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Katharina Donn is a lecturer and post-doctoral academic fellow at the University of Augsburg. Her research in the field of trauma studies uncovers the paradox of intimate vulnerability and globalised spectacle in the aftermath of terror, and she has published her findings internationally in journals in Germany (Anglia), Spain (Miscelánea) and the UK (Journal of American Studies). This summer, she will be joining the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin as Visiting Professor.
While she is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Katharina will be completing the manuscript of her book, A Poetics of Trauma after 9/11: Representing Vulnerability in a Digitized Present, to be published by Routledge this year. It contributes to the most recent turn in trauma theory that looks to pluralise this concept and its research. The post-9/11 context offers unique insights into the complex relations between the real and the virtual, discourses of the nation and transnational memory patterns. She proposes that relevant texts explore a literary ethic of witnessing when they expose the materiality of the human body in its universal vulnerability, and offers modes of perception that respond to the human within the sphere of the spectacle.
