Refugees, Migrants, and Exiles in German and Comparative Literature

Aglaia Blioumi is Assistant Prof. Dr., born in Bad Cannstatt-Stuttgart. From she studied German literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and at the Free University of Berlin. In 2001 she obtained her doctorate (summa cum laude) at the Free University of Berlin on German-Greek migration literature. She taught at the Free University of Berlin, the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and at the Open University Patras. She has been a Lecturer in German Studies since 2005 and an Assistant Professor since 2013 an at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her main areas of research are migration literature, cultural studies and Landeskunde, intercultural literature, travel literature, as well as literary didactics. From 2013 to 2018 she was the Chairperson of the Foundation Board of the Adamas Foundation Götz Hübner. She has been the vice president of the Adamas Foundation since 2019. She has made numerous presentations in Greek and international conferences and magazines.

Nicole Colin is Professor of German culture at Aix-Marseille Université (AMU), Director of the German-French graduate school “Conflicts of cultures – cultures of conflicts” (AMU/ University of Tübingen) and an honory professor at the University of Amsterdam. She works on German cultural history (with a focus on literature and theatre), the theory of cultural transfer, cultural exchange between France and Germany, cultural heritage, and the sociology of cultural fields. Selected publications: Deutsche Dramatik im französischen Theater nach 1945. Künstlerisches Selbstverständnis im Kulturtransfer (Transcript, 2011); (with Joachim Umlauf) Im Schatten der Versöhnung. Deutsch-französische Kulturmittler im Kontext der Europäischen Integration (Steidl, 2018); Lexikon der deutsch- französischen Kulturbeziehungen nach 1945 (Narr, 2015).

Katerina Karakassi holds the position of Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature in the Department of German Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She completed her PhD with a scholarship from the Greek State Scholarships Foundation. She worked as a researcher at the Department of General and Comparative Literature of the University of Essen-Duisburg. Since 2006, she teaches “History of European Literature” as a scientific collaborator at the Open University of Greece. She was Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz. Her research interests include the German literature of the 18th and the 20th century, comparative literature, and literary theory. Between 2018 and 2020 she was director of the Master-Programme German Philology. Theory and Applications.

Dorothee Kimmich is a Professor of German Literature at University of Tübingen since 2002. She completed her habilitation in 1999 at the University of Giessen. From 1994-2000 she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Freiburg. She attained her Dr. Phil. (1991) and her Diploma (Staatsexamen) (1986/1987) in German Studies and History, University Tübingen.

Selected publications: Leeres Land. Niemandsländer in der Literatur (Konstanz UP, 2021); Ins Ungefähre. Ähnlichkeit und Moderne (Konstanz UP, 2017); Lebendige Dinge in der Moderne (Konstanz UP, 2011); Wirklichkeit als Konstruktion. Studien zu Geschichte und Geschichtlichkeit bei Heine, Büchner, Immermann, Stendhal, Keller und Flaubert (Fink, 2002); Texte zur Literaturtheorie der Gegenwart (co-ed. Reclam, 1996 and 2003); Epikureische Aufklärungen. Philosophische und poetische Konzepte der Selbstsorge (WBG, 1993).

Robert Leucht is full professor (professeur ordinaire) of German at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. His research focuses on exile studies, utopian studies, as well as 20th century German language literature from a transnational perspective. He also works on the relation between literature and technology.   

Leucht is the author of three monographs, Experiment und Erinnerung. Der Schriftsteller Walter Abish (Böhlau 2006), Dynamiken politischer Imagination. Die deutschsprachige Utopie von Stifter bis Döblin in ihren internationalen Kontexten, 1848–1930 (De Gruyter 2016), and most recently Der Ingenieur. Grammatik eines Hoffnungsträgers (Zürich 2021), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. His most recent research project is titled Switzerland as a Hub of International Literature. A History of Publishing in Switzerland in the Age of Extremes, 1914-1991 and concerns the role Swiss publishers of the 20th century played in innovating and advancing the global circulation of international literature.

Caroline Merkel is an Assistant Professor of German at the Department of Slavic and Baltic Studies Finnish Dutch and German at Stockholm University. She received her PhD at Tübingen University with a thesis on the suburbs in contemporary German and Swedish literature. Her current research interests include multilingualism and cultural theory in Swedish exile as well as spatiality and the city in modern German literature.

Werner Michler, Professor of Modern German Literature at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg. He studied German Philology and Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Teaching and research at the universities of Vienna, Oxford, Münster, Berlin. President of the Austrian Society for German Studies 1997–2020. Research areas: history and theory of literary genres, German and Austrian Literature 18th -20th century, literature and science, history and theory of translation, literary education. Publications include: Darwinismus und Literatur. Naturwissenschaftliche und literarische Intelligenz in Österreich, 1859–1914 (Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau 1999); Kulturen der Gattung: Poetik im Kontext, 1750–1950 (Göttingen: Wallstein 2015); Gattungstheorie(co-edited) (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2020), Genie in der Nachromantik (German Life and Letters 75-3/2022, special issue, co-edited).

Camilla Miglio, Full Professor of German Literature at  Sapienza Università di Roma. Her research focuses on contemporary, 20th century and Goethe Age German literature. She deals with the history, theory and poetics of translation, West-East relations in literature, and geopoetics. Her publications include studies on Herder, Novalis, Goethe, Brentano, Rilke, Benn, Bachmann, Kafka, Celan; among those monographs on Paul Celan (Celan and Valéry. Poetry, translation of a distance, 1997; Vita a fronte. Saggio su Paul Celan, 2005) and on Ingeborg Bachmann: La terra del morso. L’Italia ctonia di Ingeborg Bachmann, 2012). She is also translating German literature of Romanticism and the 20th century into Italian.

Helga Mitterbauer is a Full Professor and holds the Chair of German Literature at the Université libre de Bruxelles. She obtained her MA (1992), her PhD (2000) and her venia legendi (2008) from the University of Graz, where she taught form 1993-2013. From 2010-2015, she taught at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. She was a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Zagreb, Innsbruck, and at the ELTE Budapest. She is the President of the Coordinating Committee of the ICLA -book series CHLEL (Amsterdam, Benjamins) and co-editor of the book series Forum: Österreich (Frank & Timme, Berlin). She has been publishing on German, Austrian, and Comparative Literature. 

Joan Mwangovya is working at the Université libre de Bruxelles on her PhD thesis “The Portrayal of African Migrants in German Speaking Literature“. She has been teaching at Karatina University, Nairobi/Kenya, and at the Goethe Institute in Kigali/Ruanda. She has given several papers at universities in African countries, Germany and Belgium.

Raluca Rădulescu, Prof. Dr. Phil., Professor of Intercultural German Studies at the Institute of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest, since 2019. She defended her PhD in 2008 on contemporary Romanian-German literature. Research interests include exile literature, migration literature, cultural theory, modernist poetry, intermediality. From February 2021 she is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Trier and Flensburg with a project on colonial sea voyages in German-language literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Publications: https://unibuc.ro/user/raluca.radulescu/

Catherine Teissier, Dr. Phil, Associate Professor in German Studies (regional studies, language and history) at the Aix-Marseille Université (AMU). Her main research interests are contemporary German literature (GDR and Neue Länder), women’s literature, Franco-German relations and cultural transfer, political and social systems in comparison, discourses of memory and representation of history in forms of popular culture. She is a member of the European research group Observatoire Européen des Récits du Travail (https://caer.univ- amu.fr/obert/). She works in the Creative Europe project “History boards” on the representation of the Years of Lead in comics (Germany - Italy) (http://deplombetdesang.com/).