Prof. Andrew S. Gross

Prof. Dr. Andrew S. Gross

Professor of North American Studies

Teaching at the University of Göttingen since 2015. Previously Andrew Gross held positions at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (2012-2015), at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Free University of Berlin (2004-2012), and at the University of California, Davis (1993-2004).




  • Habilitation, Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften, Freie Universität Berlin, 2012
  • Ph.D., English with designated emphases in American literature and critical theory, University of California, Davis, 2001.
  • M.A., English, University of California, Davis, 1995.
  • B.A., summa cum laude, double major in English and philosophy, University of Arizona, 1993.

Andrew Gross' areas of interest include travel literature and tourism, representations of the Holocaust, modernist poetry, and the cultural history of the Cold War. He is currently researching literary representations of liberalism in texts that go back to the eighteenth century.

Books

  • Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age, edited with Sarah Wasserman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
  • Body Trouble: Entkörperlichung, Whiteness und das amerikanische Gegenwartskino. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2001.

Selected Articles

  • "Neither Billiard Ball nor Planet B: Latour’s Gaia, Literary Agency, and the Challenge of Writing Geohistory in the Anthropocene Moment." In New Directions in Philosophy and Literature, edited by David Rudrum, Ridvan Askin, and Frida Beckman, 179-97. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
  • “Multispecies Chronotopes: Keywords for Thinking Creatively Beyond the Human.” Introduction to An Eclectic Bestiary: Encounters in a More-than-Human World. Eds. Birgit Spengler and Babette Tischleder. Bielefeld: transcript, 2019, pp. 11-30. Download as free excerpt (PDF).
  • "Urban Animals" (photo series). An Eclectic Bestiary: Encounters in a More-than-Human World. Eds. Birgit Spengler and Babette Tischleder. Bielefeld: transcript, 2019, pp. 163-77.
  • "Theorising Things, Building Worlds: Why the New Materialisms Deserve Literary Imagination." Open Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (2019): 125-34.
  • "Thinking Objects, Building Worlds: Why the New Materialisms Deserve Literary Imagination." In Projecting American Studies: Essays on Theory, Method, and Practice. Eds. Frank Kelleter and Alexander Starre. Heidelberg: Winter, 2018. 225-39.
  • "Beating True: Figuring Object Life Beyond Ontology." Colloquy "Thing Theory in Literary Studies," Curators: Sarah Wasserman, Patrick Moran. Arcade: Literature, the Humanities, & the World. Stanford University, November 2017
  • "Thickening Seriality: A Chronotopic View of World Building in Contemporary Television Narrative. "The Velvet Light Trap, No. 79: "Serials, Seriality, Serialization" (Spring 2017): 120-25.
  • "Earth According to Pixar: Picturing Obsolescence in the Age of Digital (Re)Animation." In America After Nature: Democracy, Culture, Environment. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf, Juliane Braun. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. 441-60.
  • "Introduction: Thinking out of Sync: A Theory of Obsolescence." Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 1-17 (with Sarah Wasserman).
  • "iDob 5.3: Wiring Wetware, or Dreaming the Medium that Holds All the Answers." Das Medium meiner Träume: Hartmut Winkler zum 60. Geburtstag. Eds. Ralf Adelmann, Ulrike Bergermann. Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag, 2013. 271-82.
  • "A Soap Bubble is as Real as a Fossil Tooth: Physical Objects and the Presence of the Past." The Pathos of Authenticity: American Passions of the Real. Eds. Ulla Haselstein, Andrew S. Gross, MaryAnn Snyder-Koerber. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. 75-92.
  • "The Deep Surface of Lily Bart: Visual Economies and Commodity Culture in Wharton and Dreiser." Amerikastudien / American Studies 54.1; special issue: Appropriating Vision(s): Visual Practices in American Women's Writing (2009): 59-78.
  • "Literary Interiors, Cherished Things and Feminine Subjectivity in the Gilded Age." English Studies in Canada 31.1 (March 2005; special issue: "Interiors"): 96-117.
  • "Plump with Fuel, Ripe to Explode: Media Aesthetics after 9/11." Media Cultures. Eds. William Uricchio and Susanne Kinnebrock. Heidelberg: Winter, 2005. 267-273.

