Univ.-Prof.ⁱⁿ Dr.ⁱⁿ Sylvia Mieszkowski, MA

Dep. Speaker for the Research Plattform GAIN

Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies

E-Mail: sylvia.mieszkowski@univie.ac.at
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Sylvia Mieszkowski is Professor of British Literature at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Vienna, and currently serves the research platform GAIN as one of two deputy heads. Having obtained her PhD as a member of the German Research Foundation’s Training Group “Gender Difference & Literature”, she published her dissertation as Teasing Narratives: Europäische Verführungsgeschichten nach ihrem Goldenen Zeitalter (2003). She co-edited Gendered Academia: Wissenschaft und Geschlechterdifferenz 1890-1945 (with Miriam Kauko and Alexandra Tischel), before she spent a year, financed again by the German Research Foundation, as postdoc fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Both gendered and queered bodies are at the focus of another volume, co-edited with Christine Vogt-William, on Disturbing Bodies (2008). Having obtained her habilitation from Goethe-University Frankfurt in 2011, she published her second monograph as Resonant Alterities: Sound, Desire and Anxiety in Non-Realist Fiction (2014). Salzburg University’s Gend-Up programme appointed her twice: once as scientist in residence (2013), and once as guest professor (2017). Most recently, Sylvia published “Jenseits von Atwood: gruselige Echos oder die ‘Magd’ als Figuration (geschlechter-)politischen Widerstands” in: Gender: Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft 2 (2020). Two more articles connected to issues of gender are in the press: “Acts of Resistance: female counter-conduct in transcultural dystopian narratives” in: Eva Hausbacher, Liesa Herbst, Julia Ostwald, Martina Thiele (Hrsg.): geschlecht_transkulturell – Aktuelle Forschungsperspektiven. Wiesbaden: Springer/VS (forthcoming 2020) and “Compassionate Projection: Zadie Smith’s The Embassy of Cambodia” in: JSSE special issue: Borders, Intersections and Identity in the Contemporary Short Story in English, Journal of the Short Story in English 75 (forthcoming 2020). Gender and desire, as intersected categories of analysis, remain central to Sylvia’s scholarly work; be it as a fellow of international research groups (Women’s Tales: The Short Fiction of Contemporary British Writers, 1974-2013 and Intersections: Gender and Identity in the Short Fiction of Contemporary British Women Writers; both financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competition), or as an academic teacher. In Vienna, she has taught Introduction to Gender Studies, Introduction to Queer Theory, Queer/Ing Film and Postfeminism/s, and organised a lecture series Fighting the Backlash: Gender Studies and Queer Theory im 21. Jahrhundert. Inspired by the research questions at the heart of the GAIN-platform, she is currently preparing a class on The Unmarked Gender? Studying Masculinities.