Evi Zemanek is an associate professor of German, interart, and media studies at the University of Freiburg (ALU). She holds a PhD in comparative literature from LMU Munich. Besides intermedia and intercultural studies, her main research interests lie within the fields of ecocriticism, literary ecology, and cultural ecology. She has published on the aesthetics of nature, risk narratives, ecotopia, and, more generally, on the history and poetics of “ecological genres.” She is a member of the Transatlantic Humboldt Network Environmental Humanities, and in 2013 founded the DFG-sponsored network Ethik und Ästhetik in literarischen Darstellungen ökologischer Transformationen (Ethics and Aesthetics in Literary Representations of Ecological Transformations). Since 2016, she has been a member of the Upper Rhine Cluster for Sustainability Research with a project on cross-cultural sustainability communication focusing on the rhetorics of sustainabilty in German, French, and English mass media. In 2016, she was awarded a research fellowship at FRIAS and in 2017 she received the Heinz Meier-Leibnitz Award from the DFG. She is currently writing a book on “Caricatures of Man-Made Nature,” which investigates the entanglements of environmental history and media history.
RCC Research Project: Caricatures of Man-Made Nature: Reflections on Environmental Change in German Magazines from the Era of Industrialization
Selected Publications:
- “Mocking the Anthropocene. Caricatures of Man-made Landscapes in German Satirical Magazines from the Fin de Siècle.” In Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond, edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone, 124–47. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
- “(Bad) Air and (Faulty) Inspiration: Elemental and Environmental Influences on Fontane.” In German Ecocriticism, edited by Caroline Schaumann and Heather Sullivan, 129–45. Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
- “Bukolik, Idylle und Utopie aus Sicht des Ecocriticism.” In Ecocriticism. Eine Einführung, edited by Gabriele Dürbeck and Urte Stobbe, 187–204. Köln: Böhlau 2015.
- “‘Climate change is real.’ – ‘Kriegen wir die Kurve?’ – ‘Je n’y crois pas.’ Wissenspopularisierung und Appell im deutschen, englischen und französischen Sachcomic zum Klimawandel.” In Literatur und Ökologie. Neue literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, edited by Christiane Solte-Gresser and Claudia Schmitt, 547–62. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2017.
- “Elemental Poetics: Material Agency in Contemporary German Poetry.” In Ecological Thought in German Literature and Culture, edited by Gabriele Dürbeck, Urte Stobbe, Hubert Zapf, and Evi Zemanek. Ecocriticial Theory and Practice. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, forthcoming.
- ed. Ökologische Genres. Naturästhetik - Umweltethik – Wissenspoetik. Umwelt und Gesellschaft, edited by Christoph Mauch and Helmuth Trischler. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017.