Literary and Cultural Studies, Performance, and Art

He is the author of Narrating the Prison (Cambria Press, 2007) and Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Alber received fellowships and research grants from the British Academy, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the Humboldt Foundation. In 2013, the German Association of University Teachers of English awarded him the prize for the best Habilitation written between 2011 and 2013. Between 2014 and 2016, he worked as a COFUND (Marie-Curie) Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) in Denmark. His project focused on the negotiation of Aboriginal identities in contemporary Australian narratives. Alber is currently President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN).

Entitled ‘Fielding Peter Carey’, his project accounts for a method of reading Carey’s oeuvre in relation to the promises and perils of the global publishing industry since the early 1970s.

He is interested in Carey’s work as part and product of the neo-liberal regime of publishing that has commodified his celebrity and his fiction. He has published on Carey’s archive and the literary field in JASAL. His forthcoming article on Carey’s Jack Maggs and world literature will be published in Antipodes later in 2018. His interview with the American-Australian writer Dominic Smith was published in Antipodes in June 2016. He also acted as the Postgraduate Representative of ASAL (Association for the Study of Australian Literature) between 2015 and 2018. He has taught in the areas of Australian literature, modern and contemporary literature and critical theory.

While doing research for her dissertation on Aboriginal Gothic, she stayed at the University of New South Wales, with a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service. She completed her PhD at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her thesis was published as Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film in 2010 and was nominated for the Walter McRae Russell Award for Literary Scholarship 2011. She also is a board member of the German Association for Australian Studies (GASt) and in 2018 hosted the biennial conference of the GASt on ‘Australian Perspectives on Migration’.

In her research, she focuses on Postcolonial and Indigenous Studies as well as law and literature and cross-media studies. Katrin has published widely in the area of Australian literature and has combined postcolonial approaches with the Gothic, as well as with law and literature studies. She held positions at the universities of Münster, Cologne, and Düsseldorf and since 2020 has been working as a research fellow at the Postcolonial Studies Section (Anglophone Studies) at the University of Duisburg-Essen. There, Katrin currently is pursuing her postdoc project ‘Narratives of Flight and Migration in Law and Literature,’ which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

One of the first people in Germany working on postcolonial ecocriticism and, more recently, literary education for sustainability, he is the author and editor of more than 12 books and over 50 scholarly articles spanning environmental and transcultural learning, inclusive education, and the intersections of literature pedagogy and literary theory. Recent publications include Interkulturelles Lernen mit Literatur: Fokus Nigeria (as co-editor; Klett Kallmeyer 2020) and, as editor, Cultivating Sustainability in Language and Literature Pedagogy: Steps to an Educational Ecology (Routledge, 2021).  His current work explores the potential of literacy and the role of literary fiction in education for climate action as well as the role of dissent and controversy in culture-sensitive and inclusive educational settings. A particular interest in this is in non-Western climate imaginaries and educational practice of indigenous communities in Australia and disadvantaged people in India. Other interests include questions of educational philosophy, especially in terms of modelling learning objectives in times of large-scale extinction and climate catastrophe, literary value, the intersection of literary studies and literature pedagogy, and multimodal literature and media pedagogies.

She gained her PhD at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès and wrote her thesis on Australian author Tim Winton. She then carried on her research as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lille and in 2018 joined the university of Toulon to become Professor of postcolonial literature. At an administrative level she has held the positions of Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Student Life; Head of Department and she is currently Dean of the Faculty of Languages, Literatures and Human Sciences. Her research deals with ecocriticism and poststructuralism in Australian fiction, issues of landscape and cultural discourse, and more recently with lenticular ontologies. Dr Ben-Messahel is a leading specialist on Tim Winton and has published widely on Australian literature. Her publications include monographs collective works and articles. She works in an international environment and as such has chaired the European Association for Studies of Australia (EASA). She is now part of the board of EASA and is involved with the editorial board of the Journal of the European Association for the Study of Australia (JEASA). In her home-institution, Dr Ben-Messahel is leading the research group “Translations, Textualités, Transmédialités” within the research centre BABEL (University of Toulon). Prof. Ben-Messahel is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.

