• Cultures of War and Critical Military Studies 
• Cultural Theory and US Popular Culture (esp. film and TV series) 
• Affect Studies, Public Feeling, and Sentimentality 
• Cultural Mobility (esp. in the transatlantic world) 
• African American and Asian American Literature  
• Gender Studies and Feminist Theory 

As a professor of American literature and culture, I cover the literary traditions and cultural formations of the US from their beginnings until today in my lectures and seminars. My research revolves around cultures of war and US military culture, the politics of popular culture (esp. regarding the role of affect and sentimentality), and the dynamics of race and gender in the transatlantic world.

Before joining UZH’s English Department, I earned my doctorate from the University of Bremen with a dissertation that has been published as Transatlantic Cultural Exchange: African American Women’s Art and Activism in West Germany (transcript 2013). I spent time at several US universities and institutions (UW at Madison, Yale, Harvard, the Library of Congress) to study and conduct research, and I obtained my Habilitation/venia legendi from FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2024. I previously taught at the University of Bremen, HHU Düsseldorf, and FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and received the FAU Teaching Award in 2022. My publications include numerous journal articles and book chapters, most recently “Liberation, Re-Education, Democratisation: The Politics of Gratitude in German-American Relations after 1945” in Contemporary European History 34.2 2025 and “Feeling Barbie: Mothers, Daughters, and White Feminist Genealogies” in Feminist Theory 26.3 2025 (with Stefanie Schäfer) as well as several co-edited volumes, including The Lexicon of Global Melodrama (transcript 2022), Re-Thinking Solidarity (spec. issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies 2023), and Civilization, Democratization, Containment: Strategies of Re-Education in Imperial Settings and Beyond (spec. issue of The International History Review 2024).

I am a member of The Occupation Studies Research Network and The Global Sentimentality Project as well as of the Editorial Advisory Board of WiN (since 2017) and the Board of Readers of Amerikastudien/American Studies (2025-2032). At UZH, I am the deputy director of the MA Kulturanalyse/Cultural Analysis. As of 2026, I also serve as president of the Swiss Association for North American Studies (SANAS).

The manuscript for my second monograph Happy Home Front Heroines? Military Spouses in the Cultural Imaginary of the US received FAU’s Habilitation Award in 2025. I am currently revising it for publication.

I am honored to deliver one of the keynote lectures at the 2026 annual conference of the German Association for American Studies on “Kinship in American Studies.” At UZH, I co-organize(d) two conferences in 2026: “New Adult Fiction: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf ein populäres Phänomen” (Mar. 19-20, 2026, with Prof. Christine Lötscher) and “American Un/Freedoms,” the biennial conference of SANAS (Nov. 5-6, 2026, with Prof. Barbara Straumann).

I am available to supervise BA, MA and PhD theses, particularly as they pertain to my main research interests. 

ORCiD Profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9817-5751

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katharina-gerund-b662b94b/