What is the status of the literary representation of music in the age of media-technological reproducibility? In our digital age, computers and earphones allow the listener to experience the bodily affective immersion in a seemingly limitless cyberspace of music files, whose aura they can project back onto their surroundings, transforming reality into resonant projection screens of their own fantasies, desires, and aesthetic sentiments. The possibilities and limitations of these digitally mediated atmospheres open up a new understanding of the literary representation of musical experiences by high-modernist writers.

A  comparison between Thomas Mann's description of the production of musical entrancement by the fashionable gramophone in Der Zauberberg and Georg Trakl's poetic exploration of the Orpheus myth in "Passion" reveals a hidden conflict in early 20th century culture between state-of-the-art media-technological reproducibility and a seemingly anachronistic exploration of "live" or "real-time" musical atmospheres whose immersive affect and hermeneutic meanings exceed  the acoustic data storage capacities of technological media while allowing themselves to be represented authentically by the literary imagination. Theoretical work on technological media (W. Benjamin and F. Kittler), the phenomenology of atmospheres (H. Schmitz, G. Böhme, T.  Griffero) and sonic resonances (H. Rosa) will be brought together to explore this largely uncharted territory encompassing sound studies, philosophy, and literary criticism.

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

Rolf Goebel is an emeritus professor at the Department of World Languages and Cultures

 Click here for further information on research interests and publications.

// Respondant: Prof. Dr. Britta Herrmann (University of Münster)

Britta Herrmann is a professor for Modern German Literature and spokesperson for the Graduate School Practices of Literature

Click here for further information on research interests and publications.

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Documentary is not simply a neutral medium to record reality. Rather, it participates in the social imaginations of reality as a contested terrain. This paper discusses how documentaries activate the imaginations of radioactive waste. While many documentaries and scholarly discourses have tended to localize and nationalize the issues of radiation since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident, radiation is fundamentally a global matter in that it is produced and distributed through the transnational network from the front end (uranium mining) to the back end (nuclear waste disposal), is supported by the economic and political worldwide network, and may damage the entire earth. Moreover, supposed that the only way to dispose radioactive waste is to bury it in the deeply excavated repository (1,710 feet underground in the case of Onkalo, Finland), radioactive waste literally and symbolically epitomizes the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which humans have intervened in the planet to a significant degree. But, at the same time, this very abstract and gigantic nature makes it difficult for us to imagine radioactive waste. It is against this background that documentaries have played vital roles in bringing concrete imaginations about the social and ecological reality. Taking Waste: The Nuclear Nightmare (Éric Guéret, 2009) and Charka (Shimada Kei, 2017), among others, for case studies, I will explore how these documentaries alike problematize radioactive waste but evoke different imaginations of it. It is particularly interesting to see how a film shows radioactive waste as the otherwise invisible global material and institutional reality in which radioactive waste are unevenly distributed so that privileged people can enjoy their electric lives by at once exploiting and marginalizing other people near these sites.

// Prof. Dr. Hideaki Fujiki (Nagoya University)

Hideaki Fujiki is a professor for the Japan-In-Asia Cultural Studies program

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This Keynote Lecture was organized by the Editorial Team of On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture, in cooperation with the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture and the University Library Giessen.

Academic publishing, a core part of any research activity, has become, in recent years, a highly politicised act. Boycotts have arisen against the major publishers – and particularly Elsevier – over claimed monopolistic practices. At the same time, the rise of open-access (OA) publishing has presented a series of social and economic challenges that are still unresolved. While it appears to yield great promise of universal access, for many researchers, the increasing number of mandates for open-access from centre-right governments appears to betray the argument that this form of dissemination could be of greater ethical import. Coupled with high article processing charges, OA appears emptied, in many ways, of any of its political force.

In this talk, Martin Paul Eve will talk about the ongoing debates around open-access publishing; the core challenges for the humanities disciplines in achieving better levels of access; and the implications of open, digital forms for the future of the scholarly monograph.

// Prof. Martin Eve (Birkbeck, University of London, UK)

Martin Paul Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London.

Click here for further information on research interests and publications.

Suggested preparatory reading:

To counter the narrative that the global pandemic merely accelerated an inevitable digital transition, we need a foundational critique of the mutual entanglements among higher education and media technology over the longue durée. This talk distills switches, binaries, and polarizations in ongoing debates about the “idea of a university,” putting a materialist theory of the university as a media system in dialogue with recent work in critical university studies. Even if the key social aspects of the digital order consist in automation, interactivity, and interconnectivity, it remains unclear whether a truly “free” and “open” university is possible in the digital age.

In this talk, Erik Born will examine the shifting historical alliances among the university, the book market, and the nation-state. Drawing on media history and theory as well as the emergent field of critical university studies, the talk aims to provide a space for discussing digitization and academic labor.

// Prof. Erik Born (Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies, Cornell University)

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Recommended reading:

• Kittler, Friedrich. “Universitäten im Informationszeitalter.” In Medien – Welten – Wirklichkeiten, edited by Gianni Vattimo and Wolfgang Welsch, 139–145. Munich: Fink, 1998.
• Kittler, Friedrich. “Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 244–255.

