is a postdoctoral researcher at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the University of Mainz (Germany) and a member of the “Young Academy” of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. As part of his PhD-fellowship with the RTG minor cosmopolitanisms at the University of 283 Potsdam, Jens wrote a thesis on “The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s),” which was published with Universitätsverlag Winter (2020). His thesis analyzes conflicting discourses of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territory negotiated in US legal and Indigenous life writing texts in the contexts of the North American continent and the Pacific. He is also co-editor of an anthology titled Across Currents: Connections between Atlantic and (Trans)Pacific Studies (London: Routledge, 2018) as well as co-editor of a special forum of the Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) on American Territorialities. His postdoctoral research project employs an ecocritical and posthumanist lens to look at representations of the future of extraterrestrial human life in contemporary US literature and culture.