Dr. Mahshid Mayar

Dr. Mahshid Mayar

Assistant Professor of American Studies


University of Innsbruck
Department of American Studies
Innrain 52d, 6020 Innsbruck

Humanities building, 3rd floor, room 40309

Phone: +43 512 507-41611
E-Mail:  Mahshid.Mayar@uibk.ac.at

Office hour: by appointment

Current Resarch Project

Erasure Poetry Project

A book-length study of a sub-genre of documentary poetry known as “erasure poetry,” my Habilitation/second-book project, W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States, interrogates the ways the political pervades the poetic and the poetic manifests the political in 21C U.S. poetry. An example of century-long practices in experimental & conceptual forms of poetry and fine arts that Kenneth Goldsmith identifies as practices in “managing language,” erasure poetry is an emerging poetic form with textual, visual, and discursive roots in carefully selected, often (but not always) publicly available “source texts.” This book project builds on “the documental turn in North American poetry” (Michael Leong 5), critically examining erasure poetry’s capacity not only to archive but also to question what archives (should and need to) entail.

Research

  • Intersections of Literature and History
  • American Poetry | Documental Protest Poetry
  •  Transnational American Studies [ focus on race & racialization
  • Critical Sound Studies | Sound, Silence, Noise in Contemporary U.S. Literature
  • Archives and Politics of Archiving | Archival Silences
  • Empire Studies | Cartographies of Empire | Empire, Age, and Race
  • Historical Childhood Studies | History of Education

