Dr Aaron Nyerges

Senior Lecturer in American Studies and Honours CoordinatorUnited States Studies Centre

Aaron Nyerges is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Centre. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Sydney and a BA in Creative Writing from the State University of New York. His work focuses on the relationship between literature, media and geography. His first book, American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.

Biography

Aaron Nyerges is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Centre, where he was Academic Director from 2021-2024. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Sydney and a BA in Creative Writing from the State University of New York, Plattsburgh. His work focuses on the relationship between literature, media and geography. His first book, American Modernism and the Cartographic Imagination, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.

Dr Nyerges is currently at work on two book-length research projects. The first — on “animal poetics” — explores the traces that animals leave in human thinking and literary writing. It considers the historical construction of zoology through the prism of mythology, and especially the transformative animal, which has the capacity to animate the boundaries of Linnean taxonomy. The second project maps out the Mediterranean travel of the American modernist poet HD (Hilda Doolittle), with a focus on her voyages to Greece and her subsequent rewriting of the Helen myth. Together these paths of enquiry seek to place American literature amid the broader forces of global modernity, namely its transformations in media, communication and transit technologies; its remaking of antiquity; the creation of the sciences of cartography, zoology, and botany; and indigenous and non-European critiques of colonialism in both practice and theory.

At the University of Sydney, Aaron teaches classes on social media and American society, Hollywood and the internet, as well as on the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped, and shape, the United States. He is interested in talking to students and other scholars about a wide range of topics, including US popular culture and new media technologies; sexuality, race and gender; colonialism and indigenous studies; critical theory and psychoanalysis; film, literature and aesthetics, and the territorial expansion of the United States, especially its cultural interactions with the Caribbean and the Pacific.