Rate My Professor Dirk Wiemann

Prof. Dr. Dirk Wiemann holds the Chair of English Literature in the Department of English and American Studies at Universität Potsdam. He graduated from Oldenburg University with studies in English, German, and Political Science, obtained his PhD in Comparative Literature in 1998 funded by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and completed his habilitation on contemporary Anglophone Indian novels in 2006. His career includes three years as a DAAD-funded Visiting Lecturer at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad and the University of Delhi, Assistant Professorships at the Universities of Magdeburg (2001-2006) and Tübingen, and his appointment at Potsdam in 2008.

Wiemann's research focuses on literature as collaboration, genre transformations in world literary space, South Asia studies, English Renaissance republicanism in literature, politics, and aesthetics, literature and the British Empire, cultural and literary theory, postcolonialism, theories and practices of cosmopolitanism, and Berlin in post-1989 Anglophone fiction. His major monographs are Anglophone Verse Novels as Gutter Texts: Postcolonial Literature and the Politics of Gaps (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), Postcolonial Literatures in English: An Introduction (co-authored, Metzler, 2019), Genres of Modernity: Contemporary Indian Novels in English (Brill, 2008), and Exilliteratur in Großbritannien 1933-1945 (Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998; e-book Springer, 2013). He has edited volumes including Postcolonial Justice (Brill, 2017), Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism (Ashgate, 2014), and European Contexts for English Republicanism (Routledge, 2013). Currently, he is spokesperson for the DFG-funded Research Unit Collaborations: Assemblages, Articulations, Alliances (2025-2028), principal investigator of its project From Bystander to Actor, and was director of the DAAD-funded bilateral network Writing the Cosmopolitan Imagination: Genre Transactions in World-Literary Space with the University of Delhi (2016-2020). He was a member of the DFG-funded Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms and contributes to scholarly journals and conferences.