Dr. Susana Rocha Teixeira

​Research Associate

Heidelberg Center for American Studies
Curt und Heidemarie Engelhorn Palais
Hauptstraße 120
69117 Heidelberg

T: +49 (0)6221-54 38 84
F: +49 (0)6221/54-3878
E-mail: srochateixeira@hca.uni-heidelberg.de

Susana Rocha Teixeira is a postdoctoral research associate in the DFG Research Training Group “Authority and Trust” (GKAT). She completed her PhD in American Literature and Culture at Heidelberg University “summa cum laude” in 2019. Her thesis titled “The American Makeover Culture and Masculinities: Roots, Connections and Representations” explores (fictional) representations of hegemonic masculinity in cultural products that employ makeover aesthetics, tropes or narratives in order to analyze how males resorted to forms of makeover in order to forge and reassert their masculinity and thus by extension reaffirm conventional notions of masculinity and national identity, especially during times of ‘crisis.’ From 2017-2021 Susana worked as a (postdoctoral) research associate for the DFG-funded collaborative research project “Practices of Comparing” 1288 at Bielefeld University, where she completed a research project on “Practices of Comparing in the Context of the Harlem Renaissance in a Hemispheric Perspective.” In 2015 she was a visiting scholar in residence at the History Department at the American University in Washington DC and in 2017 at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences/Center for Advanced Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
In her postdoctoral research project (“Re-Imagining the New Negro Renaissance: The Black Renaissance in Baltimore and Beyond”), Susana uses Baltimore as a case study to explore the formation of (literary or artistic) recognition, canon formation, and reading and reception practices in the context of the New Negro Movement. Although the primary interest of this study lies on ‘serious’ literature, it also takes the significant production of lowbrow, middlebrow or popular culture during the New Negro era into consideration, which reshaped, and had a lasting impact on notions of black identity and cultural production. It is also interested in the black press, which often was a platform for discussing writers, artists, cultural products, and disseminating ideas about literary, artistic and cultural values within and beyond the country.