Victorian Studies
The 19th century represents an important focus in teaching and research, where we pursue an interdisciplinary approach to our readings of Victorian novels, foregrounding the significance of both Victorian and contemporary theories and discourses with regard to physiology, philosophy, phenomenology, affect theory, and gender studies.
Shame in Victorian Fiction
In her post-doc project “The Performativity of Victorian Shame: Materialist-Discursive Perspectives on the Shame Affect in the 19th-Century Novel” (working title), Anja Hartl examines experiences and representations of shame in Victorian literature. Drawing on a wide range of theories, most notably affect theory and New Materialism, Hartl explores how shame is constructed socially and discursively and which functions it is attributed in selected novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde. Focusing in particular on how the texts represent, negotiate and instrumentalise shame, Hartl identifies eminent political and ethical concerns in the novels’ conceptualisations of shame that radically question the sexual norms, conventional gender roles and the political status quo of the time, while also pointing to the limits of affective emancipation. In this sense, shame experiences in 19th-century fiction function as a testing ground for identity formation and emancipation – both individually and socially.
Energy Infrastructures in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
In her post-doc project “Energy Infrastructures in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press” (working title), Julia Ditter examines the representations of energy infrastructures in the nineteenth-century Anglophone periodical press. She posits that the periodical press of the nineteenth century played a central role in the creation of systems and epistemologies of energy that continue to structure our understanding of and relationship with energy today. In particular, she is interested in the affordances of the periodical as a miscellaneous literary form for creating and negotiating energy imaginaries, the connections between energy infrastructures and the British Empire, and how understanding these imaginaries and connections may help us grapple with our relationship with energy today.