Cooperations

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Bongers

Santiago de Chile
Chile

Catholic University of Chile
Faculty of Literature and Linguistics

Wolfgang Bongers is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Literature and Linguistics, Catholic University of Chile. He holds a PhD in Literature and Intermediality from the University of Siegen, Germany, and a Master of Arts in Romance Philology from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. As a film and literary critic, he specializes in the intersections between literature and audiovisual media (film, television, installations, digital art), as well as the construction of cultural memories in analog and digital archives, their technologies and materialities throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. “Literature and Publicity” are prominent themes in this context. He has led several national and international research projects and is the author of numerous articles and the books “Writing/Figures: Julio Cortázar’s Transtextual Aesthetics” and “Interferences from the Archive: Aesthetic and Political Cuts in Film and Literature. Argentina and Chile.” Currently, he is the Co-Director of the Millennium Nucleus project “The Futures of Artificial Intelligence” (nucleofair.org).

Prof. Ana Casas

Alcalá de Henares
Spain

Universidad de Alcalá
Departamento de Filología, Comunicación y Documentación

Ana Casas is an Associate Professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Alcalá. As a specialist in contemporary narratives, she is the author, among others works, of the monographs El cuento español en la posguerra. Presencia del relato breve en las revistas literarias [The Spanish Short Story in the Postwar Period. (2007)] and Voces de lo fantástico en la narrativa española contemporánea [Voices of the fantastic in contemporary Spanish narrative (with David Roas, 2016)]. She is also the editor of La autoficción. Reflexiones teóricas [Autofiction. Theoretical reflections (2012)], El yo fabulado. Nuevas aproximaciones críticas a la autoficción [The fabled self. New critical approaches to autofiction (2014)], El autor a escena. Intermedialidad y autoficción [The author on stage. Intermediality and autofiction (2017)] and Pensar lo real: autoficción y discurso crítico [Thinking the real: autofiction and critical discourse (with Anna Forné, 2022)]. She belongs to the GEF (Fantastic Studies Group, at Autonomous University of Barcelona) and the Contemporary Literature Research Group-GILCO (University of Alcalá). She is the head editor of Pasavento. Journal of Hispanic Studies (https://erevistas.publicaciones.uah.es/ojs/index.php/pasavento/).

Prof. Dr. Orlando Grossegesse

Braga
Portugal

Universidade do Minho

Orlando Grossegesse studied Romance philology at the LMU in Munich from 1981 to 1986 with a focus on Hispanic and Lusitanian studies as well as communication sciences. Since 1990 he has worked at the Universidade do Minho (Braga, Portugal), where he founded the German department. His teaching and research topics include the diverse relationships between German-speaking and Lusophone cultures and literatures in the 19th century and up to the present. Studies on literary translation play an important role (e.g. Ilse Losa, Albert Vigoleis Thelen, Curt Meyer-Clason), in the context of migration and the mediation of foreign-language literature to the public in German-speaking countries.

Prof. Dr. Michael Hagner

Zürich
Switzerland

ETH Zürich

Michael Hagner is currently working on a book that brings together published and unpublished essays arguing that transformations in book culture and larger transformations in society, science, and culture are mutually dependent. The book will be published under the title „Die moralische Ökonomie des Buches“.

Prof. Dr. Ilse Logie

Gent
Belgium

Universiteit Gent
Department of Literary Studies

Ilse Logie is a Professor of Latin American Studies at Ghent University (Department of Literary Studies). A first topic that is central to her work is related to the production, circulation and reception of contemporary Latin American literature in global markets. She is the chair of the Research Group “Centre for Literature in translation” (CLIV, Ghent University and University of Brussels). The group’s research objectives focus on the role of translation in the cultural transfer of knowledge, ideas, ideologies, norms and values as well as aesthetic procedures in fiction and non-fiction. In the examined corpora, this transfer and reinterpretation of cultural codes mainly manifests itself in a poetics of multilingualism and interculturality.

Her second field of research deals with the representation of different types of violence within contemporary Latin American narratives (especially in Argentina and Chile), on which she has produced numerous publications.

Prof. Dr. Annick Louis

Franche Comté | Paris
France

My work develops an epistemology of contemporary narratives situated between fiction and non-fiction, based on a comparative corpus, which includes the Americas and Western Europe. This type of “cross-bordering” narrative is increasingly popular with specialized and non-specialized audiences and nowadays represents a vast international and globalized production, in which different literary traditions are present. I’m particularly interested in the direct and indirect effects and impacts which works that blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction have in the contemporary world.

