ANNOUNCEMENT

We are pleased to officially announce the birth of MERIDIANO. Inter-Institutional Network of Social Sciences and Humanities, a new non-profit inter-institutional network founded from the Southern Cone by Chilean intellectual Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo.

MERIDIANO brings together 24 institutions — universities, scientific societies, and doctoral programs — from Latin America, the United States, and Europe, with the purpose of contributing to the construction of new knowledge circuits, open and non-profit.

EVENT

Dear friends and comrades. 

This year we have launched a wonderful and much-needed intellectual and inter-institutional network that brings together more than 20 universities, doctoral programs, master's programs, faculties, and societies—a wonderful network that I have the immense honor of leading and that is now entering its consolidation phase with a major event hosted by the University of Santiago de Chile, the University of Los Lagos, the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Chile, and the National University of Córdoba.

We invite you to the inaugural event titled: “Mapping the 21st Century: Silvia Federici in Our Intellectual History."

Silvia Federici is one of the most prominent researchers and intellectuals on the contemporary scene, an intellectual committed to political struggles who, even today—in times of struggle and resistance—continues to shape the horizon of our era.

We hope you will help us share this registration link, and we extend our invitation to you to attend this important gathering

Throughout 2026, we will be establishing new spaces to help foster new debates and dialogues.

Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo

Principal investigator: PD Dr. Tim Lanzendörfer

Reading in the Age of Trump: The Possibilities, Politics, and Futures of Literary Studies (Now) is a DFG-funded Heisenberg grant project led by PD Dr. Tim Lanzendörfer. The project investigates the current state of literary theories and literary studies through the lens of reading, understood here as a theoretical problem. It is build on three principal pillars:

1. Contemporary literary theory, the problem of critical reading, and the modes of reading that should shape literary studies' engagement with the world. In this part of the project, a discussion of the last decade or so of Anglophone literary theory will lead to a new theorization of the project of literary studies as an academic discipline. It will conclude in a monograph, currently entitled “Reading in the Age of Trump: Literary Studies in the Postfactual University."
   
   
2. Contemporary literature and its interest in reading, expressed both as metaphorically coded, as formally and structurally presupposed, and as directly represented. Reading protagonists, metaphors of reading in contemporary fiction, and ways in which novels facilitate or complicate their own reading are all part of this wide-ranging effort at re-reading reading in the contemporary novel. This part of the project will conclude in a shorter monograph, currently entitled “Reading Reading in the Contemporary American Novel."
3. The public face of literary studies and its social uses, investigated as  part of a larger desire to think through the relevance of the public literary humanities especially in the “age of Trump" and all that that means. This project will conclude with a short German monograph entitled “Nichtfaschisten Machen, oder: Literaturwissenschaftsvermittlung und die Frage, warum wir Bücher nicht nur lesen sollten.“

The DFG-funded research project „Play|Experience: Art and (Post)Critique in Transmedial Contexts between Games and Literature" is partially related to this project.

Project Investigator: Max José Dreysse Passos de Carvalho, MA

Play|Experience is a DFG-funded research project that investigates the narratives of videogames from a variety of theoretical as well as empirical angles. Central to this endeavor is the category of (aesthetic) experience, which stands as a contentious notion at the heart of numerous debates across the contemporary humanities.

The project is after the specificities of ludic experiences, which it seeks to draw out by juxtaposing them with analogous discussions on experiantiality in literary contexts. At the same time, it takes the controversies surrounding recent forays into the primacy of aesthetic experience, including but not limited to literary postcritique, as jumping off points to question the status of experience across diverse aesthetic forms altogether. Does aesthetic experience even matter? Why? How? Vice versa: is there anything other than experience that matters about art? If so, what? The project starts out from the assumption that the study of games is particularly suited to producing insights into these form-transcending problems, but it also argues that these more general, theoretical concerns on aesthetics, art, and narrative, can help us improve our understanding of games.

Among other things, Play|Experience hopes to develop our methodological grasp on the ways game narratives are usually talked about: what distinguishes the review from the critique from the postcritique? What, across all of this, is the status of interpretation? These problems the project addresses in light of the commodified reality of commercial game production today, which is as marked by ruthless and exploitative labor practices as it is by manipulative monetization schemes. Inevitable too, then, is the question of how art and commodity relate to one another.

Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities):

https://www.forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de/index.php/en/projects/democratic-vistas

Spokespersons: Prof. Dr. Johannes Völz and Prof. Dr. Gunther Hellmann
30 Professorial Members, among them Prof. Dr. Heike Schäfer