Tim Lanzendörfer is Heisenberg Fellow for Literary Theory, Literary Studies, and Literary Studies Education. He works on a research project entitled “Reading in the Age of Trump: The Possibilities and Politics of Literary Studies Now" with three central areas of research. First, contemporary literary theory, especially the Anglophone debate on the merits of critique and postcritique; second, contemporary fiction's manifold investment in the question of reading as a practice and theory; third, the publicexpansion of the work of literary studies to include greater publics and a more diverse audience.

He obtained his PhD and postdoctoral degrees at the University of Mainz (2012; 2019) and worked at Mainz, the University of California Davis, and Freie Universität Berlin as assistant professor, visiting assistant professor, and visiting associate professor.

He currently supervises a DFG project entitled “Spiel|Erfahrung: Kunst und (Post-)Kritik in transmedialen Kontexten zwischen Spielen und Literatur.“ The project investigates the aesthetics and meaning of digital and analog role playing games and their literary forms.

His publications include the monographs The Professionalization of the American Magazine: Periodicals, Biography, and Nationalism in the Early Republic (Schöningh, 2013), which won the Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize in 2015; Books of the Dead: Reading the Zombie in Contemporary Literature (U Mississippi P, 2018); and Utopian Pasts and Futures in the Contemporary Novel (Edinburgh UP, 2023).

He is also editor and co-editor of a number of essay collections and anthologies, among them The  Poetics of Genre in the Contemporary Novel (2015), the  RoutledgeCompanion to the British and North American Literary Magazine (2022) and The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, TV, Podcast, Games (2023).

Among his current publication projects are an edited collection on The Futures of Zombie Studies (with Marlon Lieber), a monograph on literary studies called Nichtfaschisten machen: Literaturwissenschaft und die Frage, warum wir Bücher nicht nur lesen sollten as well as a special issue on the literary public humanities (with Pavan Malreddy). 

He is the co-convenor of the Network on Academic Forms.

CV

Blog (https://platonicmonkeywrench.wordpress.com/)