zurück

Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin

Literary and Cultural Research
At the ZfL, culture is considered in terms of its double origin in cult and téchnē, literature as a medium for the transmission of historically and culturally differentiated knowledge and as an archive of cultural memory.

Research Profile
The ZfL pursues interdisciplinary research in the areas of European cultural history and the history of science and knowledge; the methodology informing this research is tied to both philology and cultural research. It centers around the partly hidden imprint of premodern, especially religious, concepts, practices, and interpretive patterns upon modernity; and around the continuing impact of historical scholarly-scientific theories, concepts, and procedures that tends to be overlooked. The research focuses on problems that intersect with a wide range of disciplines, being located at key junctures between the humanities, the natural sciences, and the arts.

Political Engagement
The exploration—at times experimental and precarious—of procedures for interdisciplinary research is aimed at developing both an epistemology of cultural research and forms of cultural expertise in face of explosive questions related to the knowledge society and the "Europeanization of Europe." To these ends, present-day problems are studied in light of their basic historical premises: premises that are cultural, imagistic, and semantic in nature. This includes an inquiry into methodological-theoretical and terminological conventions.

History
Following a four-year preliminary period, the ZfL was founded in 1996 as one of six centers for research in the humanities. Since then, it and both the Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) and the Centre for  Modern Oriental Studies have formed the Centres for Advanced Study in the Humanities (GWZ).
Between 1996 and 2007 the GWZ was supported by the State of Berlin and the German Research Foundation (DFG). In addition, the ZfL secured funding from various sources including the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as well as private and public foundations.
Following a highly positive evaluation by the German Science Council, the ZfL has been supported since 2008 with an annual budget of approximately 2.5 million Euros by the State of Berlin, together with program-funding from the BMBF. At the same time individual projects are promoted by the BMBF, the DFG, and the VolkswagenStiftung.

Advisory Board
The scholarly board offers advice to the administration in the planning, realization, and evaluation of research projects. Since 2008 it includes the following members:
Jürgen Fohrmann (Universität Bonn)
Rodolphe Gasché (University at Buffalo, NY)
Michael Hagner (ETH Zurich)
Caroline Jones (MIT Cambridge, MA)
Helmut Lethen (IFK Vienna)
Vivian Liska (Universiteit Antwerpen)
Monika Wagner (Universität Hamburg)


Interdisciplinarity
Members of the ZfL represent various philological disciplines (comparative literature, German, Romance, Slavic, North American, and Arabic literature); cultural studies, aesthetics and art history, musicology, media studies, religious studies, Islamic studies, history of science, philosophy, and psychology.

Institutional Cooperation
Beyond the work on current projects, the ZfL has cooperative relations with institutions in Germany and abroad. Alongside universities and research institutes in the Berlin region, these include:

In addition, the ZfL works together with various cultural institutions in Berlin such as:


Visiting scholars, Fellows, and Honorary Members
Researchers from Germany and abroad whose work relates to projects of the ZfL are invited for short-term stays at the center as visiting scholars and fellows.

Some renowned scholars in the humanities who have worked very closely with the center have been named honorary members:
the art historian Hans Belting (Karlsruhe)
the theorist of art and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman (Paris)
the historian Carlo Ginzburg (Pisa)
the theorist of literature, psychoanalyst and author Julia Kristeva (Paris)
the theorist of images William J. T. Mitchell (Chicago)
the philosopher Michail Ryklin (Moscow)
the scholar of Germanic studies Irina Scherbakova (Moscow)
and Stéphane Mosès of blessed memory.

Library
The ZfL houses a publicly accessible research library with an emphasis on literary and cultural research. Approximately 1,200 new volumes and 175 current periodicals are acquired annually. At present the library's holdings amount to more than 44,000 volumes.
Go to Library


Publications
Results of the research at the ZfL are published in two book-series. Since 2003 seventeen titles have appeared in the Trajekte series (Fink Verlag); and more than thirty titles have appeared in the Literaturforschung series (Akademie Verlag; since 2006 Kulturverlag Kadmos). In addition, research results are frequently published with other presses (Fischer, Suhrkamp, de Gruyter etc.). Twice a year, the ZfL publishes its journal Trajekte.
Go to Publications



Read more (ZfL Brochure English/German)