Caitlin Flynn invited by Antonia Murath (January–March 2020)

 
^{Caitlin Flynn and Antonia Murath}

Antonia Murath and Caitlin Flynn will continue to work on their project "Female Voices in Medieval Literature", which they initiated with an international conference in May 2019 together with Prof. Dr. Jutta Eming. The conference explored the question of whether "voice" can be gendered and how literary characters in Middle High German, Older Scots, and Middle English literatures adhere to or resist binary constructions of gender at the intersections of speech, genre, linguistic construction, rhetorical conventions, and present-day critical interventions. Gendered speech can be perceived as a complex and embodied process: reconnecting the acts of speaking and silence with bodily action or inaction, especially in a gendered context, opens up literary interpretation to new avenues of discussion. In this way, the body is instrumental in challenging, subverting, or reaffirming a spoken message. The construction of such bodies and their speech is further complicated by transnational medieval transmission histories.

Antonia Murath and Caitlin Flynn will jointly edit a collected publication of the "Female Voices" conference proceedings, for which they will co-write a comprehensive introduction that provides a sound theoretica and methodological framework for exploring gendered speech in medieval narratives. This collection will be published as a special issue in Nottingham Medieval Studies in 2021.

Caitlin Flynn recently completed an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship at Freie Universität Berlin. Prior to her Humboldt Fellowship, she completed a doctoral thesis on the grotesque in Older Scots and Middle English at University of St Andrews. To date, her publications reflect her sustained interest in late medieval comedy and comparative studies. Her Humboldt Fellowship project expanded on this interest in an exploration of the depiction of sexuality and femininity in Older Scots and Middle High German comic verse.

Antonia Murath is a research assistant at the department for German and Dutch Philology (Medieval German Literature). She is working on a PhD project on gender and human-thing relations in the European vernacular "Floris and Blanchefleur" and "Custance" traditions.

Bashir Abu-Manneh, Ghayath Almadhoun, Nemat Khaled, und Lindsey Moore invited by Ruth Abou Rached (June–July 2020)

       
^{Bashir Abu-Manneh, Ghayath Almadhoun, Nemat Khaled, Lindsey Moore and Ruth Abou Rached}

Together with her guests, Ruth Abou Rached (PalREAD, Arabistik Seminar) will be hosting Re-locating the Map: Writing Displacement and Belonging in New times and Places, a series of lectures, public readings and workshops on Palestinian literature of the past and present. Through their research (Bashir Abu-Manneh and Lindsey Moore) and public readings of their works (Ghayath Almadhoun and Nemat Khaled), the guests will explore what, how and why Palestinian writers write experiences of displacement, exile and alternative belongings from various critical and creative perspectives. By showcasing creative practices and scholarship on Palestinian literature, our guests will invite new questions on trends and developments of Palestinian writing in past and recent times. This series also situates why Palestinian writing gives us vital sources of insight into the wider dynamics of diasporic, migrant and exilic literatures.

Lectures:

Ghayath Almadhoun (Berlin DAAD writer in Residence): Tues. 16 June, 14:00–15:30

Bashir Abu-Manneh (University of Canterbury, UK): Tues. 23 June, 14:00–15:30

Lindsey Moore (Lancaster University, UK): Tues. 30 June, 14:00–15:30

Nemat Khaled (Berlin-based writer and literary critic): Tues. 7 July, 14:00–15:30

For more information on the lecture series, please contact Dr. Ruth Abou Rached at ruth.abou-rached@fu-berlin.de

Bashir Abu-Manneh is a reader in Postcolonial Literature and director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kent, U.K. He is author of The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to the Present (2016) and Fiction of the New Statesman, 1913-1939 (2011). He has edited a collection of essays on Edward Said - as literary critic and postcolonial theorist - After Said: Postcolonial Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century (2019).

Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet born in Damascus, and has been resident artist for the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program Award Scholarship (Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD) since July 2019. His award-winning collections of poetry have been featured in many artists creative works and translated into many languages, including Chinese, Farsi, French, German and Swedish. A selection of his poems entitled Ein Raubtier namens Mittelmeer (tr. Larissa Bender) published by Arche Literatur Verlag AG topped the Litprom-Bestenliste / Sommer 2018, the list for the best books translated into German.

Nemat Khaled is a Palestinian novelist and short-story writer born in Damascus, now based in Berlin. After graduating in Law in Damascus, she became an acclaimed, award-winning journalist and founded many local Palestinian cultural and literary initiatives. Her novels and short stories in Arabic are known for covering the diverse aspects of lived Palestinian refugee experience from hauntingly poetic, inter-generational perspectives. Her novel telling the stories of Palestinian women in Al-Yarmouk Camp, Damascus has also been published in German under the title of Hannanacht (tr. Nuha Sarraf-Forst & Angelika Rahmer).

Lindsey Moore is a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University, U.K. She specialises in Postcolonial Theory and post-1948 literature of the Arab world (including North Africa), with particular interest in Palestinian, Lebanese and "Levantine" literatures as well as migration/diaspora literature. To date, she has focused on configurations of national and transnational community, with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. She is author of Narrating Postcolonial Arab Nations: Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine (2018). Her most forthcoming volume is titled Global Literature and the Middle East: Twenty-First Century ArabPerspectives in English (2021). ORCID: 0000-0003-3531-7764

Ruth Abou Rached is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Arabistik Seminar, Freie Universität Berlin, and works in the ERC Horizon-2020 project PalREAD: Country of Words: Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present, led by Refqa Abu-Remaileh. Her research at "PalREAD" focuses on sources of Palestinian literature and cultural production located in public, archival and cultural institutions in the Middle East, European and other international settings. ORCID: 0000-0001-8961-5586 

Louis Nana invited by Thea Santangelo (October–November 2020)

 
^{Louis Nana and Thea Santangelo}

Louis Nana is a PhD Student at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen and at the Université de Cergy-Pontoise. In his doctoral project, one of the core focus is on the literary tendencies of the so called "Afro-devenirs" in the francophone African area. Thea Santangelo is scientific assistant at the Insitute for Roman Philology. Her researches are dedicated to the literature of italian futurism. Since spring 2018 they are both members of the PhD Programme "Entangled Temporalities in the Global South" at the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen.

