Skip to main content
University of Regensburg
DE: diese Seite auf deutsch

Jannis Buschky

About

Since 2023, Jannis Buschky has been a doctoral candidate in American Studies and a member of the ERC project “Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility” (Prof. Müller). He earned his master’s degree (M.A.) in American Studies from Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz in 2022. He is a doctoral fellow of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.

Together with Gilberto Mazzoli, he hosts the podcast “Off the Road: A Podcast about the Environmental Humanities”.

Research

Jannis Buschky’s research focuses on oil in American fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. At the time when Americans were beginning to live with oil as a widely available resource, his dissertation traces the literary beginnings of American petromodernity back to the extraction zones enabling the rise of the emerging fossil fuel-based economy and culture. Arguing for the necessity of a regional approach to the study the literary beginnings of American petromodernity, he examines the ways in which the earliest American novels about oil extraction represent extraction zones in major oil producing regions in the American West. 

In his dissertation, The Regional Imaginations of the Early American Oil Extraction Novel, 1900-1945, he inspects how oil shapes and is shaped by tropes of the American West. His research is situated at the intersection of the energy humanities, the environmental humanities, and western studies.

His work has appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and is forthcoming with Amerikastudien/American Studies.

Address

Jannis Buschky

CV

Academic CV:

10/2026 – present Research Associate on the ERC project ‘Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility’ (Prof. Dr Timo Müller), University of Regensburg

04/2023 – 08/2024 Research Assistant on the ERC project ‘Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility’ (Prof. Dr Timo Müller), University of Konstanz

April 2023 – present: PhD student in American Studies, University of Konstanz

 

Grants:

August 2024 – present PhD scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation

09/2023 Grant: ‘UMass/BW Researcher Mobility Programme’, University of Massachusetts Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Publications

  • "Merging Oil Culture and Indigenous Modernity in John Joseph Mathews’s *Sundown* (1934).” *Amerikastudien / American Studies*, vol. 71, no. 4, forthcoming.
  • "Slippery Ground: Petrofeminism in Mary Austin’s *The Ford* (1917)." *ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment*, 2025, pp. 1–20.
  • "Review of *Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War* by Lisa Brooks." *Amerikastudien / American Studies*, vol. 66, no. 4, 2021, pp. 712–13.

Teaching

2025–2026 Literature of the American West (University of Konstanz, winter semester 2025–2026)

2024 Petroleum Addiction, Pleasure, and Violence on the American Road (University of Konstanz, Summer Semester 2024)

2023–2024 Automobile Narratives and Petrocultures in the Twentieth Century (University of Konstanz, winter semester 2023–2024)

Conferences/Presentations

Invited Lectures:

01/2026 “Vanishing Oil in John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown (1934).” Invited guest lecture at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies on 22 January 2026.

Conference and Workshop Presentations:

August 2026 “Invisible and Extractable? Settler Resource Logic and Indigenous Futurity in John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown (1934).” TU Dresden. Presentation at the conference “Petrocultures 2026: Situating Energy” on 26 August 2026.

July 2026 “Fueling Early Automobility: Oil Extraction in American Literature, 1914–1945.” Verkehrszentrum at the Deutsches Museum, Munich. Presentation at the workshop “Environmental Mobilities: Research, Public Engagement, Museum Practice” on 22 July 2026.

May 2026 “The Space of the Nation or the Space of the Planet? Going Underground in Edwin Lanham’s Oil Novel *Thunder in the Earth* (1941).” University of Münster. Presentation at the 72nd Annual Conference of the German Association of American Studies, “Kinship in American Studies”, on 29 May 2026.

01/2026 “The Regional Imaginations of the Early American Oil Extraction Novel, 1900–1945.” University of Vienna. Presentation at the conference “Early Petropoetics” on 15 January 2026.

July 2024 “1924: Modernism on the Assembly Line.” Centre for Modernist Studies at the University of Birmingham. Joint presentation at the “Modernism in 1924” conference with Timo Müller, Otilia Teodorescu-Stadler and Gilberto Mazzoli on 17 July 2024.

June 2024 “Working Bodies in Upton Sinclair’s Oil!” School of Humanities, University of Southampton. Presentation at the “Infrastructures of Representation, Infrastructures of Extraction: Energy, Environment, and Literary Form in World Literatures and Cultures” conference on 15 June 2024.

November 2023 “The Time and Subject of Oil in Edwin Lanham’s Thunder in the Earth.” Presentation at the Environmental Humanities Conference organised by the Journal of Ecohumanism on 17 November 2023.

November 2020 “New England History Reconsidered.” Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies. Presentation at the Obama Lecture on 26 November 2020.

To top