Institute for World Literature hosted by Oxford and Berlin

This year’s summer school of the Institute for World Literature is taking place at the Humboldt University, Berlin, hosted by Prof. Stefano Evangelista, who holds an Einstein Visiting Fellowship there. Thanks to funding provided by the Einstein Foundation and the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership, Oxford and the universities represented by the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) were able to allocate ten free places to their graduates. They joined an international cohort of around 140 students from universities across the world who are spending four weeks attending seminars on a broad range of topics relating to world literature and participating in student-led colloquia. Alongside Stefano Evangelista, the faculty also includes Oxford academics Prof. Elleke Boehmer and Prof. Ankhi Mukherjee. Keynote lecturers include the Institute’s former director, Prof. David Damrosch (Harvard) and prize-winning writer Judith Schalansky. Besides giving students the chance to work closely with experts in the fields of comparative and world literature, the summer school provides a unique opportunity for graduates to get to know each other and lay the foundations for future academic collaborations.

The collaboration with the Institute for World Literature is part of the research project ‘Boundaries of Cosmopolis’, led by Stefano Evangelista and Professor Gesa Stedman, director of the Centre for British Studies at the Humboldt University. It also supports the work of Dr Evi Heinz and Rosa Chrystie-Lowe – both Oxford alumnae. Since its start in 2023, the project has organised academic workshops and public events on the topics of cosmopolitanism and world literature. A particular focus has been on studying the role of periodicals in circulating translations and ideas of world literature around the turn of the twentieth century.

The English Faculty is now an institutional affiliate of the Institute for World Literature. This means that each year, two of our graduate students are able to attend at a reduced rate.

HU Berlin / Stefan Klenke