Xan Holt's academic focus is is on German-language literature, film, and television of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. He specializes in the environmental humanities; migration and diaspora studies; transnational and world literature; and film, television, and new media. He also works on Polish-language literature and film.
His current manuscript, “Transit and Trespass: Crossing Borders in Central European Literature," focuses on works of German- and Polish-language literature from the beginning of the Cold War to the present. In it he argues that, by presenting border-crossings as acts of political and aesthetic transgression, the writers discussed use literature to undermine geopolitical divisions and generate new transcultural affiliations and diasporic imaginaries.
A second book project, tentatively titled "Dumping Grounds: Wasted Bodies, Lands, and Materials," draws on recent developments in the environmental humanities, such as the burgeoning subfields of waste and discard studies and the concepts of planetarity and the posthuman, in order to approach practices and theories of artistic and textual reuse from an international and ecocritical vantage. The project will trace the trajectory of ‘trash’ from the nineteenth-century figure of the ragpicker to today’s spam-generating botnets and bring together European critical theory and the anti-imperial strategies of movements from the Global South.
Xan has published articles in several German studies journals (e.g., The Germanic Review and Monatshefte), as well as chapters in collected volumes and contributions to the annual publications (Jahrbücher) of the Uwe Johnson Society and the Arno Schmidt Society. He is an editor for The Germanic Review.
