Research projects
Research projects
Online commentary on Michael Ende's "The Neverending Story" (1979)
DFG project
Following on from the currently developing Michael Ende research, the project aims to create a digital commentary on "The Neverending Story". There are currently no editions of Ende's texts that fulfil the requirements of scholarly editions. This applies to German-language children's and young adult literature as a whole. As a first step, the project is exploring what a commentary for a novel for young people might look like. In a second step, the different preliminary stages and variants in the German Literature Archive in Marbach and the International Youth Library in Munich will be documented and analysed from a text-genetic perspective. They will also be made available for further research on the project website. Insights into the genesis of the text will be incorporated into the commentary.
The project also addresses desiderata in German-language children's and young adult literature research: for example, the standards for an annotated digital edition of children's and young adult literary texts can be reflected on and tested in the project. Furthermore, the project can provide information on how scholarly, easily usable and digitally available annotations of rights-affirming texts can succeed. In this respect, the project can also provide an answer to the question of how to deal with texts of contemporary literature that are defended by the right in the context of digital edition and commentary projects.
Project leader: Prof. Dr Thomas Boyken
Collaborator: Dr Sarah Gaber
Cooperation partners: Prof. Dr Klaus Müller-Wille (University of Zurich), Prof. Dr Gerhard Lauer (University of Mainz)
Funding: DFG
Funding period: February 2026 to January 2029
Biopolitics in the Viennese feuilleton of the interwar period. Close readings and quantitative analyses of newspapers
DFG project
The DFG-funded research project is dedicated to the feuilleton of Viennese daily newspapers of the interwar period from a literary and knowledge-historical perspective and using methods of digital humanities and computational linguistics. At the centre of the investigation is biopolitical knowledge, in particular discourses on eugenics, hygiene and physical culture, which are formative for the media culture of modernity. The feuilleton of Viennese daily newspapers is of particular importance in this context, as the Austrian metropolis was a centre of medical-biological research and its popular communication in the interwar period and served as a socio-political laboratory for the reform projects of the Social Democratic municipal government of "Red Vienna". The project examines the two leading Viennese daily newspapers of the early 20th century, the Arbeiter-Zeitung and the Neue Freie Presse, which had a formative influence on political and cultural life, and thus focuses on the cultural and ideological tensions between Austromarxism and the liberal-bourgeois camp.
A special focus is placed on the literary texts published in the newspapers. Novels and stories published in the Arbeiter-Zeitung and Neue Freie Presse by authors such as Joseph Roth, Leo Perutz, Veza Canetti, Gina Kaus, Rudolf Brunngraber, Karel Čapek, Karl Schönherr and others reflect contemporary discourses on eugenics and physical culture in a dimension that has hardly been researched to date. The combination of the history of knowledge with media- and genre-related perspectives on the feuilleton is intended not least to illuminate the aesthetic dimension of biopolitical knowledge in the modern age of the early 20th century.
The processing of the two newspapers carried out by the Austrian National Library as part of the project will provide a comprehensive digital text corpus, which can then also be used to make methods from computational linguistics and digital humanities fruitful for data-driven research into the history of knowledge.
Project leader: Prof. Dr Urte Helduser
Collaboration: Wiebke Gärtner
Cooperation partners:
Prof. Dr Roland Innerhofer (Vienna/Linz)
Prof. Dr Nils Reiter (University of Cologne)
Type of funding: DFG, FWF (Weave)
Project duration: October 2025 to September 2028
More information on the project pages.
Colporta literature. Oldenburg fairground prints of the 19th century in a cultural and media context
Research project, Pro*Lower Saxony / Cultural Heritage
The research project, funded by the state of Lower Saxony (Pro*Niedersachsen / Kulturelles Erbe), aims to digitally catalogue, research and make accessible a unique cultural heritage of Lower Saxony: a collection of small prints from the 19th century held by the Oldenburg State Library.
Project leader: PD Dr Christian Schmitt
Cooperation partner: Oldenburg State Library
Duration: October 2023 - September 2026
Funded by zukunft.niedersachsen, the joint science funding programme of the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture and the Volkswagen Foundation.
More information on the project pages.
Post-war and Middle Ages: Children's and youth literature (1945-1970)
DFG project
Although research into post-war literature has experienced an enormous boom in the last ten years, one sub-sector has hardly taken shape: children's and young adult literature. This is highly regrettable, as the concentration on the literary crest loses sight of the breadth and differentiation of the literary field. The project makes a decisive contribution to opening up this field. Using the example of medieval themes and motifs in children's and youth literature between 1945 and 1970, the interrelationship between literary creation and integration into social and societal utilisation contexts will be examined. This motif/topic in particular clearly demonstrates the diverse exchange processes between adult and children's and young adult literature. In the research project, a different view of children's and young adult literature in the post-war period is supplemented by a change of perspective on a systematic level: children's and young adult literature is viewed as a 'hybrid form' of artificial-aesthetic and social-societal practices. This involves a praxeological definition of children's and young adult literature as an aesthetic-social practice.
Project leader: Prof. Dr Thomas Boyken
Staff member: Sofie Dobbener
As part of the project, a database has been created that bundles and filters the bibliographical data of the medieval children's and young adult literature found in the research.
Inclusive Philology. Literary Disability Studies in the German-speaking world
DFG network
The aim of the academic network, which is funded by the German Research Foundation, is to further establish the perspective of Literary Disability Studies in the German-speaking world. In addition to networking scholars interested in questions of Literary Disability Studies, the network is developing an elaborate theoretical toolkit for the literary and cultural-scientific exploration of figurations of disability in literary texts and other media configurations. Thirdly, literary-historical case studies are undertaken, in particular on German-language literature of the eighteenth century, classical modernism and contemporary literature, which reveal the multifaceted representation and discursivisation of disability. In this way, the network contributes to the theoretical profiling of Literary Disability Studies on the one hand and to the revision of the literary canon from a disability perspective on the other.
Contact person: Urte Helduser
To the project page.