Project Description
This mapping project both supplements and enhances my book project and helps make it accessible to a wider audience. My book examines how contemporary literary and cultural works imagine borders and border-crossing experiences. Focusing on the German-Polish borderland, I highlight and analyze border poetics, which I define as a narrative practice that places historically and geopolitically specific boundaries in relation with more figuratively understood border experiences (e.g., life and death, gender, ethnicity). I argue that this entanglement of different types of border experiences produces distinct narratives that reach far beyond their local contexts, and that these narratives are expressions of a cosmopolitan imagination. This imagination is crucial for thinking about migration, displacement, and refuge in the past and today. The complex border dynamics involved in this project are difficult to grasp in writing alone. The goal of the SURF project is therefore to map the literary geography of several works, and to show visually and through annotations the connections between these texts. Methodology: read texts with an eye to the borders and movements in them; literary and cultural analysis to understand border dynamics; historical and cultural research to contextualize movements; find ways to represent contexts and movements visually; find material to visualize and document these movements.
Tasks and Responsibilites
Read and analyze literary works (in German and/or Polish), and draft maps for them; create visual representations of the borders and border crossings in these works; research and integrate further historical and cultural context; expand the existing interactive map that can be used by other scholars for research or instruction as well as the general public; weekly to bi-weekly meetings to discuss research findings, technical issues, and next steps in the project.
Desired Qualifications
None Listed.