Annika Thiem, a Ph.D. candidate and assistant professor at the American Studies Program at the University of Tübingen, will teach and collaborate in learning alongside Honors College students. This semester she is teaching HHUM205 Section 0106: Negotiating (In)Justice Through Fiction, in which Honors Humanities students will consider the political dimensions of fictional narratives. The goal of this class is to see how literature, film and contemporary TV shows dramatize various forms of injustice at different historical moments and how they criticize hegemonic power structures.
Thiem is also teaching ENGL250: Reading Women Write, which looks at what a woman needs in order to write, what role gender plays in the production, consumption and interpretation of texts, and to what extent women comprise a distinct literary subculture. Please check the Schedule of Classes if you wish to enroll in this course.
In her Ph.D. project, tentatively titled “Subverting Hegemonic Epistemology and Power: Ghosts and Spirits in American Women’s Writings,” Thiem puts ghost stories by white middle-class women from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries into dialogue with contemporary novels by ethnic authors. More specifically, her dissertation examines the subversive potential of the ghost trope, and the ways in which it is used by women writers to criticize hegemonic structures of power/knowledge and particularly epistemic injustice and epistemic violence.
Previously, Thiem worked as grant manager and project administrator of the EU-COST Action “Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories,” an international and interdisciplinary research project. She completed her M.A. in American Studies at the University of Tübingen in November 2018 with her Master’s thesis titled, “The Puritan Influences in Stephen King’s Carrie, ’Salem’s Lot, and The Stand.”