Prof. Dr. Christine Magerski

Zagreb
Croatia

Sveučilište u Zagrebu
Germanistische Abteilung

Christine Magerski holds the Chair of German Literature at the University of Zagreb. After her Master’s in Comparative Literature and History at Free University of Berlin, she worked on her dissertation at Monash University/Melbourne on the beginning of the sociology of literature in Germany in the late 20th century. Already in this context, she was focused on examining the interconnection between literature and society. At the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin as well as at University of Zagreb, she researched the social and cultural history of modernity with special consideration of the avant-garde and subcultural movements. Her research on literary sociology revolves around questions of socio-cultural self-description with special emphasis on the creative class and its (self)publicity. Christine Magerski is currently working on a monograph on images of society in literature and sociology of the 20th century. She lives with her family in Zagreb and in Berlin.

Monographs on the topic of literature, society and the public sphere:

Die Konstituierung des literarischen Feldes in Deutschland nach 1871. Berliner Moderne, Literaturkritik und die Anfänge der Literatursoziologie, Tübingen: Niemeyer 2004; Gelebte Ambivalenz.

Die Boheme als Prototyp der Moderne. Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2015.

Literatursoziologie. Grundlagen, Problemstellungen und Theorien. Zusammen mit Christa Karpenstein-Eßbach, Wiesbaden: Springer VS 2019; Umgekehrte Mimesis. Bausteine einer Geschichte der Künstlichkeit. Zusammen mit David Roberts, Weilerswist: Velbrück 2023.

Prof. Dr. Volker Mergenthaler

Marburg
Germany

Marburg University
Lehrstuhl für Neuere deutsche Literatur

https://www.uni-marburg.de/de/fb09/neuere-deutsche-literatur/institut/personen/mergenthaler

Volker Mergenthaler is Professor of Modern German Literature at Marburg University. His research interests historically focus on the 19th and 20^th centuries, and systematically on media and material philology. His recent publications consider literary markets, competing media and generic formats and connected publica, as well as their historically specific analysis and reflection.

Selected Publications

Formatwechsel. Karrierestationen einer Erzählung von Christian Munk / Günther Weisenborn. In: Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 79 (2024), S. 181-227.

Journalähnliche Bücher – buchförmige Journale. Hg. v. Andreas Beck u. Volker Mergenthaler (2022)

Optische Auftritte. Marktszenen in der medialen Konkurrenz von Journal-, Almanachs- und Bücherliteratur (zus. mit Stephanie Gleißner, Mirela Husić u. Nicola Kaminski) (2019)

Garderobenwechsel. »Das Fräulein von Scuderi« in Taschenbuch, Lieferungswerk und Journal (1819-1871) (2018).

Prof. Dr. Stephan Moebius

Graz
Austria

Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
Institut für Soziologie

My research interests lie particularly in the field of sociological theory of praxeology and, in relation to literature, in the study of texts as aesthetic practices. Here, texts are conceived as elements of discourse-practice formations, more precisely: as complexes of discourses and practices, as further defined by Susanne Knaller in our project on the analysis of “liminal texts” of the long turn of the century, see S. Knaller/S. Moebius/M. Scholger (2022): Twilight Zones. Liminal Texts of the Long Turn of the Century (1880 to 1940). Austria, France, Germany (open access: https://unipub.uni- graz.at/obvugrveroeff/download/pdf/7009574?  originalFilename=true).

In addition to the interest in texts as discourse-practice formations, in particular the liminal texts of the long turn of the century that oscillate between science and art, my sociological focus is also on the power relations in which texts are embedded, in particular the forms of symbolic power according to Bourdieu.

