetry. 

Between April 2012 and March 2015, she was the academic coordinator of the UA Ruhr-project “Spaces – Communities – Representations: Urban Transformations in the USA” in the framework of the  MERCUR program of the Mercator Foundation. The edited volume titled Urban Transformations in the USA that emerged out of this research cooperation was published with Transcript in 2016. 

Following her dissertation on the negotiation of mixed race heritage in family narratives of the 1990s, Julia Sattler started her research at the intersection of American Studies and Urban Planning. Since then, she has taught several classes together with colleagues from the Dortmund School of Spatial Planning as well as a variety of seminars focusing on urban topics such as the Great Migration and the emergence of post-industrial cultures in the Dortmund and Bochum American Studies departments. She was a visiting researcher at the University of Michigan in 2013 and at Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library in 2016. 

She is currently finalizing her Habilitation with the working title “Ruhr|Detroit: American Cultural Studies and Urban Planning.” This project investigates cultural practices of dealing with industrial heritage in the Ruhr and in Detroit, as well as the manifold ways in which literary and planning discourses shape each other when it comes to narrating the postindustrial landscape and its supposed future(s).