KNL SoSe25

Summer Semester 2025

Prof. Dr. Ger Duijzings(University of Regensburg) and Miloš Đurović (University of Regensburg)

KNL: Spaces of Peripheralization: Extractivism, Pollution and Environmental Future in Southeastern Europe

22.05.2025, 18:00-20:00 (CEST), GGK/GCSC (KFR) & Online (BBB)

The event Spaces of Peripheralization tackles the pressing ecological issues in the region of Southeastern Europe that despite often remaining “under radar” of the international public mobilized various local efforts to counter both environmental degradation and the re-production of the region’s image as a European (semi)periphery.

While the keynote by Prof. Dr. Ger Duijzings (Regensburg) will employ a comparative approach and showcase some examples of ecological/waste colonialism throughout the region, the photography exhibition by Miloš Đurović (Regensburg) will zoom into the context of the north Montenegrin mining border town of Pljevlja, illuminating the exctractivist practices and the issue of air pollution. These aspects marked both the socialist past and the capitalist present of the town, producing often visible marks on Pljevlja’s environmental “palm print” - marks that stand in contrast to Montenegro’s status as the first legally ecological country (Turnock 2001).[1] The event thus encourages approaching Southeastern Europe through ecological justice and artistic lenses, rarely considered in academia to date. Such an approach contributes to positioning concerns of local populations at the heart of the discussion, directly addressing the call from heritage scholars to shift focus in an effort to decolonize knowledge production about the region (Horvat and Ranković 2022)[2].

The event is preceded by a doctoral workshop, targeting the GCSC and JLU community of young scholars, with a focus on visual methods (in particular photography) in critical sustainability studies. The workshop is given by Miloš Đurović, and takes place 14h-16h in the GCSC premises in Otto-Behaghel-Str. 12, in the seminar room 126, on the first floor.

RA7 Global Studies and Politics of Space in Cooperation with RA9 Ecology and the Study of Culture and WG Europe's East.

Prof. Dr. Timothy C. Baker (University of Aberdeen, UK)

KNL: Rereading Childhood: Autobiography, Criticism, and Memory

04.06.2025, 18:00-20:00 (CEST), GGK/GCSC (KFR) & Online (BBB)

All literary criticism is to some extent autobiographical: the way we select and analyse texts says as much about us at the works themselves. Authorship can be seen as an act of rereading as much as writing, and tracks our own changing relationships with texts over time. Likewise, many current writers are explicitly choosing to blur the lines between literary criticism and memoir to show how the categories of reader and writer always overlap. In this session Timothy C. Baker will be reading from and discussing their recent hybrid memoir Reading My Mother Back: A Memoir in Childhood Animal Stories, in which they revisit children’s classics to tell a story of grief, trauma, and family secrets. Baker’s memoir tells the story of his mother’s life, and death, through the animal stories they shared, both familiar and less-well-known. The memoir touches on memory, loneliness, disability, and religion, and shows how literature can provide a way to understand our experiences and connect with what we have lost. Reading My Mother Back offers a bold and personal view of why the stories we read, share, and write about matter.

Prof. Dr. Mari Jarris (Cornell University, UK)

KNL: What is Queer Marxism?

24.06.2025, 18:00-20:00 (CEST), GGK/GCSC (KFR) & Online (BBB)

Jarris’s current book manuscript, Utopia as Revolution: Marxism’s Queer Pasts and Futures, posits that utopia has been a site for theorizing queerness and Marxism together since the nineteenth century. It offers a counternarrative to the dominance of scientific socialism by tracing the transnational queer Marxism that emerges from a rereading of canonical German, Russian, and French socialist texts as utopian. At the same time, Utopia as Revolution seeks to expand the Marxist archive to include overlooked visions of polyamory, androgyny, the socialization of motherly care, and queer kinship. They have also begun a second book project that examines the literary and visual representation of queerness in the Weimar Republic and early Soviet Union against the backdrop of German and Russian colonialism, arguing that ethnoracial hierarchies were co-constitutive of “modern” queer identities.

Research Focus

• 19th- and 20th-Century German- and Russian-Language Literature
• Socialisms and Marxisms
• Feminist and Queer Theory
• Utopianism
• Critical Theory

Organised as part of the exchange between GCSC & Cornell University.

Prof. Dr. Rolf Goebel (University of Alabama, Huntsville, USA)

KNL: Sound Studies Today: Auditory Experience, Media Technologies, and Literary Textuality

08.07.2025, 18:00-20:00 (CEST), GGK/GCSC (KFR) & Online (BBB)

As an interdisciplinary and intercultural field of inquiry, current sound studies explores, among many other directions, the interplay among the human subject’s auditory experiences, media-technological sound (re-)production, and music, visual arts, or literature in diverse historical/cultural contexts. My talk will address theoretical and methodological concerns of current North-American and German sound studies. Critical attention will be given to recent forays into sonic materialism’s focus on bodily-affective resonance, idiosyncratically subjective sound experiences, and factors of race, gender, and social class. Selective examples will be taken from Friedrich Hölderlin (for the classical-romantic period), Virginia Woolf (for high modernism), Yukio Mishima (for Japanese late modernism) and Don DeLillo (American postmodernism). These excerpts reveal the power of the literary imagination to provide self-reflexive interrogations into the (non-)representability of sound, addressing philosophical assumptions, cognitive interests, and ideological biases that sometimes remain partly hidden under pragmatic research projects into sonic realities. 

Prof. Dr. Tore Strøvold (University Of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway)

KNL:Confronting Climate Change in Popular Music: Nostalgia, Apocalypse, Utopia

15.07.2025, 18:00-20:00 (CEST), Online only (BBB)