Sandra Tausel
Sandra Tausel
Sandra Tausel, PhD Candidate in US-American Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria
Hi, my name is Sandra Tausel, and I’m very excited to join the Wirth Institute as the 2024-25 Austrian Doctoral Research Fellow! I’m currently in the final year of PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies at the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, where I also worked as a university assistant before receiving the Marietta Blau-Grant for Alberta. At the University of Innsbruck, I am also affiliated with the Innsbruck Doctoral College Gender and Gender Relations in Transformation. I hold a BA in German Studies from the University of Graz, Austria, and a European Joint Master’s Degree in English and American Studies from the University of Graz and Université Paris Diderot (now Université Paris Cité), France. During my time as a university assistant in Innsbruck, I taught undergraduate classes in US-American Literary and Cultural Studies and held academic writing workshops after becoming a certified writing coach at the writer’s studio in Vienna.
My research interests are located at the intersection of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and contemporary US-American Literary and Cultural Studies because I believe that interdisciplinary and intersectional analytical approaches can provide valuable insights into gendered power structures, questions of identity, as well as socio-cultural and political issues. Putting it more succinctly in her final chapter of Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, bell hooks remarks that “the function of art is to do more than tell it like it is⎯it’s to imagine what is possible” (281). Accordingly, I am particularly interested in researching literary texts and representations that do just that and allow for a critical examination of social and reproductive justice issues, carceral imaginaries, race, and whiteness, thereby helping to promote social equity in fiction and beyond. The novels I analyze in my dissertation project titled Reproductive Ageism: Narratives of Age-Based Reproductive Control also aspire to answer hooks’ call as they invite readers into (auto)fictional worlds depicting reproductive experiences influenced by race, class, gender, gender identity, and age, while also having their characters question, negotiate, and challenge normative reproductive prescriptions and traditionally accepted conventions of mothering and parenting. My project is specifically interested in analyzing chrononormative and age-based reproductive expectations that differently affect and stigmatize characters – women and people capable of childbirth – during young adulthood, adulthood, and later adulthood in contemporary US-American novels since 2018.
Granted that I survive my first Canadian winter, I’m looking forward to and am very thankful for the opportunity to finish my dissertation during my fellowship at the Wirth Institute while getting to explore the U of A, Edmonton, and Alberta.
Contact
E-mail: tausel@ualberta.caAddress:
University of Alberta
Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies
300-E
Arts & Convocation Hall
Edmonton, Alberta
Canada T6G 2E6