Congratulations to Professor Stefano Evangelista (Trinity College) who has been awarded a BUA (Berlin University Alliance) Einstein Visiting Fellowship. From October 2023 onwards, Professor Evangelista will work with Professor Gesa Stedman (Centre for British Studies, Humboldt University) on a project entitled “The Boundaries of Cosmopolis: Berlin and London”. By exploring not only the literary relations between the two cities, but also cosmopolitan networks within each city, they will try to unravel how the optimistic discourse on cosmopolitanism also created forms of exclusion by setting new boundaries.
Archival work in Berlin and the UK will form a large part of their endeavours. A series of early-career workshops with invited speakers from the UK, Europe and the US will aim to establish a dialogue between literary history, world literature and cosmopolitanism, understood from historical and philosophical perspectives.
Professor Evangelista commented, “I’m delighted to have been given this opportunity by the Einstein Foundation. The Fellowship builds on my long-standing partnership with the Centre for British Studies of the Humboldt University, which I’ve developed thanks to a TORCH Knowledge Exchange Fellowship, as well as awards from the John Fell Fund and the AHRC. The Fellowship will enable me to recruit Berlin-based doctoral and post-doctoral students and to run a series of workshops in Berlin, in which I hope to involve Oxford graduates and colleagues from the English Faculty. During the Fellowship we’re also planning to host a summer session of the Harvard Institute of World Literature. I hope that the Fellowship will strengthen the links between Oxford and Berlin and lay the foundations for new collaborations”.
Professor Evangelista’s work as Einstein Visiting Fellow will develop within the framework of the Oxford Berlin Research Partnership, which aims to foster the links between universities and cultural institutions in the two cities. In particular, his project will strengthen Oxford’s partnership with the Humboldt-Universität, and it will feed into the ongoing activities of Oxford in Berlin.
