Current Research Projects

The 2023 annual conference of the German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (CDE) is organized by Ilka Saal and Johanna Hartmann (University of Halle).

Under the title “Theater & Community: Poetics, Politics, and Performances," it will take place at Augustinerkloster Erfurt from June 8-11, 2023.

For more information, visit the conference website

Antonia Purk’s postdoctoral research project investigates the nexus of foodways and racialization in children’s literature, cookbooks, and local color fiction. The project examines food as part of a sign system that gestures towards cultural anxieties over self and other within textual and visual media of the 19^th century.

Oliver Erdmannis currently working on his PhD project. The project investigates how contemporary African American authors make references to texts from Greek classical antiquity to critique modernity. To that end, it intends to show the processes through which classical references are made to both explore and transcend various ways of modern worldmaking within which racial knowledge is shown to be integral to modernity’s self-understanding. It investigates how authors such as Jesmyn Ward and Jamaica Kincaid as well as playwrights such as Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Suzan-Lori Parks inquire the structural positionality of Blackness within a set of distinctly modern phenomena such as racial capitalism, individual subjectivity, and liberal humanism through classical myth. Operating within the frameworks of post-Blackness, Afropessimism and fugitive aesthetics, this study suggests that these writers engage in a way of classical reception that becomes intelligible in its signifying on classical texts and their discourses only through activating contemporary conceptions of Blackness.

Praxeologies of Truth

Prof. Ilka Saal is active member and deputy spokeswoman of the University of Erfurt's research group "Praxeologies of Truth". Antonia Purk is the academic coordinatorof the research group. For more information, please go to Praxeologien der Wahrheit.

European Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The European Study Group of Nineteenth-Century American Literature was established at the 2006 conference of the European Association of American Studies (EAAS) in Cyprus by a group of European Americanists. Our initiative has received enthusiastic support of academics from all over Europe. In the course of a three day long get-together the group focuses on lesser-known texts by American women writers of the nineteenth century.  Click here for more ...

Enacting Presences: Jamaica Kincaid's Writings of History

In July 2021 Antonia Purk completed her dissertation project on literary engagements with history in the works of Jamaica Kincaid. The project investigates how both Kincaid's fictional and non-fictional works not only attend to the personal pasts of the author and her literary figures, but how they also perform memory work with regard to a collective Afro-Caribbean history. Focusing on the interplay of the media text, photography, and the human body, the project intends to highlight the poetic aspects of Kincaid's works in producing new knowledges of the past where previously there were none, as predominant forms of historiography were (and still are) dominated by the mechanisms of colonialism which eclipsed all other versions of history but that of the West, and to respond to the continuing effects of traumatic history on contemporary lives.

Mapping Black Atlantic Memories: The Contemporary Poetical Space of Narratives of Slavery

Luana de Souza Sutter is currently working on her dissertation project on the poetics of memory and mediality in contemporary novels about slavery published in the transatlantic space of the Black Diaspora. Her project investigates how textual and literary devices employed in recent slavery novels published in Brazil, Canada, United States, and the United Kingdom engage with the history of slavery from a contemporary postcolonial perspective. With special focus on the novel’s concern with spatiality and mediality, I hope to map out the poetics of slavery in the contemporary production of the extended Black Atlantic space (including Brazil) and investigate to which extent recent literary articulations of slavery narrative bespeak ongoing political and ethical concerns of postcolonial and African Diasporic critical thought.