Melanie Frey

Universität Konstanz

Department of Literature, Art and Media Studies

Tel.: +49 7531 88 4507

E-Mail: melanie.2.frey@uni-konstanz.de

Office hours: Wednesdays, 13:00 - 14:00

Please register for the office hour via mail at least 24 hours in advance. Please also indicate whether you prefer meeting in-person on campus or online via Zoom.

About

Melanie Frey is a doctoral candidate at the Chair of American Studies at the University of Konstanz since the winter semester 2023/24.

She studied English and History at the University of Konstanz, specializing in 19th and early 20th century literature and culture. Her thesis, “Voice in Performed Poetry: Analyzing Voice Usage to Address the Topic of Oppression in the Context of Two or More Performers”, examines how performed poetry negotiates experiences of oppression through changes in voice.

Her current research is part of the ERC-funded project project "Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility", which considers how early automobility generated environmental knowledge. The project has built an online database which collects forms of automobile literature from the early 20th century. Melanie Frey manages the project’s text corpus by overseeing the digitization and cataloging of texts from both digital and analogue archives.

Current research project

Her PhD project focuses on the formation of the road trip as a genre in American literature. She engages with previously unexamined road literature and their connections to antecedent travel writing. She demonstrates that early automobile literature of the early 20^th century mobilizes pioneer narratives from 1820-1860 to articulate a new form of American travel narrative.

Supervisor:                 Prof. Dr. Timo Müller (University of Konstanz)
Co-supervisor:            Prof. Dr. Anne Kwaschik (University of Konstanz)

Affiliations

• ERC-funded research project "Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility", Prof. Timo Müller, University of Konstanz

Lectures

• Cultures of Automobility (WiSe 2024/25) – Seminar / Hauptseminar, with Prof. Timo Müller and Dr. Gilberto Mazzoli
• The American Road Movie (SoSe 2024) – Introductory Seminar / Proseminar
• Automobile Narratives and Petrocultures in the Twentieth Century (WiSe 2023/24) – Introductory Seminar / Proseminar