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We often hear that in the age of the digitalization, people no longer read books. What this juxtaposition of “online culture” and “book culture” ignores, however, is the fact that there is a growing group of readers who combine “old” and “new” media practices and use social media to structure and communicate their lives as book lovers. This talk presents the example of BookTube – a group of YouTube channels – in order to discuss how literary reading is `done` on social media. Which affordances of BookTube do the practitioners utilize for their reading? Does the printed book as an object still play a role in this context? To what extent do social media transform literary reading into a more social activity? And how does this relate to long-standing reading practices?

Join the lecture to find out more about the world of online book culture – and on the way reflect about your own reading practices in the age of digitalization.

// Prof. Dorothee Birke (Associate Professor for English Literature, Norwegian University of Science and Technology)

Recommended reading:

• Naya Reads and Smiles: «How I Annotate My Books» https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UEtd3-fRws

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In this lecture, I introduce the concept of literary gaming as a way of understanding the hybrid media ecologies between lucidity (playfulness), narrativity and poetic expression in contemporary digital culture. Taking an aesthetic approach, I demonstrate how literary expression in digital-born media exceeds and subverts traditional notions of literature. Looking at examples of digital poetry and fiction, literary-narrative games and virtual reality installations, I showcase how concepts of worlding, multimodality, and procedurality open up entirely new hermeneutic, phenomenological and critical paradigms that require new, transdisciplinary research agendas for analyzing, understanding and co-creating  these complex works, and for exploring how they can help us address real-world questions and challenges.

// Prof. Dr. Maura Spiegel (Columbia University, USA)

Maura Spiegel is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature; Founder and Co-Director, CUIMC Division of Narrative Medicine

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// Respondant: Dr. Burcu Alkan (University of Manchester, UK)

Burcu Alkan is an honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester. Her research topography covers a broad area that includes English, American, Turkish and World Literatures from a comparative perspective.

Click here for further information on research interests and publications.

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My case study for this talk, Ambrose Bierce’s “One of the Missing,” is literary fiction; my theoretical argument, however, is broader: it concerns narrative cognition as an elementary sensemaking resource, and how cultural forms of narrative negotiate with it in semiotic media. I want to suggest that contingency in fiction is a marker of the gap between the reductive but efficient sense-making of narrative and the unmanageable systemic complexity of experience. Narrative contingency, in other words, is symptomatic of the way our cognitive dependence upon a basic narrative logic strongly constrains how we understand complexity; but sophisticated cultural forms of narrative, including literary fiction, work to loosen these constraints – principally by exploiting two intrinsic features of narrative, which are its reflexiveness, and the irreducible narrative function of the implicit. Literary fiction chafes at the limits of narrative sense-making by subjecting narrative logic to the complex processes of its own articulation within a semiotic system, displacing interpretative interest from its sequential logic onto the circulation of meaning within the complex networks of signification that narrative itself cannot help generating. One of the effects of this reflexive movement, I suggest, is to continually confront narrative sense-making with the unassimilable in contingency, and so return it to the frontier of its encounter with phenomena, the threshold of emergent meaning where narrative cognition supervenes upon embodied experience.

// Prof. Richard Walsh (University of York)

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Suggestions for preparatory reading:

Ambrose Bierce, “One of the Missing,” *In the Midst of Life*. New York: Neale Publishing Co., 1909 [1891]. Pdf attached and accessible online here: http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415537070/data/section2/bierce-one_of_missing.pdf

Richard Walsh, “Narrative Theory for Complexity Scientists,” in R Walsh and S Stepney eds., *Narrating Complexity*, Springer, 2018, 11-25. 

Susan Stepney, "Complex Systems for Narrative Theorists," in R Walsh and S Stepney eds., *Narrating Complexity*, Springer, 2018, 27-36. 

Further Reading:
Richard Walsh, “Sense and Wonder: Complexity and the Limits of Narrative Understanding,” in R Walsh and S Stepney eds., *Narrating Complexity*, Springer, 2018, 49-60. 

Richard Walsh, "Complexity, Scale, Story: Narrative Models in Will Self and Enid Blyton," *Insights* 10 (6) 2017.

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This talk will posit the “episode” as the primary narrative unit that shapes multi-media print narratives in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the rise of the periodical press, authors were faced with rapidly changing printing technologies and an expanding literary marketplace. Whereas earlier picaresque novels comprised series of episodes that were only loosely connected, new media conditions demanded new narrative strategies. This project looks at the ways that nineteenth-century authors began using the episode to generate complex forms of transmedia continuity that generate continual (and futural) narrative pleasure. By looking beyond its own narrative limits and asking “what comes next,” the episode conveys a storytelling gap that prompts continuation in future episodes, thus generating a potentially infinite series that, in many cases, exceeds the boundaries of text and medium. I trace the development of multi-media episodes from the eighteenth-century work of Karl Philipp Moritz to the nineteenth-century bestseller Karl May; I end by arguing that the episode continues to structure popular transmedia storytelling well into the twenty-first century, in print, online, and on screen. This paper uncovers a continuity between print media in the long nineteenth century and digital media in the twentieth and twenty-first, giving us a deeper historical view of our own storytelling practices and aligning these practices with larger shifts in how we conceive of life, pleasure, value, and politics.

