PD Dr. Karin Hoepker

Please note that I am currently on leave, serving as a guest professor at the University of Konstanz April-September 2025.

Fresh off the press: Horn, Katrin, Karin Hoepker, and Selina Foltinek, eds. Speculative Endeavors. Managing Knowledge and Capital in the Long Nineteenth Century. Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century Series. Manchester UP, 2025.

Research Interests

Researcher Profile on ORCiD

• Current projects
  • “Literature and the Public Sphere in Differentiated Contemporary Cultures”, DFG research training group
  • “Love, Transatlantically: Semantics of Love in Fiction”
  • “The Edge of Reason: Fiction, Risk and Probability in American Antebellum Narratives”
• Narrative Theory & Fiction
• Economic Criticism, Cultures of Finance, The Future of Work
• US-American Literature, 19^th to present
• Science & Fiction; Literature & History of Science
• Ecocriticism
• Popular Culture, Seriality, and American Television
• Architecture, Urban Studies
• Humanism and Posthumanism

CV

• Guest Professor of North American Literature, University of Konstanz, SS 2025
• Guest Professor of North American Literature, John-F.-Kennedy Institute, FU Berlin, SS 2023-WS 2023/24
• Guest Professor (Vertretung Prof. Dr. Sabine Sielke), Department of English, American, and Celtic Studies (IAAK), Bonn University, WS 2021/22
• Deputy Chair of American Studies, esp. American Literature (Lehrstuhlvertretung Prof. Dr. A. Kley), Georg Thyssen-Foundation “Lesezeit”-Program, SS 2020
• Guest Professor, Department of English and American Studies, Vienna University, WS 2019/20
• Habilitation April 2018: The Edge of Reason – Fiction, Risk, and Probability in Antebellum American Literary Narrative, awarded the Habilitationspreis 2018 
• Research at the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine, August 2014
• Visiting Scholar, Department for Comparative Literature at Stanford University, 2012/2013
• Summer Academy of the German National Academic Foundation, La Colle-sur-Loup 22.09.-05.10.2013
• Assistant to the managing director of the Institute for English and American Studies’ executive board 2009–11
• Assistant Professor, Department of English and American Studies since April 2009
• 2008/09 awarded postdoctoral fellowship of the Program for the Advancement of Gifted Female Scholars (“Programm zur Förderung besonders begabter Nachwuchswissenschaftlerinnen”)
• Dissertation in 2008 on “No Maps for These Territories? – Towards an Archaeology of Future Urbanity in William Gibson’s Work”
• Fellow at the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program of the German Research Foundation (DFG) “Cultural Hermeneutics: Reflections on Difference and Transdifference,” FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, 2004-2006
• Studied English and American Studies and German Literature at the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and at Indiana University Bloomington

Functions

• Principal Investigator DFG research training group “Literature and the Public Sphere in Differentiated Contemporary Cultures”
• Department Representative of Women’s Affairs (Frauenbeauftragte -2024)
• Member Interdisziplinäres Zentrum Gender, Differenz, Diversität (IZGDD)
• Coordinator of the Masters Program “North American Studies: Culture and Literature”
• Editor of the New American Studies Journal (NASJ)
• Peer reviewer for the European Journal of American Studies, Atlantis, JAAS
  

Publications

In preparation:

with Antje Kley, Dirk Niefanger, and Antonia Villinger, eds. Handbuch Literatur und Öffentlichkeit. Metzler/ Springer Nature, 2025.

The Edge of Reason – Fiction, Risk, and Probability in Antebellum Literature. (Contributions to English and American Literary Studies Series.) Peter Lang, Fall 2025.

“The Code of Capital: Transgenerational Wealth and the Spectacle of the Marketplace in The House of the Seven Gables,” America and Ownership. Territory, Slavery, Jubilee, ed. by Gesa Mackenthun. Winter Verlag, Spring 2025.

