Sulimma | CV

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Maria Sulimma

NORTH AMERICAN STUDIES SECTION

maria.sulimma@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de she/her
☎ +49 761 203-3323

PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT

FELLOWSHIPS & AWARDS

• FRIAS Junior Fellowship 2023/2024
• Fulbright American Studies Award (2022)
• Rolf Kenter-Dissertation Prize (2019)
• Fulbright American Studies Institute (2018)
• Elsa Neumann-Dissertation Scholarship of the State of Berlin (2017 – 2018)

CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION

• Co-organized with Eva von Contzen and Fachschaft Englisches Seminar: Theme Week “Queer Perseverance?: Exploring the Kaleidoscope of LGBTQIA+ Representation and Expression” (University of Freiburg, 20-24 Nov. 2023)
• Co-organized with Lena Mattheis: Int. Conference “Queer (Second) Cities” (University of Freiburg and the University of Surrey / Online, 30-31 Aug. 2023)
• Co-organized with Lena Mattheis: Int. Symposium of the Association of Literary Urban Studies (ALUS):  “Early Career Paths: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives” (Online, 13 Sept. 2023)
• Co-organized int. Conference “Transatlantic Rust Belts - Scripting Urban Future(s)” (University Alliance Ruhr, Wayne State University, and University of California, Santa Barbara, 9-12 Sept. 2021)
• Co-organized with Juliane Borosch, Barbara Buchenau, and Frank Mehring: “Spring Academy RUDESA 2021: Grounding American Studies” (University Duisburg-Essen and Radboud University Nijmegen, 8-12 March 2021)
• Co-organized with Anna Sennefelder: interdisciplinary Symposium “Scripts, Scapes und Situierte Normativität“ of the research groups “City Scripts” and “New Travel-New Media“ (University Duisburg-Essen and University of Freiburg, 24-26 Nov. 2020)
• Co-organized with Kathleen Loock: Student Conference “Postfeminism(s) in Popular Culture” (John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, 6 July 2018)
• Co-organized with Frank Kelleter: int. conference “Seriality, Seriality, Seriality: The Many Lives of a Field that isn’t One” (Freie Universität Berlin, 22-24 June 2016)

MEMBERSHIPS AND OFFICES

• Member of the Editorial Board of the Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik / A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture (since September 2023)
• Book Review Editor of the Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik / A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture (since September 2023)
•  Board member of the Association of Literary Urban Studies /ALUS (since October 2022)