Main Research Interests

• Narrative Form in the 19^th Century German Novels
• Critical Theory
• Media Studies

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In this talk I outline the development of the new interdisciplinary field of the GeoHumanities linking relatively recent developments in the digital humanities and GIS to ancient concerns for space, place and ways in which we inhabit the world, the flowering of spatial theory since the 1970s in geography, and the spatial turn across the humanities and social sciences of the last few decades. In addition, I link the fusion of all of these histories with the embrace of ‘geo’ themes in the creative arts ranging from geo-poetry to conceptual art. While the emergence of GeoHumanities is not without problems and dangers I argue that the new field presents many theoretical, creative and strategic opportunities for scholars across the humanities and social sciences.

Main Research Interests

• Geographies of Mobility
• Geographies of Place

Publications (selected)

• Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell 2013.
• Citizenship in worlds of mobility. In: Ola Soderstrom, Didier Ruedin, Shalini Randeria, Gianni D’Amato and Francesco Panese (eds.): Critical Mobilities. London: Routledge 2013.

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My argument starts with two different readings of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda by two scholars who have a radically different idea on the force and goal of empathic reading: Martha Nussbaum and Sara Ahmed. The former bases her argument on a human subject that is coherent, stable and through an ethical mode of reading literature is able to place herself in the position of someone else. The latter takes willful, unstable, swerving subjects as her point of departure, who find themselves oppressed in such a way that the very idea of their having a will of their own is made impossible. Nussbaum is looking for an underpinning of justice on some sort of common human ground, while Ahmed accepts the irreconcilability of positions, or the principal impossibility of a common ground. Focusing on the ways in which both authors employ radically different strategies of empathy, I ask what the goals of empathic reading could be in a juridico-political context. Here, I trace a chiastic relation between politics and law that is of relevance at times in which politics is turning more and more into a power game propelled by emotions and the force of law is threatened by parties demanding that their emotions be served.

Main Research Interests

• Rhetoric (Classical and Modern)
• Literature and Politics
• Politico-Cultural Organization of Europe

Publications (selected)

• “Poet/healer/judge: Literature as cicatrix – the case of Maria Dermoût’”. In: Grave, Jaap; Honings, Rick; Noak, Bettina (eds.): Illness and Literature in the Low Contries: From the Middle Ages until the 21st Century. Göttingen: V&R Unipres 2016, 181-198.

• “The comedic sublime in a dynamic of worlds: the work of Frans Hals in a Dutch Baroque”. In: Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 8(2): 1-24, 2016.

• With Zeeuw T.L. de: “Towards a New Judicial Scene for Humans and Animals: Two Modes of Hypocrisy”. In: Law and Literature 27(1): 23-47, 2015.

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Over a long history, Europe and culture are interwoven as terms. And within the contemporary context of European Unionization, the complex connection of the two has taken on new forms. The EU project is a singular project because it strives for economic, political, and cultural union. The globe is crisscrossed by free market-oriented projects to foster economic union, as well as supranational organizations that strive to accomplish various forms of political agreement. Only in the space of Europe does the project include a cultural component and of the three aspirational dynamics that drive European unification, culture remains both the least studied and yet the most compelling of the three. Nevertheless, Europe is not the EU, nor is culture equivalent to the current EU culture industry policy. This presentation will propose a framework for critical studies of European culture through attention to each of the terms: critical, Europe, and culture. Such a framework helps us better answer a number of questions. How do we approach culture in this political and economic context? How do we assess the European commercialization of cultural heritage? How does the striving for transnational cultural union differ from that cultural union produced in the nation state? In what way does the contemporary understanding of Europe call forth new histories? Among others.

Main Research Interests

• (Un)Popular Culture
• Visual Alterity

Publications (selected)

• The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014.

• German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008.

• After the Avant-garde: New Directions in Experimental Film. Rochester: Camden House Press, 2008.

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Without doubt, Sound Studies has become a burgeoning field for rich, eminently interdisciplinary initiatives in the humanities. One of the major contributions of the field has been to mark out the neglect in theories of medial modernity that focus entirely on various kinds of visual culture and their historicity. What I call "cultural acoustics," while under the broad rubric of sound studies, specifically draws attention to the potent role that acoustic practices could play in distinguishing, comparing, establishing, and dispersing cultures, whether scientific, musical, political, national, trans-national, or religiously bound. Examples include the work of Ana Maria Ochoa on listening and knowledge in nineteenth-century Colombia, Jonathan Sterne’s work on the centrality of sound, hearing, and listening to the “cultural life of modernity,” or Charles Hirschkind’s on the “ethical listening” of sermons and its role in the social and political transformations in Egypt. In my talk, I will use my own research on eighteenth-century Europe to discuss the key role played by listening practices and conceptions of sound in formative ideas of culture, nation, and anthropology and what these findings offer to the contemporary study of culture.

