Promoting Young Researchers

The ZfL attaches particular importance to the promotion of researchers in the early stages of their carreers.

Doctoral students can work at the ZfL primarily on ZfL Doctoral Positions (part-time 65%) for projects with a recognizable relevance to one or more of the program areas or within the framework of third-party funded projects.

A meeting of all doctoral students, organized in consultation with the management, is held once every semester.

In 2017, ZfL began awarding the Carlo Barck Prize for outstanding dissertations in the field of literature and cultural studies that pose innovative questions and display original conception. The prize money of 10,000 Euros is awarded as a six-month fellowship at the ZfL.

In conjunction with the International Walter Benjamin Society and the Walter Benjamin Archive, the ZfL awards the “Walter Benjamin Award for Young Researchers,” endowed with 4,500 Euros for young researchers to independently conceive, organize and conduct a two-day workshop.

Current Dissertation Projects

• Blumenberg and Psychoanalysis (Freud, Ferenczi, Klein)
  Florentine Emmelot
• The French Reception and Transformation of Pragmatism
  Moritz Gansen
• Scenes of Alternative Sociality in the Black Radical Tradition and Critical Theories
  Noah Grossmann
• Receptions of Antigone: Death, Life and Gender in Hegel and Butler
  Paula Magalhães
• Critical Recapitulations: Repeated Origins Between Evolutionary Biology and Marxist Theory
  Liola Mattheis
• Composition and Community: The Extra-Musical Imagination of Polyphony 1800/1900/1950
  Shira Miron
• Imagining Black Europe: Continuities from the Négritude Movement to Contemporary Afropean Literature
  Jenaba Samura