About
A research project by Dr Leila Essa, funded through the NWO Talent Scheme (2022-26)
What decisions do authors from marginalised communities take inside and around their fiction when facing exclusionary creative industries and societies?
How do they individually and collectively intervene in public discourses through artistic and activist work? How do they set out to reach or even teach wide audiences?
And what consequences do these dynamics have for conceptions of authorial intention in literary criticism?
My methodology for tackling these questions is comparative: Following lines of existing networks, influences and overlaps, I conduct case studies from the German and British scene that also always point beyond these two contexts. And it is collaborative: This research centres exchange with and between the writers whose intentions are at stake.
Thanks to a Veni grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the project will run from 2022 to 2026. It is hosted by the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University, where I am an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature (more on my teaching, writing and previous research on my UU profile page).
Here you can follow the latest developments of Intention & Intervention:
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Conversations and their afterlife
“Seen as Friendly, Seen as Frightening?”, a research interview I held with novelist Mithu Sanyal is now out in Rewriting Identities in Contemporary Germany, a joint volume edited by Selma Rezgui, Laura Marie Sturtz and Tara Talwar Windsor. Our conversation is available in open access and the entire book is very worth ordering to your…
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Disrupting ‘disruption’
‘Who has the right to “disrupt” the university?’, a Jewish Currents essay by Dennis Hogan asked in May, analysing what’s at stake when students – or managment – interve in university life. This question has also been central at Utrecht University in the past months. Mia You powerfully captures the dissonances of being a good…
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A fourth of 2024
Since the last update on the Peter-Weiss-Prize in my previous post, my research into the false reporting around Artists for Palestine UK has been picked up by journalist Sonja Zekri, who spoke to me for her report in the national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. And much else has happened in this first quarter of 2024, too:…