Dr. Matthias Klestil
Universitätsassistent
Department of American Studies
University of Innsbruck
Innrain 52d, 6020 Innsbruck
Humanities building, 3rd floor, room 40306
Phone: +43 512 507 41619
E-Mail: Matthias.Klestil@uibk.ac.at
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5126-4063
Office hours: by appointment
Degrees
- Dr. phil. in Amerikanistik, Universität Bayreuth, Deutschland
- Dissertation: "Reading Green in Black: Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature, 1830s-1920s"
- M.A. in Intercultural Anglophone Studies, Universität Bayreuth, Deutschland
- B.A. in Germanistik, Universität Bayreuth, Deutschland
- B.A. in Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Bayreuth, Deutschland
Research and Teaching Interests
- Contemporary North American Fiction and Film
- 19th and 20th Century U.S. Literature and Literary History
- Ethnic American Literatures
- African American Culture
- Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities
- Narrative Theory
Teaching
current semester: SS2025
past semester: WS 2024/2025SS2024
Publications (selected)
Monographs
Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. (Open access)
Journal articles
- "African American Literature, Racial Vulnerability, and the Anthropocene: Rereading W.E.B. Du Bois' The Quest of the Silver Fleece in the Twenty-First Century." JAAAS, vol. 4, no. 1, 2022 (2024), pp. 131-152. https://jaaas.eu/jaaas/article/view/152.
- "Frederick Douglass, 'Niagara.'" The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, vol. 30, 2022 (2023), pp. 100-110. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48752432.
- "Wenn der Mars von der Erde erzählt. The Martian als Anthropozänes Kino." Film-Konzepte, vol. 67, no. 3, 2023, pp. 65-81.
- "Resisting (through) the Elements of Race: A Fugitive Humanist Reading of Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik ZAA, vol. 70, no. 1, 2022, pp. 39-57. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2022-2048.
Book Chapters
- "Canines and Tricksters in Atlanta." Greater Atlanta: Black Satire after Obama, edited by Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue, University of Mississippi Press, 2024, pp. 125-138.
- "Unveiling Subjection, Practicing Subjectivation: Race, Power, and Strategies of Rewriting the Self in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition." Power in Language, Culture, Literature and Education: Perspectives of English Studies, edited by Marta Degani and Werner Delanoy, Narr, 2023, pp. 215-232.
- "Time(s) of Race: Narrative Temporalities, Epistemic Storytelling, and the Human Species in Ted Chiang." Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology, edited by Alexa Weik von Mossner, Marijana Mikic, and Mario Grill, Routledge, 2022, pp. 39-57.
Reviews
- Hannes Bajohr, ed., Der Anthroposophie im Anthropozän: Die Wiederkehr des Menschen im Moment seiner vermeintlich endgültigen Verabschiedung. Ecozon@, 2022, pp. 216-218.
- Christian Eilers, Paul Austers autobiographische Werke: Stationen einer Schriftstellerkarriere. JAAAS, 2022, pp. 93-96.
Conference Presentations
- Versional Narration in African American Literature: Kiese Laymon's Long Division and Percival Everett's Telephone. 2024, International Conference on Narrative, Newcastle, UK
- The Politics of Versional Narration in Contemporary African American Fiction. 2024, Recentering Form(s) in and of the Margins: The Politics of Self-Reflexivity, Brussels, Belgium
- Versional Narration, Social Justice, and the Anthropocene. 2023, Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA), Montreal, Canada
- Kill me Maybe: Versional Narration and Multiplied Death in Life after Life and Russian Doll. 2022, International Conference on Narrative, Chichester, UK
- The Politics and Pedagogy of Versional Narratives: On Paul Auster's 4321. 2022, Annual Meeting of the DGfA/GAAS, Tübingen, Germany
- Reforming (through) the Sublime: Antebellum African Americans, Antislavery, and Niagara Falls. 2022, NCSA Conference Radicalism and Reform, Rochester, NY, United States
Guest Lectures
- Underground Railroad Narratives beyond the Human. 2022, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany
- The Anthropocene, Race, and African American Literature. 2022, SUNY Potsdam, Potsdam, NY, United States
- Environmental Dimensions of the Underground Railroad. 2022, SUNY Potsdam, Potsdam, NY, United States