 CONFERENCE PAPERS AND INVITED TALKS

• “A Gentrifier and a Dog: Narratives of Urban Transformations and their Canine Representations” (24-27 Jan. 2024, Int. Conference “Narratives of Home and Dwelling: Cultures, Crises, Utopias,” University of Innsbruck)
• “Drawn to Light: Electricity, Television, and the ‘Banal Anthropocene’ of Yellowjackets” (27 Sept. 2023, Jahrestagung der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft “Populäre Kulturen,“ Saarland University)
• “Stadt als Festival / Festival als Stadt” (13 July 2023, Conference “Zukunft leben oder überleben? Zukunftslaboratorien als Möglichkeitsräume für ein gutes Leben jenseits der Gegenwartsgesellschaft,“ University of Freiburg)
• With Eva von Contzen, “Televisionary Talk Club: Rings of Power” (6 July 2023, Carl-Schurz-Haus, Freiburg)
• “Remember how deep we go – Stories of Oceanic Cities” (21 June 2023, Inaugural Lecture / Antrittsvorlesung, University of Freiburg)
• “Von Gärten und Windrädern. Klima, Raum und Gender“ (13 June 2023, lecture series “KLIMA: Kulturen, Künste, Medien,“ University of Freiburg)
• with Eva von Contzen, “‘In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom…’: Medieval Studies Meets Television Studies” (23 May 2023, Symposium “Medieval Identities: (Re)Constructing the Self and the Other,” University of Freiburg)
• “Gentrification, Leisure, and the Contemporary Novel” (21 April 2023, Urban Inequalities Workshop, Initiative on Cities, Boston University)
• “Sarah Schulman’s Maggie Terry and the Dilemma of the Gentrifier-Protagonist” (28 Mar. 2023, Penn State Abington)
•  “’The Shape of an Endless Longing’: Water and Urban Communities” (25 Mar. 2023, North Eastern Modern Language Association, Niagara Falls)
• “Mobility, Serial Television, and Climate Change” (21 Mar. 2023, University of Delaware)
• “Green Gentrification, Garden Politics, and Feminist Memoir.” (16 Mar. 2023, Symposium: “New Urban Imaginaries: Narrating the Post-Industrial City,” Penn State Abington)
• “Urban Transformations in Queer Crime Fiction” (13 Mar. 2023, University of Delaware)
• “Gentrification Imaginaries: Postindustrial Literature, Leisure, and Urban Transformations” (7 Mar. 2023, Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, Princeton University)
• “Die Zukunft der Stadt erzählen: Urbane Microscripts und Gentrifizierung“ (17 Feb. 2023, Global Futures Talk, University of Freiburg)
• With students from the seminar “African American Urbanism,” “Anticipating Black History Month: The Last Black Man in San Francisco” (19 Jan. 2023, event and screening at the Carl-Schurz-Haus, Freiburg)
• with Sieglinde Lemke, “Kulturwissenschaften und Klimagerechtigkeit“ (18 Jan. 2023, Lecture Series “Nachhaltigkeit,“ University of Freiburg)
• “Climate Crisis on TV: Urban Tourism and Aviation in Killing Eve” (10 Jan. 2023, University of Hannover)
• “Microscripts of Gentrification:  Leisure and Urban Transformations in Contemporary Literature” (14 Dec. 2022, Keele University)
• “The (Lost) American Dream on TV: Television Homes and Millennial Home Ownership” (30 Nov. 2022, Atlantische Akademie Rheinland-Pfalz)
• “Leisure in the Postindustrial City: Gentrification and Literature” (24 Nov. 2022, University of Münster)
• “More than just remembering: Gender, Seriality, and Television” (23 Nov. 2022, University of Münster)
• “The Travel Writing of Louisa May Alcott” (27 Oct. 2022, EUCOR Lecture Series “Nineteenth-Century Women’s Literature”)
• “To live in a city is to consume its offerings: Speculative Fiction and Gentrification in Ling Ma’s Severance“ (28 June 2022, ISSN Narrative Conference, University of Chichester)
• “Television and Seriality” (13 Dec. 2021, University of Paderborn)
• “TV Thursday - Gentrifizierung und Fernsehen“ (9 Dec. 2021, conversation with journalist Vanessa Schneider, Atlantische Akademie Rheinland-Pfalz)
• with Hanna Henryson, “Nothing was solved, only accelerated: Gentrification as Apocalypse in Contemporary Dystopian Berlin Novels“ (28 Oct. 2021, University of Uppsala; 7 Dec. 2021 University of Duisburg-Essen)
• “Trivial Pursuits: Literature, Gentrification, and Postindustrial Cities“ (17 Nov. 2021, KWI/ Institute for the Advanced Study, Essen)
