Languages, Literatures, & Cultures

Research Interests

Ecocriticism, concepts of alterity, German literature from1880 to 1945 (especially Rilke, Nietzsche, Celan, Kafka, Jahnn), t(r)opology of laughter, adoption/doing family

Current Research Project:

From Ego to Eco: Mediatisations of Environmental Encounters

For many centuries, anthropocentric worldviews were crucial for the exploitation of nature for man's ends. Such self-assertive approaches to the natural world contributed to creating the multifarious imbalances that today threaten ecosystems on a global scale. A growing body of works awakens awareness of, and sensitivity towards a global eco-consciousness that pays attention to the interdependence of species. This project is designed to build on the success of the recent 'From Ego to Eco' (June 2011) conference, and the more recent symposia’Ecopoetry Now!’ (January 2012) and 'Seeking Shelter or Dwelling in the Open. Examining Ecocritical Approaches to Human Habitation'. The research project seeks to analyse the parameters, conditions and consequences of environmental narratives, by reviewing historical phases of migration and diasporic writing, and writings of settlement belonging with regard to the ecological and ethical discourses they articulate. We investigate eco-ethical dimensions of narratives of migration, settlement and belonging centred around the experience of the Huguenot in Europe, the Spanish in Latin America, and closer to home, the cultural significance of the Irish boglands. Thus, from different cultural and historical perspectives we will examine how landscape is not just the nature of a specific region, but rather the mediated spaces in which cultural imagination interprets nature and in which nature has been reshaped and rearranged through direct human impact as the result of these imaginations. Gender is a key category in these semantisations and arrangements.
 
http://genderarc.org/projects/gdi-project-ego2eco.htm