I’ve been interviewed by Karolin Viseneber from FRIAS about my fellowship project on generative AI. Read the interview here:
Blog
Upcoming workshop on Anglophone studies in the age of genAI at FRIAS
BlogNew book chapter on Gothic Germanism in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine available open-access
Blog“Terror is not of Germany”: Gothic Germanism and the Transnational Tale of Terror in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. In: Writing Angst. Schauerliteratur, Gothic Novel und Literarischer Schrecken von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Jakob Baur, Lars Koch, and Barbara Schaff. Bielefeld: Transcript 2026. 111-124. Open access: click here
New essay on Robert Louis Stevenson’s auto-commentary on his writing of Jekyll & Hyde in Connotations
BlogOut now with Connotations, a journal dedicated to continuing critical debate of its contributions:
Strange Case of Stevenson and Unseen Collaborators: “A Chapter on Dreams” as a Textual Double of Jekyll and Hyde. Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate, Vol. 35 (2026): 13-31. https://doi.org/10.25623/conn035-guttzeit-1 and https://www.connotations.de/article/gero-guttzeit-strange-case-of-stevenson-and-unseen-collaborators-a-chapter-on-dreams-as-a-textual-double-of-jekyll-and-hyde/
If you feel inspired to write a response, please send it to editors(at)connotations.de
Call for Papers: Cultures of In/Visibility and In/Audibility
BlogAlice Borrego, Héloïse Lecomte, Esther Peeren, and I are calling for papers for a conference on „Cultures of In/Visibility and In/Audibility“, 23-24 April 2026, held at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis.
The deadline for abstracts is 31 October 2025.
Please see the full CfP below:
New book on In/Visible Subjects out in November
BlogMy new book on In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Narratives of Invisibility will be out in November 2025. Find out more on the book here: https://link.springer.com/book/9783032026385
Habilitation in English Literature
BlogLast week my postdoctoral/professorial dissertation, the Habilitationsschrift, was accepted by the Faculty of Languages and Literatures at LMU Munich and I was awarded the degree of Dr. phil. habil.! This qualifies me to teach English Literature as an associate or full professor in German-language academia (the so-called venia legendi, or right to teach).
The manuscript deals with In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Modern Narratives of Invisibility, ranging from the eighteenth-century novel through Romantic poetry, Victorian Gothic fiction, and the modernist text to contemporary literary responses to surveillance capitalism. I am now working on turning the manuscript into a book and will next present some of its eighteenth-century readings at an invited lecture at the University of Siegen on 8 July, 2024.
Contemporary Literature and Social Invisibility: Special Issue of ZAA out now
BlogTwo years after I organised a workshop on The Literature of Invisibility at the Center for Advanced Studies of LMU Munich, a selection of contributions on the state of invisibility studies and its particular relevance for contemporary literature has come out as a special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Many thanks to all the contributors and editors! https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/zaa/html#latestIssue
Follow this DOI for my introduction: https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2039
Esther Peeren’s „Afterword: Running with the Metaphor of Social Invisibility“ is available open source: https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2045
Contents:
“Contemporary Literature and Social Invisibility: Introduction” (Gero Guttzeit)
“Thresholds of In/Visibility and the Scopic Power of Literature” (Françoise Král)
“The Poetics of (Un)Mournability: Emma Donoghue’s Hood (1995) as an Elegy in Invisible Ink” (Héloïse Lecomte)
“Experience(s) of Decorporation: The Invisibilisation of Care in John Lanchester’s Capital (2012)” (Alice Borrego)
“Becoming (In)Visible: Self-Assertion and Disappearance of the Self in Contemporary Surveillance Narratives” (Betiel Wasihun)
“‘Perced to the roote’: Refugee Tales and the Poetics of In/Visibility” (Sibylle Baumbach)
“Afterword: Running with the Metaphor of Social Invisibility” (Esther Peeren)
Habilitationsschrift submitted
BlogThis week I submitted my manuscript In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Modern Narratives of Invisibility to LMU’s Faculty of Languages and Literatures as my Habilitationsschrift. The manuscript offers readings of authors from eighteenth-century novelists and poets Eliza Haywood, Susanna Rowson, and Anna Letitia Barbauld to nineteenth-century writers John Keats, James Forbes Dalton, Fitz-James O’Brien, and H.G. Wells, to twentieth-century and twenty-first-century authors G.K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, China Miéville, and Jennifer Egan. In German-language academia, the Habilitationsschrift is the major requirement of qualifying for the postdoctoral degree of Dr. habil., which is, in turn, the requirement for applying to the positions of associate and full professor in Germany.
Artikel über unsichtbare literarische Figuren erschienen
BlogMit dem Verhältnis von Literatur, Philosophie und Rhetorik im Zeichen der Unsichtbarkeit setzt sich ein neuer Aufsatz auseinander: “Compound Invisible Objects”: Moralischer Charakter, literarische Figur und die Gyges-Problematik bei Adam Smith und Eliza Haywood. Herausgegeben ist er von Wolfgang G. Müller und Rainer Thiel als Teil von Band 5 (2022) der Internationalen Zeitschrift Kulturkomparatistik mit dem Themenschwerpunkt „Literatur – Philosophie – Ästhetik“. Der Volltext ist verfügbar unter: https://izfk.uni-trier.de/index.php/izfk/article/view/IZFK-5-08-Compound-Invisible-Objects/66