Research
Cultural contact, cultural transfer, high cultures, subcultures, countercultures, popular cultures, working-class cultures, media cultures, cultural memory...
To analyse, to theorise and to think through forms of cultural contact requires diverse methodologies and a multiplicity of perspectives. Our research-group combines a diverse range of academic perspectives to allow for an open dialogue on and insightful analysis of our shared interest: cultural contact.
Over 50 academics from the Faculty of Language, Literature and Culture and the Faculty of Philosophy and History work in this inter-disciplinary network, including the following disciplines: American Studies, English Studies, German Studies, Romance Studies, Slavic Studies, Comparative Literature, Translation Studies, Linguistics, History and European Ethnology.
This diversity of subjects is connected by shared research-interests, such as
- the contact between cultures along different analytical criteria, such as foreign/own, high/low/middle, fictive/real, mediated/immediate. This focus, however, is not merely interested in dichotomies but in forms of liminality, hybridity and figurations of the third.
- the transposition and representation of trans- and inter-cultural contact in literatures, film, music, photography, social media and other cultural artefacts and practices.
- a trans-cultural and trans-national approach to pressing concerns such as migration, the (de-)construction of geographical, socio-political and cultural borders; representations of agency and victimhood and cultures in the Anthropocene
- a theoretical-methodological reflection of culture as a category of social debates as well as a scientific and scholarly category of analysis
- the diachronic and historical contextualisation of culture(s)
- the discussion of political, cultural, economic and legal categories of power and the intersectional analysis of texts along categories such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and habitus through the lens of literary and cultural studies
- practices of mediation within and between cultures and their respective (academic) discourses
These research interests are currently discussed/examined in the following research projects on
- multilingualism in different media, translation-studies
- the (de-)construction of borders, border crossings, migration, liminality and contact zones
- The transdisciplinary examination of the relationship between nature and culture and attendant concerns regarding the Anthropocene, and the critical as well as epistemically productive nature of artistic perspectives on the Anthropocene.
- intermediality in different media and art forms (literature, film, music, photography, social media, visual arts, etc.)
- (distorting and equalising) reflections, phenomena of irritation, dissolution, doubling and multiplication that shape a subject’s experiences and are expressed in and shaped by artistic representations.
Here you can find more information on projects and publications