Maria Menzel

Maria Menzel holds a bachelor’s degree in English and American Studies from the University of Bamberg. She completed the research master's programme in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam with a thesis entitled: “Working (non-)human animals: Investigating affective labour through the animal transformation.” During her studies, Maria worked with the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies and Soapbox Journal for Cultural Analysis.

Dissertation Topic: Attachment, Displacement, Fabulation: The Form and Politics of the Postcolonial Family Epic

I aim to analyse iterations of what I term the family epic in my dissertation, specifically those written by Anglophone postcolonial writers negotiating unstable forms of belonging. The texts selected for further analysis are Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, and The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. “Family epic” is an oxymoron, encapsulating the balancing act these processes of critical fabulation manage: they combine historical fact and fiction to tell familiar stories of belonging that span continents and centuries. I argue that their aim is to fill the gaps in the archives caused by diaspora and displacement. What forms of attachment and belonging beyond or around the nation-state do these novels foster? By comparing formally similar literary texts written in different (inter)national contexts, I frame the family epic as revealing an attachment to the family as an ordering unit. The project examines how such attachment to the form of the family might in some way limit these texts’ subversive potentials, and conversely, how the narratives subvert the imposed structure of the family. In a broader sense, my research investigates how the literature of the family can function in remembering processes of (de)colonization.

Published Papers and Articles

• Menzel, Maria. “Acting, Anxiety and Authenticity: Performing Affective Labour in Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal.” Literature & Aesthetics, Vol. 33, 2, Nov. 2023, pp. 88-101.
• Menzel, Maria. “Space Nostalgia in The Old Drift: Memorializing Matha Mwamba, the Afronaut.” Junctions: Graduate Journal of the Humanities, Vol. 7, 1, Oct. 2023, pp. 97-108.
• Menzel, Maria. “Embracing Vulnerability: A Case Study on ‘The Raging Grannies.’” Netherlands American Studies Review. Fall 2022, pp. 4-10.

Conference Papers

• “Animated bodies: The worker’s body as a space of affect in Sorry to Bother You.” Conference paper, 33rd Annual Conference of the Postgraduate Forum of the German Association for American Studies, Leibniz University Hanover (Nov. 2023).