Projects

Becoming Axolotl: Empathy, Simulation, and Embodiment in Medieval Narratives

Funded within MAPS (Mutlilateral Academic Projects) - a multilateral funding instrument with Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania, implemented under the second Swiss Contribution, mandated by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The project will go from July 2025 until July 2029. 

Situated at the intersection of coggnitive literary studies, affect studies, sensory studies, new materialism, and narratology, this project explores the role of medieval narratives in the simulation of cognitive, emotional, and snesorial experiences of radical others, both human and more-than-human (animals, plants, objects, spirits, gods, monsters). Considering a variety of encounters across and beyond medieval Europe (including Scandinavia, England, the Middle East, and the Byzantine and Mongol Empires), the three interlinked subprojects explore literature of a variety of genres from the eigth to the fifteenth centuries. 

Co-PIs: Prof. Dr. Annette Kern-Stähler (Bern); Dr. Mirko Sardelic (Zagreb); Dr. Catalin Taranu (Bucharest)

More information

Articulating Rubbish: A Sociolinguistic Approach to the "Crisis of Waste"

An SNSF-funded project running from May 2023 to April 2027, directed by Prof. Dr. Crispin Thurlow with doctoral researchers Charmaine Kong, Alessandro Pellanda and Laura Wohlgemuth. Whether we call it trash, garbage, junk, refuse, detritus, or just rubbish, waste is undoubtedly a matter of major concern: “With approximately 1.3 billion tonnes of municipal waste generated each year … urgent action is needed to head off the threat to the environment and human health posed by this global waste crisis.” (UNEP, 2012). Simply put, the Articulating Rubbish project asks the following question: what is the role of language in this “crisis of waste”? We know, for example, that language plays a powerful role in naming and categorizing the world around us. It is in this way that words not only help define what waste is and isn’t, but also help produce, maintain, and regulate the everyday practices of waste-making – both small-scale and large-scale.

More information

The Senses: Past and Present

Co-principal investigators: Prof. Annette Kern-Stähler (University of Bern), Prof. Fiona Macpherson (University of Glasgow), and Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow): This sensory studies project brings medieval sensory studies into dialogue with contemporary philosophy and science. Past international conferences and workshops, funded by the SNSF and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, at the Universities of Bern and Glasgow; 2023 conference at Monte Verità, Ascona, funded by Centro Stefano Franscini.

More information

Sensing Creation: Perception and the Book of Nature in Anglo-Saxon England (SNF Project Prof. Annette Kern-Stähler)

‘Sensing Creation’ seeks to uncover how learned Anglo-Saxon writers understood perception and how the senses allowed people to make sense of the world around them, that is God’s Creation. The project examines this interface between the senses and the external world both in the learned Latin texts which circulated in Anglo-Saxon England and in Old English vernacular writing. Where much recent research has utilised ecocritical theory to approach the ‘natural world’ in Anglo-Saxon England, this project instead turns to early medieval thinking about the external world, allowing us to understand medieval texts on their own terms. This way of examining medieval texts depends, moreover, on the Biblical metaphor of the ‘book of nature’, which signified that one could come to know God by studying his Creation. Central to this metaphor is the idea of reading, an act dependent on sight, hearing, and to a lesser extent touch, faculties of sense which we already suspect to have been of central importance in the Anglo-Saxon understanding of perception. Finally, this project, as the first systematic study of the senses in Anglo-Saxon England, will be a substantial contribution to this burgeoning field of inquiry.

Mediating the Ecological Imperative - Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl

The goal of this SNSF Sinergia project (2021-2024) is to research the way twentieth and twenty-first century cultural products respond to the ethical demands the ecological crisis places on our society and how this manifests in the formats that mediate these demands. Examples of these cultural mediations are part of a growing consciousness about the image politics of climate change and the role of cultural sustainability or examined according to the principles of contemporary eco-aesthetics and new documentary ecologies. We take the notion of an “ecological imperative” of cultural products—an ethical stance toward human resource management built upon Kantian terms—as a starting point. This SNSF Sinergia project builds on the rich research results of the Environmental Humanities and propels the state of the art by exploring the mediation of ethical demands engrained in images, literary texts and eco-ekphrases, expanded artforms, and practices of social engagement. We ask how specific formats in cultural production work intermedially to engender the ecological imperative. Our corpus differentiates between specific formats and modes from across the disciplines of image studies, literary studies, art history, and social anthropology. Our objects of study are examples of cultural products’ potential to inspire human beings to take action and to acknowledge the demands of an ecological imperative. Due to our common expertise, the geographical focus is on the Americas.

