Erasure
Poetry
Project

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. These interests are grounded in broader engagements with empire studies, cultural geography, historical childhood studies, and the history of education.

She is the author of Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), which received the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for Original Research in Transnational American Studies from the American Studies Association.

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.

Since 2025, she has served as Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. Before joining the Department of American Studies in Innsbruck, she held research and teaching appointments at Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Bonn, the University of Mannheim, the University of Cologne, and Amherst College. Her teaching spans American literature, transnational American Studies, poetry, critical sound studies, archival studies, and histories of empire.

She is co-editor, with Mischa Honeck, of the forthcoming De Gruyter Handbook of U.S. Empire and, with Marion Schulte, of Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations Across Disciplines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Her most recent editorial work includes, with Gulsin Ciftci, the special issue “Texts and Traces of American Pasts: On Forms of Knowing in the Folds of the Archive,” scheduled for publication in European Journal of American Studies in 2027. Her work has appeared in Journal of Transnational American Studies, European Journal of American Studies, Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, Amerikastudien / American Studies, Review of International American Studies, Anglia, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Oxford Bibliographies, and Los Angeles Review of Books.

Mayar serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Transnational American Studies and gender forum. She is a member of the Poetry Network, an initiative by the European Association for American Studies, and the DFG Research Network “Cultural Politics of Reconciliation.”