Research projects
Cultural artifacts as seismographs of our present offer a means of gaining insight into the current human condition. The aim is to develop a profile in the area of the immediate present in order to accompany socially and politically relevant issues such as "precarity" or "migration" in the humanities.
In my dissertation, which was awarded the Tiburtius Prize of the Berlin universities, Wunderbares Erzählen. The Fairy Tales of Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, which was awarded the Tiburtius Prize of the Berlin Universities, analyzes the specific features of the "contes de fées" in terms of content, style and narratology after examining the history of their reception and edition. While this study is thus set in the 17th century, my habilitation thesis Auf Spurensuche. Remembered contemporary history in contemporary European fiction from a comparative, literary and cultural studies perspective on the problem of the literarization of memory, remembrance and history using the example of French, Spanish and German authors. My current research project Narrative of Crisis in Contemporary Romance Cultures focuses on artefacts of contemporary Hispanophone and Francophone textual and visual cultures that give artistic expression to the economic and socio-political developments in the wake of globalization and migration at the turn of the millennium. This will initially be explored in a first sub-project entitled Zu einer Poetik des Prekären. Working Worlds in Contemporary European Literature.
The foundation of an Observatoire de l'extrême contemporain | Observatory of Contemporary Cultures, which is to be understood in the sense of the Research Priority Area "Culture and Knowledge" as a place for taking stock and archiving, but also for meeting authors, is intended to promote the communication of Romance literature through the organization of readings, colloquia and similar events.The aim is to communicate contemporary Romance literatures and cultures to a university and non-academic audience by organizing readings, colloquia, etc. and thus to present the focal points described above to the public in a way that combines teaching and research activities.