The twenty-first century has witnessed a proliferation of migrant states of exception. While processes of globalization and technological development have fostered movement on a hitherto unprecedented scale, they have also brought the highly uneven distribution of both deliberate and enforced mobility to the fore. The international symposium at the University of Wuppertal explored expressions of migrant states of exception, paying particular attention to the complex ways, both real and imagined, in which borders and sovereignty have been on the one hand set aside, and on the other negotiated. The symposium brought together scholars from a broad range of disciplines and various parts of the world, including Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, and the USA.

The conference proceedings were published in a double special of the journal Parallax, Volume 27, Issues 2 and 3 (2021).

Conference Website: https://migrantstatesofexception.wordpress.com/

Sponsored by: German Research Foundation

The international conference expanded and systematized perspectives on the work of Georg Hermann, a prolific German-Jewish author widely read in the first third of the 20th century.

Sponsored by the: Fritz Thyssen Foundation

Funded by the European Commission from 2021-2025, this collaborative project brings together researchers, NGOs, and creative writers and artists from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ghana, Italy, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, and Senegal. In the wake of the 2015 refugee "crisis" it aims to a critically revise European migration discourse, and to generate a fair narrative on migration.

This project has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No.101004945

Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, this opus magnum is an innovative contribution to cultural narratology. Focusing on the future of narrative fiction in a digital culture and attention economy, the book explores the changing functions of slow reading as a subversive, critical and mindful activity.

Sponsored by the: Volkswagen Foundation

What happens after reading? How can cognitive theory account for the nature of aesthetic experience? And why do we make the effort, if the bulk of narrative detail is forgotten very soon? This essay, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, answers these questions, and some more.

You can read the essay here.

This narrative long-term project uses empirical, theoretical, analytical and creative approaches to narrative to explore various aspects of politics, culture and society in the microstate between Austria and Switzerland. The results will be published in a series of books with Limmat Verlag, Zurich.