Ass. Prof. Dr. Mahshid Mayar
Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Innsbruck
Department of American Studies
Innrain 52d, 6020 Innsbruck
Humanities building, 3rd floor, room 40309
Phone: +43 512 507-41611
E-Mail: Mahshid.Mayar@uibk.ac.at
Office hour: by appointment
Current Research Project
A book-length study of a sub-genre of documentary poetry known as “erasure poetry,” my Habilitation/second-book project, W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States, interrogates the ways the political pervades the poetic and the poetic manifests the political in 21C U.S. poetry. An example of century-long practices in experimental & conceptual forms of poetry and fine arts that Kenneth Goldsmith identifies as practices in “managing language,” erasure poetry is an emerging poetic form with textual, visual, and discursive roots in carefully selected, often (but not always) publicly available “source texts.” This book project builds on “the documental turn in North American poetry” (Michael Leong 5), critically examining erasure poetry’s capacity not only to archive but also to question what archives (should and need to) entail.
Call for Proposals "Deliberate Poetics"
The call for proposals is now open for Deliberate Poetics: Erasure, Materiality, and the Politics of the Page, an essay collection edited by Mahshid Mayar, Michael Fuchs, & Sandra Tausel -- dedicated to explorations of erasure poetry and arts.
Abstracts of up to 500 words, accompanied by a brief biographical statement of no more than 100 words, are invited for submission by February 15, 2026, to erasurepoetryproject@gmail.com.
Following acceptance, full essay drafts (6,000–8,000 words, including bibliography) will be expected by August 1, 2026.
Ass. Prof. Dr. Mahshid Mayar Intervied for Digital Childhoods Series
In the summer of 2025, Assistant Professor Dr. Mahshid Mayar was interviewed for the Digital Childhoods series, organized by the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth. In the interview, Dr. Mayar discusses questions of childhood, temporality, and archival presence, reflecting on how these themes shape the study of childhood in historical contexts.
The full interview is available on the Society’s website.
Research
- Intersections of Literature and History
- American Poetry | Documental Protest Poetry
- Archives and Politics of Archiving | Archival Silences
- Transnational American Studies [ focus on race & racialization
- Critical Sound Studies | Sound, Silence, Noise in Contemporary U.S. Literature
- Empire Studies | Cartographies of Empire | Empire, Age, and Race
- Historical Childhood Studies | History of Education
Teaching
current semester: WS 2025/2026
past semester: SS 2025
Publications
- in preparation: Mayar, Mahshid. W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States [ Habilitationsprojekt ].
- 2022: Mayar, Mahshid. Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (2022).
- Winner of Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for Original Research in Transnational American Studies (2022), American Studies Association (ASA).
- under contract: Mayar, Mahshid, and Mischa Honeck, eds. De Gruyter Companion to U.S. Empire. Berlin: de Gruyter (2025).
- 2022: Mayar, Mahshid, and Marion Schulte, eds. Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations Across Disciplines. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
- 2021: Mayar, Mahshid, and Stefan Schubert, eds. “American Video Games and the Politics of Popular Culture.” European Journal of American Studies 16.3 (2021).
- 2020: Mayar, Mahshid, ed. “Spaces of Empire.” U.S. Studies Online, British Association for American Studies (2020).
- 2018: Mayar, Mahshid, ed. “Encounters in the ‘Game-Over Era’: The Americas in Videogames.” fiar: Forum for Inter-American Research 11.2 (2018).
- 2017: Mayar, Mahshid, and Yaatsil Guevara González, eds. “Done with Eurocentrism? Directions, Diversions, and Debates in History and Sociology.” InterDisciplines: Journal of History and Sociology 8.2 (2017).
2025 “Consider Children’s Temporality, ‘Playes’,”
interview for the Digital Childhoods series, Society for History of Childhood and Youth.
2023 “School of Racism & Citizens and Rulers of the World,”
podcast conversation with Catherine Larochelle (Université de Montréal, Canada) and Kristine Alexander (University of Lethbridge, Canada), Society for the History of Children and Youth (forthcoming).
2022 “Children’s Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mahshid Mayar ,”
interview by M. Buna, Los Angeles Review of Books.
2022 “The Author’s Corner with Mahshid Mayar,”
interview by John Fea, The Current.
2022 “Citizens and Rulers of the World: Podcast Episode,”
podcast conversation with John Yargo, New Books Network.
2022 “#IchBinHanna - #IchBinRayhan: Precarity in German Academia,”
bilingual podcast episode for Philologie im Gespräch (together with Dr. Kristin Eichhorn (Universität Stuttgart) and Dr. Iudita Balint (Fritz-Hüser-Institut für Literatur und Kultur der Arbeitswelt)).
2021 “4,5 Fragen / 4,5 Questions,”
interview with Der Arbeitskreis ‘Geschichtswissenschaft und Digitale Spiele.
- Mayar, Mahshid. “Splintered Archives: Versions and Versioning through Erasure Arts and Poetry” (article in Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAAS) – edited by Matthias Klestil).
- Mayar, Mahshid. “Erasure as Seriality – A Study of the “Serial Attitude” in A Humument and Tree of Codes.” Serial Circulation: Print Cultures and Periodical Modernities, edited by Daniel Stein and Maxi Albrecht. Anglia: Journal of English Philology 1 (2025).
- 2023: Mayar, Mahshid. “‘Playes Print the Letter.’ American Child(hoods) as Archival Present/ce.” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 16.3 (2023): 361-383.
- 2023: Mayar, Mahshid. “Huck in the Balloon, Huck in the Divan -- The American Child and the Cartographic Scripts of Empire.”Journal of Transnational American Studies 14.1 (2023): 53-74.
- 2023: Mayar, Mahshid. “Sand Opera: Imperial Scripts of Crisis and Intergeneric Fields of Erasure in Philip Metres’ Poetry of Erasure.”Capitalist Crisis Poetry: Neoliberalism and the 21st Century Lyric, edited by Stefan Benz, Marcel Hartwig, and Hannah Schoch. Amerikastudien/American Studies 68.2 (2023): 231-41.
- 2022: Mayar, Mahshid. “Children, Childhood, and Empire.”Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies. Ed. Heather Montgomery. New York: Oxford University Press (2022).
- 2022: Mayar, Mahshid. “Silence as Masquerade: Punctuation, Prosody, and Performance in ‘A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease’.” Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations across Disciplines. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (2022).
- 2022: Mayar, Mahshid, and Marion Schulte. “Silences in History, Linguistics, and Literature: An Introduction,” introduction to Silence and Its Derivatives: Conversations across Disciplines. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2022).
- 2021: Mayar, Mahshid. “Feasts of Indifference: Racialization, Affect, and Necropolitics in 1X War Games.” European Journal of American Studies 16.3 (2021).
- 2021: Mayar, Mahshid, and Stefan Schubert. “Joystick in the Garden,” introduction to Special Issue “American Video Games and the Politics of Popular Culture.” European Journal of American Studies 16.3 (2021).
- 2020: Mayar, Mahshid. “Spaces and Spatialities of Empire: An Introduction,” introduction to “Spaces of Empire” Essay Series, U.S. Studies Online, British Association for American Studies (2020).
- 2020: Mayar, Mahshid. “What on earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy.”European Journal of American Studies 15.2 (2020): 1-19.