Dorothee Marx

Dorothee Marx is a Lecturer and Research Associate at the Chair of North American Studies and Coordinator at the Center for North American Studies at Kiel University. She serves as Co-Speaker of the German Association for American Studies Diversity Roundtable and an editor at Closure: Kieler e-Journal für Comicforschung.

• PhD candidate in American Literary Studies at Kiel University
• Holds an MA in English and American Literatures, Cultures and Media (2016)
• Bachelor of Arts in English/American Studies and Scandinavian Studies (2012)

Her research interrogates Disability Studies through literature, comics, and cultural studies, focusing on temporalities of disability, trauma narratives, and intersections with gender, race, and chronic illness. She pioneered affected scholarship by integrating her cystic fibrosis experience into academic work.

Key trends in her publications include graphic medicine (30%), temporalities (25%), and intersectional analyses of disability (20%). Articles span journals like Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and Closure, plus book chapters on trauma and eugenics.

• 2020 Sabin Award for Comics Scholarship (International Graphic Novels and Comics Conference)
• 2019 Martin Schüwer Publication Award for Excellence in Comic Studies

She has organized symposia including Moving Towards Collective Action: Activism and Academia (2022) and co-edited Laboring Bodies and the Quantified Self (2020). Her work appears in Zeitschrift für Disability Studies, Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. She teaches courses on crip time, disability in American fiction, and comics research methodologies.

Her current research project Bodies Irregular. Temporalities of Disability in Contemporary North American Literature explores how disabled characters' experiences challenge normative temporal frameworks in novels and comics. She also contributes to public discourse through interviews in Deutschlandfunk Kultur and taz.