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Nicole Koenigsknecht

Nicole Koenigsknecht, M.A.

  • Teaching and Research Assistant in English Literature
  • Assistant Prof. Dr. Katharina Gerund
Room number
PET 107

Research Interests

• Indigenous literatures and cultures

• Settler-colonialism; anti-/decolonial theories

• Environmental humanities 

• Food sovereignty; food imperialism 

• Christian nationalism

Short Bio

I am a teaching and research assistant to the Chair of American Literature and Culture—Prof. Dr. Katharina Gerund. In my doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled “Unsettling Colonial Appetites in North American Indigenous Literatures,” I contemplate what it means to consume—read, analyze, teach—literary texts written by Indigenous authors as a settler living and working in Europe. This involves investigating if and/or how Indigenous literatures can nourish readers’ relationships with places and communities on Turtle Island. To undertake this work, my project hinges on the multifaceted signification of the term “body” as I consider how the paraconsistent, co-constitutive relationships between bodies of land and water, (human) biological bodies, and bodies of text are animated in/through contemporary literary works by predominantly Anishinaabe and Cree writers.

After completing my BA in English and German at Michigan State University, I moved to Austria to work as a Fulbright U.S. Teaching Assistant for the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science, and Research. In July 2024 I received an MA in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures from the University of Vienna. My MA thesis, titled “Nurturing Resistance: Food Sovereignty in Jonny Appleseed and The Seed Keeper,” was supervised by Prof. Dr. Stefanie Schäfer

I am an active member of the Emerging Scholars Forum of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries (GKS), Austria’s Young Americanists, and the Swiss Literary PhD Network.

Recent Activities

Most recently, I organized two panels for early career researchers at the annual conference of the GKS which takes place in February 2026 in Tutzing, Germany. In November 2025 I was invited to present at the kick-off event for the CanadaForum at the University of Mannheim. And, in May 2025, I delivered a guest lecture for Uni Trier’s American Studies Lunch Lecture Series: Indigenous Stories of Land and Water. Additionally, in the last year, I have presented at conferences and workshops in Berlin, Frankfurt, Lisbon, and Vienna.

My book chapter, “‘Momma always said that woman was the epitome of resource’: Contesting Canada’s Colonial-Capitalist Food Systems in Jonny Appleseed,” was published in the volume Canada: A Model for Gender Equality? in late 2024. I also co-organized, with Jody Danard, the conference Territory, Tension, and Taboo: Canada in Crisis which took place in October 2024 at the University of Bremen.

 

Teaching

(Re)imagining the American West

Spring 2026
Contemporary North American Indigenous Literatures Spring 2025
Textual Analysis Yearly mandatory module (Spring 2025 - present)

 

Supervision

I am available to supervise BA theses that align with my research interests.