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10 July | Quick-Fire Talks – New Voices, Next Turns: Emerging Futures in Literary Research

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 brought together a constellation of researchers whose work opens up innovative perspectives on storytelling, temporality and literary practice.

The session adopted a dynamic format of short provocations, lightning talks and open-ended discussion. Participants responded to prompts that invited 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 considered how literature negotiates visions of the future, unsettles inherited hierarchies and offers new ways of thinking through our entangled ecological and political worlds. The panel thus aimed to provide space 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.

Topics of inquiry included:

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

Image Credit: S. Messner 2025 for EXC 2020 using a photo by Valeria Reverdo on Unsplash.

With:

FSGS = Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies

Julius Böhm (Comparative Literature | EXC 2020/FSGS) | Critique, Commodification, Re-Appropriation: Circulations of the Theory Book Since 1967

Melina Brüggemann (Comparative Literature | EXC 2020/FSGS) | After the Crisis of Representation: (Im-)Possibilities of Writing for Others in the 21st Century

Carla Dalbeck (French Studies | EXC 2020/FSGS) | (Trans)formation of National Poets: Transcultural and Transtemporal Dimensions of National Literary Value

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

Chiara Liso (Comparative Literature | EXC 2020/FSGS) | The (M)other Tongues of Contemporary Post-German Poetry

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

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

Omid Mashhadi (Performance Studies | EXC 2020/FSGS) | Amateur Performance and the Aesthetics of Bareness

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

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

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

Nathalie Rennhack (Early American Studies | EXC 2020/FSGS) | Publication and Media Politics in Early American Women's Writing

Anton Terhechte (China Studies | EXC 2020/FSGS) | On and Off the Shelves: Printed Islam in the Reform-Era People's Republic

Laura Untner (Digital Literary Studies | EXC 2020/FSGS) | 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 (English Studies | EXC 2020/FSGS) | Dismantling the Status Quo from Within: Prizeworthiness and Queer Working-Class Kinship