Institut für England- & Amerikastudien (IEAS)

Marlon Lieber is assistant professor of North American literature and culture at the Institute for English and American Studies, a position he has already held from 2013-15. In recent years, Lieber has been assistant professor of North American Studies with a focus on cultural and media studies at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel. Moreover, he has taught classes on technology in the contextual studies program at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Universität St. Gallen. In 2018, he received his PhD from Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. While working on his dissertation, Lieber spent six months as visiting research scholar at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Reading ‘Race’ Relationally: Embodied Dispositions and Social Structures in Colson Whitehead’s Novels, his first book which is based on his doctoral dissertation, is forthcoming with transcript Verlag in early 2023. The book provides a reading of Whitehead’s first six novels that draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s relational sociology.

His current research project, tentatively titled “Appropriately Automated Luxury Pastoralism: Lewis Mumford and the Radical Techno-Republican Constellation,” investigates a tradition of social and technological critique articulated in the context of the economic and ecological crises of the 1930s, its predecessors in radical 19^th-century political thought, and the way in which it anticipates today’s discourses on automation, ecology, and postcapitalism.

Lieber is a member of “The Failure of Knowledge / Knowledges of Failure,” a research network funded by the German Research Foundation. His contribution discusses Andy Warhol’s ambition to paint money from the perspective of Marxian value-form theory. It is part of a research project on analogies between socio-economic and aesthetic form tentatively titled “Spectral Objectivities.”

In 2021, Lieber co-edited a special issue of Coils of the Serpent on “Im/possibility,” which includes his article on “The Living Dead in the Long Downturn.” In 2018, he co-edited a special issue on “Marx and the United States” of Amerikastudien / American Studies which commemorated the 200^th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birthday and featured contributions by Joshua Clover, Michael Denning, Walter Benn Michaels, and others.

See his personal homepage for a list of publications.