Poetics and knowledge cultures

The Institute of Slavic Studies Graz conducts interdisciplinary research in the field of cultural and literary aging studies. Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl conducts research on representations of ageing in Russian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, not least from the perspective of intersectionality, as well as on current generational discourses in Slavia. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the European Network in Aging Studies, to which she contributes her expertise on Eastern and South Eastern Europe. Together with Ulla Kriebernegg(CIRAC) and Florian Bieber(CSEES) and colleagues from Regensburg, Budapest and Sofia, Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl and Oana Hergenröther form the research team of the Volkswagen Foundation-funded project Transforming Anxieties of Ageing in Southeastern Europe: Political, Social, and Cultural Narratives of Demographic Change (2023-2027).
There is a long-standing cooperation with Tatjana Petzer's research focus on transformation aesthetics, which examines, among other things, counter-concepts to ageing, above all rejuvenation, immortality, trans- and posthuman existence in IT, art, medicine, natural science and philosophy.

Selected publications:

Gramshammer-Hohl, Dagmar; Hergenröther, Oana (eds.) (2021): Foreign Countries of Old Age: East and Southeast European Perspectives on Aging. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Gramshammer-Hohl, Dagmar (ed.) (2017): Aging in Slavic Literatures: Essays in Literary Gerontology. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Petzer, Tatjana (ed.) (2021): Immortality. Slavic variations. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.

Contact:

MMag. Dr. Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl

°°°synergiewissen is an open access lexicon and interactive space for interdisciplinary exchange on concepts and models, techniques and practices of interaction (synérgeia).
The wiki platform was founded by Tatjana Petzer as part of her project "Knowledge History of Synergy" (04/2010-03/2021), which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation with a Dilthey Fellowship. In her research, she continues to explore the meandering of energy and synergy discourses in religious and intellectual history, art and science.

Socio-ecological change is constantly producing new images of the future. Transformation, in turn, is designed from the future. Aesthetics - future - transformation are in a dynamic interplay. The future has been in vogue ever since the futures of modernity became a thing of the past. Following on from preliminary studies in the history of knowledge on the aesthetics of transformation in modernity, Tatjana Petzer's research focuses on

1. medial modeling of futurity as soft factors in shaping the future
2. body, human and spherical enhancement
3. future knowledge of material (vestimentary, architectural, global) cultures
4. ideological trends: immortology, futuro-synergetics,eco- and retrofuturism, trans- and posthumanism

Selected publications:

Petzer, Tatjana (ed.) (2021): Knowledge and belief. Figurations of the Synergo in Slavic Modernity. Paderborn: Brill, Wilhelm Fink.

Slavic Studies is participating in Cluster 2 of the focus area"Trans-Mediterranean Entanglements" with research projects on the aesthetics of the Mediterranean, its artistic representations and discursivizations:

• The Mediterranean in the literature of Russian-speaking emigration: An ambivalent place of longing (Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl)
• Poetics and knowledge of the Adriatic (Tatjana Petzer)

Lisa Haibl is also examining post-Yugoslavian narratives about the Adriatic prison islands of Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur in her doctoral project.

Tatjana Petzer is a member of the DfG network Russian Ecospheres. Forms of Ecological Knowledge in Russian Literature, Culture and History (2022-2025). Together with the two coordinators of the network, she publishes the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Ecological Culture, which analyzes concepts, forms of representation and knowledge practices of "ecological culture"(ėkologičeskaja kul'tura) in the Russian imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet space. The interdisciplinary handbook combines aesthetic, literary and cultural studies as well as environmental history perspectives on culturally specific, dynamic and medially mediated human-nature interactions as well as on social and artistic interventions in the ecosphere.

Selected publications:

Tatjana Petzer (ed.): Ecology in Eastern European Terminology. In: Forum Interdisziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte 12 (2023) 1. Berlin: Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research.

The project aims to establish a new research cooperation between the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Graz and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Ilia State University. The cities of Tiblisi and Graz are historically and currently transit spaces due to their location towards northern Eurasia and south-eastern Europe, areas that are strongly influenced by borders. Transit is not understood sociologically, but culturally and semiotically as a figure of thought of non-dwelling and transitory processes of "porosity" (Walter Benjamin). The aim of this pilot phase, which is funded by the OeAD with an APPEAR Preparatory Grant, is to establish a laboratory for research and education that addresses the dynamics between crisis and creativity in diaspora networks and makes an integrative understanding of transit/ion fruitful for teaching and multiplication processes.

With the help of Patrick Sanio, student assistant in research and teaching at the Slavic Studies Department in Graz and graduate of the summer school Literary Translation Slovenian-German in Premuda, Tatjana Petzer is publishing texts and memoirs by the advocate and author Ljuba Prenner from Slovenia in the interwar and post-war period. The anthology is published under the title "Nicht Mann, nicht Frau" by Klingenberverlag in Graz.