Author Olga Thierbach-McLean

Olga Thierbach-McLean

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.

“The Product of a Spoiled America”: Divorce as Collective Crisis in U.S. Popular Culture of the 1990s

Olga Thierbach-McLean

Articles, Issue 10 2020-21

The new millennium has entered its third decade, but the 1990s have never quite left us. For twenty years, they have been haunting the pop-cultural imagination as a lost golden era. In what is just the latest i... Read More...

A Conflict-Laden Consensus: Is the U.S. a One-Party System in Disguise?

Olga Thierbach-McLean

Articles, Issue 8 2018-19

With Donald Trump as U.S. President and leader of the Republican Party, the ideological divide between American conservatives and liberals seems greater than ever before. From healthcare to environmental policy... Read More...

“‘Normal People’ Indeed!”: Anne Tyler, Sally Rooney, and the Narrative of Youthful Quirk

Cold Reality: Revisions of War in John Knowles’ ‘Phineas’ and A Separate Peace

The State Department’s Northern Ireland Special Envoys and the redemption of the Good Friday Agreement

“a settled place”: Reproductive Performance in the Liberties and The Liberties

‘The Ethics of Quantum Colonialism’: Navigating American Racial Anxiety in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became

Depictions of Shame: White Identity and Cultural Blackness in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner

Satire, Symbolism, and the “Working Through” of Historical Ghosts in The Confidence-Man

Review: Katherine Manthorne, Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex.

Review: Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War

Review: Austenfeld, ed., Robert Lowell in a New Century

Review: Wills, Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture

Review: Sawires-Masseli, Arab American Novels Post-9/11: Classical Storytelling Motifs against Outsidership

Review: Christian Schmidt, Postblack Aesthetics: The Freedom to be Black in Contemporary African American Fiction.

Review: Wickham Clayton, ed, Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film

The IAAS's Americanista: An Interview with Catherine Gander (IAAS Chair)

From Mitchelstown to Michigan: Kevin Roche’s Formative Years

“The Product of a Spoiled America”: Divorce as Collective Crisis in U.S. Popular Culture of the 1990s

A Conflict-Laden Consensus: Is the U.S. a One-Party System in Disguise?