Overview
Katrina L. Nousek is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies. Trained in literary and cultural studies, history, and comparative analysis, she studies cultures that arise in tension with power dynamics in nation-states (e.g., transnational, multilingual, postsocial, postcolonial). Her research and teaching explore how readers/users and cultural producers participate in world-making practices that illuminate emergent, multiple, and intersectional operations at play within and beyond dominant narratives about cultural legacies or historical events.
Her current book manuscript, The Future is History: Postsocialist Subjects and Social Grammars after 1989, explores how migrating and transnational narrators articulate social dreams unrealized by European states. This research positions 20th-century European socialist nation-building as co-existing with European modernity to reevaluate ideologies of progress. Her narratological literary readings shift attention from urban centers of revolution through which postsocialist history is often told to illuminate alternative memory practices and social geographies of rural and minoritized communities as well. A second research project on “Shadow Arts” examines cultural techniques for negotiating textual gaps in contexts of colonization and decolonization, Angst, and identity formation.
Her publications draw from transnational and postsocialist culture to develop methods applicable to the environmental humanities, narrative studies, book studies, and media studies. She has taught at intersections of German with Global Studies, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, and Comparative and Digital Humanities.
Office Hours
T 10:00-11:00am & by appointment
Goldwin Smith Hall, Room 182
Research Focus
Postwar & contemporary literature, culture, media
Migration and transnationalism in literature, media, and the arts
Postcommunist/postsocialist cultures
Intersectional subjectivities
Concepts of time and futurity
Narrative studies
Cultural techniques
Publications
“Writing Precarity in the Book Industry: Globalization in Heike Geißler’s Saisonarbeit (2014).” Writing for the B-Side: German Literature Beyond the Bestseller List. Eds. Rachel Halverson and Ben Schaper. Berghahn Books, 2025. 126-144.
“Dismantled Monumentality: Capturing Postsocialist Erasures in Berlin.” German Studies Review 45, 2 (2022): 307-327. (Peer-Reviewed).
“(Re)constructing Heimat: Intermedial Archives in Alexandra Saemmer’s ‘Böhmische Dörfer’ and Saša Stanišić’s Vor dem Fest.” Tales that Touch: Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture. Eds. Yasemin Yildiz and Bettina Brandt. De Gruyter, 2022. 233–256.
“‘Zweige, Nadeln, Dreck’: Dwelling on the Social in Simple Storys by Ingo Schulze.” Ecologies of Socialisms: Germany, Nature, and the Left in History, Politics, and Culture. Eds. Eli Rubin, Scott Moranda & Sabine Moedersheim. Peter Lang, 2019. 275–294.
“A Future-Oriented Zeitrechnung: Narrating Postcommunist Temporality and Subjectivity in Zsuzsa Bánk's Der Schwimmer (2002).” German Life and Letters. 88, 2 (2015): 302–323. (Peer-Reviewed).
“Accumulating Histories: Temporality in Herta Müller’s ‘Einmal anfassen—zweimal loslassen’.” Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics. Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar, eds. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. 252–272.