Fellow 2026-2027 Sladja Blažan
Sladja Blažan received her Ph.D. in North American Literature and Culture from Humboldt University Berlin and her professorial title (Habilitation) from University Würzburg. Before coming to CAPAS, she was an interim professor and chair of American Studies at the University of Regensburg. Sladja held teaching positions at Philipp-University Marburg, Bard College, New York University, Free University Berlin, Humboldt University Berlin and University College Dublin.
Research areas include speculative fiction, critical posthumanism, environmental humanities, and critical refugee studies. In addition, she has worked as a theatre director, dramaturg, and translator. Her most recent book, Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World (University of Virginia Press 2024), explores the role of nature in settler colonial U.S. American literature and culture with a particular focus on the production of the rational in the racialized irrational. Particularly the conceptualization of forests as animated by Indigenous spirits continues to provide a problematic cultural platform within the discourse of contemporary sustainability. The study explores the role of early environmental topics in perpetuating settler colonial and white supremacist ideologies about land and Native peoples and calls for decolonizing sustainability.
Other book-publications include Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman (Palgrave 2021), a collection of articles relating to ways in which haunting can and does express contemporary anxieties concerning the human involvement in the transformation of natural environments and their ecosystems. American Fictionary: Postsozialistische Migration in der U.S. Amerikanischen Literatur (2006) is a book-length study of transcultural entanglements and disentanglements during a period of cultural innovation shortly after the revolutions of 1989. Her areas of research include speculative fiction, critical posthumanism, critical refugee studies, and migration.