Academic Career
Jasmin Bieber has been a doctoral candidate at the University of Konstanz since Fall of 2020 and performs research on travel literature and British women in the 18th century under the direction of Prof. Dr. Christina Wald and Prof. Dr. Øyvind Eide (University of Cologne). From November 2020 to April 2021, she earned a start-up grant for doctoral research from the Centre for Cultural Inquiry at the University of Konstanz.
During her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, she worked as a student research assistant and tutor in the Department of English Literature, for Prof. Dr. Dr. Aleida Assmann, among others, as well as in the Department of German Literature in European Context. As part of this work, she supported the research team led by Prof. Dr. Thomas Weitin in the digitalization of the “Deutscher Novellenschatz” and developed as well as taught methods of digital literary analysis. She concluded her master’s degree in English Language Literatures and Cultures at the University of Konstanz with a thesis entitled “Shakespearean Echoes in Blade Runner 2049,” which reflected her interest in the intersections of early modern literature and contemporary, digital methods and media.
Contact: jasmin.bieber@uni-konstanz.de / Twitter: @Jasmin_B
Courses and Talks
Summer Semester 2021: Proseminar Adventures of a 17th Century Female Pen: Aphra Behn und her Works.
Summer Semester 2020: Proseminar Unearthing Meaning: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and an Introduction to Literary Theory.
July 2019: Poster presentation at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 in Utrecht with the talk “Disentangling the Hairball: Observing International Style in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels in Network Visualisation”
July 2017: Presentation at the Graduate Conference of the Young Researchers Forum of the Society for Canadian Studies with the title “Comparing Conceptions of Space and the City in Raymond Chandler’s and David Montrose’s Detective Stories”
Summer Semester 2019, Summer Semester 2018, and Winter Semester 2015: Tutor in the Departments of English and German Literature
Disertation project
Travel writing draws attention towards manifold sites of cultural encounters. It documents instances of contact and contrast and is concerned with identity formation and affirmation in response to experiencing the unprecedented. Under the working title “Unprecedented Paths Beyond Europe: British Female Travel Writing, 1680-1780” the aim of this dissertation is to analyse British female travel writing of the 18th century and its negotiation of individual and collective identities through spatial relations. In order to critically engage with its primary sources, which have received relatively little attention in travel writing studies, the thesis will focus on representations of cultural, social and spatial dichotomies. The thesis is conceptualised on the basis of a three-fold distinction between British, (continental) European, and non-European cultural experiences and is therefore not only concerned with the impressions of a British individual in light of the foreign and ‘Other’, but also with spaces on a geographical or imaginative border and their cultural representation and significance. Cultural and gendered differences – also in relation to the female narrators’ constantly shifting social roles – are traced in the descriptions of and interactions with these multifaceted spaces. While offering complex conceptions of their encounters beyond Britain, the thesis will question whether these women travellers are able to completely unravel racial prejudices – as they have come to be commonly reproduced in British culture – or if the texts’ endeavours should rather be understood as strategies of decentring hegemonic relations of cultural and social systems. Therefore, Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality (1774-6), Lady Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters (1767), Justice’s A Voyage to Russia (1739), and Lady Craven’s A Journey Through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789) will be utilised as examples of potential counter-narratives. In an age of growing colonial and territorial expansion, these travel writings express sceptical as well as corroborative opinions on British, and to a further extent, ‘Western’ cultural superiority, which arguably pervades many European national identities to this day.