CV

Dr. Sabrina Mittermeier teaches and researches U.S. history in a transnational context, drawing through lines to the U.K., Germany, China or Japan. Her focus has been on popular culture (including theme parks, film, and television) in the 20th and 21st century, and the ways history helps us understand it – and vice versa. She has also engaged with history of sexuality, and specifically, a queer history and studies, and hopes to help implement these permanently in the curricula of history departments in Germany.

 

Sabrina Mittermeier is the author of A Cultural History of Disneyland Theme Parks – Middle-Class Kingdoms(Intellect/U of Chicago P 2020), the first comparative cultural history of the Disneyland theme parks built in Anaheim, California (1955), Orlando, Florida (1971), Tokyo (1983), Paris (1992), Hong Kong (2005) and Shanghai (2016). The book sets the theme parks in the historical context at their opening and engages with class as a central category and factor in their success and failure. She is als the (co-)editor, among other volumes, of the upcoming Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect/U of Chicago P 2022) and The Routledge Handbook to Star Trek (2021 (with Leimar Garcia-Siino and Stefan Rabitsch), Fighting for the Future: Essays on Star Trek: Discovery (Liverpool UP 2020) (with Mareike Spychala), and Time and Temporality in Theme Parks (Wehrhahn 2017) (with Filippo Carlà-Uhink, Florian Freitag and Ariane Schwarz).  Her work has also appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and soon the European Journal of American CultureCulture, as well as several edited collections.

 

Dr. Mittermeier completed her doctoral degree in American cultural history at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich in February 2018 (advisor: Prof. Dr. Michael Hochgeschwender). Throughout her dissertation, she has been part of the DFG-funded project “Here You Leave Today – Ästhetische Eigenzeiten in Themenparks” based at the JGU Mainz, and has since also worked at the American studies department at the University of Augsburg (Prof. Dr. Katja Sarkowsky), and taught classes at the Obama Institute Mainz, the University of Bamberg, and LMU. Between November 2019 and March 2021, she also served on the board of Forum Queeres Archiv München e.V.

She is currently embarking on a second book project dealing with “Unmade Queer Television in the US and West Germany”,