Over the course of this year, quite a few mid- and long-term projects I have been involved with will be completed. The first of these is titled “Poetics of Politics.” It started as a conference our research initiative organized at Leipzig University in June 2013 (The conference website holds video clips of most of the presentations). In the meantime, our conference participants and a few additional contributors have further developed their ideas on the interrelation between a presumed recent ‘political turn’ in literature and a ‘poetic turn’ in politics. The resulting essay collection will be published at Heidelberg’s University Press “Winter Verlag” in late April.

For more information (including a table of contents), check out our research initiative’s book page, or Winter’s website, or the book blurb at Amazon.de. More events soon: a few conferences and some time in May, eventually, the monograph Fellow Tribesmen hot off the printing press!

UPDATE May 2015: The collection Poetics of Politics has been published in late April. We are glad that this project emerged out of a very successful symposium and that the subsequent book took less than two years to compile and edit. We will be proud to have the book on the table during the upcoming annual meeting of the German Association of American Studies in Bonn.