Lise Meitner Senior Fellow (Research)

Supported by a program of the Austrian Research Council (FWF) for the internationalisation of academia (project number  M 1290-G20)

Research Interests

• Theories of affect and literary representations of emotion
• The psychological principles of empire building
• Intellectual colonisation and decolonisation
• Cognitive studies of literary and non-fictional texts
• Literature, science and pseudo-science; scientific popularisation
• Definitions of human nature

Teaching

• Postcolonial literature and theory
• Shakespeare and early modern literature
• Literature and culture of the age of Enlightenment and Romanticism
• Travel writing; literary representations of discovery and exploration
• Australian studies

Current Project (with Prof. Dr. Margarete Rubik as co-investigator):

Emotion and the Formation of Colonial Mentalities: A Cognitive Approach to the Cultural Impact of Exploration Literature, c. 1750-1850

This project examines the role of emotion in the portrayal of cross-cultural relationships during the early phases of European empire building. Concentrating on representations of cultural difference in scientific and imaginative accounts published from eighteenth and nineteenth-century journeys of exploration, it examines the threat to identity posed by expansionist aspirations. This project addresses an important gap in current research when it discusses emotion as a seminal but still insufficiently understood factor in the development of cultural hierarchies. It proposes to apply techniques from cognitive psychology to the study of emotional conflicts pervading early descriptions of cross-cultural encounters. Detailed interpretation of a broad range of literary and non-literary texts will explain how the explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resolved the conflicting emotions triggered by strongly divergent cultures. A cognitive analysis of the source material will examine the subliminal processes behind the development of a proto-colonial mentality in order to shed light on the role of voyaging accounts as instruments of colonial propaganda.
The project is designed as a conduit for forging strong links with international academics in the field of emotion studies, particularly with colleagues working at the Australian multi-university Centre of Excellence for the Study of the History of the Emotions (with nodes at the University of Western Australia, the University of Melbourne and the University of Queensland).

Qualifications

• 2011  „Habilitation“ (and “Privatdozentin”), Institute for English Philology, Free University of Berlin
• 2002  Master of Arts in creative writing, University of Canberra, Australia
• 1996 PhD in English literary history, Cardiff University, GB
• 1993 Master of Arts in critical and cultural theory, Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University
• 1990 “Licentiat” (first degree) in English studies, German literature and art history, Univ. of Zurich

Selected Publications: Monographs and Edited Collections of Essays

• 1998 A Contradiction Still: Representations of Women in the Poetry of Alexander Pope, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. (viii + 245 p)
• 2001 (with Christopher Norris, ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 9: Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, 2001. (xiii + 482 p)
• 2002  Editor (with Robert Maccubbin, ed.) of a special issue, entitled Exoticism and the Culture of Exploration, of the refereed journal Eighteenth-Century Life 26.3 (245 p)
• 2004 (with Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones and Iain McCalman, ed.), The Enlightenment World, Routledge, 2004. (714 p)
• 2008   (with Jane Goodall, ed.), Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780-1830, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. (xi + 225p)
• 2008  Faustus and the Promises of the New Science:  from the Chapbooks to Harlequin Faustus, c. 1580-1730, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. (vii + 208 p)
• 2009   (with Margarete Rubik, ed.), Stories of Empire: Narrative Strategies for the Legitimation of an Imperial World Order, series: Studies in English Literary and Cultural History, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag (256 p)