I am a postdoctoral researcher in American studies with a focus on the study of U.S. imperialism, Native American studies, transpacific studies, critical legal studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies. In August 2019, I successfully defended my PhD thesis in American studies (summa cum laude) as part of my PhD-fellowship with the DFG-funded Research Training Group “Minor Cosmopolitanisms“ at the University of Potsdam. My PhD thesis, which is titled “The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialisms: Conflicting Discourses of Sovereignty, Jurisdiction and Territory in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Legal Texts and Indigenous Life Writing,” analyzes discourses of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territoriality in legal and literary narratives on the North American continent and in the Pacific.
Before joining the Research Training Group in Potsdam, I was teaching and research assistant (“Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter”) at the American Studies division at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany and the Department of English and American Studies in Potsdam, Germany. In 2016, I was DAAD-funded visiting scholar at the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (USA). I have published a number of articles relating to U.S. imperialism in the Pacific and on Hawai’i, discourses of territoriality and legitimacy in the American Southwest, and representations of Mars colonization in contemporary U.S. literature and culture. I am also co-editor of an anthology published with Routledge titled Across Currents: Connections between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific Studies and co-editor of a forthcoming special forum of the Journal for Transnational American Studies (JTAS) on “American Territorialities.”
Email: jens@temmen.de
