Profile PD Dr. Ridvan Askin
Ridvan Askin studied at the Universities of Vienna, Freiburg, and Essex and holds an MA in Philosophy, English, and Portuguese from the University of Freiburg and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Basel, where he also obtained his venia docendi in North American and General Literature.
He has taught at the Universities of Freiburg, Basel, Upper Alsace, Fribourg, and Lucerne and was a visiting scholar at The Pennsylvania State University, the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. Currently, next to teaching at Basel, he is a SNSF Senior Researcher at the University of Geneva in a project on “Vegan Literary Studies: An American Textual History, 1776-1900.”
He is the author of Narrative and Becoming (Edinburgh University Press 2016), and the co-editor of four essay collections and a journal special issue: Rethinking the North American Long Poem: Form, Matter, Experiment (University of New Mexico Press 2024), New Directions in Philosophy and Literature (Edinburgh University Press 2019), The Aesthetics, Poetics, and Rhetoric of Soccer (Routledge 2018), Literature, Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives (Narr 2015), and Aesthetics in the 21st Century (2014, Speculations 5). He is also the translator of several of Steven Shaviro’s essays published as Die Pinocchio Theorie (Merve 2018).
He was the convener of the New Developments in Theory lecture series, which ran from 2014-2022. His main research interests are 19th-21st century North American literature, aesthetics, literary and cultural theory, environmental humanities, narrative theory, philosophy and literature, poetry and poetics, and romanticism.
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