Professor of American Literature
New Publication: Ilka Saal and Bertram D. Ashe (eds.). Slavery and the Post-black Imagination. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020. Publisher
Ilka Saal gave a keynote address at the international conference "The Federal Theatre Project: Contexts and Issues" at the University of Toulouse, France on October 19, 2019.
Monographs
Edited Volumes
Selection of Recent Articles
Please see Team
My work in the field of American Studies focuses on literary, performance, and visual cultural studies. I have published widely on the literature of September 11 as well as on various aspects of 20th and 21st century American drama and theater, particularly on the political theater of the 1930s, including the monograph New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater (Palgrave 2007).
My current research focuses on recent engagements with transatlantic slavery in contemporary African American performing and visual arts. The project has been supported by a Feodor Lynen Fellowship for Experienced Researchers of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which enabled me to carry out work at the University of Toronto from 2015-2017. It has also benefitted from participation in the international DFG Network “Cultural Performance in Transnational American Studies.” This larger research project has recently come to fruition in two book publications: the edited collection Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination, edited by Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal (University of Washington Press, 2020) and the monograph Collusions of Fact and Fiction: Performing Slavery at the Turn of the Millennium — Kara Walker and Suzan-Lori Parks (University of Iowa Press, forthcoming 2021).
Before coming to Erfurt, I have taught for thirteen years at universities in the United States and for one year at the University of Ghent in Belgium. My teaching at Erfurt encompasses a broad range of topics in American literature and culture from the colonial period to the present.
University of Erfurt (Campus)
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99089 Erfurt