“The You You Are. TV-Serien als öffentliches Medium von Sozial- und Selbsttechnologien.“ Literatur und Medienöffentlichkeiten: Orientierende Fallstudien, ed. By Aida Bosch and Antje Kley. (Literatur und Öffentlichkeit / Literature and the Public Sphere Series.) Metzler, 2025. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-69735-1_4 Open Access

Workshops, Lectures, and Papers

• “Severance – Modeling, Office Space, and the Return of Organization Man in Contemporary Workplace Series,” Workshop Model Imaginaries: Literature, Economics, Abstraction of the DFG-Network “Model Aesthetics,” 04.-06.07.2024
• “Confidence and the ‘Contortions of Money’— Market Fiction & Herman Diaz’s Trust,” North American Studies Research Colloquium, John-F.-Kennedy Institute FU, Berlin, 03.07.2024
• “True Love Guaranteed: Liebessemantiken und die Macht der Algorithmen,“ lecture series Literatur und Öffentlichkeiten, FAU, Erlangen, 10.01.2024
• “Imagining Human Extinction – Dystopia and Narrative in Margaret Atwood,” 19.12.2023, invited seminar talk, Anglophone Studies Rostock
• “Speculating in Intimacy – Chance, Algorithms, and the Future of Matchmaking,” Versions of America: Speculative Pasts, Presents, Futures, AAAS Klagenfurth, 20.-22.10.2023
• “Fictitious Commodities and the Spectacle of the Entrepreneurial Individual in Hawthorne’s Seven Gables,” America and Ownership: Territory, Slavery, Jubilee, GAAS Rostock, 01.-03.06.2023
• “Affordances of Fiction: Futurity and Responsibility in Science Fiction,” SLSA EU, 18.-22.05.2023
• “Crises of Intimacy – Semantics of Love in the Digital Age,” Crises and Turns, Biennial Conference of the Nordic Association for American Studies (NAAS), Uppsala, Sweden, 25.-27.05.2023
• “Vulnerabilität, Macht und Übersetzung in Katie Kitamuras Roman Intimacies,”with Antje Kley, lecture series Ethik – Text – Kultur, Augsburg, 28.07.2022
• “The Unwinding: Steward O’Nan’s Geography of Cruel Optimism,” Flyover Fictions, Innsbruck University, Austria, 27.-28.05.2022
• “Journeys into the Abyss: Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and the Postmodern City,” Talk and discussion with A. Ganser, Vienna University, 26.11.2021
•  “Shipwreck, Risk, and the Novel: Poe’s Poetics of the Improbable,” invited lecture Current Issues in North American and Cultural Studies, Bonn, 19.10.2021
• International Conference Speculative Endeavors – Cultures of Knowledge and Capital in the Long Nineteenth Century, University of Bayreuth, deferred to 22.– 24.10.2021, org. Katrin Horn, Karin Hoepker, Selina Foltinek
• Workshop “Authorship and Cultural Participation in the Nineteenth Century,” German Association for American Studies (GAAS), Heidelberg, June 2021, deferred from 2020
• Invited talk “Fiction after Postmodernism – New Realism and the Dystopian Imagination in M. Atwood’s Work,” Otto-Friedrich-University, Bamberg, 08.02.2021
• “Cold Intimacy: Ex-Urban Masculinity in Contemporary US-American TV Series,” Metropolitan Masculinities: Narratives of Gender and Urban Space, Ruhr-University Bochum, 29.-30.11.2019
• “Semantics of Love and Fragmented Family Ties in E. Marlitt’s Work,” Annual Meeting of the German Studies Association, Seminar “Family and Knowledge” Portland, OR, 3.-6.10. 2019
• “Emotional Economy, Biomedicalization and Narratives of Managed Selves in Contemporary TV-Series,“ DGfA, Hamburg, 13.-15.06.2019
• “’Black Cargo’: Narratives of Immobility in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.“ American Im/Mobilities, Austrian American Studies Association, Wien, 16-18.11.2018
• “Peripheral Masculinities: Affect and the Rural in Contemporary US-American TV Series”, De/Constructing Masculinities? Critical Explorations into Affect, Intersectionalities, and the Body, 22-23.06.2018
• Lecture “Ugly Feelings – Öffentlicher Affekt und die Logik des Postfaktischen in den USA.” Lecture Series on Wutbürger – Gutmenschen. Ethische Aspekte gesellschaftlicher Debatten, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, July 24, 2017.
• Lecture “Risk, Whaling, and the Incorporation of Trust in Melville’s Moby-Dick.” Symposium on Re-reading the American Renaissance, University of Vienna, May 09, 2017.
• Lecture “Risk and Fiction – Reading Transatlantic Networks.” Academic Symposium and Humboldt Kolleg on Network@1800: New Directions in German and European Cultural Studies, Bowdoin College, Maine, April 05 – 08, 2017.
• Lecture “Risk, Probability, and the Order of Things in Melville’s Fiction.” Conference on Fictions of Management, FU Berlin, Dec. 08 – 10, 2016.
• Lecture “When the Whale Was Still a Fish: Precarious Knowledge and Melville’s Moby-Dick.” University of Vienna, Nov. 18, 2016.
• Lecture “Ethopolitics: Narrating the Biomedical Self.” Conference on The Biopolitics of America: Bodies, Environments, and the Liberal Imagination, University of Würzburg, July 28 – 30, 2016.
• Lecture “Sea-faring, Whale-hunting, and Mobile Orders of Knowledge in Melville’s Moby-Dick.” International Conference on Maritime Mobilities: Critical Perspectives from the Humanities, University of Vienna, Feb. 01 – 02, 2016.
• Lecture “Perils of the Sea? The Creole-Mutiny and Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave.” International Conference Perilous Passages – The Birth of Risk in 19th Century American Culture, Schloss Thurnau, Oct. 23 – 24, 2015.
• with Jeanne Cortiel. “Perilous Passages – The Birth of Risk in 19th Century American Culture.” International Conference, Schloss Thurnau, Oct. 23 – 24, 2015.
• with Antje Kley. “Unruly Creatures, Obstinate Things – Bio-Objects and Scientific Knowledge Production in Contemporary Science Novels.” Fiction meets Science, Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, Delmenhorst, Nov. 19 – 22, 2014.
• Workshop “Owning (Human) Nature? Literary Knowledge Production and the Life Sciences.” Annual Conference of the DGfA on Knowledge Landscapes North America, University of Bonn, May 28 – 31, 2015.
• Paper “No Longer Your Friendly Neighborhood Killer: Crime Shows and Seriality after Dexter.” Conference on Transgressive Television: Politics, Crime, and Citizenship in 21st-Century American TV Series, Vienna, Oct. 01 – 03, 2014.
• Workshop “Digital Detritus: Spam, Scrap, Bit Rot.” with Andrew Gross, DGfA 2014, University of Würzburg, June 12 – 15, 2014
• Guest Lecture “Killer Seriality: Dexter and Contemporary American TV.” Literature & Media Studies Program, University of Bamberg, May 06, 2014.
• Lecture “Mad Scientists, Horrid Creatures: Wissenschaftsfiktion in der amerikanischen Populärkultur.” Lecture series Populärkultur, Interdisziplinäres Zentrum Literatur und Kultur der Gegenwart, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, May 05, 2014.
• with Antje Kley. “Literatur und Wissen: Life Science und The Pursuit of Happiness in Richard Powers: Das Größere Glück.” Summer Academy of the German National Academic Foundation, La Colle-sur-Loup, France, Sept. 24, 2013.
• with Antje Kley. “Literatur und Wissen: Life Science and The Pursuit of Happiness in Richard Powers: Das Größere Glück.” Lecture series Quarks and Letters: Naturwissenschaften in Literatur und Kultur der Gegenwart, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Jan. 07, 2013.
  
