Degree: MA (München), Dr. phil (Würzburg)

I joined the Literary Studies Team as Junior Professor for Anglophone Literatures and Cultures in 2025. Previously, I held a postdoctoral research position at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn, focusing on slavery’s global entanglements in the Black Atlantic world and beyond. In both my research and my teaching, I am particularly interested in how texts, performances and media relate to aesthetic, material and political formations of resistance, refusal and repair. My research interests span broadly from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, with occasional dips into earlier centuries.

I received my PhD in English Literature from Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg. Published as Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Worlds (Palgrave 2021), it explores contemporary Anglophone literature, culture and new media forms in interplay with post- and decolonial feminism, queer studies and affect theory in the works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Warsan Shire and Shailja Patel.

I received my MA in English Literature, American Literature and Comparative Literature from King’s College London and Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, with a thesis on the (de)construction of postcolonial female voice and identity in neo-Victorian narratives (A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love).

Contemporary Anglophone literatures, Anglophone literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Caribbean Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Indian and Indian Diaspora literatures, Black Britain, Environmental Humanities and Ecocriticism, the Blue Humanities, Victorian Ecologies, Neo-Victorian literature, Gender and Queer Studies, Media Studies, the Digital Humanities.

I’m happy to supervise theses in any of these topics; please check out our list of Themenbereiche BA/BEd- und MA/MEd-Arbeit for further specifics.

For projects I am currently working on as well as for more details on my research and teaching, please visit my website: https://www.jenniferleetsch.com/

| Publications (Selection) |