Dissertation
The aim of this Ph.D. project is to elucidate the specific Tacitean representation of the urbs Roma in comparison to other literary representations and the material Rome of the Tacitean age which as part of a specific construction of past and memory reflects a subjective “Romerlebnis” that exemplifies important aspects of former values and norms.
In particular, the investigation focuses on how Tacitus perceives, presents, connotes and functionalizes the city, its urban spaces and topographies which among others implies questions about thematic, symbolic, characterizing or psychologizing functions that can be identified in the text.
Dissertation
This Ph.D. project analyses form, structure and function of spatial representations in the Greek novels. These novels have long been regarded as a tightly knit generic corpus and been read as mere cosmetic recyclings of the same story. Yet recent research concentrated increasingly on the differences between the individual texts.
Dissertation
The project aims to investigate a certain group of imperial Greek texts known as ‘doxographical texts’ from a literary perspective. The primary aim is to show that doxography is an independent literary form of philosophico-scientific re-writing within the larger context of imperial Greek literature.
Dissertation
Based on the comparative analysis of two exemplary texts (La elegia di madonna Fiammetta, 1343/44 and Il ninfale fiesolano, 1344/46), this Ph.D. thesis deals with the literary strategies and narrative devices employed to depict love, sexuality and desire. The roles, functions and transformations of the antique love deities receive special consideration.
Dissertation
The original research hypothesis of this Ph.D. project was the assumption that there is a connection between the 15th-century representations of landscape in maps and in the background of panel paintings. During the research process the focus was adjusted to the appropriation of early Netherlandish models in panel painting.
Research project
Within this research project the rise and expansion of Christianity have been investigated in a series of regional histories.
Research project
The project analyses literary genealogies in Jewish writings of the Hellenistic time. It focusses on the tradition-historical background, the narrative function and the meaning for the self-conception of the authors and readers of each scripture.
Research project
As part of the investigation of the transformations that ancient economics and chrematistics underwent in the early modern era, this project focuses on ancient psychotopology, exploring the cultural resonance and literary productivity of stoic oikeiosis as well as aristotelian-galenic models of faculty theory.
Research project
The subject of the project is the literary history of parasites, a history that from antiquity onward has been set down in a variety of genres: comedy, Menippean satire, novella, essay and autobiography. The explicit or implicit contrariness of drastic rituals of exclusion and the subliminal negativity of order have combined to bestow elementary aesthetic attractiveness upon parasitic relations, a phenomenon that has been observed since antiquity.