Main Research Interests

• 17^th to 19^th Century German Literature and Philology
• Theories and Practices of Reading
• Digital Humanities

Publications (selected)

• “Sounding Culture from the Pulpit.” In: Couturier-Heinrich, Clémence (ed.): Revue Germanique Internationale. (Forthcoming 2018, in French)

• “Cultural Hierarchies and Vital Tones: The Making of Herder’s ‘Mother Tongue.’” In: Gramling, David and Wiggin, Bethany (eds.): German Studies Review 41.3, 2017. (Forthcoming)

• “A Book of Living Paintings: Tableaux Vivants in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809).” In: Daub, Adrian and Krimmer, Elisabeth: Goethe Yearbook 23, 2016, 245-270.

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Drawing on the approach of disability studies this lecture claims the relevance of culture as an analytical category for the study of disability. It starts with differentiating several fields of research that focus on disability; then it explores the notion of culture. Next, it appreciates the social model of disability, sketches its history and resulting debates. It also provides an overview on earlier attempts of conceptualizing a cultural studies approach to disability. Further, it offers an analytical perspective that uses the concept of ‘dis/ability,’ analyses impairment, disability and normality as ‘empty signifiers,’ views dis/ability as naturalized and embodied difference, and understands this category as effected by symbolic orders, bodily practices and social institutions. Additionally, referring to the debate on independent living for persons with disabilities as an example, the lecture will highlight the heuristic value of the cultural model of dis/ability for both research and practice by describing guiding questions resulting from individual, social, and cultural models of disability. It concludes by discussing possible pitfalls of a cultural studies approach to dis/ability.

Main Research Interests

• Cultural and political sociologies of 'dis/ability'
• Body sociology
• Contemporary disability history
• Political participation of persons with disabilities
• Dispositif theory and discourse analysis

Publications (selected)

• With Anne Klein and Miquel Tamayo Korte: Das Wissen der Leute. Bioethik, Alltag und Macht im Internet. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2009.
• Selbstbestimmung als Konstruktion. Alltagstheorien behinderter Frauen und Männer. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften 2012.
• With Gabriele Lingelbach (Hrsg.): Kontinuitäten, Zäsuren, Brüche? Lebenslagen von Menschen mit Behinderungen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichte.Frankfurt/Main, New York: Campus 2016.
• With Hanjo Berressem and Moritz Ingwersen (Eds.): Culture – Theory – Disability. Encounters between Disability Studies and Cultural Studies. Bielefeld: transcript 2017.
• With Rune Halvorsen, Bjørn Hvinden, Julie Beadle Brown, Mario Biggeri and JanTøssebro (Eds.): Understanding the Lived Experiences of Persons with Disabilities in Nine Countries. Active Citizenship and Disability in Europe Volume 2. Abingdon, London, New York: Routledge 2018.
• Disability – Culture – Society: Strengths and Weaknesses of a Cultural Model of Dis/ability. In: ALTER: European Journal of Disability Research | Revue Européenne de Recherche sur le Handicap, 12(2) 2018, pp. 67-80.

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Main Research Interests

• Education for/about International Development
• Global Citizenship Education
• Ethics of Internationalization

Publications (selected)

• With Stein, S., Sutherland, A., Pashby, K., Susa, R., Amsler, S.: “Mobilising Different Conversations about Global Justice in Education: Toward Alternative Futures in Uncertain Times.” In: Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review, 26(Spring) 2018, 9-41.
• With Kerr, Jeannie: “Recognizing More-Than-Human Relations in Social Justice Research: Gesturing towards Decolonial Possibilities.” In: Issues in Teacher Education 27(2) 2018, 53-67.
• Witch Stein, S., Hunt, D., Susa, R.: “The Educational Challenge of Unraveling the Fantasies of Ontological Security.” In: Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 11(2) 2017, 69-79.

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Contemporary art describes itself very often as “conceptual.” However, what exactly does it mean? Usually, these artworks in question have little in common with the prime examples of Conceptual Art from the 1960th. It is of paramount importance for art theory today to have a clear understanding and a clear notion of the conceptual character of the arts. In my lecture, I would like to present a model of Conceptualism which allows to integrate into this model such different pieces like “One and Three Chairs” by Joseph Kosuth and the “Fettstuhl” by Joseph Beuys, or, in respect to music, 4’33’’ by John Cage and “Pendulum Music” by Steve Reich. Conceptual art arose in opposition toward the aesthetics of classical modernism. Conceptual artists tried to show that art can be separated from any aesthetic experience and reduced to one single idea. Nevertheless, the anesthetic character is not the decisive criteria for Conceptualism. My thesis is that Conceptual Music and Conceptual Art are based on the principle of an isomorphic mapping between idea and work. On the one hand, the idea of the artwork manifest itself entirely in the piece, and on the other hand, every perceivable aspect of the artwork is a representation of that idea.

