Elena Furlanetto

PD Dr Elena Furlanetto is a lecturer (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) in the Department of Anglophone Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen and, since 2024, stand-in professor at TU Dortmund. A Fellow of the Centre for Global Cooperation Research, she leads DFG-funded projects on nineteenth-century American cultural ambiguity and transatlantic voices.

Education & qualifications

• Dr. phil., Transatlantic American Studies, TU Dortmund, 2015
• Habilitation, Anglophone Studies, University of Duisburg-Essen, 2023 (Rob Kroes Publication Award 2023)

Research interests
Furlanetto’s work sits at the intersection of literary studies, memory studies and inter-American history. She explores how transnational texts negotiate slavery and freedom (comparative Underground Railroad narratives), Turkish-American transculturation, Islam in U.S. media, and the poetics of ambiguity in colonial and post-colonial writing.

Recent articles (2023-24) cluster around four impulses: creole vanishings in the nineteenth-century Atlantic, female empowerment in contemporary horror, ambiguity in migrant fiction (Ocean Vuong), and the sonic ineffable—demonstrating a sustained interest in border-crossings, racial inscription and aesthetic indeterminacy.

Awards

• Rob Kroes Publication Award 2023, European Association of American Studies

Grants & projects

• Principal Investigator, DFG Research Unit 2600 “Ambiguity and Difference”, 2019-2025
• Co-organiser, DFG Research Network “Voices & Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600-1865”, 2021-2024
• Fellowship project “Northbound and Southbound: Underground Railroads in Comparison”, Centre for Global Cooperation Research

She currently holds office R12 V01 D02 on the Essen campus and advises interested students by appointment.