Office Hours I am currently on research leave and might be slow to respond to email. No office hours scheduled at this point.
Upcoming Talks
"Language, Literature, Environments: Two Apes in Conversation", Symposium The Long and Winding Road: Sprache, Diversität und Englischunterricht, University of Cologne, May 20, 2022.
(with Pavan Malreddy) "Environmental (In)Justice and Ecological Solidarities", Teacher Training Workshop at the 32th Annual GAPS Conference, Contested Solidarities, University of Frankfurt, May 27, 2022.
(with Julia Hoydis) "Literacy, Climate Action, and Quality Education: Three Cases for Diversity", Literacy and Diversity: New Directions (22nd European Conference on Literacy and the 46th Annual Conference of the Literacy Association of Ireland), Dublin City University, July 4-6, 2022.
"How Can We Read When Our Beds Are Burning? Teaching English Literature in Terrible Times", UNITE Summer School Sustainability in Schools andTeacher Education. International Perspectivesand Impulses, University of Cologne, September 19-23, 2022.
Current Projects | Aktuelle Projekte
Climate Change Literacy
(in collaboration with the University of Duisburg-Essen)
The project makes a necessary intervention within the rapidly expanding field of interdisciplinary climate change communication and against the background of science-centred literacy debates, which largely ignore the contribution of the humanities. It thus responds to urgent calls by scholars and policy-makers to address the challenge of climate change by paying attention to the complex embeddedness of climate change in individual and sociocultural contexts. Rather than offering ‘cli-fi’ book recommendations and reducing the function of literature either to a more pleasurable form of information transfer or to the affective dimension of evoking sympathy or concern, it develops a new notion of climate change literacy that is built on a reassessment of the cognitive, affective, and pedagogic potentials of literary writing. After laying the necessary theoretical groundwork, it moves to illustrate the specific contribution literary studies can make to an adequate understanding of and response to climate change through the analysis of a selection of popular contemporary climate novels. The project group consists of three scholars with expertise in interdisciplinary literary studies, cultural literacies, and education for sustainability.
Wissenschaftsforum zu Köln und Essen: Cultures of Climate
Together with Professor Jens Martin Gurr (University of Duisburg-Essen), I am speaker and PI of the project group "Cultures of Climate," as part of UoC/UDE's Wissenschaftsforum. The group engages with societal and cultural dimensions of climate change and research in, as well as communication of findings from, the humanities. Through a set of events and projects, from academic seminars and lectures to teacher training initiatives as well as citizen scholarship and political workshops, we are offering insights into literary, cultural, multimedial and educational ways of grappling with climate complexity and approaches to furthering socio-ecological transformations.
In various publications and talks I am exploring the intersections of educational and literary theories and the potentials of such a transversal outlook for literature pedagogy and the practice of teaching literatures and cultures in ELT contexts from primary school to university-level education.
Output (selection):
Research monograph: Literary Theory for Educators (in preparation).
Research monograph (edited with Julia Hoydis): Teaching the Posthuman (Winter 2019). (LINK)
Open-Access Journal publication (edited with Julia Hoydis): Reading in Ruins – Exploring Posthumanist Narrative Studies (Open Library of Humanities, publication in 2020).
Research article: "Literature Pedagogy in the Anthropocene" (in: The Anthropocenic Turn: The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age. Eds. Gabriele Dürbeck & Philip Hüpkes. Routledge, 2020).
Research article: "Posthumanism in Theory and (Reading) Practice" (in: New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel. Eds. Sibylle Baumbach & Birgit Neumann. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Keynote presentation: "Posthumanism and Literary Learning: Lessons in Relatability", (6. Tag der Englischdidaktik, Augsburg University, 2020).
Mediating Socioecological Emergencies: The Environmental Humanities for Well-being (EHWell)
(in collaboration with the Universities of Nantes (PI), Birmingham,Florence, Leiden and Linnaeus)
The project wants to position EUniWell as a trailblazer for a European space of teaching in EH to foster the well-being and empowerment of students, citizens, and communities in a new climactic regime. It recognizes the centrality of shared curricula development through international collaboration as a pivot for change via research and practice. Specifically, it will develop a rotating field study summer school for in-depth engagements with transnational questions for a sustainable Europe conceptualised and conducted by involved Universities and local communities. It will be an integral part of a transnational EHWell teaching module.
Death Writ Large: Extinction and the Environmental Humanities
The project investigates cultures of death and imaginaries as well as practices of dying in light of the existential threats of climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss and explores the pedagogic implications for a sustainability education in times of large-scale species extinction and the pre-trauma of run-away climate change.
Output (selection):
Research article: "Dying to Teach: Teaching Human-Animal Studies in an Age of Extinction". Multispecies Futures. New Approaches to Teaching Human-Animal Studies. Eds. Andreas Hübner, Micha Edlich and Maria Moss. Berlin: Neofelis, 2022.
Keynote presentation: “Teaching Animality in the Face of Extinction” (Teaching Human-Animal Studies, Leuphana University Lüneburg, 2020).
Conference presentation: “‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’? Death, Extinction, and the Limits of Competence Orientation” (Taboo Topics in Foreign Language Education, Würzburg University, 2020).
Lecture Seminar: “The Pandemic Imagination: Reading and Teaching Fictions of Crisis" (University of Cologne, Winter 2020)
Lecture Series (with Ute Planert): "a.r.t.e.s. moriendi" (as part of the a.r.t.e.s. Research Master programme) (University of Cologne, Summer 2021)
The project is associated with MESH, the University of Cologne's research hub for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities.
"Diversitätsorientierte Literatur-, Kultur- und Sprachdidaktik" (dilikus)
Die Reihe „Diversitätsorientierte Literatur-, Kultur- und Sprachdidaktik“ (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier) stellt sowohl anwendungsbezogene Forschung der Schulentwicklung und Unterrichtsforschung in Zeiten erhöhter bzw. verstärkt wahrgenommener Heterogenität als auch für Grundlagenforschung in den Bereichen der Inter-/Transkulturalität vor, der Mehrsprachigkeit und einer Pädagogik der Vielfalt und Anerkennung, die sich dezidiert mit den Implikationen für und Möglichkeiten der fachdidaktischen Praxis auseinandersetzt.
Band 1: Inklusion und Nachhaltigkeit (Hg. Roman Bartosch und Andreas Köpfer).
Band 2: Language Awareness bei mehrsprachigen Kindern (Johanna Jördening).
Band 3: Towards Transformative Literature Pedagogy (Hg. Roman Bartosch).
Band 4: Inklusion und Deutsch als Zweitsprache als Querschnittsaufgabe in der Lehrer*innenbildung (Hg. Anna Grosshauser, Andreas Köpfer und Hanna Siegismund).
Band 5 (i.V.): Englisch ganz praktisch. Eine Ermutigung (Ulla Schäfer).