Main Research Interests

• Music Philosophy
• Art Philosophy
• Systems Theory

Publications (selected)

• “Digitization and Concept: A Thought Experiment Concerning New Music.” In: Search. Journal for New Music and Culture, Issue no. 7 2010, 1-14.
• With Ullrich, Wolfgang: “Why the Socialist States Have Failed in Respect of Design.” In: Villa Sovietica. Soviet Objects: Import-Export. Musée d’ethnographie de Genève 2009, 175-183.
• “Avant-garde Today. A Theoretical Model of Aesthetic Modernity.” In: Critical Composition Today. Hofheim: Wolke 2006, 9-42.

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Taking the idea of the hospital library as a central case study, this lecture draws on the spaces between medicine and the humanities, particularly the different ways of reading and knowing that seem inherent in each discipline. The notion of reading to get well, or ‘bibliotherapy’ is broadly established in current usage in the social sciences and humanities, but the word’s first appearance, in an issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1916 was meant as a joke. Something of this vulnerability remains on both a micro and macro level, as arts-based interventions try to justify themselves in medical contexts, and in the precarious status of the humanities in a global funding context geared towards the sciences.

A study of the East London Children’s Hospital library catalogue, which survives from the nineteenth century, is thought-provoking in the light of these contemporary questions. While we can recover something of Victorian reading habits and mores from looking at the archival material, this lecture will reflect on the difficulty of reading this (or any) hospital library space ‘well’. Articulating and placing a use-vale on a space which is, both ‘under-theorized’ (Nethersole, 2011) and riven by affective forces may be an impossible and counterproductive task. The lecture will conclude with reflections on possibilities for public engagement for those in the humanities – particularly the difficulties of translating ideas of affect and anecdote in a world dominated by measurement and evidence.

Main Research Interests

• Medical Humanities
• Literature and Emotion
• Nineteenth Century Literature

Publications (selected)

• “The Trouble with Feeling Now: Thomas Woolner, Robert Browning, and the Touching Case of Constance and Arthur.” In: 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. 2016(23).

• “The Episodic Trollope and An Editor's Tales.” In: Victorian Studies, Vol. 58(1) 2015, 57-83.

• “The Condition of England Novel.” In: Discovering Literature, British Library Website, 2014.

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This lecture seeks to provide a new conceptual and analytical framework for understanding how problematic conceptions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ are constructed among communities and within groups and communities in post-colonial multi-ethnic societies. While using the specific case of Trinidad and Tobago, it draws on experiences from post-colonial societies in similar situations globally exploring dimensions of inter-ethnic tensions, competition, conflict and social relations and their gendered manifestations.  Drawing on ideas from political psychology it explores the efforts of postcolonial societies to build nation-states out of the violent and unequal legacy of racialized and ethnicized colonial political economy.

Main Research Interests

• Women’s labour
• Gender and history
• The intersectionality of race, class and gender

Publications (selected)

• Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses. St. Augustine: University of the West Indies Press, 2004.
• Caribbean Sociology: Introductory Readings. Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2001.
• Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: A History. In: Palgrave Macmillan Journals 1998

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In my lecture, I discuss the path-breaking importance of Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, an unpublished 900-page manuscript written by her in the 1970s. Black Metamorphosis is a remarkable manuscript, and deserves close study for a number of reasons. It is arguably the most important unpublished non-fiction work by an Anglophone Caribbean intellectual, and the major guide to the transition in Wynter’s thought between her work mainly on the Caribbean and Black America in the 1960s and 1970s, and her theory of the human from the early 1980s onwards. A close study of Black Metamorphosis also reveals that it is a crucial text for comprehending the emergence of African diaspora studies in the post-independence Anglophone Caribbean, and is in fact the most sustained, and compelling interpretations of the black experience in the Western hemisphere ever written by a Caribbean intellectual.

Main Research Interests

• Anti-colonial thought
• Caribbean cultural studies
• The coloniality of citizenship in the contemporary Anglophone Caribbean

Publications (selected)

• With Yanique Hume, Caribbean Popular Culture: Power, Politics and Performance. Jamaika: Ian Randle Publishers, 2016.
• With Yanique Hume, Caribbean Cultural Thought: From Plantation to Diaspora. Jamaika: Ian Randle Publishers, 2013.
• Caribbean Political Thought: The Colonial State to Caribbean Internationalisms. Jamaika: Ian Randle Publishers, 2013.

