Alisa Preusser
Associated Doctoral Fellow
Campus Am Neuen Palais
Am Neuen Palais 10
Building 19, Room 1.30
14469 Potsdam
Germany
consulting hours
Wednesday 1-2pm (in person/on zoom).
Please register via email in advance.
Dissertation Project
Resisting Waste Colonialism: Indigenous Literary Interventions
Focusing on Turtle Island, my PhD project joins critiques of settler colonialism as producing so-called wasted lives and places. I read contemporary Indigenous literary and cultural texts as interventions into forms of waste colonialism in different contexts, from contaminated land- and waterscapes to museum spaces. My project speaks to a larger research interest as to how societies narrate themselves through their relations to what and whom they position as waste(d). It is thus centrally concerned with relations between literature, culture and socio-ecological in/justices. A literary and cultural studies scholar by training, I am interested in conversations between and across discard studies, literary studies and cultural studies and how these may inform an anti-colonial critique of waste colonialism from my own situated reading position as white German scholar engaging with Indigenous creative and critical voices in Potsdam/Berlin.
Biography
Alisa Preusser (M.A., M.Ed.) is an associate with the DFG-funded RTG ‘Minor Cosmopolitanisms’ at the University of Potsdam, where she also holds a position as a PhD researcher and lecturer in American Studies. She has previously worked as a research assistant at the University of Muenster and the University of Augsburg. Alisa’s research interests include Indigenous studies, settler-colonial and postcolonial studies, anticolonial methodologies, waste and discard studies as well as museum studies. She has published on Thomas King’s short fiction and Craig Santos Perez’s poetry. Alisa is an active member of the Emerging Scholars Forum of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries and served as the forum’s co-speaker from 2022 to 2025.
Research Interests
- Indigenous literatures and theories
- Urban literatures
- Ecocriticism, waste and discard studies
- Anti-colonial, decolonial, postcolonial and settler-colonial studies
- Kinship studies
- Border studies
Publications
Preusser, Alisa. “Performing the Nation in Thomas King’s Short Fiction.” Zeitschrift für Kanadastudien, vol. 41, 2021, pp. 152-74.
Presentations
"Against the Necropolitics of Settler Colonialism: Literary Kin- & World-Making in the Ruins." Postcolonial Narrations 2022 “Postcolonial Matters of Life and Death”. Universität Bonn. October 2022.
"Poetic Reclamations and Reconfigurations of the WasteLands in Indigenous Literatures." Workshop "Cultural Memory and Literature: Research in Dialogue," Graduiertenkolleg Practicing Place: Soziokulturelle Praktiken und epistemische Konfigurationen, Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. July 2022.
"'Is It a Climate Change Crisis or Is It a Kinship Crisis?' Environmental In/Justice and Solidarity in the WasteLands." 32nd Annual Conference of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS) "Contested Solidarities: Agency and Victimhood in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures." Goethe Universität Frankfurt. May 2022.
“Waste Matters: Tracing the Politics of Waste in Thomas King’s Novels.” 42. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Kanada-Studien in deutschsprachigen Ländern (GKS) “Ecologies – Environments – Ethics.” Grainau. February 2022.
“Sila’s Arctic: Transnational Relations under Contestation.” 31st Annual Conference for the Postgraduate Forum (PGF) of the German Association for American Studies (DGfA) “Transnational Relations: Past, Present and Future.” Universität Stuttgart. December 2021.
“Navigating Water Boundaries in Thomas King’s Truth & Bright Water.” 41. American Indian Workshop “Indigenous Shapes of Water.” Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. November 2020.
“Performing the Nation in Thomas King’s Short Fiction.” 41. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Kanada-Studien in deutschsprachigen Ländern (GKS) “Political Orders.” Grainau. February 2020.
“‘The Woman Who Fell from the Sky’ – Eine indigene Schöpfungsgeschichte als Intervention in dominante Umweltdiskurse.” Konfliktnarrative: Bürgerkriege, Generationenkonflikte, identitätspolitische Auseinandersetzungen. Universität Augsburg. February 2020.
“Stuck in the Borderlands: Crossing the 49th Parallel in Thomas King's ‘Borders.’” Borders and Crossings 2019: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Travel and Travel Writing. University of Leicester. July 2019.
“A Cyborg Reading of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist.” Fantastic Beasts, Monstrous Cyborgs, Aliens and Other Spectres: Exploring Alterity in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Universität Freiburg. October 2018.
“Moving across Borders in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony.” Moving Centres & Traveling Cultures. Postgraduate Forum “Postcolonial Narrations,” Goethe Universität Frankfurt. October 2018.