Mark Schmitt

Mark Schmitt has been a postdoctoral Stuart Hall Fellow and instructor in British Cultural Studies at TU Dortmund University, Germany between 2016–19. He previously worked at the University of Mannheim and Ruhr-University Bochum, where he received his MA in British and American Studies and Comparative Literature in 2011. He received his PhD in 2016 from Ruhr-University Bochum for the study British White Trash: Figurations of Tainted Whiteness in the Novels of Irvine Welsh, Niall Griffiths and John King (publication forthcoming). His research, publications and teaching focus on social abjection, the intersections of race and class and their cultural figurations, contemporary British and Irish literature, theories of British Cultural Studies and Critical Race/Whiteness Studies and film studies.  

His current postdoctoral research project, tentatively titled Lost Futures? An Archaeology of Counter-Hegemonic Futures in Britain from 19th-Century Anarchism to 21st-Century Anti-Capitalism is intended to sketch a conceptual history of alternative political projects in Britain. It examines notions of political temporalities and their development throughout recent British history, drawing on Hall’s reading of Gramsci and his conceptualisation of hegemony for this purpose.