Catrin Gersdorf

Catrin Gersdorf is Professor of American Studies at the University of Würzburg, and the Speaker of the Environmental Humanities class at the Graduate School for the Humanities. She is the author of The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction of America (2009), and co-editor of America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment (2016). Most recently, she co-edited (with Catriona Sandilands) a thematic issue on Gardening (Against) the Anthropocene with Ecozon@, the European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. Her current research focuses on literary and cultural responses to the challenges of the Anthropocene. “Where Is Utopia in a Time of Disaster and Catastrophe?” is a conversation with novelist Allegra Hyde, recently published in New American Studies Journal, Vol. 74, (2023). “Zwischen Utopie und Zynismus: Eine kurze Kritik des Verzichts” (Semantiken des Verzichts, Eds. Heike Paul and Astrid Séville) is a forthcoming essay in which she investigates rhetorical strategies that call for a renunciation of ecologically unsustainable habits.