Florian Zappe received his M.A. and PhD from the John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of the Freie Universität in Berlin and is currently working as Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen, Germany.
His interest in Beat culture took root when he stumbled across Burroughs’s Naked Lunch almost two decades ago. Beyond that, his research interests range widely from the theory and history of the avant-garde, critical and “French” theory, pop(ular) culture, the history of European and American cinema (with a focus on independent and experimental film), modern and postmodern literature to surveillance practices and their effects on our culture.
Florian is the author of books on William S. Burroughs and Kathy Acker. Most recently, he published the article “In the Generic Interzone – On the Liminal Character of William S. Burroughs’s ‘Routines’” in the volume Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian and British Writing