Februar 2024-Februar 2025

W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States

Invested in transnational and Asian American Studies, Mahshid Mayar [she / her] is the author of Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire (University of North Carolina Press 2022), that has been awarded the Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies (by the American Studies Association). Mahshid’s second-book project, which she is working on during her time at the Dahlem Humanities Center, interrogates the politics and poetics of silence through “erasure poetry” by Asian- and Indigenous American poets.

Over the years, Mahshid has published numerous essays and articles on American childhoods, cultural history of the US empire, historical digital games, and more recently on silence and silencing and 21C US poetry. Together with Marion Schulte (Universität Rostock), she has co-edited Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations across Disciplines (Palgrave Macmillan 2022), an edited volume that offers a cross-disciplinary survey of silence and silencing across the humanities.

Recipient of a 3-year DFG research grant, Mahshid is writing her second-book project at the North American Studies Program at the University of Bonn and the Dahlem Humanities Center. Focused on the “scripts of empire” as her main research interest, Mahshid further works on two more collaborative projects -- one on perceptions of noise in the United States and the other on the history of the US empire.

Mahshid has held fellowships at Amherst College, Massachusetts, University of Georgetown, Washington D.C., and the International Youth Library, Munich.