Prof. Dr. Susanne Gruß

I joined the Institute of English and American Studies as the new chair of English Literature in 2024. Before that I was professor of English Literature and Culture (with a special focus on gender and queer studies) at the University of Cologne (2022-24) and had positions as visiting professor at the universities of Bonn, Passau, and Frankfurt/Main (2020-22) and as (senior) lecturer at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg (2001-20). I hold a PhD in English literature (published as The Pleasure of the Feminist Text: Reading Michèle Roberts and Angela Carter, Rodopi/Brill 2009) and have finished a second book manuscript on the intersections of law, drama, and genre in the early modern age (The Laws of Excess: Law, Literature, and the Laws of Genre in Early Modern Drama, 2020).

My research and publications focus on contemporary British literature and culture as well as on early modern England. Within these very broad areas, my specialisms include gender studies and feminist theory, neo-Victorianism (and cultural appropriations of the long nineteenth century more generally), Black British writing, (film) adaptation, and, more recently, the cultural and literary implications of the fungal world; as well as early modern culture and drama (especially revenge tragedy & tragicomedy), collaboration and/in theatre, early modern piracy, and (early modern) law and literature. In both fields I am interested in popular culture and questions of canonisation and genre.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7584-3403