Project Leaders
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Anne Fuchs
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Anne Fuchs (MRIA, FBA) is Professor and Director of the UCD Humanities Institute. Internationally known for her work on German cultural memory, modernist and contemporary literature and on temporality in the 20th and 21st centuries, she has overseen major funded research projects and acts as a regular grant assessor for the German Scientific Council, the DFG, the Swiss National Fund and the ERC. As a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the British Academy she has served on strategic committees, such as the RIA Council, the RIA Higher Education Futures Group, the RIA Committee on Research Infrastructure, RIA Brexit Taskforce. She serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Open Research Europe (ORE, see (opens in a new window)Open Research Europe), the EU platform for the publication of research stemming from Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and/or Euratom funding across all subject areas. She is also Collection Advisor of the ORE Collection Transnational Literature.
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Megan Kuster
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Megan Kuster is Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Manchester on the “Avian Poetics” project, led by (opens in a new window)Dr Clara Dawson, and an affiliated researcher at the UCD Humanities Institute. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century colonial science and literature, especially issues of race, labour, and capital. Megan was previously a European Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2019-21) on the SouthHem Project led by (opens in a new window)Professor Porscha Fermanis. She has published articles on Katherine Mansfield, and natural history collecting in nineteenth-century New Zealand in Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society and the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.
Research Profile
Sarah Comyn
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Sarah Comyn is an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the UCD School of English, Drama and Film. Her work explores the relationship between literature and value; where value is considered as aesthetic, economic, social, ethical and/or political. She was previously an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2018-20), and a European Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2016-18) on the SouthHem Project led by (opens in a new window)Professor Porscha Fermanis.
Recent publications include: (opens in a new window)Political Economy (Routledge, 2024); (opens in a new window)Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies (Manchester, 2021; ed. with Porscha Fermanis), (opens in a new window)Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (2019: with Lars Atkin, Porscha Fermanis and Nathan Garvey); and (opens in a new window)Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of “Homo Economicus” (Palgrave 2018). She is the author of articles on the literary cultures of gold mining, settler sociability, race, and hemispheric methods in the Journal of Victorian Culture, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Journal of Commonwealth Literature.
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Project Team
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Marek Tamm
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Marek Tamm is professor of cultural history in Tallinn University, Estonia. He is also Head of Tallinn University Centre of Excellence in Intercultural Studies and Vice-President of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. His primary research fields are cultural history of medieval Europe, theory and methodology of history, digital history, and cultural memory studies. He has recently published Breakthroughs in Cultural Psychology (ed. with Jaan Valsiner; Tallinn University Press, 2024), The Fabric of Historical Time (co-authored with Zoltán Boldizsár Simon; Cambridge University Press, 2023), The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (ed. with Peeter Torop; Bloomsbury, 2022,), A Cultural History of Memory in the Early Modern Age (ed. with Alessandro Arcangeli; Bloomsbury, 2020), Making Livonia: Actors and Networks in the Medieval Baltic Sea Region (ed. with Anu Mänd; Routledge, 2019), Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism (ed. with Laurent Olivier; Bloomsbury, 2019) and Debating New Approaches to History (ed. with Peter Burke; Bloomsbury, 2018).
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Marek Wasilewski
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Marek Wasilewski is a graduate of Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan (1993), Poland, and Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London (1998). He was awarded the British Council, Fulbright and Kosciuszko Foundation scholarships. In 1998 he lectured at Dartington College of Art in Totnes UK. In 2000 as a Fulbright Scholar in Residence he lectured at the Florida Atlantic University in the USA. In the frame of Erasmus exchange program he also lectured at Konstfack Academy in Stockholm and European School of Visual Arts in Poitiers. He is a professor at the University of Arts in Poznań and director of the Municipal Gallery Arsenal in Poznań. He is a member of AICA. In the years 2000-2017 he was editor in chief of the cultural magazine Time of Culture ( Czas Kultury). He published in magazines such as Art Monthly, Springerin, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Switch on Paper, the International Journal of Education and Art, Respublica Nova. He published four books: Absent Art (1999), Sex, Money and Religion (2001) Is Art a Mad Dog? (2009), Art in the Times of Populism (2021).
Caitríona Ní Dhuill
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Caitríona Ní Dhúill is Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Salzburg, where she works on relationships between literature and ecological consciousness. Her publications include the monographs Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch (2010) and Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography (2020). She founded the Centre for Culture and Ecology at Durham University in 2017 and the Eco-Humanities Research Group at University College Cork in 2020. She is co-editor of the volumes Anthropocene Austria and Precarious Life and Determined Letters (2025). She graduated with a PhD in German Studies from Trinity College Dublin in 2005.
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National and International Project Participants
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University College Dublin
Maeve Cooke
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Maeve Cooke is Full Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her current research explores questions arising for critical theory in the context of anthropogenic ecological disaster on a global scale. She has published two monographs in critical social theory: Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics (MIT Press, 1994) and Re-Presenting the Good Society (MIT Press, 2006) and is the author of over 100 articles in the areas of social and political philosophy. She is on the editorial board of several scholarly journals and has held visiting appointments at leading universities in the USA and Europe. She has just completed a book manuscript with the working title Transitioning Critical Theory: Openings Towards the Future.
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Gillian Pye
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Jeanne Riou
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International
John Barry
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QUB School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics
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Aleida Assmann
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Emeritus Universität Konstanz
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Dirk Oschmann
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Dirk Oschmann, born in 1967 in Gotha, pursued his education in German, English, and American Studies in Jena and Buffalo, USA, earning his Ph.D. in Jena in 1998. As a Feodor Lynen Fellow at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he furthered his studies in Madison, USA, in 2001/2002. After his habilitation in Jena in 2006, he then served as a Junior Professor for Modern German Literature (2005-2011) and has been a Professor at Leipzig University since 2011. His career has featured guest professorships and lectureships at institutions like Canterbury, UK (2009), UC Davis, USA (2006), University of Notre Dame, USA (2010), and Brown University, USA (2013 & 2025). His books include »Bewegliche Dichtung« (2007), »Friedrich Schiller« (2009) and »Freiheit und Fremdheit. Kafkas Romane« (2021). His pamphlet »Der › Osten‹: eine westdeutsche Erfindung« (2023, tr: The ›East‹: a West German Invention) caused a great stir in public circles. Oschmann lives in Leipzig.
Image Credit: Jakob Weber
Universität Leipzig: (opens in a new window)Research profile