Third-party funded projects
Story Machine - Exploring Implications of Recommender Based Spatial Hypertext Systems for Folklore and the Humanities
Prof. Dr Astrid Ensslin
DFG/AHRC, 2025-28, Bilateral Grant, 1.7m
Project StoryMachine, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, is a collaboration between Hof University of Applied Sciences, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the University of Hertfordshire, the University of London, the University of Regensburg and the University of the Arts London. It aims to preserve, explore and provide greater access to folklore traditions in Germany and the UK, through the development of a digital infrastructure called StoryMachine.
Transitions: Examining Changing Regimes of Sexuality in Post-Soviet Muslim Republics
Prof Dr Timothy Nunan
DFG/AHRC UK-German Funding Initiative in the Humanities, 2025-2028, 700.000€
A description of this research project is forthcoming.
Triangle of Hubris: Iran, Iraq, and the United States, 1991-2003
Prof. Dr Timothy Nunan and Dr Dani Nassif
Thyssen Foundation Project, 2025-2027, 190.000€
This research project investigates the trilateral relationship between the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, and the United States from 1991 to 2003, a pivotal era between the Gulf War and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Our central aim is to determine how Washington and Tehran understood the Ba'athist regime and assessed the potential for regime change throughout the 1990s. The project is uniquely positioned to address this through a synergy of newly accessible historical sources: recently-released Iraqi state files (1968-2003) provide a detailed view of Saddam’s perspective, while new American archives, notably the papers of Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul Bremer III, and Iranian printed sources reveal the calculations of Iraq’s adversaries. Led by Prof. Dr. Timothy Nunan in conjunction with Dr. Dani Nassif, this work promises a significant contribution to the historiography of Baʿathist Iraq, the Iraq War, and the post-Cold War international order.
Literary Journalism in the Cold War: Affective Structures of Transperipheral Solidarity in Images of Thought between Ryszard Kapuściński and Gabriel García Márquez
Dr Joanna Moszczyńska (Professorship: Prof. Dr Anne Brüske)
Walter Benjamin position, since 2024
In Dr Moszczyńska's current research project, she is investigating the aesthetic and socio-political interdependencies between the work of Ryszard Kapuściński and Gabriel García Márquez in the context of the conflict between the USA and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. García Marquez's documentary narratives about the countries of the Eastern Bloc and Kapuściński's about Latin America convey ideas about socialism/socialisms and are integrated into the affective processing of experience through the representation of socialist spaces and encounters with the Other.
By elaborating a philological and cultural studies approach to socialist affects, the research project focuses on narrative frames of thought that are affectively attuned to lived historical moments and aims to uncover certain affinities - thematic, structural, genre-related - between the two authors as they raise social and political issues relevant to the Cold War period. The project thus makes a contribution to the transnational history or, for example, the intertwined history of the intellectual left as well as to genre research.
The emancipation of the Uyghurs as a back door to China: Soviet disputes with China and Turkey over East Turkestan/Xinjiang in the twentieth century
Dr Siarhei Bohdan (Professorship: Prof. Dr Timothy Nunan)
Gerda Henkel Foundation, 2025-2026
In this project, Dr Bohdan plans to examine how the Soviet Union supported Uyghur nationalist movements in the twentieth century, both during the existence of the Republic of China and the First and Second East Turkestan Republics, and later after the founding of the People's Republic of China. Bohdan plans to conduct research trips to Kazakhstan, Turkey, and other countries to explore how Moscow's policy toward Uyghur groups changed after the Sino-Soviet split and as the Republic of Turkey courted Uyghur nationalist groups.
"FEMTRACK: Menstruation, Tracking Apps, Bodies & Identities"
Prof. Dr Astrid Ensslin (Associate Researcher)
Marsden Fund New Zealand, 2023-2027
Project management: Prof Sarah Riley (external link, opens in a new window)
The homepage of the project can be found here. (external link, opens in a new window)
"The knowledge of digital literature" (Knowledges of Digital-born Literature)
Prof. Dr Astrid Ensslin (Associate Researcher)
DFG Network, 2025-2028
Project management: Dr Annette Gilbert, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg (external link, opens in a new window)
The homepage of the project can be found here. (external link, opens in a new window)
Qualification Projects
Habilitations
- Laura Niebling (Habilitation, @Media Studies, SLK): Medizinnetze / Netzmedizin.
- Gal Sela (Postdoc, Planned Habilitation, @DIMAS) Beyond Talmud: Magic, Law, and Gender in Late Antique Babylonia
- Minerva Peinador (PostDoc, @DIMAS, SLK, Brüske):
Intervención migrante en España o ¿es posible descolonizar Europa? (C)rea(c)ción artística y literaria de colectivos latinoamericanos en España y la reimaginación de la comunidad (Spanish)
Dissertations
- Barbara Aranda (Dissertation, @DIMAS, SLK, Brüske):
Más allá de las fronteras del héroe: Reimaginar las narraciones de viajes en la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea - Teresa Puchinger (First supervision, University of Heidelberg, Université des Antilles, @DIMAS, SLK, Brüske): Faire semblant, faux-semblant, reconfiguration : Lakomédi-a kréyol de Raphaël Confiant entre fresque balzacienne et simulacre créole
- Felicitas Loest (Co-supervision, University of Heidelberg, @DIMAS, SLK, Brüske)
- Sebastian Richter (Dissertation, @DIMAS, SLK, Ensslin): Failure in Games: Phenomenology and Action Theory
- Edip Sönmez (Dissertation, @DIMAS, SLK, Ensslin): The Societal Implications of AI in the Cultural Industries
- FS Schönberg (Dissertation, @DIMAS, SLK, Ensslin): The Hard Core of Games: Narratological and Persuasive Potential in Reading and Employing Formal Game Elements
- Jordan Ashworth (First Supervision, University of Alberta, @DIMAS, SLK, Ensslin): Doing Glitches in Speedrunning: A Case Study of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
- Max Dickeson (Co-supervision, University of Alberta, @DIMAS, SLK, Ensslin): Social Rolls: Narrative Play and Social Interaction in Tabletop Role-playing Games
- Melanie Oberg (Co-supervision, University of Alberta, @DIMAS, SLK, Ensslin): Games Without Language: Reading the Story of Silence
- Mira Faltermeier (Dissertation, @DIMAS, Law, Krämer-Hoppe)
- Paul Schillinger (Dissertation, @DIMAS, PKGG, Nunan):
The Other's Episteme: Indigenous Knowledge in Colonial Settings
- Barbara Wimmer-Bulin (Dissertation, @DIMAS): Konkurrierende Zugriffe auf Landschaft. Von Arkadien zur Agrarindustrielandschaft: Sozio-ökologische Konflikte im Zuge der Agrarindustrialisierung im Naturschutzgebiet an der Südwestküste Portugals. Eine ethnographische Fallstudie.