Rate My Professor Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Professor of American Literature and Culture in the English Department at the University of Lausanne, where she has taught since 2006 after working at the University of Geneva for 12 years. She has held key administrative roles, including Head of the English Department from 2015 to 2017 and 2022 to 2024, Director of the English Doctoral School of Occidental Switzerland (CUSO) from 2017 to 2024, and Director of the New American Studies Masters Specialization Program since 2013. Her research centers on cultural studies and genre theory, particularly the Gothic, adventure, and melodrama, alongside war narratives in twentieth-century American literature, film, and popular culture. She explores how these genres perform affective, ethical, and ideological work, addressing issues of gender, queer theory, race, militarism, nationalism, and increasingly ecology, environmentalism, and social justice. Soltysik Monnet investigates the cultural politics of American literature from the nineteenth century onward, including representations of combat death, military violence as spectacle, antiwar horror, and the role of counterculture in sustainable futures.

Her major publications include the monograph The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic: Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2010), which examines gender, race, and sexuality in works by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, James, and Gilman, and Combat Death in Contemporary American Culture: Popular Cultural Conceptions of War since World War II (2020), analyzing melodrama, adventure, and horror formulas in war stories. She co-edited Neoliberal Gothic: International Gothic in the Neoliberal Age and The Ecological Future with Christian Arnsperger. Recent articles cover topics such as ecogothic in films, war gothic, and haunted nature. Soltysik Monnet received the Russel B. Nye Award for Outstanding Article in the Journal of Popular Culture for “American War Adventure and the Generic Pleasures of Military Violence: Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper” (2018). She has organized conferences like “Writing Contemporary Wars and Contemporary Militaries” (2022) and “Narratives of (Un)Sustainability” (2019), and delivered numerous invited keynotes on war gothic, psychedelics in literature, and ecological imagination at institutions including the International Gothic Association, University of Lodz, and Free University of Berlin. She serves on editorial boards for Horror Studies, American Gothic Studies Journal, and Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, and the Scientific Committee of PSYCHE, UNIL-CHUV.