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, Lucerne, Bern, and Lausanne, and was a visiting scholar at The Pennsylvania State University, the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. From 2023 to 2026, he was an 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 Transcendental Poetics and the Futures of American Romanticism (SUNY Press, 2026) and Narrative and Becoming (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), and the co-editor of several essay collections and a journal special issue: Vegan Intersections: Histories, Literature, Texts (De Gruyter, 2026), 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 21^st Century (2014, Speculations 5). With the research team at the University of Geneva, he co-edited an extensively annotated online bibliography on veganism in the nineteenth-century US. 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 19^th-21^st century North American literature, aesthetics, cultural, literary, and media theory, environmental humanities, narrative theory, philosophy and literature, poetry and poetics, and romanticism.

Prospective PhD students: Please note that I do not use LLMs (AI) at all and I am not interested in supervising candidates who use LLMs for their research. Do not submit research proposals generated with the help of LLMs.