From 2003 to 2005 she was a research assistant in the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Memory Cultures’ (University of Giessen, Germany). In 2003 she was granted a research stay at the Aboriginal Research and Resource Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney. In 2008 her dissertation on culture-specific narrative stagings of remembering in contemporary novels by Indigenous authors from Australia, Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand was published. She did research and worked in London, UK and Heraklion, Crete from 2007 to 2009. From 2012 to 2019 she was postdoc at the Department of English, American, and Celtic Studies, University of Bonn (with a research stay in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 2014). Research, teaching and publications focus on Indigenous Literatures and Cultures, Postcolonial Theories, Pacific Literatures, Narratologies and Memory Studies.

She convenes the Turkish Studies and Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies programs. Dr Cevik-Compiegne’s research combines archival and ethnographic research methods and focuses on the social and cultural legacies of the First World War and politics and practices of remembrance of the war in post-imperial and postcolonial nations. Her research uncovers intercultural experiences of the war and its current memorialisation among diasporas in Australia. Her current research explores Turkish diasporic life writing in Australia and in Germany. Burcu Cevik-Compiegne held a visiting fellowship at the Centre for Australian Studies in Cologne in 2023.

Her research interests include theories of settler colonialism and Indigeneity in Australia and Canada, feminist theories, women’s life writing, travel and nature writing. Book publications include Pursuits of Settler Belonging in Australian Post-Millennial Memoirs (Anthem, 2025), Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-fiction and Life Writing in Australia and North America (2017) and (co-authored) Alternatives in Biography: Writing Lives in Diverse English-language Contexts (2011). She served as the general editor of JEASA, European Association for Studies of Australia’s journal, and is a member of EASA. Martina Horáková is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.

She previously taught at the Universities of Klagenfurt, Cologne, Duisburg-Essen, and Cambridge. Her research interests in literary studies and the Environmental Humanities include the history and development of the English novel, narratology, literature and risk theory, posthumanism and new forms of digital literature, and climate change and extinction narratives across different media. Among her recent book publications are Climate Change Literacy (co-authored with Roman Bartosch and Jens Martin Gurr, CUP, 2023), the co-edited volume Aging Studies and Ecocriticsm (Lexington, 2023) and Risk and the English Novel (De Gruyter, 2019). Together with David Higgins (Leeds), she is currently Principal Investigator of the project “Just Futures? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultural Climate Models” (funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, the AHRC and the German Research Council DFG, 2023-2026), which explores questions of intergenerational justice and climate futures. She is general editor of the open access journal Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies and vice-president of the German Association for the Study of English (2022-2025).

Julia has a long-standing interest in postcolonial studies, with special focus on contemporary Anglophone Indian, African and Australian literatures and cultures. Since 2010, she has been an active member of the Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS). Her doctoral dissertation focused on ethics and historiography in the works of Amitav Ghosh (published as Tackling the Morality of History. Amitav Ghosh and the Ethics of Storytelling, Winter 2011). She is also particularly interested in research at the intersection of the environmental humanities, postcolonial and performance studies. Publications here include essays on Indigenous Australian dance theatre or on climate change drama, which includes works of Australian dramatists such as Stephen Carleton and Ian Meadows.

Her research interests combine didactic perspectives and literary/cultural criticism, focusing on the intersection between representations of identity and cultures in the context of school education. Her paper delivered at the conference “Nature and Environment in Australia” (Cologne, October 2016), “Australian Tropes of Nature: Representation and Appropriation in EFL Teaching” (forthcoming: pedocs, 2017), assesses the representation of Australian identity in English school teaching from a perspective of postcolonial scepticism concerning appropriate representation of cultures and identities in their complexity and fluidity.

This interest also extends to her academic teaching: “Teaching Australia in Postcolonial and Intercultural Perspective” (summer semester 2018) will explore the theoretical question of representing cultural identities in view of lesson and sequence planning for school teaching at lower and upper secondary levels, with a special focus on the genres of fiction and short film.

She was also involved in the organization and coordination of the Dr R Marika Chair for Australian Studies at the English Department of the University of Cologne (from 2010-2014).

His PhD project, entitled “Twenty-First Century Vibes: Stimmung in Contemporary Anglophone Literature” explores new ways to figure affective presences wothin contemporary works. His work with Bettina Burger on integrating new digital media technologies technologies into teaching Australian Studies has led to two ELFF (Elearning Förderfond) awards as well as the 2021 Digi-Fellowship awarded by the state government of NRW. Their courses, centering around the Australian Fantastic  and Blogging, have so far reached over 200 students. He works and collaborates closely with Bettina Burger and David Kern.

