Research Projects

One of Apl. Prof. Dr. Philipp Wolf 's current research projects.

One of Apl. Prof. Dr. Philipp Wolf 's current research projects.

About the Project

Our project is entitled “Reading Post Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital: Narrative, Technology and Cognition in the Twenty-First Century”. It is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the German Research Foundation (DFG) (Funding Ref: AH/X001601/1) and will run from February 2023 to June 2026.

The project focuses on what we define as Post Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital (PPFDs) : contemporary print fictions that imitate, incorporate, and/or utilize digital media, and also display thematic concerns for the digitally mediated worlds in which they are set.

The project aims to:

• Propose a new literary genre : Post Postmodernist Fictions of the Digital (PPFDs) include contemporary print fictions (from c. 2000 onwards) that self-reflexively engage with, represent, and/or exploit digital media semiotically, structurally, ontologically, and/or thematically.
• Investigate the narratological distinctiveness, and reception of PPFDs written in English.
• Provide new methodologies for empirically investigating the effects of PPFDs on readers.
• Offer new empirical insights into the ways that readers cognitively process PPFDs.
• Produce a body of new research on PPFDs that will be disseminated via: an open access catalogue of PPFDs , a website, a social media account , conference papers , journal articles , and an international workshop.
• Contribute to and engage the public in debates about what comes after postmodernism via public events , a project website, and a social media account .

About the Team

The project team is based in Sheffield, UK and Giessen, Germany.

• Jan Alber is Professor of New English and American Literature and Head of the English Department at JLU Giessen University (Germany) and Past President of the ISSN. He is the author of Narrating the Prison (Cambria Press, 2007) and Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Alber received fellowships and research grants from the British Academy, the Exploratory Research Space at RWTH Aachen University, the German Research Foundation, the Humboldt Foundation, and the Ministry for Culture and Science of Northrhine-Westphalia. From 2014 to 2016, he was a Marie-Curie Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (Denmark). Alber is currently working on a UKRI project on the processing of post-postmodernist fictions of the digital with Alice Bell.
• Alice Bell is Professor of English Language and Literature at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. Her research specialisms are stylistics, narratology, empirical literary methods, and digital fiction. Her publications include The Possible Worlds of Hypertext Fiction (Palgrave 2010), Digital Fiction and the Unnatural (OSUP 2021), and Reading Digital Fiction: Narrative, Cognition, Mediality (with Astrid Ensslin, Routledge 2024).
• Nadia Georgiou works as an AHRC-funded postdoctoral researcher at Sheffield Hallam University and as postgraduate research supervisor at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. Her research interests include reader responses to (translated/multilingual) literary texts, the production and circulation of literature and the sociology of literature. Her publications have appeared in Cultus , the AALITRA Review and JoSTrans . She is an active freelance translator.
• Denise Wong is postdoctoral researcher at Justus Liebig University Giessen (Germany). She is Reviews Co-Editor of C21: Journal of 21st-century Writings and her work has been published in Textual Practice , the Journal of Asian American Studies , DIEGESIS and The Problems of Literary Genres . She has contributed chapters to the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to the Millennial Novel , Narrative Intersubjectivity and Storyworld Possible Selves , and The Routledge Companion to Literature and Cognitive Studies . Her first monograph, Shame in Contemporary You-Narration: Time, Gender, and Race , will be published in October 2025.

For further information, please visit the PPMD project's website