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Main Research Interests

• The arts of the Cold War era
• The question of why the American avant-garde came to be dominated and defined by queer artists during what was perhaps the single most homophobic decade (the Cold War era) in this nation’s history

Publications (selected)

• Performative Silence and the Politics of Passivity. In: Making a Scene, ed. Henry Rogers. London: Birmingham University Press, 1999. John Cage's Queer Silence or How to Avoid Making Matters Worse. In: GLQ, Duke University Press, 1999. Reprinted in Here Comes Everybody: The Music Poetry and Art of John Cage, ed. David Bernstein, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
• Lovers and Divers: Picturing a Partnership in Rauschenberg and Johns. In: Frauen/Kunst/Wissenschaft, 1998

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To speak of literature in the Age of Amazon is perforce to speak of it in relation to consumerism and the consumer economy, these things, dating by most accounts to middle of the 18th century and exploding at the end of the 19th, of which Amazon.com is in some obvious ways the 21st  century apogee. While some very fine scholarly work has been done on the so-called culture of consumption, surprisingly little has been made of the revolution in economic theory it carried in train, the so-called neoclassical or Austrian or marginal revolution. It is in this body of thought, I will argue, that we encounter a concept crucial for illuminating both the reflexive self-construction of narrative fiction as a certain kind of consumer good, offering certain kinds of satisfaction, and the absolute limit to that self-construction owing to the nature of time. This is the concept of opportunity cost, and by showing its relevance both to 19th century psychological realism and early-20th century modernism, I hope in this lecture to lay the groundwork for a deeper understanding of the literature of the present.

Main Research Interests

• American Literature
• Modern and Postmodern literature
• Literary Criticism/Theory

Publications (selected)

• The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.
• The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001.
• Social Geometries: Taking Place in Henry James. California: University of California Press, 1999.

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The discourse on sustainable development in the Anthropocene is, essentially, centered on the question of how the complex relations between society and nature can be conceptualized, analyzed, and shaped. In my lecture, I present a specific interpretation of social ecology as an attempt to address this question. The basic idea of Frankfurt social ecology is to put the modern distinction between nature and society at the start of a critical analysis. Theoretically, relationships between humans, society and nature are conceived as societal relations to nature. This concept focuses on patterns and modes of regulation, as well as on the entanglement of material-energetic and cultural-symbolic aspects of the relationship in different areas of action such land use, mobility, or water, energy and food supply. Using an approach that conceptualizes social-ecological systems as provisioning systems, I will show in which way theory and empirical research practice can be linked. Research that aims at contributing to sustainable development needs to integrate different kinds of scientific and non-scientific knowledge. It must combine scientific research with societal practice, in order to offer solutions for real-world problems while at the same time producing generalizable knowledge. Therefore, I will discuss transdisciplinarity as the research mode of choice for social ecology as a problem-oriented science.

Main Research Interests

• Concepts of societal relations to nature
• Population dynamics, biodiversity and provisioning systems
• Gender and environment

Publications (selected)

• Hummel, Diana, Thomas Jahn, Florian Keil, Immanuel Stieß & Stefan Liehr (2017): Social Ecology as Critical, Transdisciplinary Science – Conceptualizing, Analyzing and Shaping Societal Relations to Nature. Sustainability 9(7), 1050
• Diana Hummel & Immanuel Stieß (2017): Social Ecology. A transdisciplinary approach on Gender and Environment research. In: MacGregor, Sherilyn (Ed.): Routledge International Handbook on Gender and Environment. London/New York., 186-201;
• Mehring, Marion/Barbara Bernard/Diana Hummel/Stefan Liehr/Alexandra Lux (2017): Halting biodiversity loss: how social-ecological biodiversity research makes a difference. International Journal of Biodiversity Science, Ecosystem Services & Management 13 (1), 172-180

“Infrastructure,” as comedian John Oliver points out, “is not sexy.” Only when infrastructures malfunction, when a bridge collapses, when a nuclear reactor melts down, or when a denial-of-service attack shuts down half the Internet, do these crucial everyday services receive any public attention.

The emerging field of “infrastructure studies” seeks to remedy this blind spot. At the nexus of urban planning, public policy, media studies, and the history of technology, the study of infrastructure addresses problems of scale, draws attention to the materiality of technology, and shifts the locus of critique from the nodes in a network to the connections between them. While recent studies have tended to focus on contemporary concerns, the field itself arguably has deeper roots in the venerable sciences of Verkehrswissenschaften, which studied the movements of people, goods, and messages in tandem.

After providing a comparative overview of these academic fields, the focus of this lecture will be on representations of infrastructure in modern German literature, especially the lyric genre. In contrast to the current inconspicuousness of infrastructure in the public sphere, the celebration of infrastructure in German modernity took the form of songs in praise of actual inventions, comic blame of impossible ones, and, above all, affirmations of the newly ascendant class of engineers. At the same time, the celebration of infrastructure may have amounted to little more than “700 intellectuals pray[ing] to an oil tanker,” as Bertolt Brecht cynically put it.

Ultimately, the aim of this lecture, in historicizing both infrastructure studies and the fascination with infrastructure, is to address a larger question: To what extent is cultural studies itself a form of infrastructure, an often inconspicuous but always vital means of connecting, and, even more importantly, maintaining the connections between different concerns?

Main Research Interests

• The emergence of wireless technologies around 1900
• Relations between old media and new media
• The history of mysticism, interface design, and digital textbooks

Publications (selected)

• Co-editor of Neighbors and Neighborhoods: Living Together in the German-Speaking World. United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.
• Author of articles on early avant-garde films and medieval media theory.

