Erasure
Poetry
Project
by Mahshid Mayar, PhD
Current Team
Principal Investigator:
Dr. Mahshid Mayar [she / her]
Assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck since 2025, Mahshid Mayar (she/her) is an Americanist with a focus on transnational American Studies. Her research examines the intersections of literature, history, and politics, with particular attention to race, racialization, and the cultural operations of U.S. empire. She currently works most closely on American poetry—especially documental and protest poetry—alongside critical sound studies, archival theory, and questions of erasure, silence, and performance.
Since February 2024, Mayar has led the research project W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States as Principal Investigator, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Within this research context, she is currently completing a second monograph, which examines poetic practices of redaction, disappearance, and documentary refusal in twenty-first century US. Latest in her engagement with erasure poetry is the essay collection Deliberate Poetics: Erasure, Materiality, and the Politics of the Page, which Mayar co-edits with her team members, Michael Fuchs and Sandra Tausel.
Michael Fuchs has a “voracious scholarly appetite” (quote by a reviewer of an application to a Norwegian university)—from videogames and pulp novels to Thomas Pynchon and (apparently) poetry, he swallows them all. After stints at the University of Graz, University of Siegen, and University of Oldenburg, Michael joined the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck in spring 2022 and the project on erasure poetry in July 2025. He has co-edited books such as The Gothic and Twenty-First-Century American Popular Culture (Brill, 2024), Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), and Intermedia Games—Games Inter Media: Video Games and Intermediality (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), and written about topics such as sharks, dinosaurs, zombies, COVID-19, US exceptionalism, US sports, and Austrian B-movies. For more information, see here.
Past Project Team Members
Research Assistant:
Luca von Kirschbaum [they / them]
Luca von Kirschbaum holds a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, where they wrote their thesis on self-identity, trauma, and reconciliation in Richard Wagamese's Indian Horse. They are currently pursuing a Master of Arts in North American Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany. Luca's research interests include Native American and Indigenous Literary Studies, Queer Studies, and Disability Studies. They have been involved in disability advocacy, including a six-month internship in 2023 advising the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development on the inclusion of people with disabilities in international cooperation.
Current Affiliation: University of Bonn, Germany
Involvement in the Project: Apr. 2024 - Jan. 2025