Prof. Dr. Barry Murnane

Oxford
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

University of Oxford
Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages

Barry Murnane ist Associate Professor of German an der Universität Oxford. Er forscht in komparatistischer Hinsicht zu Themen von der Frühaufklärung bis zur Gegenwartskultur, mit besonderen Schwerpunkten in der Literatur und Kultur der Sattelzeit um 1800, der Moderne (vor allem Franz Kafka), Gothic und Horror, und Gegenwartsdrama. Er beschäftigt sich immer wieder mit Forschungsfragen des Graduiertenkollegs, mit Arbeiten zu Genealogien der Literaturkritik (Literaturkritik nach 1700 hg. v. B. Murnane u.a. [2019]), zum Verhältnis von Populärkultur und Literatur (Zwischen Popularisierung und Ästhetisierung hg. von B Murnane & Rainer Godel [2014]), Popliteratur (“Gaps, Great Divides and Other Stories. Transferbedingte Signaturen des Populären in Theorie und Literatur um 1968”, in: Die amerikanischen Götter. Transatlantische Prozesse in der deutschsprachigen Popkultur seit 1949 [2015], 65-88), oder zu Repräsentationen von Neoliberalismus und Globalisierung in der Gegenwartskultur (“‘Toleranz – du nervst mich so’: Reinventing Lessing’s Nathan der Weise for the Contemporary German Stage”, in: The German Quarterly 93.4 [Fall 2020], 447-465).

Prof. Dr. Gerson Neumann

Porto Alegre
Brazil

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Instituto de Letras / Departamento de Línguas

Prof. Dr. Gerson Roberto Neumann is associate professor at UFRGS – Porto Alegre – since 2011, where he is dedicated to the study of German literature and language, as well as translation. His background is in Portuguese/German Letters at UNISINOS, in São Leopoldo (1990-1994). From 1995 to 2001 he was a German teacher in Rio de Janeiro; he earned a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature at UFRJ (2000) and a PhD in Literature Sciences at FU-Berlin, with a DAAD scholarship (2004). His thesis, published in Germany, is entitled “Brasilien ist nicht weit von hier! Die Thematik der deutschen Auswanderung nach Brasilien in der deutschen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts (1800-1871)”.

From 2014-2015, he conducted post-doc research at the University of Potsdam with a Capes and Alexander-von- Humboldt scholarship. He recently published the following translations from German into Portuguese: Am Beispiel meines Bruders (Author Uwe Timm) and Kant’s Foundation of the metaphysics of customs (Author Allen Wood; Dieter Schonecker), both in 2014 and Die Colonie. Brasilianische Lebensbilder (Author Friedrich Gerstäcker) in 2016. He is currently coordinating a project on the work of the writer Yoko Tawada and two translations of the author will be published later this year in Brazil. He is a researcher-founder of the Center for European and German Studies – CDEA and Member of the Historical Institute of São Leopoldo – IHSL.

Prof. Dr. Alla Paslawska

Lwiw
Ukraine

Nationale Iwan-Franko-Universität Lwiw
Interkulturelle Kommunikation und Translationswissenschaft

Alla Paslawska teaches at the National Ivan Franko University in Lviv. She is a Germanist, translator and editor of German-Ukrainian anthologies. Her research focuses on Ukrainian women’s literature and its translation into German, multilingual literature of Galicia, representation of the city of Lviv in the works of its authors, the German-language legacy of the Ukrainian national poet Ivan Franko and the role of his translations from and through German on the formation of Ukrainian national literature, the Ukrainian exile literature. It deals with the modeling of (inter-, multi and trans-) cultural relations on the historical example of Germans in Ukraine.

Prof. Dr. Maurizio Pirro

Milano
Italy

Università degli Studi di Milano
Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature, Culture e Mediazioni

Research interests: Culture of the Enlightenment, Classical Modernism, Contemporary Literature. My work is characterized by a cultural-historical approach. As a literary scholar, I basically strive to focus on the strategies through which social discourses are reflected, reformulated, and medially processed in fictional texts. Of particular importance for my understanding of literature is the question of how genre-specific dispositives influence and help shape processes of production and reception (e.g., in the idyll tradition between the early modern period and the Enlightenment). Theory-forming moments in literary discourse represent another research concern, which I have pursued in works on essayistic writing in the 20th century, among others.

Prof. Dr. Regina Schober

Düsseldorf
Germany

Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
Lehrstuhl für American Studies

+49 211 8114925
https://www.anglistik2.hhu.de/faculty/staff/prof-dr-regina-schober

Regina Schober is Professor of American Studies at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf. She teaches American literature and culture from the early colonial period to the 21st century, with a focus on literary negotiations of digital culture, intermediality, gender, and theories of the global information age. She is author of Spider Web, Labyrinth, Tightrope Walk: Networks in American Literature and Culture (DeGruyter, 2023), of Unexpected Chords: MusicoPoetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell’s Poetry and Poetics (Winter, 2011), and co-editor of The Failed Individual: Amid Exclusion, Resistance, and the Pleasure of Non-Conformity (with Katharina Motyl, 2011) as well as of Data Fiction: Naturalism, Numbers, Narrative, special issue of Studies in American Naturalism (with James Dorson, 2011). She was visiting scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2017) and at Harvard University as well as at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville (2008). Her research interests include transformations of subjectivity in the information age, network concepts, the quantified self, theories of reading, and discourses of failure. She is part of the DFG research network The Failure of Knowledge/Knowledges of Failure, of the DFG research project Probing the Limits of the Quantified Self, of the DFG research network Model Aesthetics: Between Literary and Economic Knowledge, as well as of the BMBF project AI4All.

