EXC 2020 Temporal Communities

Part of the EXC 2020 Annual Conference 2025 "Futures of Doing Literature", 9–11 July 2025.

What futures can we imagine for literature – and for the ways we do literature – when we start from the margins, the footnotes, the postscripts or even the digital comment threads? This panel brings together a constellation of researchers whose work opens up innovative perspectives on storytelling, temporality and literary practice.

The session will adopt a dynamic format of short provocations, lightning talks and open-ended discussion. Participants will respond to prompts that invite them to reflect on their projects – Why this now? What does this do? – and formulate their own questions, challenging the boundaries of what we value as literature and how it acts in the world.

Together, we will consider how literature negotiates visions of the future, unsettles inherited hierarchies and offers new ways of thinking through our entangled ecological and political worlds. In doing so, we will create room for experimentation and critical curiosity – a space where the emerging voices of early career researchers can shed fresh light on the question of how literary research itself can become a practice of future-making.

We invite you to explore with us

• New takes on who literature is for, and where it happens – from Reddit threads to religious bookshelves to digital archives of reception.
• Critical engagements with storytelling as a method for confronting ecological crisis, postcolonial inequality, and the shifting politics of identity, humour and form.
• Early sparks of research projects already asking: What futures are we writing towards, and what futures do we resist?

  

With:

Julius Böhm (EXC 2020/Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies) | Critique, Commodification, Re-Appropriation: Circulations of the Theory Book Since 1967

Melina Brüggemann (EXC 2020/Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies) | After the Crisis of Representation: (Im-)Possibilities of Writing for Others in the 21st Century

Carla Dalbeck (EXC 2020/Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies) | (Trans)formation of National Poets: Transcultural and Transtemporal Dimensions of National Literary Value

Dhritii Dutta (University of Hyderabad/EXC 2020 Fellow 2025) | Internet Humour, Social Media, OTT Mediation and an Emancipated Spectatorship

Chiara Liso (EXC 2020/Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies) | The (M)other Tongues of Contemporary Post-German Poetry

Nicolas Longinotti (Freie Universität Berlin) | Translation, Moralisation and Female Agency in the Parnaso antártico: Ovid in the Spanish Colonisation

Pedro Mora Madriñán (EXC 2020/Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies) | Critical Theory on the Periphery of Capitalism: Literary Form and Contradictions of Progress in the Work of Roberto Schwarz

Omid Mashhadi (EXC 2020/Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies) | Amateur Performance and the Aesthetics of Bareness

Sulthana Nasrin (Jawaharlal Nehru University/EXC 2020 Fellow 2025) | Between Literate and Literary: Transnational Print Networks and Reading Aloud Practices

Elena Patrika (EXC 2020/Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies) | Textbooks of Ancient Greek Grammar at the Time of the Modern Greek Enlightenment: The Medium and its Technologies

Ananya Punyatoya (Jawaharlal Nehru University/EXC 2020 Fellow 2025) | From Canon to Commons: Global Community Narratives and Shared Sickness in the Digital Realm

Nathalie Rennhack (EXC 2020/Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies) | Publication and Media Politics in Early American Women's Writing

Anton Terhechte (EXC 2020/Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies) | On and Off the Shelves: Printed Islam in the Reform-Era People's Republic

Laura Untner (EXC 2020/Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies) | Paradigms of Digital Reception Studies: Productive Literary Reception Testimonies as Linked Data Using the Example of the German-Language Literary Reception of Sappho

Victoria Wirtz (EXC 2020/Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies) | Dismantling the Status Quo from Within: Prizeworthiness and Queer Working-Class Kinship

   

Initiated by Dîlan Canan Çakir (Research Area 5: Building Digital Communities), Rebecca Hardie (Articulations) and Viktor J. Illmer (Research Area 5: Building Digital Communities).