Her research is dedicated to the study of the poetics and politics of Anglophone literatures, to world literatures and transcultural exchange, to postcolonial ecocriticism as well as to intermedial configurations in postcolonial fiction. She is author, co-author and editor of a range of books and articles that explore post/colonial modes of articulation in literature and film.

Her current research projects focus on the polycentric network of Anglophone world literatures and on postcolonial ekphrasis/ literary visuality. Together with Juergen Reulecke she is general editor of the series Forms of Remembering/Formen der Erinnerung (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, since 2004). Recent publications include co-edited volumes on Anglophone World Literatures (Special Issue Anglia, 2017) and on Literary Environments: Ecocritical Theories and Ethics in Anglophone Literatures (anglistik & englischunterricht, 2018) as well as a number of articles on verbal-visual configurations in Anglophone Literatures. She is currently writing a monograph on Postcolonial Ekphrasis and Counter-Visions in Anglophone Literatures – Contacts, Contests and Translations.

Her research interests lie in Indigenous Futurisms, cli-fi, posthumanism, environmental colonialism, and decolonial ecology. Her most recent monograph in English is Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction (Peter Lang, 2017). Some of her recent papers in English include “Wording Mute Posthumanism in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book”, Antipodes, 36/1, 2022: 107-122; “Indigenous Futurism” in The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel, ed. David Carter (Cambridge University Press, 2023); and “Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius: Welcome to Australia’s ‘future past’” in Mapping the Megatext: Essays on Global Science Fiction, ed. Dale Knickerbocker (University of Wales Press, forthcoming). She has taught and lectured at universities in France, Croatia, Czechia, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Japan and Australia, and has presented at over thirty international conferences. She chairs the European Association for Studies of Australia (EASA) and serves on the advisory board of Peter Lang series World Science Fiction Studies. Her current project is on a third monograph on Anthropocene fiction and film, with a focus on Indigenous cultural production. Professor Polak is collaborating closely with Professor Adone and team.

He then worked as a journalist at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Adelaide, Sydney and Darwin before moving to Germany in 1996. In Germany, he has worked as a freelance writer, editor, translator and teacher. In 2009 he joined the English Department in Stuttgart, where he teaches courses on Australian literature and culture, African literature, and British literature and culture. His PhD, completed in 2016, examined the impact of the 1992 High Court Mabo decision on discourses of land and history in contemporary Australian fiction.

Her main research interests are postcolonial studies and eighteenth-century British literature and culture in a comparative European perspective. She is the author of Die verordnete Kultur: Stereotypien der australischen Literaturkritik (1990) – a study of the history of literary criticism in Australia – and Die Kunst der Kritik (2000), a study on the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s concept of criticism. She has edited three collections of essays on aspects of cultural transfer in 18th-century Europe as well as an anthology of Contemporary Indian Short Stories (2006).

She has published numerous articles on postcolonial theory and literatures, especially on Australian literature and culture. Together with Elisabeth Bähr, she has edited the collection of essays by Australian and German scholars, ‘And there‘ll be NO dancing’: Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australia since 2007 (Cambridge Scholars 2017). She has served on the board of the German Association for Australian Studies (GASt) and is a member of the association’s Academic Advisory Council as well as co-editor of its book series KOALAS.

More recently, she has specialized in the field of Precarity Studies and co-edited the collections of essays Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis: Planetary Precarity and Future Habitability (Routledge 2025), Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World (Brill 2022), and Representing Poverty in the Anglophone Postcolonial World (V&R unipress/Bonn University Press 2021). She serves on the steering committee of the international network “Challenging Precarity”.

A trained Americanist, she is interested in the transnational entanglements of Atlantic slavery. While her previous work examined American antislavery literature and looked at, among other literary genres, German immigrant women’s fiction in the United States, her current research explores German immigrants’ recruitment to and involvement in Australia’s cotton and sugar economies and how Atlantic discourses of anti/slavery reverberated in multifaceted ways in German immigrant writings in Australia. She is also working with Emma Christopher (UNSW) on a project tentatively entitled “Atlantic Slavery’s Long Shadow in the Pacific.”