Antigone

„The Antigonistic Conflict: Funeral Policy and the Limits of Self-Conception of Modern Societies“

Funding: the VW Foundation "Forum Originality Suspicion"

In cooperation with the chair of political theory/ Prof. Dr. Marcus Llanque.

Detailed information, please see project pages.

Environmental Humanities (english)

Environmental Humanities as a major research focus of the University of Augsburg. The Environmental Humanities are institutionally associated with the Environmental Science Center (Wissenschaftszentrum Umwelt). In their membership and research agendas, the major disciplines of the humanities and social sciences at the university are represented. Besides, other schools and disciplines such as environmental sciences (especially geography), law, economics, computer sciences are also cooperating. The Environmental Humanities provide a platform of transdisciplinary research which brings together the manifold activities conducted at the University of Augsburg in the domain of environmental knowledge and research, emphasizing the special contribution that the humanities and social sciences can make to that transdisciplinary ecological knowledge.

Cultural Ecology Research Group

The Augsburg Cultural Ecology Research Group at the Chair of American Literature discusses recent texts and theories of ecocriticism and cultural ecology in colloquia, workshops, and conferences. The group cooperates with international partners, especially with Serenella Iovino (University of Turin), who was a guest professor and Humboldt scholar at the Chair of Amerikanistik from 2010 to 2012.

What Is Cultural Ecology?

Cultural Ecology is a transdisciplinary research paradigm in ecocritical literary studies developed in previous publications by Hubert Zapf such as Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie (2002), Kulturökologie und Literatur (2008) and newly systematized in Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts (2016). It presupposes that cultural systems and phenomena are interrelated with ecological ones, and that they can thus be analyzed in ecological terms. Building on work by Gregory Bateson, Peter Finke, and Wolfgang Iser among others, the approach proposes a theory of imaginative literature that considers literature itself as a particularly powerful form of cultural ecology. Its central assumption is that literature acts like an ecological force in the larger cultural system.

More information you will find : Cultural Ecology Research Group