Olga Thierbach-McLean is an independent scholar, journalist, musician, and literary translator. After studying North American literature, Russian literature, and musicology at the University of Hamburg and UC Berkeley, she earned her doctorate in American Studies at UHH. She is the author of various articles on U.S. political culture, as well as of the book Emersonian Nation which traces the resonance of Emersonian individualism in current U.S. discourses on personal rights and social reform. Her main research interests are in contemporary U.S. politics and particularly the intersections between politics and literature, in American Transcendentalism, the intellectual history of liberalism, and dystopian fiction. Currently, her projects are focused on the cultural appropriation debate as an aspect of American political exceptionalism and on the reimagination of the cyberpunk genre as social criticism.
