Promoting Young Researchers

The ZfL attaches great importance to the promotion of young researchers. Funding opportunities for doctoral students include:

• ZfL Doctoral Positions (part-time 65%) for projects with a recognizable relevance to one or more of the program areas
• doctoral positions within the framework of projects with outside funding

A meeting of all doctoral students, organized in consultation with the management, is held once every semester. In addition, each year the ZfL organizes an International Summer Academy related to its annual topic, open to doctoral students and post-docs from around the world.

In 2017, ZfL began awarding the bi-annual 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

• “Écrire dans la langue de l'ennemi”. The Concept of Autosociobiographical Writing in Contemporary French Literature
  Christina Ernst (Project Neighborhood in Contemporary Berlin Literature)
• The French Reception and Transformation of Pragmatism
  Moritz Gansen
• Empowering the Collective. Describing Music Cultures in Black Sound and Cultural Studies
  Noah Grossmann
• Historical Narratives in the Works of Soviet Yiddish Writers
  Irina Kissin
• Metaanthropology. An Epistemic Poetics of the Ethnographic Form
  Andreas Lipowsky
• Symbiotic Worldview. Theories and Practices of Coexistence in the Anthropocene
  Salome Rodeck