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Melanie Frey

Office hours will be held exclusively via Zoom (external link, opens in a new window)

About

Melanie Frey is a PhD candidate in American Studies. She majored in British and American Studies and History at the University of Konstanz with a focus on literature and culture of the 19th and early 20th century. Her current research is part of the ERC- funded project "Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility", which considers how early automobility generated new environmental knowledge. The project has built an online database which collects forms of automobile literature from the early 20th century. Melanie Frey manages the project’s text corpus by overseeing the digitization and cataloging of texts from both digital and analogue archives.

Research

Using fictional and nonfictional automobile narratives between 1890-1930, Melanie Frey examines the formation of the road trip as a genre in her dissertation. Her project’s aim is to find and analyze previously unexamined road literature in the context of antecedent travel writing – pioneer narratives between 1820-1860 – to highlight which methods, tropes, and strategies were employed to articulate this new form of travel in American literature.

Melanie Frey

Conferences/Presentations

•  “‘All was open country, rolling and vast’: Western landscapes in early automobile literature.” Presentation at the VI International Conference on the American Literary and Cultural West: Local/Regional Perspectives and Global Imaginings, ReWest 2026, hosted at the University of the Basque Country (EHU) in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain), October 5-7, 2026.

•  “Automobile / Immobile: Constructions of Indigeneity and Whiteness in early automobile narratives.” Presentation at the workshop “Environmental Mobilities: Research, Public Engagement, Museum Practice" at Verkehrszentrum Deutsches Museum in Munich (Germany), July 22, 2026.

•  Organisation of the conference Cultures of Automobility, hosted by the “Off the Road” project at the University of Konstanz (Germany), October 10-12, 2024. Participation in the roundtable “Off the road”, October 11, 2024.

•  “Nostalgia in Early Automobile Travel Writing.“ Guest talk at the Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures hosted by the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main (Germany), May 2, 2024. 

•  “‘I guess there must be pioneer blood in our veins‘: Pioneering Nostalgia in Early Automobile Travel Writing.“ Presentation at the 35th Biennial EAAS Conference, 1924-2024: The American Immigrant Narrative Revisited, hosted by the Bavarian American Academy in Munich (Germany), April 4-6, 2024. 

Funding

•  ERC-funded research project " Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility ", Prof. Timo Müller, Universität Konstanz (2023-2026) / Universität Regensburg (2026-2027)

•  Doctoral sponsorship of Cusanuswerk

Teaching

Uni Regensburg

•  American Literature II - The Twentieth and Twenty-First Century (WiSe 2026/27)

Uni Konstanz

•  The American Road Movie (SuSe 2024) 

•  Automobile Narratives and Petrocultures in the Twentieth Century (WiSe 2023/24)

Publications

•  “Review: Pink Cars and Pocketbooks: How American Women Bought Their Way into the Driver’s Seat, by Jessica A. Brockmole.” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 94, no. 3, 2025, pp. 339-40.

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