Promoting Young Researchers

The ZfL attaches great importance to the promotion of young researchers. Funding opportunities for doctoral students include:

• ZfL Doctoral Positions (part-time 65%) for projects with a recognizable relevance to one or more of the program areas
• doctoral positions within the framework of projects with outside funding

A meeting of all doctoral students, organized in consultation with the management, is held once every semester. In addition, each year the ZfL organizes an International Summer Academy related to its annual topic, open to doctoral students and post-docs from around the world.

In 2017, ZfL began awarding the bi-annual Carlo Barck Prize for outstanding dissertations in the field of literature and cultural studies that pose innovative questions and display original conception. The prize money of 10,000 Euros is awarded as a six-month fellowship at the ZfL.

In conjunction with the International Walter Benjamin Society and the Walter Benjamin Archive, the ZfL awards the “Walter Benjamin Award for Young Researchers,” endowed with 4,500 Euros for young researchers to independently conceive, organize and conduct a two-day workshop.

Current Dissertation Projects

• The French Reception and Transformation of Pragmatism
  Moritz Gansen
• Scenes of Alternative Sociality in the Black Radical Tradition and Critical Theories
  Noah Grossmann
• Critical Recapitulations: Repeated Origins Between Evolutionary Biology and Marxist Theory
  Liola Mattheis
• Composition and Community: The Extra-Musical Imagination of Polyphony 1800/1900/1950
  Shira Miron
• Imagining Black Europe: Continuities from the Négritude Movement to Contemporary Afropean Literature
  Jenaba Samura