The Center for Cultural Studies is a place for basic research in cultural studies and reflections on the theory of science. The projects pursued at the Center are characterized by their interdisciplinary and comparative approach to questions of cultural forms and cultural techniques. An interest in cultural studies theory and methodology guides the research. The Center understands cultural studies as process-oriented cultural studies, with a focus on theory formation, concept transfer and practices. Culture is understood as a relational, processual concept.
The following research areas form the basis for the projects developed at the Center:
Core Topics of Our Research
The following core topics currently form the basis for the projects of structured and practical interdisciplinarity carried out at the Center for Cultural Studies in the context of emotional cultures, media cultures and scientific cultures:
Transdisciplinary Narratology
Genre & Culture
Theater as performance
Image as text / text as image
AI & authorship
Culture in the natural sciences
Questions in the interaction process between language-text-action create the connecting framework for these core areas of our research. The following selected research projects provide an insight into the work at the Center for Cultural Studies.
Selected projects
Bestiaries of the modern age
Bestiaries of modernity: Literary renegotiations of a medieval text genre.
Gencarelli, Angela
Habilitation project, DAAD scholarship holder, September 2020
At the beginning of the 20th century, the bestiary, a catalog-like animal book last widespread in the High Middle Ages, returned in several European and Hispano-American literatures. A curious finding that encourages to expand the spectrum of previously researched text genres in modern literature. Medieval bestiaries collected and portrayed animal figures with their symbolic or allegorical meanings, not for their own sake, but because of their salvation-historical referential character in the context of religious interpretations of nature. It is therefore all the more astonishing that this genre of text, which had been suppressed in the course of modern natural history research, became highly topical again at the beginning of the 20th century, under a strongly secularized and scientific understanding of nature. The research project reconstructs this remarkable genre dynamic for the German-language bestiary tradition, which has remained almost completely undiscovered until now despite its breadth and diversity, and seeks to determine the new functions of these reference games in more detail.
Global Currents in Translingual Poetry
Global Currents in Translingual Poetry: Tracing Language, Geography and Culture in Contemporary Anglophone Literatures
Schantl, Lisa, & Schwanecke, Christine, & Šlapkauskaitė, Rūta
Habilitation project funded by Arqus, started on 1.11.2024
In a time of globalization and migration, research on international, transcultural and linguistically diverse literature has become indispensable. For this reason, this project is dedicated to an art form that has received little attention to date: translingual poetry, which lends itself particularly well to linguistic exploration, de- or transformation and innovation. Translingual and transcultural literature, written in an author's second language(s), challenges the prevailing notion that language and culture are bound to linguistic communities defined by national borders. The project transcends the boundaries between different humanities disciplines and makes linguistic approaches fruitful for literary and cultural analysis. It shows that in translingual poetry, language is "de-automatized" (Schmitz-Evans 1997: 120) and (re)constructs transcultural knowledge and intercultural understanding.
Using the example of various poetry texts in English, the world's most widely spoken second language, sociolinguistics and postcolonial literary studies are methodically brought together to form a theory of second-language poetry, the special features of which are suitable for breaking with ossified patterns of thought in research and culture. Following the transnational turn in literature (Jay 2014), translingual poems by authors with and without a migration background are compared in order to trace geopolitical and ecological currents in Anglophone poetry and their revisionist and visionary (trans)cultural potential.
Jay, Paul. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Cornell University Press, 2014.
Schmitz-Emans, Monika. The Language of Modern Poetry. Fink, 1997.
Worth reading
Research
Funded research
Further activities
Archive
Publications and activities of the Center for Cultural Studies before 2019
Publications, sponsored conferences and other events of the Center for Cultural Studies that were published or took place before 2019 are listed in this document..