Prof. Dr. Pia Wiegmink 

BCDSS Professor

Room 2.019
Niebuhrstr. 5
D-53113 Bonn
Phone: +49 228 73 62479
wiegmink@uni-bonn.de

Office hours: Thursdays,  4.30-6 pm (in person or via Zoom), please register via email in advance

Team assistant: Martina Kuhnert

Team: Dr. Jennifer Leetsch, Luvena Kopp, Dr. Sunčica Klaas

Upcoming workshop: Global Voyages, Local Sites

Working Groups:

  • Life Writing, Slavery and Dependency
  • Rethinking Atlantic Narratives of Slavery and Freedom

Wiegmink_Pia.jpg
© Barbara Frommann

"I envision the BCDSS to be a lively and interdisciplinary academic community which enables a broad variety of scholars to become familiar with and learn from each other’s diverse areas of expertise; this exchange, I believe, will fuel my own research on the literatures of (anti)slavery and its global entanglements in exiting and unique ways."


Academic Profile

In her research, Pia Wiegmink is interested in cultural practices and particularly narratives of American slavery and dependency and their global entanglements and circulation. Her most recent monograph Abolitionist Cosmopolitanism (Brill 2022) redefined the potential of nineteenth century American abolitionist literature as a cultural and political imaginary. She situated abolitionist literature in specific transnational contexts and highlighted the role of women as producers, subjects, and readers of abolitionist literature.

Her current research includes

  • the upcoming symposium “Global Voyages, Local Sites: The Long Shadow of Atlantic Slavery in the Anglo-American and German Pacific” (June 2023)
  • the working group “Life Writing, Slavery and Dependency” 
  • a project, tentatively entitled “the protocols of dependency in American literature,” which analyzes intersecting tropes and discursive structures of various forms of dependency inherent in nineteenth century American literature.
  • a co-edited special issue “Beyond Slavery and Freedom” in Journal of Global Slavery (forthcoming; with Jutta Wimmler)
  • a co-edited special issue “Slavery and Colonialism in German Cultural Memory: Discourses, Debates, and Practices” in Atlantic Studies: Global Currents (forthcoming; with Heike Raphael-Hernandez)

3 monographs; 4 edited collections; 25 articles (+1 forthcoming); 6 reviews (+2 forthcoming); 39 national and international lectures and papers; (co)organizer of 7 conferences/workshops; (co)organizer of 8 panels; advisor of 5 MA theses (first advisor) and 39 BA/B.Ed. theses

9/2020
Venia legendi, American Studies, JGU Mainz, Germany

5/2019
Submission of Habilitation, American Studies, JGU Mainz, Germany

7/2010
Ph.D. American Studies, University of Siegen, Germany

6/2004
M.A. Theatre Studies and English Studies, JGU Mainz, Germany

Current Position
Professor for  Dependency and Slavery Studies, University Bonn, Germany      

2021
Assistant Professor (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin), Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, JGU Mainz

2019–2020
Interim Chair of American Studies, University of Regensburg

2010–2019
Assistant Professor (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin), Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, JGU Mainz

2017
Visiting Professor, English Department, York University, Toronto

2011–2012
Visiting Researcher, English Department, Georgetown University,Washington D.C.

2005–2010
Lecturer, Department of Literature, Culture and Media Studies/American Studies, University of Siegen

2021
Rob Kroes Award for the best unpublished manuscript in American studies by a European scholar for the year 2020  (European Association for American Studies)

2020
Best Article Award 2019 Amerikastudien/American Studies

2015–2018
DFG Research Network: “Cultural Performance in Transnational American Studies” (co-organization)

  • Reviewer for various journals
  • 4/2021 – Special Forum Editor, Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS)

2015–2018
DFG (German Research Foundation) research network “Cultural Performance in Transnational American Studies” with Dr. Birgit Bauridl (University of Regensburg)

2017
DFG (German Research Foundation) financial support for international workshop („From Abolition to Black Lives Matter: Past and Present Forms of Transnational Black Resistance, 26.–18. November 2017 JGU Mainz, organized with Nele Sawallisch, Frank Obenland and Johanna Seibert)

2012
DAAD Post-Doc Fellowship as visiting scholar at Georgetown University Washington, DC (discontinued 10/2012 due to parental leave)

03/2011
Eccles Centre Fellowship in North American Studies, Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library, London.

2006
Research Fellowship (DAAD/German-Academic Exchange Service travel grant), University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles 

  • 2022. Abolitionist Cosmopolitanism: Reconfiguring Gender, Race, and Nation in American Antislavery Literature. Leiden: Brill. https://brill.com/display/title/63140?language=en
  • 2021. American Cultures as Transnational Performance. Commons, Skills, Traces, co-edited with Katrin Horn, Leopold Lippert, and Ilka Saal.  London: Routledge. 
  • 2021. “Race, Slavery, and Emigration in Black Women’s Life Writing.” In African American Literature in Transition, 1830–1850, edited by Benjamin Fagan, 202–220. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  • 2021. “African American Women in Europe.” In In Search of Liberty. African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, edited by Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane Power-Greene, 253–278. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
  • 2019. “Tearing the Envelope: Harriet Jacobs’s ‘Epistolary Activism’”. Amerikastudien/American Studies 64(3): 373–390. https://amst.winter-verlag.de/data/article/9285/pdf/101903005.pdf2
  • 2019. “Cultural Performance and Transnational American Studies.” (co-authored with Birgit Bauridl) In The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies, edited by Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, and Takayuki Tatsumi, 85–95. London: Routledge.
  • 2020. German Entanglements in Transatlantic Slavery, co-edited with Heike Raphael-Hernandez. London: Routledge. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14788810.2017.13660093
  • 2017. “Antislavery Discourses in Nineteenth-Century German American Women’s Fiction.” Atlantic Studies: Global Currents 14(1): 476–496. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2017.13144334
  • 2014. “Naomi Wallace.” In The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights, edited by Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer, Christoper Innes, and Matthew C. Roudané, 391–410. London: Bloomsbury.
  • 2011. Protest EnACTed. Activist Performance in the Contemporary United States. American Studies 201. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.
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