Thomas Austenfeld

Thomas Austenfeld taught in Virginia, Missouri, Utah, and Georgia. He then served as Professor of American Literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland for nineteen years and retired in 2025. He holds a "First State Exam" from the University of Münster, Germany, as well as MA and Ph.D. degrees in English from the University of Virginia. His research concerns American modernist poets and prose writers as well as comparative approaches to the European literary tradition. Austenfeld's other fields of interest in American studies are Western American literature, biography, Southern cultures, and the writers of realism and naturalism.