Teaching

current semester: SS 2025

Publications

  • in preparation: Mayar, Mahshid. W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States [ Habilitationsprojekt ].
  • 2022: Mayar, Mahshid. Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (2022).
    • Winner of Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for Original Research in Transnational American Studies (2022), American Studies Association (ASA).
  • under contract: Mayar, Mahshid, and Mischa Honeck, eds. De Gruyter Companion to U.S. Empire. Berlin: de Gruyter (2025).
  • in preparation: Mayar, Mahshid, Stefan Benz, and Sabine N. Meyer. Noise in/as Critical American Studies.
  • 2022: Mayar, Mahshid, and Marion Schulte, eds. Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations Across Disciplines. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
  • 2021: Mayar, Mahshid, and Stefan Schubert, eds. “American Video Games and the Politics of Popular Culture.”European Journal of American Studies 16.3 (2021).
  • 2020: Mayar, Mahshid, ed. “Spaces of Empire.” U.S. Studies Online, British Association for American Studies (2020).
  • 2018: Mayar, Mahshid, ed. “Encounters in the ‘Game-Over Era’: The Americas in Videogames.” fiar: Forum for Inter-American Research 11.2 (2018).
  • 2017: Mayar, Mahshid, and Yaatsil Guevara González, eds. “Done with Eurocentrism? Directions, Diversions, and Debates in History and Sociology.”InterDisciplines: Journal of History and Sociology 8.2 (2017).
  • in preparation: Mayar, Mahshid. “Sorry for the Genocide: Reading Race and Erasure in Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (chapter in final publication - DFG Network “Cultural Politics of Reconciliation”).
  • in preparation: Mayar, Mahshid. “Hearing Blank: The Prosodics of Erasure in Public Poetry Performances” (article in Resonance – edited by Elena Furlanetto, Ilka Brasch, Abby Fagan, and Phillip Grider).
  • in preparation: Mayar, Mahshid. “The Poetic Cartographies of the Black Outdoors — The Black Boy and the Poetry that Addresses Him.”Blackness and the Knowledges of Intersectionality, edited by Julia Faisst and Nathalie Aghoro. Review of International American Studies (RIAS) 2 (2026).
  • forthcoming: Mayar, Mahshid. “Splintered Archives: Versions and Versioning through Erasure Arts and Poetry” (article in Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS) – edited by Matthias Klestil).
  • forthcoming: Mayar, Mahshid. “Erasure as Seriality – A Study of the “Serial Attitude” in A Humument and Tree of Codes.” Serial Circulation: Print Cultures and Periodical Modernities, edited by Daniel Stein and Maxi Albrecht. Anglia: Journal of English Philology 1 (2025).
  • 2023: Mayar, Mahshid. “‘Playes Print the Letter.’ American Child(hoods) as Archival Present/ce.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 16.3 (2023): 361-383.
  • 2023: Mayar, Mahshid. “Huck in the Balloon, Huck in the Divan -- The American Child and the Cartographic Scripts of Empire.”Journal of Transnational American Studies 14.1 (2023): 53-74.
  • 2023: Mayar, Mahshid. “Sand Opera: Imperial Scripts of Crisis and Intergeneric Fields of Erasure in Philip Metres’ Poetry of Erasure.”Capitalist Crisis Poetry: Neoliberalism and the 21st Century Lyric, edited by Stefan Benz, Marcel Hartwig, and Hannah Schoch. Amerikastudien/American Studies 68.2 (2023): 231-41.
  • 2022: Mayar, Mahshid. “Children, Childhood, and Empire.”Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies. Ed. Heather Montgomery. New York: Oxford University Press (2022).
  • 2022: Mayar, Mahshid. “Silence as Masquerade: Punctuation, Prosody, and Performance in ‘A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease’.” Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations across Disciplines. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (2022).
  • 2022: Mayar, Mahshid, and Marion Schulte. “Silences in History, Linguistics, and Literature: An Introduction,” introduction to Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations across Disciplines. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2022).
  • 2021: Mayar, Mahshid. “Feasts of Indifference: Racialization, Affect, and Necropolitics in 1X War Games.” European Journal of American Studies 16.3 (2021).
  • 2021: Mayar, Mahshid, and Stefan Schubert. “Joystick in the Garden,” introduction to Special Issue “American Video Games and the Politics of Popular Culture.” European Journal of American Studies 16.3 (2021).
  • 2020: Mayar, Mahshid. “Spaces and Spatialities of Empire: An Introduction,” introduction to “Spaces of Empire” Essay Series, U.S. Studies Online, British Association for American Studies (2020).
  • 2020: Mayar, Mahshid. “What on earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy.”European Journal of American Studies 15.2 (2020): 1-19.
  • 2016: Mayar, Mahshid. “Children, Impact of War on.” In Encyclopedia of War: Social Science Perspectives. London: Sage Reference (2016).
  • 2014: Mayar, Mahshid. “Child Study Association of America.” In Social History of the American Family: An Encyclopedia. London: Sage Reference (2014).
  • 2014: Mayar, Mahshid. “Tabula Rasa.” In Social History of the American Family: An Encyclopedia. London: Sage Reference (2014).
  • 2022: Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for Original Research in Transnational American Studies -- prize for Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire.
    • awarded by The American Studies Association (ASA)