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During the last decade, narrative theory has seen a burst of interest in what has been called the nexus of mind and narrative (Herman 2013), carried forth by ideas of the similarities between understanding real life and understanding fiction (Zunshine 2007; Palmer 2010). This interest has been accompanied, and at times directly challenged, by an equally energetic interest in how experimental and strange narratives found in literature, film and other media may obstruct, subvert, or deconstruct real-world protocols for sense making by presenting readers with “strange” (Caracciolo 2016), “unreadable” (Abbott 2014), or “unnatural” phenomena (Richardson 2015; Alber 2016; Iversen 2013). The starting point for this talk is the observation that storytelling constellations that defy, test or mock everyday processes of sense-making also exist outside of the realms of generic fiction. Elaborating on a rhetorical reading of the concept of defamiliarization, the aim of the talk is to show that not only do experimental, strange and unnatural narratives materialize across contemporary public discourses; they also come to serve communicative functions. This will be shown trough readings of cases from a range of traditionally nonfictive rhetorical genres such as the discourse of humanitarianism, NGO-branding, protest movements and present-day political rhetoric.

Main Research Interests

• Narrativity and storytelling
• Text theory and analysis
• Rhetorical analysis

Publications (selected)

• Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses. St. Augustine: University of

  With Mikka Lene Pers-Højholt: Interlocking Narratives: The Personal Story and the Masterplot in Political Rhetoric. In: Narrativity, Fictionality and Factuality and the Staging of Identity. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016.

• Narrative. In: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Dan Ringgaard: Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis. London: Bloomsbury, 2016

• With Henrik Skov Nielsen: The Politics of Fictionality in The Act of Killing and The Ambassador. In: European Journal of English Studies, 2016.

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Affect has become one of the key terms in contemporary critical thought and within post-deconstructive cultural studies. But, why are so many scholars in the humanities and social sciences fascinated by the idea of affect? Affect, as I will argue, does not only serve as a ‘new’ scientific concept, but even more as an ethical category and as a nano-political strategy conjuring the belief in the recreative value of affective connections as well as in affect’s capacity to exceed social subjection. In order to critically investigate the political potential of affect, one has to understand the theoretical claim for affect as a product of our current socio-historic condition. In my lecture I will demonstrate that the so-called affective turn represents an epistemological shift not only within critical-academic, artistic, and ethico-political discourses, but also in the overall way we envision social reality and humanity. Theorizing affect requires a quite specific social ontology. Taking this into account I want to disentangle the premises of affect theory to, first, analyze the underlying onto-political belief system that fuels affect theory in order to, secondly, demonstrate in how far this represents a new notion of the social, a vital political hope that is conditioned by the metaphysics of late capitalism.

Main Research Interests

• Sociology of Religion and Secularism 

• Economic Anthropology and Political Economy 

• Sociology of Emotions and Affect Studies

Publications (selected)

• With Bernd Giesen, Francis Le Maitre, Nils Meise: Überformungen. Wir ohne Nichts. Weilerswist: Velbrück, in Print. 

• With Johanna Fernandez and Danae Gallo Gonzalez: W(h)ither Identity. Positioning the Self and Transforming the Social. Trier: VWT, 2015. 

• Von der Verehrung. Eine kultursoziologische Untersuchung. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2014.

If Applied Linguistics is “an interdisciplinary field of research and practice dealing with practical problems of language and communication” (Li Wei 2014:2), the study of culture has long been seen an essential component of Applied Linguistics, if only because the problems created by language in the real world have very often to do with the social, historical and cultural context in which linguistic resources are put to use. That context, that both structures and is structured by language, is what we call “culture”.  Before the advent of globalization, the Internet and the large scale migrations of the 21st century, culture was studied as the national context in which national languages were learned and used. Today, with the increasingly multilingual and multicultural nature of industrialized societies, the spread of English as a global language, and the relentless rise of neoliberal ideology, the notion of “culture” is seen as being less useful in Applied Linguistics than historicity and subjectivity, performativity and symbolic power.

Claire Kramsch (University of California, Berkeley, USA)

Main Research Interests

• Applied Linguistics

• Second Language Acquisition

• Cultural and Stylistic Approaches to Language Study

Publications (selected)

• The Multilingual Subject. What Language Learners say About their Experience and why it Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009.
• Language and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1998.
• Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford University Press. 1993.
• With Ellen Crocker: Reden, Mitreden, Dazwischenreden: Managing Conversations in German. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. 1990.

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It comes as no surprise that in an age that is captivated by posthumanism in its sundry forms, the humanities seem to have lost much of their pertinence. However, literary theory, which over the past two decades has mutated into just “theory,” has shown real aptness in dealing with human border zones, the primary posthumanist domains. Is it appropriate, then, to speak of a posthumanist turn or reorientation in relation to literature and the literary humanities? In order to answer this question, one will have to take into account how an injection of posthumanist theorizing into our critical frameworks may radically put them into question or at least exert pressure on some of our ingrained concepts and routines. In other words, does the consideration of posthumanist claims on the part of the humanities turn these disciplines into something we might call, on good conceptual grounds, “the posthumanities”? How much of our current practice will be deemed compatible with new demands and protocols that arise in the wake of such disciplinary upheaval and realignment? This lecture concludes that literature is bound to play a central role in the further development of posthumanist thinking and its peculiar modes of inquiry.