• Workshop and Paper “Life! Risk Narratives and the Novel in the 21st Century,” organized by Prof. Dr. Jeanne Cortiel, Bayreuth Institute for American Studies (BIFAS), July 19 – 20, 2012.
• Workshop “Narratives of Self – Life Sciences and Life Writing in the Biomedical Age.” Annual conference of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), Mainz, June 2012 (co-organized with Eva-Sabine Zehelein).
• “Dexter – Pathologizing the New Picturesque.” Is It ‘Cause It’s Cool? Affective Encounters with American Culture, 38th Annual Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies (AAAS), Schloss Leopoldskron, Salzburg, Nov. 04 – 06, 2011.
• Workshop “Faculty Towers – Academic Self-Reflection in Film, Fiction, and Theory.” Annual conference of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), Jena, June 2009 (co-organized with Jeanne Cortiel).
• with A. Ganser. “The Propitious Moment: Navigating the Ethnic Other in the Urban Geographies of Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Jarmusch’s Night on Earth.” EthniCities: Metropolitan Cultures and Ethnic Identities in the Americas, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung (ZiF), Bielefeld, Mar. 18 – 20, 2009.
• “The Human at the Threshold: Atwood, Houellebecq, Ishiguro.” Close Encounters – ScienceLiteratureArt, European Biannual Meeting of the Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts (SLSA), Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, June 13 – 16, 2006.
• with A. Ganser. “Cruises and Crusades: Productions of Urban Space in Taxi Driver and Mean Streets.” Workshop on Site of Passage: The City as a Place of (Non)Conformity in Contemporary American Multicultural Literature, Art, Theater, and Film, EAAS Biennial Conference “Conformism, Non-Conformism, and Anti-Conformism in American Culture,” Nicosia, Cyprus, Apr. 07 – 10, 2006.
• “‘Intimate Caesurae:’ Constructions and Transience of ‘Humanity’ in Recent Fiction.” Annual Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Princeton, NJ, Mar. 23 – 26, 2006.
• Co-organized with Dr. Christian Huck, Workshop “The Object of Cultural Studies: Praxis – Cognition – Text?,” featuring Dr. Doris Bachmann-Medick, Dr. Joachim Renn, and Dr. Barbara Zielke, Jan. 28 – 29, 2005.
• with Jens Klenner, George Mason University. “Cruising Spaces of Hyperrealism: The Humvee in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.” Panel “‘Like Nothing Else:’ Critical Analyses of the Humvee,” Annual Conference of the Cultural Studies Association (CSA US), Boston, Mass. May, 05 – 09, 2004.
• “FutureNature: Concepts of ‘Life’ and ‘Nature’ in the fictional Worlds of Crichton’s Prey and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake.” Cross-Fertilizations: Literature, Science, and Nature, 3rd Conference of the Association for Science, Literature, and the Environment (ASLE-UK), University College Chichester, UK, July 16 – 18, 2004.
• “FutureNature and the End of Man: Reading Atwood’s Oryx and Crake against Agamben’s The Open.” Annual Conference of the Society for Literature and Science (SLS), Durham, N.C., Oct. 14 – 17, 2004.
• “Mirrorworlds, Urban Spaces: Heterotopographies in William Gibson’s Virtual Light-Trilogy.” Border//Crossings, 6th Graduate Conference, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Nov. 05 – 07, 2004.
• “Meaning Out of Control? Popular Culture as Interdisciplinary Challenge,” featuring Prof. Dr. R. Winter (Klagenfurt) and Tobias Nagl (Amherst), workshop co-organized with Dr. Christian Huck, Apr. 18 – 19, 2004.
• “Nomadic Urban Spaces – Interstitial Topographies in William Gibson’s Virtual Lights-Trilogy.” Mapping Identities: Urban Landscapes and the Discourses of Space, Annual Colloquium of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Catholic University of America, Washington D.C., Apr. 03, 2004.

