“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…

‘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…

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:…

As there has been considerable public interest in the letter that I sent to representatives of the Green party, the CDU and the SPD in Bochum last week, I also want to post a quick update on the reply I have received today. My letter had outlined the need to publicly acknowledge that the politicians…

A very quick January update on a letter sent, a special issue to read, and an event to attend. In my previous blog post, I had pointed out factual inaccuracies at the basis of the controversy around the Peter-Weiss-Preis, which were then also reproduced in the official statement by the Bochum politicians Barbara Jessel (Die…

My second, and longer, research trip brought me to Berlin on 8 October, a day after the horrific Hamas massacres in Israel and at the start of the IDF’s relentless bombing campaign on Gaza. Impossible to think about much else since or to write about my project here as if it existed in a vacuum….

It’s been a full summer! The “Homelands, Nightmares, Good Immigrants” event announced in the last blog post was a joy, as captured in the photos below and in this detailed write-up by publisher Gersy Ifeanyi Ejimofo for New Books in German. It was particularly great to have the time and space to continue our panel…

Since the March update, I’ve had opportunities to discuss authorial strategies with writers, fellow researchers and public audiences in Essen, Amsterdam, Turku (online) and Utrecht (twice), but I also got to travel purely as an observer. Graz, this photo would suggest, is well-prepared for research trips. The reason for mine was the premiere of Simone…

My first ideas for this research project back in 2018 were sparked by the anthology The Good Immigrant (ed. by Nikesh Shukla, 2016) and the search for comparable contemporary works in German. Shortly after, Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum was announced (Your Homeland is Our Nightmare, ed. by Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, 2019) and…

Three days into 2023 I got to conduct my first in-depth author interview. Mithu Sanyal and I discussed anticipated audiences, kinship among writers and among texts, degrees of marginalisation in and beyond the literary scene, and to what extent the concept of “postmigration” can still be a fruitful one. This research conversation will appear in…