Michael C. Frank, Prof. Dr.
- Associate Professor of Literatures in English of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- Phone
- +41 44 634 35 50
- Room number
- PET-205
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Victorian culture and imperialism
The spatial turn in literary studies
Postcolonial and migrant writing
Cultural representations of terrorism and the “War on Terror”
(Neo)Imperialism and environmental change
I am Professor of English Literatures and currently serve as Head of the English Department. In both my research and teaching, I have a special interest in cultural-historical and discourse-analytical approaches to texts and their surrounding contexts. My early academic work focused on the late Victorian period; more recent publications deal with post-9/11 literature and film as well as postcolonial and migrant writing.
From 2003 to 2014, I was a research associate with memory scholar Aleida Assmann, the chair of English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz. There, I received my PhD in 2005 for a dissertation on cross-cultural encounters and the anxiety of cultural influence in colonial literature of the nineteenth century. In 2014, I was awarded the Habilitation degree for a study on the cultural imaginary of terrorism from the late Victorian period to the present day. Another research interest is the global impact of the “War in Terror.”
Prior to coming to Zurich, I held acting professorships at the universities of Konstanz, Giessen, and Duesseldorf, and taught as an adjunct lecturer at the universities of Bern and Basel.
In November 2019, I convened an interdisciplinary conference on The Figure of the Terrorist in Literature, Film and Media at the University of Zurich. A collected volume based on that conference was published in June 2023 by Edinburgh University Press.
In May 2021, I co-organized the biennial conference of the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (SAUTE) on “Migrations and Contacts.” The peer-reviewed conference proceedings were printed as a special issue of Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature (SPELL) in 2022.
Most recently, in May 2024, I co-hosted the annual conference of the Association of Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS) on the topic of “Post/Colonial Environments” at the University of Zurich. Together with Johannes Riquet of Tampere University and the poet Joan Naviyuk Kane, I am currently working on a volume based on that event.
| MA seminar “Global Mobilities: The Literature of Migration” | HS23 |
| MA seminar “Borderlands – US/Mexico” | FS22 |
| MA seminar “‘Criss-crossing the Atlantic’: Caribbean Writing and Culture in Britain” | HS20 |
| BA seminar “Progress and Decline: The Late Victorians” | FS22 |
| BA seminar “Other Worlds: (Post)Colonial Science Fiction” | FS21 |
| Lecture Series in Irish Studies, organized by the Swiss Centre of Irish Studies (SCIS) | every autumn semester |
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PhD Theses
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MA Theses:
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