• “Hipsters and Gentrifiers in the Work of Sarah Schulman: A Literary Studies Approach to Gentrification“ (16 Nov. 2021, lecture series: “Hipsters and Gentrifiers: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Culture,” Ruhr University Bochum and University of Duisburg-Essen)
• “AOC plays Among Us: Politik und/als Populärkultur“ (11 Oct. 2021, Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut Saarland)
• “This is what a Gentefier looks like: Gentrification and Seriality in Vida and Gentefied“ (23 Sept. 2021, Symposium  “To Be Continued: Defining, Producing, Performing, Consuming, and Theorizing Serials and Adaptations,” University of Delaware)
• “A Portal to a City that No Longer Exists: Drinking Coffee at the Bodega during Gentrification” (12 Sept. 2021, Symposium “Transatlantic Rust Belts – Scripting Urban Future(s),” Wayne State University)
• “Where is Everybody?: The Agoraphobic Imagination of Gentrification in Times of COVID-19” (2 Sept. 2021, conference “Ecologies of Fear: Spatial Politics and Imaginaries of Crisis and Danger,” KWI Essen)
• “TV Thursday: Good Wives, Witches & Girlbosses - wie Serien Frauen eine Stimme geben” (15 July 2021, conversation with journalist Vanessa Schneider, Atlantische Akademie Rheinland-Pfalz)
• “Needs to Be More Explicit about the Methodologies…: Reluctance, Collaboration, and Vulnerability in Research Processes” (18 June 2021, annual conference of the German American Studies Association, University of Heidelberg)
•  “Gentrification in Series:  Television Storytelling from Gentefied to Search Party” (29 May 2021, conference “The City, the Media & Gentrification: Actors, Discourses and Representations,” Sorbonne Université Paris)
• “Dilemma as Technique: Gentrifier-Protagonists in Sarah Schulman’s Maggie Terry and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation” (7 May 2021, Symposium “Urban Intersections: Class, Race, Gender and Gentrification,” Keele University)
• “TV Thursday - Serial Politics” (15 April 2021, conversation with journalist Vanessa Schneider, Atlantische Akademie Rheinland-Pfalz)
• “The White Postfeminist Trivial of Lena Dunham (… and Sylvia Plath … and Philip Roth)” (14 Dec 2020, Leibniz University Hannover)
• “Is that how Lovecraftian Horror Works Now?!: On Gentrification, Cultural Homogeneity, and Dichotomies of Consumerism in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became” (21 Aug 2020, Symposium “Representing Urban Change: Gentrification and Displacement in Literature and other Media,” University of Uppsala; available online: https://media.medfarm.uu.se/play/kanal/697/video/12920)
• “Unmittelbare Stadt“ (7 July 2020, lecture series “Kernbegriffe für die Stadt der Zukunft“ TU Braunschweig; available online: https://www.uni-due.de/cityscripts/events)
• Lecture “Focus Feminist Heritage: Bandits (1997)” and interview with actor Jasmin Tabatabai (7 March 2020, Berlin Feminist Film Week)
• “Of Trivial Things, Leisure, and Cities” (3 Feb. 2020, Symposium “Spending Time With/In the Nineteenth Century,” Goethe University Frankfurt)
• “Killing Eve… and the Planet – One Flight at a Time: Popular Culture and Aviation” (11 Dec. 2019, lecture series “Popular Culture, Media, and Politics in the US,” John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin)
• “Barista, barista, (anti-)capitalista?: White Masculinity, Coffee Connoisseurship, and the Urban Café” (29 Nov. 2019, conference “Metropolitan Masculinities: Narratives of Gender and Urban Space,” Ruhr University Bochum)
• “Seriality and Gender: The Politics and Practices of American Television” (24 Oct. 2019, University of Heidelberg)
• “Play by Paratext: Television Narration, Seriality, and Interactivity” (1 June 2019, ISSN Narrative Conference, University of Pamplona)
• “Surviving the City: Zombies, Run! and the Horrors of Urban Exercise” (17 May 2019, conference “Playing the Field II: Video Games, American Studies, and Space,” University of Duisburg-Essen)
• “Simultaneity versus Seriality: The Conflicting Temporality and Locality of Television’s Urban Chase Scene” (15 Feb. 2019, Symposium of the Association for Literary Urban Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen)
