Melanie Kreitler is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Giessen, Germany, and MSCA fellow at Ghent University, Belgium. She is the author of Mental Illness and Narrative Complexity (EUP 2025) as well as co-editor of Diversity Issues in the USA (transcript 2024) and the special issues “Mental TV” (Series 2025), “Queer Politics in Media and Legal Cultures” (Amerikastudien 2024), and “Illness, Narrated” (On_Culture 2021). Her research interests are in the intersections of cognitive and cultural approaches to film, television, and videogames, and critical approaches to empathy. Her current work addresses failed empathic engagement in narrative fiction across media, including literature, film, graphic novels, and videogames.

Recent publications include:

“Morality at Play: What Loop Games Tell Us About Ourselves.” Unspool: Critical Time Loops in Screen Media, edited by Nick Jones. Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming in 2026.

“Looping Minds: Reclaiming Agency beyond a Normative Chronology.” Poetics Today, vol. 46, no. 1, 2025, pp. 105–25.

“The Politics of Plot Twists: Cognition, Culture, and the Convention of Mental Illness.” GRAMMA: Journal of Theory and Criticism, vol. 30, 2025, pp. 67–91.