Magdalena Müller

I have a B.A. in English and American Studies from Charles University in Prague, where I graduated with honours with an M.A. degree in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures. I have an IELTS certificate with an overall band score 8.5 (C2). Currently, I am a PG researcher at the University of Manchester and my research focuses on African American women's literature and the frontier mythology.

My main research interests are African-American literature and frontier mythology in American literature and culture. My current research focuses on the analysis of the frontier mythology in late twentieth-century neo-slave narratives authored by African American women, particularly on the works of Octavia Butler, J. California Cooper, Jewelle Gomez, Toni Morrison, and Sherley Anne Williams. I examine the ways those authors employ the tropes of frontier myth, as proposed in Richard Slotkin’s theory, in order to revise and criticise the cultural narrative of frontier heroism as a basis of American national identity. My research project is supervised by Dr. Douglas Field and Dr. Monica Pearl.

My broader research interests include Native American and Canadian literature and culture, immigrant literature, and women’s literature, including film, from the nineteenth century to modern times, identity and nationhood, and the revision of cultural narratives of the US. Previously, I researched John Updike’s suburbs and Freudian psychoanalysis, and narrative strategies as a response to trauma in Toni Morrison’s work.

• I am a founding member and the Inclusion Officer of American Studies PGR the Society. We created the society in order to provide a community for American Studies PGRs as well as enhance our experience at the University through social events, such as book clubs or film screenings, academic-focused discussions and reading groups, and well-being workshops.

• I have presented my research as a part of the SALC PGR day in November 2022.
• I was a part of the team that organized the Manchester American Studies PGR Workshare Conference in February 2023 and the Manchester American Studies PGR Workshare Conference in November 2023, where I also presented my research.
• I have presented my paper “Revisions of the Frontier Narrative in the Works of Oscar Micheaux, Toni Morrison, and Jeymes Samuel” as a part of a roundtable discussion on ‘American Space’ at the BAAS conference in Keele in 2023.
• I have presented my paper ‘The Frontier of the Middle Passage: African American Women’s Literature and the Captivity Narrative’ at the UoM American Studies Conference in May 2024
• I was a part of the organization committee for the European Network for Short Fiction Research conference in Manchester 2023 ‘Landscape and Temporality’, where I also chaired a panel. 
• I was a part of the organizational team for an outreach workshop on Do the Right Thing (1989) for the University American Film Studies in April 2024

Awards and Grants

• Postgraduate Travel Award (2023) - Awarded by University of Manchester to attend the 2023 BAAS conference
• Postgraduate Travel Award (2024) - Awarded by University of Manchester to attend the 2024 HOTCUS conference

Magdalena Müller, "‘Maysville? That’s a white town’: “The Harder They Fall” and Blackness in the Western Landscape," USSO (8 March 2023)

I am currently a seminar leader on the Twentieth Century American Literature course.