Alice Borrego, Héloïse Lecomte, Esther Peeren, and I are calling for papers for a conference on „Cultures of In/Visibility and In/Audibility“, 23-24 April 2026, held at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis.
The deadline for abstracts is 31 October 2025.
Please see the full CfP below:
My new book on In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Narratives of Invisibility will be out in November 2025. Find out more on the book here: https://link.springer.com/book/9783032026385
Last week my postdoctoral/professorial dissertation, the Habilitationsschrift, was accepted by the Faculty of Languages and Literatures at LMU Munich and I was awarded the degree of Dr. phil. habil.! This qualifies me to teach English Literature as an associate or full professor in German-language academia (the so-called venia legendi, or right to teach).
The manuscript deals with In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Modern Narratives of Invisibility, ranging from the eighteenth-century novel through Romantic poetry, Victorian Gothic fiction, and the modernist text to contemporary literary responses to surveillance capitalism. I am now working on turning the manuscript into a book and will next present some of its eighteenth-century readings at an invited lecture at the University of Siegen on 8 July, 2024.
Two years after I organised a workshop on The Literature of Invisibility at the Center for Advanced Studies of LMU Munich, a selection of contributions on the state of invisibility studies and its particular relevance for contemporary literature has come out as a special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Many thanks to all the contributors and editors! https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/zaa/html#latestIssue
Follow this DOI for my introduction: https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2039
Esther Peeren’s „Afterword: Running with the Metaphor of Social Invisibility“ is available open source: https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2023-2045
Contents:
This week I submitted my manuscript In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Modern Narratives of Invisibility to LMU’s Faculty of Languages and Literatures as my Habilitationsschrift. The manuscript offers readings of authors from eighteenth-century novelists and poets Eliza Haywood, Susanna Rowson, and Anna Letitia Barbauld to nineteenth-century writers John Keats, James Forbes Dalton, Fitz-James O’Brien, and H.G. Wells, to twentieth-century and twenty-first-century authors G.K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, China Miéville, and Jennifer Egan. In German-language academia, the Habilitationsschrift is the major requirement of qualifying for the postdoctoral degree of Dr. habil., which is, in turn, the requirement for applying to the positions of associate and full professor in Germany.
Mit dem Verhältnis von Literatur, Philosophie und Rhetorik im Zeichen der Unsichtbarkeit setzt sich ein neuer Aufsatz auseinander: “Compound Invisible Objects”: Moralischer Charakter, literarische Figur und die Gyges-Problematik bei Adam Smith und Eliza Haywood. Herausgegeben ist er von Wolfgang G. Müller und Rainer Thiel als Teil von Band 5 (2022) der Internationalen Zeitschrift Kulturkomparatistik mit dem Themenschwerpunkt „Literatur – Philosophie – Ästhetik“. Der Volltext ist verfügbar unter: https://izfk.uni-trier.de/index.php/izfk/article/view/IZFK-5-08-Compound-Invisible-Objects/66
The chapter is on Poe’s “The Devil in the Belfry” and “William Wilson” in particular, and it’s part of a great handbook of The American Short Story, edited by Erik Redling and Oliver Scheiding: please click here for the abstract
This article by Isabel Kalous and me on the visualisation of surveillance on scholarly book covers has just come out with On_Culture: https://www.on-culture.org/journal/perspectives/covering-surveillance/
As part of the international lecture series on „Invisible Lives, Silent Voices“, I’m very happy to be speaking about „The Invisible Author, Then and Now“ in the session on „Invisible Writers“ this Thursday on 9 December, 6pm. In the same session, Christine Reynier will be speaking about „Invisible Novels of the Interwar Period: The Case of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926)“. For access to the Zoom meeting, please contact the organizers at invisibilitysilence@gmail.com or drop me a line.
The international seminar „Invisible Lives, Silent Voices“ is organised by Alice Borrego, Guillaume Le Blanc, and Héloïse Lecomte. You can find out about the other sessions here: https://invisibilitysilence.wordpress.com/programme/
Great news: I have been granted LMUexcellent funding to go to UC Berkeley as a Visiting Scholar as part of the LMU-UCB exchange programme, thanks to the fantastic support of Professor Dorothy Hale. Covid-permitting, I’ll be spending one month at UCB in the fall semester 2022 to present and continue my work on invisible characters and the novel.