Shayan Rahmanian Koushkaki, M.A.

Dissertation Project: “Institutional Poetics: Fiction and Poetry Creative Writing Programs as Sites of Power”

The dissertation focuses on understanding university creative writing programs (CWPs) as distinct sites of power within the US-American literary field. This means that the intersection of socio-political identities (e.g. gender, race, and class) with literary value and the university as a predominantly white institution of the cultural elite is necessary to understanding the literary practice imparted by the foundational institution of US-American literary production. My project explores how the social forces and power relations at the university translate into the classroom, assignments, extracurriculars, and texts authored by current students and canonized graduates. I then argue that due to their position within the ‘subfield of small-scale production’ within the literary field and their promotion of writing as a teachable craft, CWPs impart approaches to writing that result in an aversion towards genre fiction and a privileging of artificially complex texts that are marked by formal experiments, constant shifts in narration or representations of time, as well as an autopoetic reflection of literary form, authorship, and the CWP itself. This obsession with literary form is a result and reproduction of the distinct social rules that shape understandings of literary value by the subfield of small-scale production and primarily appeals to other literary professionals (i.e. editors and publishers) to whom it is meant to signal that writer-students produce literature worth critical acclaim.

Research Interests

• Critical University Studies
• Decolonial Feminisms
• Black Studies and Black Ontology
• Sociology of Literature (particularly Literary Value and Literary Practice)
• Paratext and Authorship
• Literature and Remembrance
• Poetry as Resistance

CV

• October 2025 – September 2028: Research associate in the research training group “Literature and the Public Sphere in Differentiated Contemporary Cultures” (GRK2806)
• September 2025: M.A. New German Literary Studies / Neuere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft (Leibniz University Hannover)
• March 2025: M.A. North American Studies (Leibniz University Hannover)
• September 2020: B.A. Interdisciplinary Bachelor / Fächerübergreifender Bachelor in English and German Studies (Leibniz University Hannover)

Conference Presentation and Workshops

• “‘The Only Possible Relationship to the University Today is a Criminal One.’ A Reflection on Repressions of Student Activism.” Presentation and Panel Discussion ‘North American Studies in Crisis,’ Leibniz University Hannover, 25. June 2025.
• “Whiteness as a Structure of Neglect in Academia.” Online-Symposium ‘Care and Neglect in (German) American Studies’ by the Diversity Roundtable of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS/DGfA), Zoom, 07. February 2025.
•  “‘Dragon Fruit and Peaches in the Wine.’ Black Noise and the Effability of Afro-Optimism through Music.” Seminar ‘Black Feminist Thought,’ Leibniz University Hannover, 12. June 2024.

Publications

Rahmanian Koushkaki, Shayan, and Theresa Sambruno Spannhoff. “Kanon Und Kanonisierung im Vereinigten Königreich und den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika.” Projekt: Kanon, edited by Nils Gelker and Manuel Zink, Wehrhahn, 2021, pp. 97–116.

Teaching

• “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” — Poems of Resistance, Survival, and Suffering (Leibniz University Hannover, Winter 2025)

Memberships and Networks

• Member of the German Association for American Studies (GAAS/DGfA)
• Organizational member of the Decolonial Feminisms Reading Group (DFRG)