Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Germany
fellow
Berit Callsen
2024-2025
Home institution
University of Osnabrück
Country of origin (home institution)
Germany
Discipline(s)
Cultural studies
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Berit Callsen wurde 2013 an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Romanischer Philologie promoviert. Von 2017 bis 2024 war sie als Juniorprofessorin für Romanische Kulturwissenschaft an der Universität Osnabrück beschäftigt. 2023 nahm sie als Mecila-Stipendiatin an der Thematic Research Group “Submerged Visualities: New Perspectives on Nature and Indigeneity in Latin American Literature, Film and Performance Art” in São Paulo/Brasilien teil. Zu ihren Forschungsschwerpunkten zählen Figurationen von Natur in jüngsten lateinamerikanischen Literaturen und Filmen, Körperkonstruktionen in zeitgenössischen Literaturen und Kulturen Spaniens und Lateinamerikas, Subjektkulturen der spanischen Moderne (19./20. Jh.) sowie Visualität und Wahrnehmungspoetiken in spanischer, lateinamerikanischer und französischer Literatur und Film (20./21. Jh.).
Research Project
“Watery Surroundings – Islandic Conditions: Active Waterscapes in Latin American Literature and Film”
This research project focuses on the staging of aquatic agency in recent Chilean, Argentinian and Brazilian literature and film, published between 2009 and 2023. Embedded in discourses from the Blue Humanities as well as from Material Ecocriticism and New Materialism, it aims at producing new insights into the construction of relations between water and humans as well as into the poetic implications of land-water-contacts. All films and poetries of the corpus focus on water as an active element in islandic conditions. Thus, a hypothesis is that aquatic agency as a storytelling force is shaped not only through multiple human/more-than-human entanglements but that it is also intrinsically linked to the literary and filmic modulation of the liminal space between water and land.
Research Interests:
Aesthetic figurations of nature in recent Latin American documentary film; constructions of corporality in contemporary Latin American literature and culture; subject cultures in Spanish modernity (19th/20th century); visuality and poetics of sight in Spanish; Latin American and French literature and film (20th/21century)