Main Research Interests

• Eighteenth- to Twentieth-Century Literature and Philosophy 

• Literary and Media Theory 

• Lyric Poetry and Poetics  

• Systems Theory

Publications (selected)

• Lektüren der Erinnerung: Lessing, Kant, Hegel. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2012.
• With Peter Uwe Hohendahl and Thomas Teufel: Back to Kant II: The Fate of Kant in a Time of Crisis. The Philosophical Forum 41:1-2 (2010): 1-230.
• Unterlandschaft. Eggingen: Edition Isele, 1999.

This lecture discusses how cultural memory is studied today in different disciplinary, national and regional contexts – and how it might, or should, be studied tomorrow. After a quick look back at the evolution and main crossroads of the field in the past three decades, I will try to recapitulate some of the most important developments of memory studies in recent years. I am quite aware, however, of the sheer impossibility of constructing one single ‘state of the art’ of memory studies. Instead, I will show some of the more interesting ‘states’ that this highly diverse, international and interdisciplinary field has reached. Finally, I will zoom in on some examples (taken mainly from literary, media, and transcultural memory studies), and ask where the preoccupation with cultural memory may lead us in the future. 

Main Research Interests

• Anglophone Literatures and Culture

• Transcultural Memory Narratives

• Media Studies/Intermediality

Publications (selected)

• Bibel und Literatur um 1800. München: Wilhelm Fink 2011.

• With Ansgar Nünning, in collab. with Sara B. Young: Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2008. 

• Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005.

• With Ansgar Nünning: Media & Cultural Memory/Medien & kulturelle Erinnerung. Vols. 1ff. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, since 2004.

A specter is haunting European academia – the specter of artistic research. This specter invokes an ambivalent promise: For some the hybridization of academic studies and art practice seems to be a worthwhile endeavor inasmuch as it aims to break with incrusted institutional structures within the field of art and knowledge production. Others hope to enhance the visibility of their institutions by acquiring public funds to establish new study and research programs that work at the intersection of art and research; or in short: artistic research has economic value.

In our lecture we will, first, address the discussion on artistic research by asking how an aesthetic critique of scientific knowledge production could look like. By, secondly, referring to concrete examples we will further question the potential of artistic research as a hybrid cultural praxis that receives its value precisely from sitting at the nexus of academic studies and art. Do we need to hold on to a constitutional difference between artistic practice and scientific praxis or does this distinction dissolve? In relating our thoughts to the institutional critique – specifically focusing on the critique of the higher education sector – we will assume that the praxis of artistic research can only fully unfold its potential if such a praxis gets encouraged by means of funding, but without institutionally embedding and regulating this very praxis.

Main Research Interests

• Contemporary Performance Art

• Subjectivity and Identity

• Theories of Space and Scenography

• Theatre and Critique

Publications (selected)

• With Anneka Esch-van Kan, Stephan Packard: Thinking – Resisting – Reading the Political. Zürich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013.
• With Marion Tiedtke: Die Kunst der Bühne: Positionen des zeitgenössischen Theaters. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2011.
• Identität als Experiment. Ichperformanzen auf der Gegenwartsbühne. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011.
• With Marion Tiedtke: Die Kunst der Bühne. Zeitgenössische Positionen der Regie und der Choreographie. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2011.

Falk Rößler 

Main Research Interests

• Aesthetic Strategies in Contemporary Performing Arts

• Artistic Research

• Quality of Life-Discourse

Publications (selected)

• Eierlegende Wollmilchsäue? Anmerkungen zu Künstlerischer Forschung. In: Frankfurt in Takt. Schwerpunktthema Künstlerische Forschung. Frankfurt am Main: Magazin der Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Frankfurt am Main, 2015.
• Das starke Selbst. Stoische und zeitgenössische Lebenskunstkonzepte als Medien der Lebensgestaltung. München: Grin, 2011.
• Benjamins taktiles Paradies. Zum Politischen in Walter Benjamins Kunstwerk-Aufsatz. In: Flade/Förster/Ugarte Chacón: Paradiese am Rand. Studentisches Denken. Marginalien an der Universität? München: USP, 2010.

Main Research Interests

• Anglophone Literatures and Cultures
• Postcolonial, Global and Transcultural Studies
• Postcolonial and Material Ecocriticism
• Intermediality and Ekphrasis in Postcolonial Literatures

Publications (selected)

• Präsenz und Evidenz fremder Dinge im Europa des 18. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015.
• With Ansgar Nünning: Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2012.
• A Short History of English Literature until 1900: A Survey of Periods, Genres and Major Writers. Stuttgart: Klett, 2010.
• With Ansgar Nünning: An Introduction to the Study of Narrative Fiction. Stuttgart: Klett, 2008.
• Erinnerung – Identität – Narration. Gattungstypologie und Funktionen kanadischer Fictions of Memory. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2005.