After having served as professor of English Literature and Culture at Bremen University in 2024-2025, Katrin was appointed Academic Director of International Programmes at the Faculty of Law, University of Düsseldorf in April 2025. She is also a research fellow at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working on a research monograph with the working title Migra§tory: Narrating Refugees in Law and Culture. This project is situated in the area of law and cultural studies and draws on C20/C21 film and literature as well as on documents of international law. In her project, she focuses on narratives, visual representations, and theories in and of international law, the narrative authority of the 1951 Refugee Convention, and migration texts from a postcolonial and transnational point of view and offers an innovative and transdisciplinary insight into the dynamics of international migration, refugees, and diasporic identity.
In her research, Katrin addresses the links between various geographical regions and diverse cultural and historical contexts as represented in a number of different media (film, TV, graphic novels, videogames, digital media). She is interested in geo- and ecocritical approaches to culture and works on questions of spatial imperialism and spaces and places in the anthropocene. In her research project “Oceanic Storytelling,” Katrin combines her interests in both the spatial dimension of cultures and migration in order to establish the idea of oceanic storytelling as a new concept in cultural studies.
In her interdisciplinary “Living Archives” project, she is concerned with the ways in which Indigenous onto-epistemologies (such as understanding Country as the foundation of culture and as story) manage, practise, and safeguard science by way of a narrative cultural science. With this participatory project, she aims for a decolonial perspective on her own research.
Katrin’s research is located in a matrix of synchronic and diachronic perspectives. This shows in her work on the mechanics of legal fictions, which she explored in a project entitled “Legal Fictions in Victorian Literature: Towards a New Interdisciplinarity.” Combining her interest in Victorian literature and culture with that in both Postcolonial and British Studies, she focused on the legal fictions of civil death and coverture and has become interested in the cultural evolution of the Condition-of-England novel up to Brexit and beyond and into other medial forms such as film and installations.
One of the main issues for her is a truly interdisciplinary approach to culture, not only in terms of law and culture scholarship, but also in her work in British and Postcolonial Studies, especially Blak/Black Australian Studies.
