2 PhD Positions in Literary and Cultural Studies: Ecologies of Violence

As a PhD candidate you will be working on a subproject within the Consolidator Grant project EcoViolence (2024–2029) funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and directed by Dr Susanne C. Knittel (Principal Investigator, PI) at the department of Languages, Literature, and Communication. EcoViolence is an interdisciplinary, transnational, and comparative study of the cultural imaginary of environmental violence. The project’s aim is to understand how contemporary culture frames and remembers environmental degradation as violence; how it can make visible the deep historical roots that tie eco-violence to other histories of violence, especially colonialism and genocide; and how it articulates and reflects on questions of guilt, responsibility, and implication. EcoViolence will bring together research in cultural memory studies and ecocriticism in order to develop an innovative ecological model for the study of violence, its memory and representation. Furthermore, the project explores how these representations harness affect and emotion to promote critical self-reflection. The project focuses on narrative and visual media and takes a comparative, multilingual, and media-specific approach.