Ahu Tanrisever pursued her undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Mannheim and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, receiving her Magistra Artium degree in English, German, and media and communication studies from the University of Mannheim with her thesis on representations of 9/11 in literature. Having been a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of North American Studies at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, she recently defended her dissertation, “Post-Heroism: Heroic Masculinities in Post-9/11 US Literature and Visual Culture,” which analyzes contemporary negotiations of intersecting notions of masculinity, whiteness, and “Americanness” within the focal point of the hero figure in a broad range of aesthetic objects. Her research and teaching interests encompass gender studies, questions of class and social mobility, 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century US literature and culture, US cultural history, star studies, and US narrative film (in particular, film noir, Westerns, and action films).