More information

The Beach in the Long Twentieth Century

August 2020 - July 2024. SNF Project. The beach is an important space in Western literature. Ever since the rise in popularity of the seaside holiday, the beach has been depicted as a site of leisure, sensuous enjoyment and play, clearly distinguished from and often in a dialectical relationship with industrialised and metropolitan spaces of work. Despite its significance as a spatial frame in fiction, travel writing and memoirs, however, the beach has played a relatively minor role in scholarship until fairly recently. This project seeks to redress this neglect, focussing on a period in which the beach has undergone dramatic changes, both in everyday culture and in literary and artistic representations: the ‘long twentieth century,’ dating roughly from 1890 to the present. Team: Prof. Dr. Virginia Richter, PD. Dr. Ursula Kluwick, Guðrun í Jákupsstovu.

More Information

Elite Creativities: Engaging the Language Work of Professional Wordsmiths

May 2020 to December 2023. SNF Project. In short, the Elite Creativities project seeks to make substantial contributions to the field of critical sociolinguistics. As a multi-sited discourse-ethnography, the project has four unifying aims: (1) to investigate three domains of professional language work largely or completely overlooked by language scholars; (2) to expand scholarship on language and political economy by looking at more elite, “high-end” forms of language work; (3) to generate new empirical insights into two cutting-edge issues in sociolinguistics and discourse studies, namely semiotic ideology and discursive creativity; and (4) to apply a discourse-ethnographic research design centering practitioners’ reflexive accounts of their work. Team: Prof. Dr. Crispin Thurlow (PI), Dr. Gwynne Mapes (postdoc) and Olivia Droz-Dit-Busset (doc). Affiliated doctoral researcher: Lara Portmann. Student Research Assistant: Nicolas Röthlisberger.

More Information

Canonicity, Obscenity, and the Making of Modern Chaucer (COMMode): An Investigation of the Transmission and Audiences of The Canterbury Tales from 1700 to 2020

January 2020 – December 2024. This SNSF Eccellenza project will recover the untold history of how Chaucer became both an icon of English literary fame and an icon of obscene humour by examining the evolution of his most famous text alongside the evolution of his reputation between 1700 and the present day. The project team includes Prof. Dr. Mary C. Flannery (project leader) and Dr Amy Brown (postdoctoral researcher) and will also include a doctoral researcher, who will join the project in the autumn of 2020.

More Information

Auto_Bio_Graphy: Historiographic Perspectives on Ego Documents/Personal Testimonies in Literature and the Visual and Performative Arts -- Prof. Dr. Gabriele Rippl

Dialect at the Fairground: Mobility and Language Variation among a Nomadic British Community

Nov. 2018 – Oct. 2022 SNF Project

This research project analyses the dialect spoken by Travelling Showpeople in East Anglia, England. Travelling Showpeople are a cultural group who live a nomadic lifestyle due to their occupation which mainly entails operating travelling funfairs. They are described as an extremely close-knit, family-centred community who have little contact with the settled population. Why is this interesting? Firstly, English dialectology has tended to shun nomadic speakers since they are often not deemed to represent authentic speakers of a place. Despite the existence of various nomadic groups in England, there has always been a strong focus on geographical continuity and local embeddedness. Secondly, the Travelling Showpeople are a relatively isolated community with a distinctive lifestyle. Analysing their dialect will enable us to theorise to what extent such speakers are able to acquire sedentary dialect norms and how language change enters such communities and is transmitted from one generation to the next. 

Project team: Prof Dr David Britain (PI) and Sarah Grossenbacher (PhD candidate).

More Information