Stefan Rabitsch

Associate Professor - British North American
Image of Stefan Rabitsch
Norwegian version of this page
Phone +47 22856729
Room NT 717
Available hours Specific hours for classes (see syllabi), and by appointment
Username
Visiting address Niels Henrik Abels vei 36 Niels Treschows hus 0316 Oslo
Postal address Postboks 1003 Blindern 0316 Oslo

Research and Teaching Interests

My approach of "doing" American Studies is located at the intersections of culture studies, cultural history, and popular culture (esp. audio-visual media, i.e. television, film, and video games but also comics/graphic novels and certain music genres). I teach toward creating a class environment that is focused equally on in-class work and extramural impact. I challenge students to develop and enhance an interlocking set of literacies and competences—i) historical and historiographic literacy gained from close reading/text work and comprehensive contextualization of whichever cultural artifacts are the focus of inquiry, and ii) critical media literacy skills derived from offering students popular culture entry points to various core topic areas in American Studies. Let us not forget, we do not experience our world as raw information, figures and/or data points but rather through narrative forms and narrativizing structures which, in turn, acculturate, educate, and simply inform our experience of the world through representations thereof. 

Primary fields in American cultural studies and cultural history: Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American cultural history, American popular culture and audiovisual media, twentieth- and twenty-first-century American political culture and history

Specific interests: Nineteenth-century American westward expansion, New Western History, the Global West, livestock raising and horse(wo)manship economies, remediations of historical topoi/mythoi (e.g., the American Revolution/the Early Republic, Slavery/Abolition, the American presidency, etc.) in popular media (esp. TV, film, and video games), American presidential history, American entrepreneurial culture, country music, science fiction across media (esp. TV, film, and video games from the 1980s onward), fan studies, material culture

Would you like to watch me teach? Feel free to check out any of the following lectures:
1) “Petasus Americanus, or a Cultural History of Cowboy Hats” (spring 2020)
2) “Entrepreneurship as Popular National Storytelling Tradition” (fall 2019)
3) “Playing [with] the West: Teaching, Research, and Video Games” (spring 2019)
4) “Is this Mars or Arizona?”: Space and the American Imagination (fall 2016)
5) “Star Trekkin' Across the Disciplines: Why Star Trek still matters?” (fall 2015)

Background and Education

My background and education, as it is reflected in my teaching and research, is perhaps best summarized by a chance encounter with a young girl at the Imperial War Museum in London of all places in the spring of 2018. Getting on the same elevator, she turned around, sized me up and said: "You look like a cowboy who goes to the moon." I was wearing a Star Trek shirt that day and, like every day, a western style hat—aka a "cowboy hat"—sat atop my head. Little did she know that both—American science fiction and the American West—were integral components of my journey as an American Studies scholar.

Coming from a working class background—so, I’m "first gen" college—I had the good fortune of making a few, quite random albeit formative experiences at high school that set my on track to enroll in the English and American Studies program at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. My introduction to American Studies came by way of a year-long methods class in cultural studies whose thematic focus was the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. One thing led to another; I spent my first semester abroad at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, landed an internship at the Austrian Embassy in Washington, DC, and, more generally, I sized every opportunity that allowed me to spend time stateside, especially out West. 

My PhD centered on a historical mapping of the transatlantic double consciousness that informs the worldbuilding of Star Trek. My immediate postdoctoral work led me to the University of Graz where I began to develop what would evolve into my second monograph project—a cultural history of cowboy hats (work-in-progress, under contract with University of Oklahoma Press). The project landed me a 6-month Fulbright visiting scholarship which I spent at the Center for the Study of the American West at West Texas A&M in 2019. Staving off employment precarity, which was exacerbated by the Covid pandemic, I was fortunate to spend a little time on an EU-funded visiting professorship at the University of Warsaw’s American Studies Center. Ultimately, all these trails led me to ILOS and UiO.

Image may contain: Person, Chin, Microphone, Hat, Blue.
Star Trek Las Vegas 2019 (credit: St. Dominic Bonaparte)
Image may contain: Smile, Cap, Hat, Sun hat, Engineering.
Nat. Cowboy Museum (credit Seth Spillman, Nat. Cowboy Museum)

Professional and Community Service

Tags: USA, United States, American Studies, Cultural history, American West, Westward Expansion, popular culture, popular media, American politics, Country music, Science Fiction, Star Trek, Television, Film, Video games, American entrepreneurism

