Zoë Achilles (any pronouns) is a teaching and research assistant at the chair of Prof. Dr. Michael C. Frank.

Zoë completed her BA and MA studies at the English Department of the University of Zurich. Her MA thesis, titled "The Changing Tropes of Power in African-American Speculative Fiction," analyzed how characters in speculative fiction gain their powers. The study compared the history of berserker/superhero stories in American fiction with stories written by African-American authors to showcase two predominant mythologies of power, demonstrating how African-American authors are changing the landscape of speculative fiction.

For her PhD thesis, Zoë draws on her minor in Biology and has turned towards ecocriticism. She analyzes the representation of plants in contemporary English literature, analyzing non-fiction, historical fiction, and speculative fiction that has been written since the awareness for the climate crisis reached its global platform. Recently, the awareness of human-induced climate change has drawn more attention to the position of plants within nature, and Zoë examines what this attention says about the human-plant and human-nature relationship. Because plants are active, though frequently overlooked, participants in most aspects of human life, this topic creates many intersections between different fields of literary and environmental studies.

• Ecocriticism
• Environmental Humanities
• Speculative Fiction
• Nonfiction
• Indigenous Literature
• Postcolonialism
• African American Literature