The term New English Literatures (NEL) refers to the anglophone literatures of Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Oceania, and Canada. The field has direct overlaps with English Studies, for instance by including Black and Asian British literatures as well as travel writing; via Canadian literatures, it is also closely linked to the field of North American studies, a special focus in the Augsburg NEL.

In both research and teaching, we foreground transnational and transcultural exchange processes and developments (historical and contemporary) rather than specific national literatures. Accordingly, issues of cultural plurality and hybridity, as well as literary negotiations of colonization and decolonization, migration, diaspora, and social inequality are central lines of inquiry and research.

‘Literary studies’ are therefore practiced as transcultural and comparative analyses of texts from a broad variety of national and cultural contexts; literature, with its specific aesthetic forms, is understood as part of larger cultural and societal constellations, and connections to other forms of cultural productions (e.g. film, photography, painting) are frequently included in our teaching and research.