Recent Academic Conferences and Presentations

  • “Hannah Arendt, Statelessness, and Her Two Reading Publics.” To be delivered at the annual convention of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), UCLA, 29 March to 1 April 2018.
  • “The Anecdote of the Jar.” Conference in Honor of Ulla Haselstein: "Exemplary Singularity: Fault Lines of the Anecdotal." John F. Kennedy Institute, Free University of Berlin, 1-3 February 2018.
  • “Refugee Blues: Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Statelessness.” Delivered to the symposium Women in U.S.‑American Politics, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 25-27 September 2017.
  • “Generating Value: Ezra Pound and the (Other) Modernist Lyric (Conrad Aiken),” DGfA (German Association of American Studies) annual convention, 9 June 2017.
  • “Pastoral Conservatism and the Liberal Aesthetic,” presented to the Cultures of US-American Conservatism conference, University of Göttingen, 12 February 2017.
  • “Liberal Cosmopolitanism: Free Trade, the Marketplace of Ideas, and Emerson's Relation to Germany,“ presented to the Cosmopolitanism Ringvorlesung, University of Potsdam, 10 Nov. 2016.
  • Antrittsvorlesung: “Debt, Innovation, and the Aesthetic of Austerity,” Aula, Wilhelmsplatz, University of Göttingen, 19 October 2016.
  • “The Encumbrance of the New: Debt, Innovation, and the Aesthetics of Austerity.” Symposium: The Aesthetics of the New, John F. Kennedy Institute, Berlin, 28-29 October 2016.
  • Invited Keynote, conference "Entangled Memories: Remembering the Holocaust in a Global Age, University of Hamburg, 9-11 October, 2014.
  • Invited Paper at the conference Searching for Culture, to be held at the Arts Centre of Placky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic, 16-17 October 2014.
  • “Joel Barlow and James Leander Cathcart: Barbary Captivity and Waging War for Peace.” Presented to the biennial convention of the European Association of American Studies (EAAS), The Hague, 3-6 April, 2014.
  • “Detective Fiction, Counterfactuals, and the Holocaust: Altering History for Memory’s Sake.” Presented at Touro College Berlin, 25 October 2013.
  • “Pound, Peripatetic Verse, and the Postwar Liberal Aesthetic,” presented to The Art of Walking: Pedestrian Mobility in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts from the 18th Century to the 21st, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 9-11 October 2013.
  • “Commerce and Conversion: The Clash of Civilizations in Barbary Captivity Narratives.” American literature colloquium at FAU Erlangen, 5 February 2013.
  • “Literature of the Barbary Wars: Commerce, Piety, and the Apostasy of Race.” Presented to the Amerika-Institut of the LMU München, 17 January 2012.
  • “Idylls of the Apocalypse: Goldwater and the Conservative Revolution of the 1960s.” Ringvorlesung The Sixties—America’s Longest Decade, at the John F. Kennedy Institute, FU Berlin, 12 December 2012.
  • “Goldwater in Phoenix: How Popular Conservatism Rose from the Ashes of an Unsuccessful Presidential Campaign.” Conference "Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice," Amerika Haus Munich, 1-4 November 2012
  • “Post-War American Poetry.” Invited lecture, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, 5 July 2012.
  • “Commerce and Conversion: The Clash of Civilizations in Barbary Captivity Narratives.” American literature colloquium at FAU Erlangen, 5 February 2013.
  • “Literature of the Barbary Wars: Commerce, Piety, and the Apostasy of Race.” Amerika-Institut of the LMU München, 17 January 2012.
  • “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and 9/11.” U.S. State Department Sponsored Guest Lecture, Universität Saarbrücken. 12 January 2012.
  • “Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: Violence, Detection, and the Politics of Memory after 9/11.” John F. Kennedy Institute Lecture Series: 9/11 and its Consequences. 16 November 2011.
  • “Auden’s Sense of History,” keynote address, conference Literary Dimensions: Reading Time and Space, at the Maria Curie Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland, 22-24 September 2011.
  • “What Chabon Remembers: Terrorism, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and Jews without Ethnicity,” conference "9/11—Ten years Later, Looking Ahead," University of Bonn, 8-11 September 2011.
  • “Feast and Famine in Early Accounts of Thanksgiving,” International Club of the Freie Universität Berlin, FU Clubhouse, 24 November 2010.
  • “Youth and the Young Nation in Thomas Paine,” Conference of the European Association of American Studies, Dublin, 26-29 March, 2010.
  • “The Sin Prior to Lowell’s Confession: Poetry Leading to Life Studies,” English and American literature department, University of Paderborn, 8 December 2010.

Conference Organization, Panel Chairs, Interviews (selection)

  • Co-Organizer of conference, Cultures of US-American Conservatism, University of Göttingen, 9-12 February 2017
  • Co-Organizer of the international conference "Surveillance | Society | Culture," University of Göttingen, 26-28 February 2016 (with Florian Zappe). Introduction and paper on "Representations of Surveillance in the Twitter-Novella Black Box."
  • Introduction/Moderation: Gary Shteyngart’s reading from his memoir Little Failure, at the Literarisches Zentrum Göttingen, 30. Sep. 2015.
  • Panel Chair with Dustin Breitenwischer, “The Campus Novel,” at the DGfA annual convention in Bonn, 29-31 May, 2015.
  • Interview with and Introduction to the readings of authors Rivka Galchen and Joseph O’Neill, at the DGfA annual convention in Bonn, 29-31 May, 2015.
  • Panel chair with Karin Höpker: “Scrap, Spam, Bit Rot: the Politics and Poetics of Digital Detritus,” at the DGfA annual convention in Würzburg, 12-15 June 2014.
  • Panel Chair: “Conservative Pastoralism and the Provincial Ideal in the Cold War,” at the DGfA annual convention in Erlangen, 30 May to 2 June 2013. My own paper was called, “Conservative Pastoralism and the Liberal Aesthetic.”
  • Panel Chair, American Lives, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien, 31 May-3 June 2012: “Faking It: The End of History and the Rise of Memory, Identity, and Personality.” Paper delivered: “Conservatism and the Populist Self: Chambers, Nixon, Wills.”
  • Introduction/Moderation, a reading by the American author Lev Raphael, sponsored by the US Embassy at the Jewish Museum Berlin, 3 November, 2010.
  • Panel Chair, Young Americans in Literature of the Early Republic. The European Association of American Studies, Dublin, 26-29 March, 2010.
  • Respondent, Representations of the Holocaust in a Transnational Context, MLA Annual Convention, Los Angeles, CA, 6-9 January, 2011.
  • Panel Chair, The World is Not Enough: International Scholarship in the Field of American Studies, at the American Studies Association, Washington DC, 5-8 November, 2009.
  • Panel Chair, “Literary Negotiations of Change,” at the Conference of the Second Cohort of the Graduate School of North American Studies, John F. Kennedy Institute, 10-11 July, 2009.
  • Panel Chair, The World is Not Enough: International Scholarship in the Field of American Studies, at the American Studies Association, Washington DC, 5-8 November, 2009.
  • Panel Chair, “Literary Negotiations of Change,” at the Conference of the Second Cohort of the Graduate School of North American Studies, John F. Kennedy Institute, 10-11 July, 2009.