Courses

• Narratives of Conspiracy (HS)
• Rurality, Poverty, and Whiteness (HS)
• Epidemic Fiction: Narrative & Contagion (HS)
• New/Realism: Referentiality and Fiction (HS)
• Clones & Enhancements: Life Sciences, Fictions, and Imagining the Late Human (HS)
• The Custom of the Country – Gender, Economy and Affect in the US American Novel of Manners (HS)
• The Function of Fiction: Recent US-American Novels and Theory (HS)
• American Drama – Stage & Screen (HS)
• Narratives of Slavery and Abolition (PS)
• The Morality of Blood? Die Be- und Verhandlungen von Moral in der zeitgenössischen US-TV Serie (HS, with Ingrid Stapf, Medienethik)
• “Black weeds out of a buried heart – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fiction” (PS)
• “Terrible things must happen” – American Naturalism (PS)
• American Literary Realism (HS)
• 19^th Century American Gothic Literature (PS)
• Mindgame Fiction (PS)
• American Fiction – From Independence to Civil War (Exam Preparation)
• Herman Melville – More than Whales (PS)
• Introduction to Queer Studies (PS)
• Prison in America (PS)
• Mark Twain (PS)
• Suburban Nation – Imaginations of Suburbia in American Culture (PS)
• Memory, History and Popular Culture: Strategies of Remembrance in late 20^th Century USA (PS), co-taught with Jens Klenner, George Mason University
• Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes: African American Detection in Film and Fiction (PS)
• Body and Technology in North-American Independent-Film: David Cronenberg
• Introduction to Literary Studies & Literary Theory