Erasure
Poetry
Project

Sandra Tausel (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of American Studies and a doctoral researcher in Mahshid Mayar's research project "W()oles and ()holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States" at the University of Innsbruck. Her research interests lie at the intersection of women's, gender, and sexuality studies and contemporary U.S.-American literary and cultural studies, with particular attention to how interdisciplinary and intersectional analytical approaches provide valuable insights into gendered power structures, questions of identity, and socio-cultural and political issues. 

She is particularly interested in analyzing literary texts and cultural and artistic representations that “do more than tell it like it is" and, as bell hooks writes, “imagine what is possible" (Outlaw Culture 281), thereby helping to promote social equity in fiction and beyond. The novels selected for her dissertation project, “Reproductive Ageism: Narratives of Age-Based Reproductive Control," also respond to hooks' call by inviting readers to engage with (auto)fictional reproductive experiences. Influenced by race, class, gender, gender identity, religion, and politics, all characters negotiate and challenge normative reproductive prescriptions and proscriptions, especially traditionally accepted age and timing norms regarding (not) having a child. Tausel is specifically interested in how, when transgressed, chrononormative and age-based reproductive norms stigmatize characters—women and people capable of childbirth—during emerging, established, and later adulthood in contemporary U.S.-American novels. 

Tausel was a Marietta Blau grantee at the University of Alberta (2024-2025), a university assistant in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck (2019-2024), an OeAD Lecturer at Corvinus University Budapest (2017-2019), and a Fulbright FLTA at Gettysburg College, PA (2014-2015). She is now excited to be a doctoral (soon post-doctoral) researcher on Mahshid Mayar's Erasure Poetry Project. Her contribution will focus on erasure poetry as a transformative feminist practice and examine projects such as Lisa Huffaker's “Erasures from Fascinating Womanhood," Kate Baer's I Hope This Finds You Well, Sandra L. Faulkner's “Bringing Up Baby," Isobel O'Hare's Erase the Patriarchy: An Anthology of Erasure Poetry, and Risa Cromer's Doctoring Dobbs: On the Art and Ethics of Erasing Abortion Law to tease out how erasure—the subversive creation of textual and visual voids and new narratives—is particularly well-suited to hold space for feminist resistance against long-standing political and cultural structures of patriarchal power. 

Tausel's work has appeared in libri liberorum, WiN: The EAAS Women's Network Journal, the Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS), Off Campus: Seggau School of Thought, the RSA Journal: Rivista di Studi Americani, and in anthologies published by Routledge and the University of Nebraska Press.