Skip to content
Ongoing Projects
| Project | Short Description | Spokespersons / PIs |
|---|---|---|
| Family Matters - Figures of Allegiance and Release | World literature offers a rich archive of family narratives, largely explored through social history. This Research Training Group instead treats 'family' as an imaginary institution, negotiated through cultural master narratives and iconic images that shape kinship, gender roles, and conflicts—aiming for a systematic archaeology of the family imaginary. | Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Joachim Schiedermaier PI: Prof. Dr. Tobias Döring |
| Cluster of Excellence Cross-Cultural Philology German Reception of Shakespeare | This project will be concerned with the reception of William Shakespeare’s works in Germany. It will research, edit, and make digitally accessible archival material from the Munich Shakespeare Library and beyond. A particular focus will be placed on the many rewritings, editions, and translations of Shakespeare’s plays that were characteristic of early adaptations of his works on the stage. | Speaker Cluster of Excellence: Prof. Dr. Beate Kellner PI Prof. Dr. Claudia Olk |
| Cultures of Vigilance. Transformations – Spaces – Practices: SFB 1369 Project C08 Unknowingness and vigilance in Shakespeare | In the theatre, unknowingness is crucial for fostering vigilance. This project examines the relation between unknowingness and vigilance in England at around 1600, particularly in the works of William Shakespeare. It analyses how the plays perform and produce unknowingness, suspicion and doubt, and the ways in which they reflect courtly, political, religious as well as poetological contexts in order to represent and create vigilance. | Speaker Prof. Dr. Arndt Brendecke PI C08 Prof. Dr. Claudia Olk |
Completed Projects
| Project | Short Description | Spokespersons / PIs |
|---|---|---|
| Philology of Adventure Transforming Victorian Adventure Writing: Modernist Urban Fiction and Postcolonial Rewritings Post/colonial travel and adventure between imperial and fantastic worlds | The concept of adventure refers to an elementary nucleus of storytelling – ‘elementary’ in a narratological as well as in a psychological sense. Adventure occupies a special position amongst other basic literary concepts, as it is not only a genuinely narrative term, but also a term of distinctly medieval origin. The narrative, perceptual and experiential pattern that goes by that name has proved extremely adaptive, despite all the criticism levelled against it in the modern age. It has seen more than one literary renaissance and has crossed over into ever new areas of culture (like film, computer games, advertising, tourism, etc.). In such crossovers, the originally narrative character of adventure is often no longer taken into account.... (2017-2024) | Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Martin von Koppenfels PI Prof. Dr. Tobias Döring |
| Globalization and Literature: Representations, Tranformations, Interventions | Literature constitutes an important, yet not sufficiently explored archive for the understanding of globalization processes. Thus, the DFG Research Training Group "Globalization and Literature: Representations, Transformations, Interventions" focuses on the complex relationship between literature and global/izing dynamics: What are the different functions of imagination and fiction in the processes of globalization? What are the historical constellations of globalizations made visible through the analysis of literary texts? In which ways do processes of globalization impact or transform literature and its genres? How does literature not only represent, but reflect, constitute, critize globalization? (2012-2021) | Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Robert Stockhammer Deputy Spokesperson Prof. Dr. Tobias Döring |
The Role of Nature in Conceptualising Political Order: Ancient - Medieval - Early Modern Nature and Law in Early Modern English Literature: Shakespeare, Milton, Cavendish | This Research Unit aims to explore the role and diverse meanings of nature in conceptualising political order from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the early modern period. By combining the perspectives and expertise of different disciplines - history, politics and law, theology and philosophy, art history and literary studies - the Research Unit will bring an innovative approach to pre-modern conceptualisations of nature in their socio-political dimensions. Crossing disciplinary boundaries and habits of perception and looking beyond canonical texts and images, we examine the discursive functionalisations of nature in such ways as to illuminate both their synchronic variation and diachronic changes and reveal the conditions of their long-term historical impact. The common focus of the programmes research is its concentration on the political as the centre of a societal reflection whose shaping power expresses itself in a variety of pre-modern discourses and practices of rulership. What is at issue, then, are definitions of man as a political animal, debates on the foundations of community, social hierarchy and the distribution of power, on the legitimacy of government, the authorisation of law and state institutions. When "nature" is employed to bolster specific concepts of political order, the polysemy of the term is rarely ever reduced to a single, unequivocal meaning. The argumentative force of the term, rather, derives from its semantic overdetermination, which offers a well-nigh inexhaustible resource for making (political) sense. But just as remarkable as the semantic mutations and adaptability of "nature" are the continuities of its use from the ancient world up to the threshold of modernity. The Research Units combination of projects and the interactions between them are designed to do justice not only to the synchronic polysemy and diachronic changes of "nature" but also to the persistent authority and evidence-generating power of a small ensemble of basic ideas associated with the term. (2013-2022) | Spokespersons: Prof. Dr. Andreas Höfele, i.R. Prof. Dr. Beate Kellner PI Prof. Dr. Andreas Höfele, i.R. |