News

Forgotten Voices of Modernity. German Women Authors of the Interwar Period (Workshop & Edited Volume)

Engagement with German-language literary production of the interwar period is still largely dominated by canonized male authors. Numerous women writers who were productive and successful in the 1920s and early 1930s are now almost forgotten or receive only marginal attention in scholarship. This workshop and the subsequent edited volume aim to contribute to the rediscovery and critical reassessment of these authors. We are therefore seeking contributions that address their literary work, conditions of publication, networks, and reception history. We welcome both analyses of individual works and cultural- and social-historical contextualizations. Particularly encouraged are contributions that adopt intersectional perspectives and examine the entanglements of gender with other categories such as class, ethnic or religious affiliation, sexual orientation, disability, or regional background. This approach is intended to make visible those authors who, due to multiple forms of marginalization, have been especially strongly pushed out of literary memory.

Workshops: 10.7., 17.7. & 24.7.2026 (online)

CfP: Forgotten Voices (Deadline Abstracts: 15.1.2026)

In cooperation with Dr. Marcella Fassio (German Studies, University of Halle/Wittenberg)

Postcolonial Medical and Health Humanities: South Asian Literary Imaginaries and Epistemologies (Special Issue)

The special issue, to be published at the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, invites both theoretical reflections on the postcolonial medical and health humanities, and literary analyses of cultural texts which engage with the intersections of health, coloniality, and postcoloniality in South Asia and its diasporic communities. In particular, we invite contributions which will address the following four intersecting questions:

• How do cultural texts from South Asia and its diasporic communities negotiate the colonial ramifications of health and well-being in general, and how do they address the colonial history of biomedicine and the coloniality of medicine more particularly? What role do non-hegemonic perspectives play in these negotiations?
• How do South Asian cultural texts address contemporary forms of stratification, discrimination, and exploitation in biomedicine and healthcare in postcolonial contexts? How are these related to colonial and neocolonial fault-lines, but also to regional and/or globalized forms of implication beyond the North–South binary?
• What role do epistemic and linguistic issues play in different literary imaginaries of health and medicine? That is, how do different texts address questions of knowledge production, in particular the suppression and recovery of medical and health epistemologies, and in what languages?
• Through what representational politics and poetics do different texts address these questions?

CfP: Postcolonial Medical & Health Humanities (Deadline Abstracts: 1.4.2026)

In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Julia Wurr (English Literature, University of Oldenburg) & Prof. Dr. Antara Chatterjee (Literature, IISER Bhopal)

Floods in Literature (Conference & Edited Volume)

Floods are among the defining natural experiences that have been represented in literature for centuries. Literary depictions of floods articulate early forms of ecological critique, while interpretations of flooding as divine punishment persisted well into the modern era. From a research perspective, flood narratives are closely connected to questions of hydropolitics, state preparedness, media representations, and gendered semantics of the natural event and its rescuers. Situated at the intersection of literary disaster studies, ecocriticism, the blue humanities, and the recently emerging field of literary meteorology, this project explores the largely uncharted literary representations of floods – particularly in German-speaking and Central European contexts. Given the significance of rivers such as the Rhine, Neckar, and Elbe in the German literary imagination, the project seeks to map flood narratives as a distinctive part of this tradition.

Conference: 15.–16. October 2026, University of Koblenz

In cooperation with Korbinian Lindel (German Studies, University of Koblenz)