Prof. Oliver Scheiding

Since 2004, Oliver Scheiding has been full professor and chair of North American Literature and Culture at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. He is widely known as an expert for early American studies, print criticism and culture with a focus on periodicals and material culture studies. Over the last decade, he has initiated interdisciplinary collaborative research projects especially in the field of "Transnational Periodical Cultures," and he serves as principal investigator at the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) "Studies in Human Categorization," funded by the German Research Foundation.

As a GRC fellow, he will finish his book titled, "Multiliteracies: Writing, Print, and the Emergence of American Literatures." The book offers an original and fresh approach to studying the transformations of print/media businesses, technologies and audiences that shaped the emergence of writing in North America. It unfolds a network of texts and the relationships between them in tandem with human and material agency. Thus, the book provides a seminal literary history of diverse transnational webbings and affective co-agencies that transform the printed page into a site in which countless actors and allies gain meaning via their relations.