Professor Johannes Voelz
Professor Johannes Voelz (Goethe University - Frankfurt) Summer Term 2026 MALS Program
Email - voelz@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Johannes Voelz is Professor of American Studies, Democracy, and
Aesthetics at the Institute of English and American Studies,
Goethe-University Frankfurt. His work lies at the intersection of
literary studies, cultural studies, aesthetics, and political theory. He
is the author of Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson's Challenge which inaugurated the series Re-Mapping the Transnational, edited by Donald Pease for Dartmouth College Press/UPNE. His second monograph, The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat was published in 2018 with Cambridge University Press. Currently he is completing a monograph on the aesthetics of populism, provisionally titled Disinhibited Informalization: The Rise of the Populist Aesthetic in the United
States. He has edited twelve collections of essays and special issues,
and he is the founding co-editor of the book series "Democratic Vistas -
Demokratische Horizonte" with transcript publishers.
Johannes Voelz is the spokesperson of the interdisciplinary PhD program
Aesthetics of Democracy, funded by the German Research Foundation,
which will sponsor up to 36 PhD candidates over the course of the next
nine years. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Forschungskolleg
Humanwissenschaften Bad Homburg, Frankfurt’s Institute for Advanced
Studies in the Humanities, where he launched and co-directs the research
focus Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Atlantic World (with
Gunther Hellmann). He is co-editor of WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für
Sozialforschung, the journal of Frankfurt's Institute for Social
Research (home of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory).
Professor Voelz received his dissertation from the John F.
Kennedy-Institute of North American Studies of the Free University
Berlin and his habilitation from Goethe-University Frankfurt. He was
awarded a Heisenberg Professorship by the German Research Foundation in
2016. Over the course of his career, he has spent five years of research
in the U.S., at Harvard University, the University of California,
Berkeley, and Stanford University.
For more information, please see his page at Goethe University Frankfurt.
https://www.fb10.uni-frankfurt.de/42971181/Johannes_V%C3%B6lz