Events
13 Mar 2025 – 14 Mar 2025
Workshop
Ontological Turning Points: Climate Emergency and Post-Truth
24 Apr 2025 – 25 Apr 2025
Workshop
Kulturgeschichte der Moderne in Berlin-Wilmersdorf – von der Carstenn-Figur bis in die Gegenwart
08 Jul 2025
Film screening & discussion
Playful Politics: An Evening with Dušan Makavejev’s “WR: Mysteries of the Organism” (1971)
17 Sep 2025 – 19 Sep 2025
Conference
Natural-Cultural Memory in the Anthropocene. Tracing – Archiving – Remembering

The ZfL
The ZfL is a humanities institute for literary research in interdisciplinary contexts that draws from a cultural studies framework. Its methods also engage with the structural transformations within historical-hermeneutic subject areas that have taken place in recent decades. In contrast to the study of literature at universities, predominantly organized by nationality, the ZfL fosters a broad concept of literature, but also uses interdisciplinary tools to fundamentally question the etiology of various literary concepts, their potential for the future, and the relationship between literature and other arts or cultural practices. This is done in the three program area History of Theory, World Literature, Knowledge of Life, and in the key projects.
News
Call for Application:
CURE Summer School 2025 “Dynamics of Despair”

Out now in open Access: Interjekte 15 on responses to the current conflict in the Middle East in German academia
Research
History of Theory
analyzes the genealogy of theory and develops innovative forms of historicizing it.
read moreWorld Literature
disusses the global interrelations of literature and its potential to shape the world.
read moreKnowledge of Life
investigates the knowlege of life in historical and interdisciplinary respects.
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