Prof. Dr. Tobias Döring (LMU München): Guest Lecture (15 January 2025)
Date: 15 January 2025, 4-6pm
Room: Kollegienhaus, KH 1.016
This semester, the Chair of English Cultural and Literary Studies is organising a lecture series on the topic Confronting Colonial Legacies: Facets of Human Rights Violations. We are pleased to announce that our first speaker is Prof. Dr. Tobias Döring (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; Chair of English Literature). He is an expert on Shakespeare and Early Modernism as well as Postcolonial Studies, issues on which he has published extensively. Notable works from the field of Postcolonial Studies include for instance his monographs Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition (Routledge, 2002) and Postcolonial Literatures in English: An Introduction (Klett, 2008) or the edited collection A History of Postcolonial Literature in 12 1/2 Books (WVT, 2007). Tobias Döring will give a guest lecture entitled What is Postcolonial German Writing? Reflections on Volker Braun’s (and Ann Cotten’s) Luf-Passion. Using the debates sparked by the exhibition of the so-called ‘Luf-Boat’ in the Humboldt Forum in Berlin as a starting point, Volker Braun wrote the cycle of poems Luf-Passion (2022) about Germany’s violent colonial past. The poems explore various facets of colonial human rights violations such as genocide, looting and slavery in their depiction of the German navy’s punitive expedition to the South Pacific Island of Luf in the nineteenth-century, during which they killed many of its inhabitants as well as destroyed most of the villages and boats. Moreover, Braun’s poetry collection and its translation into English by Ann Cotten also raise several striking questions with regard to the form and representational politics of postcolonial literatures.
All interested students and members of staff are invited to attend the guest lecture. If you have any questions regarding the event, please contact Prof. Dr. Claudia Lillge (claudia.lillge@fau.de) and Dr. Dennis Henneböhl (dennis.henneboehl@fau.de).