Publications

  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2024). One Nation Under Many Cowboy Hats: Western Hats and American Studies—A Cultural-Historical Conspectus. Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAS). ISSN 2616-9533. 4(1), p. 197–213. doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v4i1.105.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “When you look at a calf, what do you see?”: Land(ed) Business, Necrotic Entrepreneurialism, and Competing Capitalisms in the Contemporary West of Yellowstone. Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAS). ISSN 2616-9533. 3(2), p. 235–259. doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v3i2.147.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan & Fuchs, Michael (2022). “Out there hunting monsters”: Manifest Destiny and the Monstrosity of the American West. In Alexander, Dorian; Goodrum, Michael & Smith, Philip (Ed.), Drawing the Past, Volume 1: Comics and the Historical Imagination in the United States. University Press of Mississippi. ISSN 9781496837165. p. 228–252.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan & Pyrka, Pawel (2022). “This is America. We Don't Share Land here.” Kevin Costner, Taylor Sheridan, and Remediating New/Post-West(ern) Scholarship in Yellowstone. In Sourdot, Ludovic & Janak, Edward (Ed.), Kevin Costner, America's Teacher. Lexington Books. ISSN 978-1793647863. p. 95–127.
  • Bishop, Katherine & Rabitsch, Stefan (2022). Star Trek Nemesis. In Rabitsch, Stefan; Garcia-Siino, Leimar & Mittermeier, Sabrina (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek. Routledge. ISSN 9780367366674. p. 138–142.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2022). Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In Rabitsch, Stefan; Garcia-Siino, Leimar & Mittermeier, Sabrina (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek. Routledge. ISSN 9780367366674. p. 93–98.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan & Salisbury, Tracey (2022). “Don't Leave out the Cowboys!” Black Urban Cowboydom and Didactic Afrofuturist Countermemories in Ghetto Cowboy (2011) and Concrete Cowboy (2021). Western American Literature. ISSN 0043-3462. 57(2), p. 111–126. doi: 10.1353/wal.2022.0013.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2020). Guilty Ahabs, Starbuckian Reason, and White Cetacean Contours in Outer Space: Remediating Moby-Dick on the Final Frontier. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik. ISSN 0171-5410. 45(2), p. 217–238. doi: 10.2357/AAA-2019-001.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan & Fuchs, Michael (2019). The Birth of the Science Fiction Franchise. In Canavan, Gerry & Link, Eric Carl (Ed.), The Cambridge History of Science Fiction. Cambridge University Press. ISSN 9781107166097. p. 481–501. doi: https:/doi.org/10.1017/9781316694374.032.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan; Fuchs, Michael & Phillips, Michael (2019). The end is nigh! Bring forth the Shepard!: Mass Effect, the Apocalypse, and the Puritan Imagination. In Pöhlmann, Sascha (Eds.), Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies. Walter de Gruyter (De Gruyter). ISSN 9783110655254. p. 35–48. doi: https:/doi.org/10.1515/9783110659405-003.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan & Fuchs, Michael (2019). Playing America: An Introduction to American Culture through Video Games. Gamevironments. ISSN 2364-382X. 11, p. 86–102.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan & Domenig, Christian (2018). “My People once lived in Caves”: Pre-modern Societies in Star Trek. In Rabitsch, Stefan; Gabriel, Martin; Elmenreich, Wilfried & Brown, John N.A. (Ed.), Set Phasers to Teach!: Star Trek in Research and Teaching. Springer. ISSN 978-3-319-73775-1. p. 71–81.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2018). “Wagon Wheels, Sails, and Warp Cores”: Star Trek and American Culture: Between Allegory and Worldbuilding. In Rabitsch, Stefan; Gabriel, Martin; Elmenreich, Wilfried & Brown, John N.A. (Ed.), Set Phasers to Teach!: Star Trek in Research and Teaching. Springer. ISSN 978-3-319-73775-1. p. 29–41. doi: https:/doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73776-8.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan; Fuchs, Michael & Erat, Vanessa (2018). Playing Serial Imperialists: The Failed Promises of BioWare’s Video Game Adventures. Journal of Popular Culture. ISSN 0022-3840. 51(6), p. 1476–1499. doi: 10.1111/jpcu.12736.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan & Erat, Vanessa (2017). "Croeso i Gymru" – Where they speak Klingon and Sindarin: An Essay of Appreciation on ‘Conlangs’ and the Land of the Red Dragon. In Onysko, Alexander; Graf, Eva-Maria; Delanoy, Werner & Dobric, Nikola (Ed.), The Polyphony of English Studies. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. ISSN 978-3-8233-8140-2. p. 197–219.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2016). “Hail Columbia! Vision of a Great City”: A taxonomic appraisal of American cities of the imagination in visual science fiction. In Grech, Victor; Scerri, Mariella & Zammit, David (Ed.), Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Science Fiction: The interface of medicine, science and humanities in relation to the genre of science fiction. CreateSpace Independent Publishing. ISSN 978-1534982017. p. 156–188.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2016). "And yet, everything we do is usually based on the English": Sailing the mare incognitum of Star Trek’s transatlantic double consciousness with Horatio Hornblower. Science Fiction Film and Television. ISSN 1754-3770. 9(3), p. 439–472. doi: 10.3828/sfftv.2016.9.14.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2012). Space-age Hornblowers, or why Kirk and co. are not space cowboys: The Enlightenment mariners and transatlanticism of Star Trek. Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Networ. ISSN 1755-9944. 5(2), p. 27–54. doi: 10.31165/nk.2012.52.268.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2012). Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule(s) the space in Star Trek!: Maritime Histories, Transatlantic Anglophone Hegemonies and Science Fiction TV. In Coelsch-Foisner, Sabine & Herbe, Sarah (Ed.), New Directions in the European Fantastic. Universitätsverlag Winter. ISSN 978-3-8253-6099-3. p. 139–152.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2011). "Wagon Train to the stars" - Star Trekkin’ the U.S. western frontier. In Rio, David; Ibarraran, Amaia & Simonson, Martin (Ed.), Beyond the Myth: New Perspectives on Western Texts. Portal Education. ISSN 9788493836078. p. 177–204.