  • 2021: Dorothy Ross Prize 2020 - honorable mention for “What on earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy,” in European Journal of American Studies 15.2 (2020): 1-19.
    • awarded by Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S.USIH)
  • 2017: Westfälisch-lippische Universitätsgesellschaft Dissertation Prize 2016.
    • awarded by University of Bielefeld.
  • Feb. 2024: Postdoctoral Research Grant, German Research Foundation
  • Feb. 2025: (DFG), University of Bonn [terminated in Jan. 2025 upon the start of the new appointment at the University of Innsbruck, Austria].
  • Jul. 2016 - Jun. 2017     : Career Bridge Scholarship Doctorate-Postdoc, Bielefeld Young Researchers’Fund, University of Bielefeld.                 
  • WS 2014-15: International Researchers Fellowship, Stiftung Internationale Jugendbibliothek, Munich.
  • Sept. 2012: Fellowship for Young Historians, Robert Bosch Foundation (German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., United States).
  • Oct. 2010: Doctoral Scholarship, BGHS, German Research Foundation (DFG),
  • Mar. 2014: University of Bielefeld.
  • Oct. 2023: “Erase Till You Arrive: Versioning the Scripts of Empire in Erasure Poetry,” 50th Austrian American Studies Association Conference 2023, Klagenfurt, Austria.
  • Sept. 2022: “Child Meets Microbe: Letters and Lessons on Migration at the End of the 19th Century,” International Conference “In Search of the Migrant Child,” Institute for European Studies, University of California in Berkeley, USA.
  • Oct. 2019: “Banal, Boring, Banned: Unplayability in Digital Games,” International Conference “Future and Reality of Gaming (FROG),” Vienna, Austria.
  • Apr. - May 2017: Postdoctoral Visiting Fellowship, English Department, Amherst College, MA, United States.
  • Oct. 2014 - Dec. 2014: International Research Fellowship, International Youth Library, Blutenburg Castle, Munich, Germany.
  • Sept. 2012: Fellowship for Young Historians, Summer School organized by Robert Bosch Foundation/German Historical Institute, Washington D.C., United States.
  • Sept. 2011 - Dec. 2011: Doctoral Visiting Fellowship, Georgetown University, Washington D.C., United States
  • Oct. 2025: “My hands always laughing”—Poetry-Testimony in Nick Flynn’s “Seven Testimonies,” Westfälische Wilhelms-University of Münster [ invited by Silvia Schultermandl ].
  • Jul. 2024: “Restore like an erasure poet -- Archival Access, Law, and Erasure Poetry,” Law and Humanities Workshop, University of Bonn [ Sabine N. Meyer & Brian Wagner ].
  • Jun. 2024: “What on Earth! Thoughts on Transnational American Studies,” Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA), University of Heidelberg [ invited by Layla Koch & Martin Thunert ].
  • May 2024: “Breath-taking! – The Prosodics of Erasure in the Poetry of M. NourbeSe Philip, Solmaz Sharif, and Philip Metres,” 70th Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA) [ invited by Elena Furlanetto / Ilka Brasch ].
  • Jan. 2024: “Documents-Poems: A Study in Erasure Poetry,” Department of English and American Studies, University of Paderborn [invited by Alexandra Hartmann].
  • April 2026: “Poetics of the Anthropocene Necropolitics: Environmental Ruin and Ruination in US-American Poetry,” two-day international conference [ co-organized with Judith Rauscher].
  • June 2025: “Archiving America / American Archives,” 71st Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), University of Siegen, Germany               [ member of advising committee ].
  • Dec. 2023: “The Cultural Politics of Reconciliation, Memory, and Empire,” two-day workshop, University of Mannheim [ co-organized with Kathryn Walkiewicz, University of California San Diego ].
  • Jun./Jul. 2023: “U.S. Empire: An Authors’ Workshop,” two-day international workshop, University of Kassel [ co-organized with Mischa Honeck ].
  • Oct. 2020: "The Anechoic Chamber: Construction and Reception of Silence in Language, Literature, Music, Politics, and History,” two-day international workshop, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (ZiF), Bielefeld [ co-organized with Marion Schulte ].
  • June 2025: “A Meeting by the Archive—American Studies, History, and Literature,” workshop co-organized for 71st Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), University of Siegen, Germany [co-organized with Gulsin Ciftci, University of Münster ].
  • Jun. 2022: “Sound (and) Political Education? Sonic Dissent as Aesthetic and Political Praxis,” workshop co-organized for 68th Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), University of Tübingen, Tübingen        [ co-organized with Sabine Meyer ].
  • Jun. 2022: “Decolonizing the American Studies Classroom in Germany,” workshop co-organized for the 68th Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), University of Tübingen, Tübingen [ co-organized with Helen Gibson and Jens Temmen – called off ].
  • Jun. 2021: “Silence in/of Archives: Absence, Erasure, Censorship, and Archival Politics,” panel organized for the 6th European Congress on World and Global History (ENIUGH), Turku, Finland.
  • Jun. 2021: “This is the World! Geographies of Childhood and Pedagogies of Empire,” panel co-organized for the Society for the History of Children and Youth XI Biennial International Conference, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland [ co-organized with Catherine Larochelle, Université de Montréal, Canada ].
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