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
Research Interests
- 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
About Me
I am Professor of English Literatures. 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, Chair of English Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Konstanz. 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. This research was followed by a special issue, later republished as a collected volume, on the global impact of the “War on 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.
Recent and Upcoming Activities
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.
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.
Most recently, in September 2025, I co-organized the conference “Railway Aesthetics: Experiencing Locomotion across Media and Cultures” with Johannes Riquet (Tampere University) and Carmen Armenteros (Sapienza University of Rome). The event took the study of railway travel quite literally by being held on two moving trains between Vienna, Bucharest, and Istanbul.
Teaching (Sample)
| 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 |
Supervision (Sample)
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PhD Theses
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MA Theses
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