• “I am. I am. I am. – HBOs Girls zwischen distanzierten Blicken, Qualitätslabels, und geschlechtlicher Universalität“ (31 Jan. 2019, Carl-Schurz-Haus Freiburg)
• “ You’d be the first to die. – Death, Gender and Serialized Survivalism in The Walking Dead Franchise” (15 July 2018, “Console-ing Passions – International Conference on Television, Video, Audio, New Media and Feminism,” Bournemouth University)
• “Sir, she can hear you: The Mute Woman in Popular Culture” (26 May 2018, annual conference of the German American Studies Association, Freie Universität Berlin)
• “The Ur-Feminist Voice of a Generation?: Reading HBO’s Girls and its Critical Sphere” (5 Oct. 2017, conference “Reading American TV Series,” Saarland University)
• “Gender and Seriality in Contemporary US-American Television Narratives” (10 April 2017, TU Dresden)
• “No Place like Home?: The Apartment Shares of Contemporary Female TV Protagonists” (23 March 2017, annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago)
• “Dead yourself?: Serialized Survival and Fanagement in The Walking Dead-Franchise” (29 Nov. 2016, University of Siegen)
• “More Cringe than Comedy?  The complicated Humor of HBO’s Girls” (12 Nov. 2016, annual conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies, University of Innsbruck)
• “Some of the Spoilers… will not be Spoilers: Crossmedia Franchises between Simultaneity, Adaptation, and Transmedia Storytelling” (15 June 2016, workshop “New Media Writing,” Freie Universität Berlin)
• “Will this Gender ever be Televised? On the Challenges of Seriality and Gender Studies” (22 June 2016, conference “Seriality Seriality Seriality: The Many Lives of the Field That Isn’t One,” Freie Universität Berlin)
• “2015: Simultaneous Seriality and The Walking Dead” (17 June 2016,  ISSN Narrative Conference, University of Amsterdam)
• “Beyond the Double Bind? Professional Femininities and 'Uniform' Desires” (21 May 2016, annual conference of the German American Studies Association/DGfA, University of Osnabrück)
• “Not That Kind of Girl: Television’s Troubled Relationship with Academia and TV Criticism” (23 April 2016, biennial conference of the European American Studies Association, University of Constanta)
• “Investigating Gender and Seriality in HBO’s Girls: The Hauntings of Television's Critical Sphere” (7 Dec. 2015, University of Michigan)
• “I don't WANT to kill any of you - Gendered Discourses of Authority and Authorization” (23 Nov. 2015,  Project Narrative, the Ohio State University)
• “She is not your mother anymore: The Walking Dead and the Attraction of Serial Survival” (24 July 2015, Leibniz Universität Hannover)
• with Bettina Soller, “You Know, Government Isn’t Just a Boys Club Anymore: Female Protagonists in Contemporary US-American Political Drama and Comedy Series” (19 June 2015,  “Console-ing Passions – International Conference on Television, Video, Audio, New Media and Feminism,”  University College Dublin)
• with Felix Brinker and Frank Kelleter, “Quality TV? Die neuen amerikanischen Fernsehserien: The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad“ (13 June 2015, Freie Universität Berlin)
• “Negotiating Serial Flow: The Walking Dead as Transmedia Phenomenon” (26 Feb 2015, conference “Transmedia Storytelling and Its Reception: Economies and Politics of Participation,” Hannover)
• “Everybody Makes it Until They Don’t - Serial Television and Zombies in The Walking Dead” (11 Dec. 2014, German-American Institute Tübingen)
• “Gender and Serial Television Narratives” (3 Oct. 2014,  University of Michigan)
• “It happened in Salem, not surprisingly - On (Not) Trying Witches in Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (18 Jan. 2014, University of Göttingen; 1 Feb. 2014, University of Konstanz)
• “Doing Gender in Crossmedia Serial Narratives” (1 July 2013, annual conference of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore, University of Tartu)
• with Uta Scheer. “Once Upon a Time... Neue Geschlechterbilder in Polit-Medien und TV-Serien – Wahrheit oder Märchen?“ (16 Jan. 2013, University of Göttingen)
• “The (Lost) American Dream on TV: Television Homes and Millennial Home Ownership” (30 Nov. 2022, Atlantische Akademie Rheinland-Pfalz)