The project supported by the Dahlem Junior Host Program 2020 concerns the relations between the contemporary afrofuturistic tendencies and the historical italian futurism. The aim is to analyse the literary production of these two movements focusing on three common aspects: africanity, technology and community.

The comparative study permits on the one hand to open up the field of futurism avant-garde studies to the questions of africanity and primitivism, as well as to the related problematic of temporality. On the other hand, the comparison with the Futurism, as one of the most important theory on future imagination, is useful for a better understanding of the specific characteristics of afrofuturistic texts.

Florian Fuchs invited by Wolfgang Hottner (July 2021)

 
^{Florian Fuchs and Wolfgang Hottner}

Wolfgang Hottner is assistant professor at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature. In 2017, he completed his dissertation on anorganic aesthetics and poetics in the late 18th century and is currently working on his habilitation about the history and theory of rhyme. Florian Fuchs is a scholar of comparative literature and media. Since finishing his dissertation on the emergence and praxeology of short narrative forms at Yale University in 2017, he has been teaching German and comparative literature at Princeton University. Among other projects, he is currently working on a study about the role of "personal devices" within the constitution of western subjectivity.

During Fuchs‘s four-week stay in Berlin, their collaborative project will focus on digital formats and devices in contemporary literature. More specifically, it will study digital formats and formations (such as PDF, PostScript, and GoogleDocs), work to describe the genre-like behavior of "twitterature" as a platform-specific literature, as well as look at the technical and material role of handheld devices for these literatures. An important underlying question in this regard is the currently increased equation of digital short forms and their apparatures of reception, which leads to a set of narrative and life-related consequences that are going to be examined also via their prehistory before the digial age. Towards the end of the visit, a public day-long workshop is scheduled to further discuss the tensions between device, format, and digital literature.

Raphael Berthele and Hans-Jörg Döhla invited by Barbara Schirakowski (September 2021)

   
^{Raphael Berthele, Hans-Jörg Döhla and Barbara Schirakowski}

The one-day linguistic workshop on Verbs in language contact with Raphael Berthele and Hans-Jörg Döhla as invited speakers, originally planned for July 2020 as part of the Dahlem Junior Host Program, will take place online on September 14, 2021. The main purpose of the event is to discuss possible effects of language contact on verbs and their arguments focusing on case studies on verb-related phenomena in contact situations that involve Romance languages.

Raphael Berthele is Professor of Multilingualism at the Université de Fribourg. One strand of his research on individual multilingualism focuses on motion verbs in language contact situations (German-French) and the effects of language dominance and language mode on the encoding of spatial relations.

Hans-Jörg Döhla has been Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Tübingen. His research on language contact includes studies on the marking of verbal arguments and diachronic aspects of contact-induced language change.

Barbara Schirakowski is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Romance Philology at the FU Berlin. In her project on French, she examines the question of how the expression of the conceptual components manner and result can vary and change due to contact to Germanic languages.

 

Due to the measures taken to contain the spread of COVID-19, scheduled visits and events could not be carried out as originally planned. The following project is still pending. We will provide timely information about postponements or replacement formats.

Karen Ng, Thomas Khurana and Marc Nicolas Sommer invited by Karen Koch and Tobias Wieland

       
^{Karen Ng, Thomas Khurana, Marc Nicolas Sommer, Karen Koch and Tobias Wieland}

Within the context of the Dahlem Junior Host Program, we are happy to invite Karen Ng, Thomas Khurana and Marc Nicolas Sommer for a workshop to the Department of Philosophy. The workshop is dedicated to the topic of "Life and Logic" and will take place on July, the 2nd and 3rd. The aim of the Workshop is to spell out in detail the idea that life constitutes a logical category, a thought that has recently regained more philosophical attention. The idea is to approach this thought primarily from a Hegelian background, in which it holds a prominent position, but with an open mind to related thoughts in other philosophical traditions.

Karen Ng is Assistant Professor at the Vanderbilt University (USA). Her essays on the concept of the organism, life, and self-consciousness draw a lot of attention internationally. Her book on "Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic" will be published this year. It deals directly with the subject of our workshop.

Thomas Khurana is Lecturer at the University of Essex, and currently Heisenberg Fellow at Yale University. His work on "Das Leben der Freiheit: Form und Wirklichkeit der Autonomie" (2017) is one of the most interesting recent works on Hegel in German language. His areas of interest are among others the relation of norm and nature, and, more generally, the question of autonomy and self-consciousness.

Marc Nicolas Sommer is Assistant Professor at the University of Basel. His latest publication Das Konzept einer negativen Dialektik. Adorno und Hegel is being broadly received and places Nicolas Sommer right within the recent debates in Critical Theory and Hegelism.

Karen Koch and Tobias Wieland are both PhD students at the department of philosophy working on Hegel’s philosophy with special attention to the category of life in Hegel’s logic.