Erasure
Poetry
Project
by Mahshid Mayar, PhD
Principal Investigator:
Dr. Mahshid Mayar [she / her]
A book-length study of a sub-genre of documentary poetry known as “erasure poetry,” W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States, is the title of my second-book / Habilitation project. In this project, I interrogate the ways the political pervades the poetic and the poetic manifests the political in 21C U.S. poetry. The project started with the generous support of the German Research Foundation in Feb. 2024. This project started with a 3-year DFG “Eigene Stelle” research grant (Feb. 2024 - Jan. 2027 - paused since Feb. 2025).
My name is Mahshid Mayar and I am an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. I am 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). I am also the co-editor of Silence and Its Derivatives, an essay collection on silence and silencing across the humanities (Palgrave McMillan, 2022).
Michael Fuchs has a “voracious scholarly appetite” (quote by a reviewer of an application to a Norwegian university)—from videogames and pulp novels to Thomas Pynchon and (apparently) poetry, he swallows them all. After stints at the University of Graz, University of Siegen, and University of Oldenburg, Michael joined the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck in spring 2022 and the project on erasure poetry in July 2025. He has co-edited books such as The Gothic and Twenty-First-Century American Popular Culture (Brill, 2024), Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), and Intermedia Games—Games Inter Media: Video Games and Intermediality (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), and written about topics such as sharks, dinosaurs, zombies, COVID-19, US exceptionalism, US sports, and Austrian B-movies. For more information, see here.
Research Assistant:
Luca von Kirschbaum [they / them]
Luca von Kirschbaum holds a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, where they wrote their thesis on self-identity, trauma, and reconciliation in Richard Wagamese's Indian Horse. They are currently pursuing a Master of Arts in North American Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. Luca's research interests include Native American and Indigenous Literary Studies, Queer Studies, and Disability Studies. They have been involved in disability advocacy, including a six-month internship in 2023 advising the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development on the inclusion of people with disabilities in international cooperation.
Current Affiliation: University of Bonn, Germany
Involvement in the Project: Apr. 2024 - Jan. 2025