Prof. Dr. Susan Smulyan

Providence
USA

Brown University
American Studies

Susan Smulyan is Professor, Department of American Studies, at Brown University and recently resigned from being the Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. She is the editor of a new collection, Doing  Public Humanities, and author of Selling Radio: The Commercialization of American Broadcasting and Popular Ideologies: Mass Culture at Mid-Century, and co-editor (with Kathy Franz, NMAH, Smithsonian) of Major Problems in American Popular Culture. She regularly teaches courses in the history of advertising, public humanities, including the Methods in Public Humanities class, and in American cultural history. As Director of the Center for Public Humanities, she ran an MA Program in Public  Humanities and collaborated with a range of community partners on projects including Rhode Tour, a set of stories about Rhode Island. She is a past board chair of New Urban Arts, a nationally- recognized community arts studio for high school students and emerging artists in Providence, Rhode Island.

Prof. Dr. Werner Sollors

Cambridge
USA

Harvard University
English Literature and African and African American Studies

Werner Sollors received the Dr. phil. degree from the Freie Universität Berlin and taught there, as well as at Columbia University, at the Universitá degli Studi di Venezia, at New York University Abu Dhabi, and for more than three decades at Harvard University, where he is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English, Emeritus. He is Coeditor, together with Greil Marcus, of A New Literary History of America, which is also available in Russian translation. He has authored such books as Beyond Ethnicity, Neither Black nor White yet Both, Ethnic Modernism, The Temptation of Despair, Schrift in bildender Kunst, and Un bambino a Bergen-Belsen. Cosmopolitan Particularism, a collection of his essays, edited by Daniel G. Williams is soon to be published.

Current works:

“Goethe in Black America” (essay)

“Richard Wright’s Native Son and the African American Novel” (essay) Four 17th-century residents of Venice (short book)

Venezianische Bagatellen (essays)

With Alide Cagidemetrio, Face to Face with Antiquity (book about visitors to ancient sites)

Prof. Dr. Dominique Viart

Paris
France

Université Paris-Nanterre
Littérature française contemporaine

Dominique Viart is a member of the Institut Universitaire de France and professor at Paris Nanterre University. He directs the Revue des Sciences Humaines and, with J.-M. Moura, the Observatoire des écritures contemporaines française et francophones. He has introduced research on contemporary literature to French universities and published numerous books and articles on contemporary writers. He works particularly on the relationship between literature and the social sciences, showing how literature intervenes in social issues, invites us to revisit the history of 20th century and to think about current mutations.

Since 2006, with the Maison des Ecrivains et de la Littérature in Paris, he has organized the annual “Literature: Contemporary Issues” meetings, which bring together intellectuals, researchers and writers to discuss the major issues of our time. His publications include Littérature et sociologie (with D. Rabaté); Fins de la littérature (with L. Demanze); Écrire le présent and Le Roman français contemporain face à l’Histoire (with G. Rubino); Literature and alternative Knowledges with A. Russo), Les récits du Posthumain (with M. M. Maftei),

Prof. Dr. Norbert Christian Wolf

Vienna
Austria

University of Vienna
Neuere deutsche Literatur
Institut für Germanistik

Norbert Christian Wolf was born in Innsbruck in 1970, spent his childhood there and his youth in Würzburg before studying German, history, and general and comparative literature in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. He has been Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Vienna since 2020; before that, he was Junior Professor at the FU Berlin from 2005-2009 and Professor at the University of Salzburg from 2009-2020. From 2014 to 2020, he was elected several times as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF); first as a deputy, then after two years as the main advisor for literature and linguistics. His research interests in the German- language and not least Austrian literature are diverse and range from the 18th to the 21st century (esp. Enlightenment, Classicism and Romanticism, Classical Modernism, contemporary literature). They relate in particular to questions of literary aesthetics, the sociology of literature, cultural history, and intermediality.