Teaching

– Winter 2024/2025

PS: Victorian Short Fiction

‘The Victorian era’ refers to, among other things, a broad period of cultural production during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). While the label is not undisputed, those years were a time of exceptional economic development due to industrialization, scientific advancement and the expansion of the British empire, wherein the production and dissemination of literature was altered dramatically. The invention of the steam powered printing press made periodical sales soar; the emergence of circulating libraries provided access to works of literature to a new, primarily lower- and middle-class readership. Long novels, a characteristic of this literary era, were usually published in serialized form, delivered to their readers first in short pieces and only later as full-length works.

In this seminar we will read and discuss short texts of fiction that highlight the concerns of the Victorian era such as mystery and sensation, science and naturalism as well as decadence and aestheticism. The Victorians hold a special place in the public imaginary and we will get to know authors that shaped the literary scene of the time as well as our modern idea of the Victorians such as Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Elizabeth Gaskell. In addition to reflecting on the production conditions of these works, we will also be able to discuss the ideas we have of Victorian culture today by looking at modern adaptions.

– Summer 2024

PS: Literary Representation of the Shoah (2)

Building on the course from the winter semester 2023/24, we will be deepening our understanding of the different ways the Shoah, the murder of the European Jewry, is represented in arts and culture in this class. Following the premise that literature alongside other artistic forms has an immense impact on our cultural memory, there is much to gain from analyzing works that deal with the atrocities and consequences of the rule of the Nazi Party. These types of analyses require approaches from the fields of ethics, history and philosophy in addition to our primary focus, Literary and Cultural Studies. We will concentrate on the question of the aestheticization of the Shoah, genre conventions and considerations as well as what it means to engage with the past from today’s point of view, where the influence of survivors, of direct testimonies, on our discourse and memorial practices, is decreasing significantly, and what art, specifically, can offer us in this regard. With a guided tour through Erlangen, we will enhance our sense of history of the Nazi era on a local level.

PS: Queer Literature through the Ages

While we can trace textual evidence of same-sex desire back to antiquity, the idea of homosexuality or queerness as part of one’s identity as opposed to limited to behavioral patterns and/or specific sexual acts is extremely recent by comparison, only about 150 years old. This, of courses, raises a few questions when analyzing texts that are labeled as queer from before this conceptualization of queerness: What makes a text queer? Is the presence of queer characters sufficient? Does the author need to be (publicly, self-identified as) queer themselves? How do we deal with the anachronistic application of labels to texts and people? Using these questions to guide us, we will read texts by (British) authors that deal with queerness from Shakespeare through the Victorian Era to contemporary works including various genres and approach them using the extensive toolkit provided by the field of Queer Studies for our analysis and discussions.

– Winter 2023/2024

PS: Literary Representation of the Shoah (1)

Representing the Shoah, the murder of the European Jewry, in literary form necessarily raises questions for both the writer and the reader: How can one express genocide in words? What genres are suited for such a task? How does one draw the line between (auto-)biographical fact and fiction? What happens when the text is not based on the author’s own experiences, but those of their parents, grandparents or when there is no personal link? In order to (attempt to) answer these questions, we will read texts that deal with the Shoah through literature in various genres including memoir, graphic novel, poetry and novel. We will examine how the Shoah is represented and remembered in these works, using the theoretical framework of collective memory and the intergenerational transmission of memory and in doing so, we will also taking a look at the reciprocal relationship between literature and (collective) memory.

GS: Culture

This seminar provides a first insight into the field of contemporary Cultural Studies, with a special emphasis on definitions of culture and on the different approaches and methods of cultural analysis. The course also introduces students to special topics such as Media Studies, constructions of otherness, the role of myths in the production of social meaning, and Gender Studies.

– Summer 2023

PS: Class and Gender in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, then and now

In this course we will examine the role of class and gender in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and how these categories intersect in a close reading of the text. We will try to understand how the novel is embedded in its specific time and place, but also take a look at a modern adaptation of the work, YouTube’s “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries”. “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” was the first adaptation of a literary text that was created primarily for an online audience and made significant changes in order to fit the format and the socio-political climate of the YouTube space in the 2010s. We will look at the same intersection of categories in the web series and compare the two works.

Technische Universität Berlin

– Winter 2021/2022

Grundlagen Wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens (Introduction to Academic Work)