Poetics and knowledge cultures

The Institute for Slavic Studies Graz conducts interdisciplinary research in the field of cultural and literary Aging Studies. It is represented by Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl, whose work focuses on representations of aging in Russian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literature, including from an intersectional perspective, as well as on contemporary generational discourses in the Slavia. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS), where she contributes expertise on Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Together with Oana Hergenröther (until 2024), Ulla Kriebernegg (CIRAC), Florian Bieber (CSEES), and colleagues in Regensburg, Budapest, and Sofia, she is part of the research team for 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 collaboration with Tatjana Petzer, whose main area of research focuses on transformation aesthetics. Among other topics, Tatjana Petzer examines alternative concepts of ageing – in particular rejuvenation, immortality, and trans- and posthuman existence across computer science, art, medicine, the natural sciences, and philosophy. The results of these two perspectives were discussed at the joint conference Transforming Representations of Aging in Southeast European Literature and Film (SEE Aging Graz), which took place in September 2025.

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): Unsterblichkeit. Slawische Variationen (Immortality. Slavic Variations). Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.

Contact: 

Priv.-Doz. MMag. Dr. Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl

As part of its structured doctoral training programme, the Chair of Slavic Literature and Cultural Studies participates in several doctoral programmes. These programmes accommodate a wide range of research interests, including Slavic literatures and cultures in the context of - digitalisation and artificial intelligence, 
- transformation aesthetics and intermediality, 
- discourses on the Mediterranean and South-Eastern Europe. 

Current postdoctoral research and qualification projects for obtaining the venia legendi are discussed in our habilitation forum, which convenes at regular intervals for working meetings and small-scale workshops. 

According to Walter Benjamin, in an essay from 1916, lamentation is the “powerless expression of language”. At the same time, however, lamentation marks a step away from speechlessness, as grief is transformed from silence into musical lament. This project focuses on the tradition of lamentation among the Slavs, which has been practiced since the 20th century and has recently experienced a resurgence in response to wars and social trauma. It examines:

- the broad spectrum of lamentation and accusation, from ritual mourning to polyphonic lament songs;
- regional variations in the use and practice of lamentation;
- the social role of lamenters in liminal community situations;
- transgenerational and somatherapeutic aspects of lamentation;
- poetry in the biblical tradition of kinot,
- the emotional experience evoked by the written word.

In addition, the project <polyphon> provides an experimental space for communal singing and the exploration of traditional and artfully composed lamentation arrangements, as well as Slavic vocal traditions more broadly.

Events: 

Klang und Klage (Sound and Lamentation) in cooperation with KULTUM, 18 November 2023

Live recording of the vocal performance by Hilde Kappes & Anna Petzer (Berlin), the reading with Sofia Andruchowytsch (Kyiv), and the audiovisual performance by Svitlana Zhytnya & Nick Acorne (Kharkiv/Graz)

Since 2025, Tatjana Petzer has served as co-spokesperson for the conceptual cluster within the interfaculty profile area Dimensions of Europe. Members of this cluster investigate the transfer, ideas and concepts of knowledge, as well as the diversity of evolving discourses and perceptions of Europe in their various interactions and contexts. This builds on her research in the joint project “Topography of Plural Cultures in Europe, with particular attention to the “shift of Europe to the East”, carried out from 2006 to 2009 at the Berlin Centre for Literary and Cultural Research.

Publications:

Tatjana Petzer (co-ed.): Die Ordnung pluraler Kulturen Figurationen europäischer Kulturgeschichte, vom Osten her gesehen (The Order of Plural Cultures: Figurations of European Cultural History, Seen from the East), Berlin: Kadmos 2014.

European discourses are examined from the perspective of Mediterranean geo-aesthetics and maritime representations:

• Poetics and Knowledge of the Adriatic Sea (Prof. Tatjana Petzer)

• Master's seminar, summer semester 2024: “The Mediterranean in Literatures from and about Southeast Europe”
• Karl Kaser Explorative Research Grant 2024: “The Telluric-Maritime Paradigm in South Slavic Spatial Thinking and Representation” (participants: Mirnes Sokolović, MA, and Silvia Stecher, BA)
• Study excursion and panel The Mediterranean Legacies of Yugoslav Insular Travelogues, International Research Workshop “The Adriatic Islands in Travelogues”, 22 May - 24 May 2025, Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre in Split

• Adriatic Avant-Garde: Eco-Transversal Remapping of Northern Adriatic Avant-Gardes (Ass. Prof. Dr. Kristina Pranjić, ZRC SAZU & visiting researcher at the University of Graz, 1 October 2025 – 30 September 2027, funded by ARIS)

Slavic Studies is participating in Cluster 2 of the focus area “Trans-Mediterranean Entanglements” with
• Poetics and Knowledge of the Adriatic (Prof. Tatjana Petzer)
• The Mediterranean in the Literature of Russian-Language Emigration: An Ambivalent Place of Longing (Priv.-Doz. Dagmar Gramshammer-Hohl)

Tatjana Petzer is a member of the DFG scientific network Russian Ecospheres. Forms of Ecological Knowledge in Russian Literature, Culture and History (funded 2022-2025). Together with the two coordinators of the network, she is editing the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Ecological Culture, which analyses concepts, forms of representation and knowledge practices of “ecological culture” (ėkologicheskaia kul’tura) in the Russian imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet space. The interdisciplinary handbook brings together aesthetic, literary, cultural, and environmental-historical perspectives on culture-specific, dynamic and media-mediated human-nature interactions, as well as on social and artistic interventions in the ecosphere.

Selected publications: Tatjana Petzer (pub.): Ecology in Eastern European Terminology. In: Forum Interdisziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte 12 (2023) 1​​. Berlin: Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung.

Social and ecological change continually generates new visions of the future. Transformation, in turn, is oriented towards the future, creating a dynamic interrelationship between aesthetics, futurity, and transformation. The study of the future has gained renewed prominence since the visions of modernity have become historical artifacts. Building on preliminary research into the history of knowledge of the aesthetics of transformation in modernity, Tatjana Petzer’s research focuses on:

1. media modelling of futurity as “soft factors“ in shaping the future;

2. body, human, and spherical enhancement;

3. knowledge of material (vestimentary, architectural, global) cultures as a dimension of future-making;

4. ideological trends: immortology, futuro-synergetics, eco- and retrofuturism, trans- and posthumanism

Selected publications:

Petzer, Tatjana (ed.) (2021): Wissen und Glaube. Figurationen des Synergos in der slavischen Moderne (Knowledge and Belief. Figurations of Synergos in Slavic Modernity). Paderborn: Brill, Wilhelm Fink.

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

In collaboration with Silvia Stecher, BA (editor, literary translator, and master's student of Slavic studies), Tatjana Petzer is editing texts and memoirs by the Slovenian lawyer and author Ljuba Prenner, written during the interwar and post-war periods. The anthology is being published by Klingenberg Verlag in Graz under the title “Neither Man nor Woman“.