Main Content

Selected publications by members of the IAA

A few selected publications by members of the department are listed on this page. You will find more publications via the corresponding links which refer to each person’s publications as well as their personal pages within the department.

Carmen Birkle and Birgit Däwes (eds.): Amerikastudien / American Studies. A Quarterly

Universitätsverlag Winter, 2022
ISBN: 978-3-8253-9340-3

‘Amerikastudien / American Studies: A Quarterly’ (Amst) is the official journal of the German Association for American Studies, dedicated to an interdisciplinary and transnational concept of American Studies and covering all areas of the discipline, including literary and cultural criticism, media, history, political science, linguistics, and pedagogy. The forum section includes innovative formats and scholarly opinions on current debates in the field as well as other open formats, such as interviews and short dialogical position papers. ‘Amst’ publishes reviews with an emphasis on scholarly contributions (not exclusively) from German-speaking countries to the wider field of American Studies. The journal continuously invites suggestions for new formats to allow for cutting-edge scholarship and intellectual debate.

The first issue can be viewed here

Carmen Birkle and Johanna Heil (eds.): Communicating Disease: Cultural Representations of American Medicine

Communicating Disease: Cultural Representations of American Medicine
Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013
ISBN: 978-3-8253-6215-7

‘Communicating Disease’ focuses on the intersections of literature and medicine. It unravels the intricate entanglement of culture and disease and is devoted to the representation of life through medical narratives, exploring its value to both the literary critic and the medical practitioner. Grouped in four sections, the contributions to this volume discuss cultural representations of medical practice, the medical profession, diseases and epidemics, and potential healing functions of narratives. Topics range from eighteenth-century Old and New World practices of medicine via the careers of nineteenth-century women doctors and nurses subverting dominant gender norms, to twentieth- and twenty-first-century cognitive sciences; from smallpox epidemics via yellow fever to AIDS and biotechnology; from Alice James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Siri Hustvedt and Richard Powers as well as women pathologists on the screen; to be concluded by a transnational reading of the world of medicine in the medium of literature. (publisher’s information)

Further publications by Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle

Sonja Fielitz: Einführung in die anglistisch-amerikanische Dramenanalyse

Einführung in die anglistisch-amerikanische Dramenanalyse
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010
ISBN: 978-3534233939

This introduction provides the necessary instruments for the description and analysis of the genre of drama. The guiding principle here is the close connection between drama and theatre. The focus of the publication is on the textual analysis of figures, actions time and space. The volume concludes with a look at film analysis.  

Sonja Fielitz presents with this volume a comprehensive introduction to drama analysis.  It takes up current research approaches and discusses drama in close connection to the theatre. It becomes clear that the template of the literary text is irrevocably connected to its visual presentation on stage. The various analytical approaches to the text, the performance, the relationship between the text and performance are covered in detail. Particular attention is paid here to the important categories of figures, acts, time and space. The works of Shakespeare, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee and Caryl Churchill illustrate the procedure. The connective chapters are in the end also devoted to the fundamentals of communication, semiotics as well as film analysis.   (translation of publisher’s information)

Sandra Götz and Magali Paquot (Eds.): International Journal of Learner Corpus Research

International Journal of Learner Corpus Research
John Benjamins Publishing 
ISSN: 2215-1478
E-ISSN: 2215-1486

The International Journal of Learner Corpus Research (IJLCR) is a forum for researchers who collect, annotate, and analyse computer learner corpora and/or use them to investigate topics in Second Language Acquisition and linguistic theory in general, inform foreign language teaching, develop learner-corpus-informed tools (e.g. courseware, proficiency tests, dictionaries and grammars) or conduct natural language processing tasks (e.g. annotation, automatic spell- and grammar-checking, L1 identification). IJLCR aims to highlight the multidisciplinary and broad scope of practice that characterizes the field and publishes original research covering methodological, theoretical and applied work in any area of learner corpus research. 

Agnieszka Leńko-Szymańska and Sandra Götz (Eds.): Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency in Learner Corpus Research

Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency in Learner Corpus Research
John Benjamins Publishing, 2022
ISBN 9789027212580

This volume illustrates the high potential of learner corpus investigations for research into the CAF triad by presenting eleven original learner corpus-based studies which are set within solid theoretical frameworks, examine learner corpora with state-of-the-art analytical techniques and yield highly interesting findings. The volume’s major strength lies in the range of issues it undertakes and in its interdisciplinary thematic novelty. The chapters collectively address all three dimensions of L2 performance related to different linguistic subsystems (i.e. lexical, phraseological and grammatical complexity and accuracy, along with fluency) as well as the interactions among these constructs. The studies are based on data drawn from carefully compiled learner corpora which are analysed with the help of diverse corpus-based methods. The theoretical discussions and the empirical results shall contribute to the advancement of the fields of SLA and writing and speech research and shall inspire further investigations in the area of the CAF triad.


Further publications by Prof. Dr. Götz-Lehmann

Rolf Kreyer: The Nature of Rules, Regularities and Units in Language: A Network Model of the Language System and of Language Use

The Nature of Rules, Regularities and Units in Language: A Network Model of the Language System and of Language Use
De Gruyter Mouton, 2013
ISBN 978-3-11-031832-6

Comprehensive networks of language make use of structures that go beyond the basic associative connections that can be found in the brain. This study is an attempt to provide an account of language that restricts itself to structures of a neurophysiological kind, i.e. simple nodes, excitatory and inhibitory connections. It is shown that fundamental aspects of language system and use can be explained with such a simple and cognitively plausible network.

Further publications by Prof. Dr. Rolf Kreyer

Martin Kuester, Françoise LeJeune, Anca-Raluca Radu, Charlotte Sturgess (eds.): Narratives of Crisis - Crisis of Narrative

Narratives of Crisis - Crisis of Narrative
Wißner, Augsburg, 2011
ISBN: 978-3-89639-849-9

The early 21st century has proven to be a time of crises in the fields of the economy, ecology and politics, the events of September 11, 2001 being a harrowing starting point of the new millennium. These crises have left their mark on the way we write and read about our world in fiction as well as nonfiction. Narratives of Crisis – Crisis of Narrative brings together views by European and Canadian literary and media scholars on the crisis of narrative in a transatlantic context. This volume has arisen from the cooperation of the Marburg Centre for Canadian Studies with corresponding institutions at the Universities of Strasbourg and Nantes. (publisher’s information)

Further publications by Prof. Dr. Martin Kuester