Prof. Dr Johannes Völz

Senior Research Fellow

Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research
Schifferstraße 44
47059 Duisburg
Deutschland

Phone: +49 (0)203 379-5233
Fax: +49 (0)203 379-5276
E-Mail: voelz@gcr21.uni-due.de

Vita

Since 10/2016	Goethe University Frankfurt Institute of English and American Studies Heisenberg Professor (W3) of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics
03/2022 - 06/2022	Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna (IWM) Visiting Fellow
12/2008 - 9/2016	Goethe University Frankfurt Institute of English and American Studies Assistant Professor
9/2012 - 9/2014	Stanford University English Department Visiting Fellow
10/2003 - 12/2008	Free University Berlin John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Dept. of Culture Assistant Professor
9/2006 - 8/2007	Harvard University Department of English Visiting Scholar

Current Projects

Informalization: Aesthetic (De-)Legitimation in Authoritarian Populism (research project at KHK/GCR21)
The Aesthetics of Populism: The Politics of Strong Experience (book project)
Designated speaker of DFG graduate research training group initiative, "Ästhetik der demokratischen Lebensform", University of Frankfurt
PI in cluster initiative ConTrust: Trust in Conflict Under Conditions of Uncertainty, Univ. Frankfurt
The Affective Logic of Populism (co-organizer of intl. conference at Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg as part of cluster initiative ConTrust: Trust in Conflict Under Conditions of Uncertainty, Univ. Frankfurt, Dec. 2022)
Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World (program head of research program at Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg)
American Literature and the Transformation of Privacy (DFG research project), connected to book project in progress, Autofiction and the Affects of Singularity: On the Public Feelings of Networked Selves

Fellowship

Prof. Dr Johannes Völz joined the research group 'Global cooperation and diverse conceptions of world order' in September 2022 and will be a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre until August 2023.

Research Project at the Centre

Informalization: Aesthetic (De-)Legitimation in Authoritarian Populism

My research project investigates transnational authoritarian populism with a primary focus on the United States of America, Brazil, and Poland. It contributes to the Center for Global Cooperation Research’s aim of exploring practices of legitimation and delegitimation in global cooperation regarding populist and counter-populist mobilization. By shifting the focus from the established concerns of the political sciences to those of aesthetics (understood in the original Greek sense, aisthesis, as sense perception), affects (conceived of as feelings mobilized by, and in turn mobilizing, politics), and media culture (both mass media and social media), I aim to fill a gap in the research fields of populism and global cooperation.

Research Interests

American Studies
Democratic Culture
Political Aesthetics
Populism
Authoritarianism
American Literature and Political Thought
Political Media Cultures

Publications

Völz, Johannes (2018). The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat. New York: Cambridge University Press. Paperback: Cambridge University Press 2022.
Völz, Johannes (2010). Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson’s Challenge. Hanover: University Press of New England.
Völz, Johannes (2022). Autofiktion und die Poetik der Singularisierung,special section, edited by Johannes Voelz, WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 01.
Völz, Johannes (2021). How to Read the Literary Market (ed. Johannes Voelz, Dustin Breitenwischer and Philipp Löffler), themed issue, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (ZAA) 69.1.
Völz, Johannes (2020). The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies (ed. Johannes Voelz, Winfried Fluck and Rieke Jordan). Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) Vol. 35, 2019. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Völz, Johannes (2015). Chance, Risk, Security: Approaches to Uncertainty in American Literature. Themed issue, ed. Johannes Voelz, Amerikastudien/American Studies 60.4.
Völz, Johannes (2015). Security and Liberalism. Themed issue, ed. Johannes Voelz, Telos No. 170 (Spring).
Völz, Johannes (2022). 'Histories of the Unsayable: Reinhart Koselleck’s Aesthetic Anthropology,' American Literary History 34.4 (Winter).
Völz, Johannes (2022). 'The Post-Liberal Aesthetic; Or, How Can Literary Criticism Help Unsettle America’s Polarization?', American Literary History 34.1 (Spring). 354-368.
Völz, Johannes (2021). 'Verletzte Formen, Formen der Verletzung: Zur Ästhetik des Populismus,' WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, special section, 'Destruktivität und Regression im Rechtspopulismus,' ed. Vera King und Ferdinand Sutterlüty. 1, 141–151.
Völz, Johannes (2019). 'Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part II: The Aesthetics of Polarization,' Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 35, 261–286.
Völz, Johannes (2018). 'Toward an Aesthetics of Populism, Part I: The Populist Space of Appearance,' Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature (REAL) 34, 203–228.