Ann-Katrin Preis, M.A.

Curriculum Vitæ

Ann-Katrin Preis studied English and American Studies, Philosophy, and English Literatures and Media at the University of Erfurt, University College Dublin, and the University of Trier. Since April 2022, she has been working as a lecturer (‘wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin’) at the department of English Literary Studies at the University of Erfurt. She is currently working on a PhD project with the working title “Ecocritical and Post-Anthropocentric Dynamics in Contemporary British Nature Poetry.”

Teaching and Research Interests

• British Gothic Fiction
• Gender in Contemporary Drama
• New Materialism
• Poetry and Trauma
• Contemporary English Poetry
• Feminist Writing
• Philosophy of Mind and Neurodiversity in Literature and Other Media

PhD Project: Abstract

“[W]hat sort of literature remains possible if we relinquish the myth of human apartness? It must be a literature that abandons, or at least questions, what would seem to be literature’s most basic foci: character, persona, narrative consciousness. What literature can survive under these conditions?” (Buell 1995, 145)

This inquiry by Lawrence Buell from The Environmental Imagination (1995) will serve as a research question for parts of the dissertation. The latter will start from the thesis that since the emergence of Anthropocene awareness, British nature poetry has developed into new, post-anthropocentric directions that can be read through the lens of newly evolved philosophies of nature. Thus, two contrasting positions within New Materialism can help to approach opposing dynamics in poetry. On the one hand, entanglement theories are mirrored in a poetic approach that revolves around the embedding of humans into nature and the highlighting of interconnections between human- and non-human agents. On the other hand, theories such as Object-Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism coincide with a mode of writing that emancipates the nonhuman and presents a world independent from us. The literary reflection of these distinct theories will be illustrated and investigated through close readings of British poetry since the turn of the century by authors such as Alice Oswald, Carol Watts, and David Sergeant. So far, ecocritical readings have approached the works of well-established writers from the 20th and 19th century. Yet, scholars have largely ignored current poets, whose engagements with ecological and materialistic matters are all the more intriguing due to pressing environmental concerns of the present day and due to poetry’s ability to exploit form, materialize itself and, thus, architecturally reflect innovative conceptions of nature and its representation.