Erasure
Poetry
Project

A transnational Americanist with research interests at the intersection of literary criticism and cultural history of the US, Mahshid Mayar works on 21^st-century protest poetry, race and racialization, critical sound studies, 19^th-century US cultural history, new empire studies, and historical and literary American childhoods. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the North American Studies program at the University of Bonn and the recipient of a 3-year DFG “Eigene Stelle research grant (Feb. 2024 - Jan. 2027), which enables her to work on her second-book project, “W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States.”  Mahshid is the author of Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), winner of the 2022 Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies (ASA 2022). In her more recent work (including the present project on erasure poetry), she explores the crossover between the politics and the poetics of 21^st-century works of American erasure poetry. Mahshid is also the co-editor of Silence and Its Derivatives, an essay collection on silence and silencing across the humanities (Palgrave McMillan, 2022) and the author of various articles and essays on American childhoods for, among others, the European Journal of American Studies, Anglia, Amerikastudien, and Oxford Bibliographies.