Babette Bärbel Tischleder is professor of North American Studies with a focus on Media Studies in the English Department of the University of Göttingen. She also is an external faculty member of the Graduate School of North American Studies at the John F. Kennedy Institute, Free University of Berlin.

Her research interests include literature and material culture; object studies and thing theory; cinema and television studies; and American media history of the 19th century. She has recently focused on the economy and aesthetics of obsolescence in American literature and culture. Currently, she is embarking on a research project entitled "Serial Chronotopes: The Spatiotemporal Architecture of Narrative Worlds in American Serial Television.