The essay collection Reading the Social in American Studies, which I co-edited with Astrid Franke (Tuebingen) and Katja Sarkowsky (Augsburg), has just been published. The authors discuss the ways in which literature and other media explore, capture, and critically engage with what we broadly call ‚the social.‘ The volume speaks to my research in the field of relational sociology as well as what was once called literary sociology: interdisciplinary approaches that focus on combining the theoretical models and concepts of relational sociology with narratology and literary theory.