NELK

Michelle Stork, M.A., M.A.

   

Michelle Stork studied English Studies, Moving Cultures, Comparative Literary Studies and History of Art at Goethe University Frankfurt and Universiteit Utrecht. She holds an M.A. in Moving Cultures – Transcultural Encounters and an M.A. in History of Art, both from Goethe University Frankfurt. Her PhD project aims at reading road narratives in fiction and film across the Anglophone world from a transcultural perspective. Since November 2020, Michelle holds a scholarship with the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes).

Research Interests

  • Literature and Globalisation
  • Automobility
  • Road Narratives
  • Transcultural English Studies
      

Current Research Project

PhD project “Transculturality in the Contemporary Anglophone Road Novel and Road Movie”; supervisor: Prof Dr Frank Schulze-Engler

Publications
Articles and Book Chapters (Peer-Reviewed)

  • 2024. “A Travelling Genre: Para-Nomads in the 21st Century Anglophone Road Novel,” Anglistik 35.1. [under review]
  • 2023. “‘I Was Taken as a Child. Stolen’: Narrating Automobility, Environmental Justice and the Stolen Generations in Mad Max: Fury Road,” Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium. [under review]
  • 2023. "Experiencing the Environment from the Car: Human and More-than-Human Road Trippers in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing," Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays, edited by Sheri-Marie Harrison, Arin Keeble and Maria Elena Carpintero Torres-Quevedo, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. [forthcoming]
  • 2023. With Nadia Butt. "The Anglophone Road Novel: Moving Memoires, Histories and Identities in Jamal Mahjoub’s Travelling with Djinns (2004) and Bernardine Evaristo’s Soul Tourists (2005)," The Anglophone Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts – Literary Developments – Model Interpretations, edited by Nadia Butt, Ansgar Nünning and Alexander Scherr, Trier: Wissenschaftsverlag Trier. [forthcoming]
  • 2022. “Identities Lost and Found? Transcultural Perspectives on Jamal Mahjoub’s Road Novel Travelling with Djinns”, Postcolonial Interventions 7.1, 240-265.
  • 2021. “‘Everyone Leaves’: (Auto)Mobility and Migration in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive.” Mobilizing Narratives: Narrating Injustices of (Im)Mobility, edited by Ben Hager Driss. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 21-38.

Other

Presentations

  • “Infrastructural Friction in Contemporary Road Narratives”, 34th Annual Conference of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS), Konstanz, Germany, May 2023.
  • With Nadia Butt. “Mobile Lives, Nomadic Selves: Between Home and Homelessness in the Road Film Nomadland (2020)”, Travel Light: Apprehending Being on the Move, Western University, Ontario, Canada, March 2023.
  • "Visualising Slowness and Friction in the Contemporary Road Narrative” Panel: Representation of Mobility and Transport: Formal Matters, T2M Conference, Padua, Italy, September 2022.
  • "A Travelling Genre: Nomads in the 21st Century Anglophone Road Novel” Panel: Nomadworld: Global Mobility and the New Anglophones, Anglistentag 2022, University Mainz, September 2022.
  • "Narrating Overlapping Geographies and Border-Crossings in the Transcultural Road Novel,” Panel: Transcultural Transgressions, ACLALS Triennial Conference, Toronto, July 2022.
  • "Migration and Place-Making in the 21st Century Anglophone Road Novel,” Displacement, Emplacement, and Migration: An Interdisciplinary Conference, University Bamberg, June 2022.
  • "We need to get to Africa’: Euro-African Mobilities in the Age of Viral Disease, Nuclear Meltdown and Artificial Intelligence,” Panel: Crossovers: Imaginaries of Movement in Culture and Literary Aesthetics, Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei [online], June 2022.
  • "Constructing Middle-Class Identities in India via Automobility in Mohit Goyal’s Road Novel Colourful Notions,” Panel: Mobilities and Contested Identities, 33rd Annual Conference of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS), Goethe University Frankfurt, May 2022.
  • "Echoes, Ghosts and Polaroids: Memory and Media in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive,” Panel: Contested Phototextualities in Contemporary Latin America, Latin American Studies Association 2022 Congress, San Francisco [online], May 2022.
  • "Nomadland: In Pursuit of of Home and Community on the Road,” Workshop: Raconter l'habiter: faire face aux crises de l'habitat en France et en Allemagne de la fin du XIXes à nos jours (Wohnen erzählen: Bewältigung der Wohnungskrisen in Frankreich und Deutschland vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis heute), Lyon, April 2022.
  • "Coming Home:The Road to Sisterhood in Jaswal’s The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters,” Panel: Dis/placed Subjects: Home and Belonging in Postcolonial Women's Narratives, 53rd Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), Baltimore [online], March 2022.
  • "It´s a good car, it’s just broken down’: Alternative Narratives of Modernity in the Contemporary Road Narrative,” Modernities in the Contact Zone: Translating across Unfamiliar Objects, 9th Postgraduate Forum Postcolonial Narrations, University of Potsdam, October 2021.
  • "Driving, Drugs and Dreaming: Indigenous Automobility in Paul Collis’s Road Novel Dancing Home,” Panel: Cars, Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Montreal [online], April 2021.
  • "Bitumen streams’: The Representation of Oil and Water in Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air,” Panel: Oil and Water, 52nd Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), University at Buffalo [online], March 2021.
  • "Narrating Im/Mobility and Identity in Contemporary Road Novels by Paul Collis and Tara June Winch,” Panel: Conceptualizing Entangled Im/Mobilities in Diverse Contexts, Entangled Im/Mobilities: Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Vienna [online], March 2021.
  • "Identities Lost, Identities Found? Reading Jamal Mahjoub’s Road Novel Travelling with Djinns through a Transcultural Lens,” Rethinking Postcolonial Europe: Moving Identities, Changing Subjectivities, 8th Postgraduate Forum Postcolonial Narrations, University of Gießen [online], February 2021.
  • "A Continent of Strangers: Crossing 1950s Australia in Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home” 31st Annual Conference of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS), Goethe University Frankfurt, March 2020. [paper accepted; conference cancelled due to COVID-19]

Teaching

  • "Changing Narratives of Automobility", Proseminar, Goethe University Frankfurt, Winter 2022/23
  • "'Running from both the Living and the Dead’: Imagining Environmental and Mobility Justice in Transcultural Anglophone Texts", Proseminar, Goethe University Frankfurt, Summer 2022. Co-taught with Dr Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell. 
  • "Petroficiton", Proseminar, Goethe University Frankfurt, Winter 2021/2022
  • "Around the World with the Road Narrative: Identity, Automobility and Transculturality in Contemporary Anglophone Road Novels and Road Movies”, Proseminar, Goethe University Frankfurt, Summer 2021.

Professional Memberships

  • GAPS (Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies)
  • EACLALS (European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies)
  • Deutscher Anglistenverband
  • ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association)
  • GRADE (Goethe Graduate Academy)
  • Co-Chair of the Working Group “Transcultural Narratives” at GRADE

Links 

Find me on Academia.edu and LinkedIn.