08 Jun New Collaborative Research Centre in Literary Studies at Freiburg University
Retracing Connections is happy to announce that the German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio ‘Historical and Transcultural Narratology’ at the University of Freiburg. Within this project, researchers are investigating narratives and narrative practices in various historical and cultural contexts. The spokesperson for the Collaborative Research Centre is the RC Advisory Board Member Prof. Dr Eva von Contzen, Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg.
A new historical-transcultural narrative theory
People have always told stories. Across all eras and cultures, narratives have played a vital role in social cohesion. The new TRR Historical and Transcultural Narratology examines pre-modern narratives – that is, those from antiquity, the Middle Ages and the early modern period – drawn from various cultural contexts. The TRR will test and further develop methods from the digital humanities in order to anchor comparative narrative research more firmly in the digital realm. For its research, the TRR utilises digital and AI-based methods, ranging from prompt engineering to more advanced AI architectures. The researchers’ aim is to develop a new historical-transcultural narrative theory that overcomes the narrow focus of current narrative theories on Western and modern or postmodern traditions. This new narrative theory is intended to encompass diverse historical narrative formats and functions from various cultural contexts. In doing so, the researchers will open up new avenues for comparative, interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies on a global scale.
“The Collaborative Research Centre promises a fundamental re-examination of storytelling in the past from a comparative perspective,” says spokesperson von Contzen. “The participating researchers come from 16 different disciplines, including Egyptology, Korean Studies, Theology, Classical Studies and Slavic Studies. We are exploring questions such as how people in past cultures told stories, in what contexts, for what purposes, and what their stories were like.”
The research findings are intended to facilitate a comprehensive historical and cross-cultural comparison of storytelling from a global perspective and to offer a fundamentally new insight into the origins, diversity and functions of narrative forms. Researchers from the consortium of the Universities of Freiburg, Bochum and Bonn will work closely with the Digital Humanities Lab at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Freiburg and the Bonn Centre for Digital Humanities.
We warmly congradulate Eva and her team and are looking forward to future collaborations!
You can read the full announcement here.