Events
01 Jul 2025
Working Group
Towards Queer Counterpublics. Semi-Peripheral Archive Theory after the “Archival Turn”
08 Jul 2025
Film screening & discussion
Playful Politics: An Evening with Dušan Makavejev’s “WR: Mysteries of the Organism” (1971)
10 Jul 2025
Reading & discussion
Leben und Schreiben im (Berliner) Exil – Belarussische Spurensuchen zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit
17 Sep 2025 – 19 Sep 2025
Conference
Natural-Cultural Memory in the Anthropocene. Tracing – Archiving – Remembering

The ZfL
The ZfL is a humanities institute for literary research in interdisciplinary contexts that draws from a cultural studies framework. Its methods also engage with the structural transformations within historical-hermeneutic subject areas that have taken place in recent decades. In contrast to the study of literature at universities, predominantly organized by nationality, the ZfL fosters a broad concept of literature, but also uses interdisciplinary tools to fundamentally question the etiology of various literary concepts, their potential for the future, and the relationship between literature and other arts or cultural practices. This is done in the three program area History of Theory, World Literature, Knowledge of Life, and in the key projects.
News

Cultural property seized during Nazi persecution: Five German cultural institutions restitute 221 books to the descendants of Henry Torrès

Job advertisement: Student assistant (m/f/d) to the project “The Philology of the Physicists”
Research
History of Theory
analyzes the genealogy of theory and develops innovative forms of historicizing it.
read moreWorld Literature
disusses the global interrelations of literature and its potential to shape the world.
read moreKnowledge of Life
investigates the knowlege of life in historical and interdisciplinary respects.
read more