View all works in Cristin

  • Rabitsch, Stefan; Fuchs, Michael & Brandt, Stefan (2022). Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781496836632. 322 p.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan; Garcia-Siino, Leimar & Mittermeier, Sabrina (2022). The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek. Routledge. ISBN 9780367366674. 512 p.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2019). Star Trek and the British Age of Sail: The Maritime Influence Throughout the Series and Films. McFarland. ISBN 978-1-4766-6463-7. 279 p.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan; Gabriel, Martin; Elmenreich, Wilfried & Brown, John N.A. (2018). Set Phasers to Teach!: Star Trek in Research and Teaching. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-73775-1. 236 p.

View all works in Cristin

  • Rabitsch, Stefan; Fuchs, Michael & Gene-Rowe, Francis (2023). Introduction to the Special Section: “Beyond Petromodernity”. Extrapolation. ISSN 0014-5483. 64(1), p. 1–9. doi: 10.3828/extr.2023.2.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan & Fuchs, Michael (2023). The American Entrepreneurial Spirit: A Primer. Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies (JAAS). ISSN 2616-9533. 3(2), p. 199–211. doi: 10.47060/jaaas.v3i2.192.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “‘I’ll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares Maelstrom’: Star Trekkin’ White Cetacean Contours with Forlorn and Redemptive Ahabs.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “But all I know is, real cowboys is white”: Or, why Black Urban Cowboydom is speculative and Afrofuturist AF.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). From Morgan Kane to Sat-Okh: Finding and Teaching the West in Norwegian and Polish Backyards.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “I’m gonna let the world know we’re here”: Yellowstone as Postwest(ern) Classroom.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “Authenticity is the one thing that money [can] buy”: The Ironic Poetics and Politics of Verisimilitude in Yellowstone.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “I think I must be dreamin’, ’cause I just saw a horse run by”: The Disruptive Afrofuturist Pedagogy of Black Urban Cowboys.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2023). “Outside this valley, who knows that we’re even here?”: Land(ed) Necrocapitalism and Post-Western (Dis)continuities in Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan & Gabriel, Martin (2022). Ein Kampf um Körper, Land und Seelen: Der ‘American Southwest’ von Francisco de Coronado (1540) bis zur ‘Pueblo-Revolte’ (1680). Pallsch: Zeitschrift für Militärgeschichte. 81, p. 49–65.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2022). “It’s the Mecca of dumb money. Not New York, not L.A., right here”: The West of Yellowstone as Wasteland of the Ultra Rich, Necrotic Capital, and Schumpeterian Creative Destruction.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2022). “It feels like I’m sitting on one of them giant walking machines in Star Wars”: Black Urban Cowboys, Hypnopompic (Re)cognition, Afrofuturist Sensibilities.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2022). I’ll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom”: Star Trekkin’ White Cetacean Contours with Forlorn and Redemptive Ahabs.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan; Garcia-Siino, Leimar & Mittermeier, Sabrina (2022). Introduction: Open Hailing Frequencies. In Garcia-Siino, Leimar; Rabitsch, Stefan & Mittermeier, Sabrina (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek. Routledge. ISSN 9780367366674. p. 1–5.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan & Fuchs, Michael (2022). Introduction. In Rabitsch, Stefan; Fuchs, Michael & Brandt, Stefan (Ed.), Fantastic Cities: American Urban Spaces in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. University Press of Mississippi. ISSN 9781496836632. p. 3–31.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2019). The Far Side of the Moon Race: Decoding the Transatlantic Heritage of JFK’s ‘Frontier’. KonaK: Realitätsausschnitte aus Kontinentalamerika und der Karibik. ISSN 1561-8056. 96, p. 8–15.
  • Rabitsch, Stefan (2012). “Hornblower in space”: Britannia rules the transatlantic waves in Star Trek. Reflections: The Magazine of the C S Forester Society. ISSN 2042-1389. 22, p. 9–10.

View all works in Cristin

Published Aug. 1, 2022 1:28 PM - Last modified Mar. 18, 2024 10:40 AM