Agenda

Interview

1. Please provide a brief outline of your training and scientific activity.
I am a professor of Romance Literatures at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. As a literary scholar with strong leanings towards the history of knowledge, I am interested in what could be called the shape of knowledge, predominantly in the early modern period, and specifically with a view to European literatures (including in Latin) in a global context. I have published extensively on the history and theory of rhetoric as well as on the history of reading, books, and media, in particular with a view to an arachaeology of the
digital. At Freie Universität, I helped found a large interdisciplinary Cluster of Excellence that sought to rethink the concept of global literature and which was funded as part of the so-called Excellence Strategy of the German federal government and the ‘Laender’ from 2019 to 2025. Since 2024, I have been the director of echo, a research center dedicated to the study of rhetoric between old and new media. Launching this center was made possible through the grant that came with the marvellous Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz prize, awarded to me by the German Research Foundation in 2023. Over the past few of years, I have been busy writing a monograph on Erasmus of Rotterdam, titled "Erasmian Keywords", which is due to be published by Edinburgh University Press in spring 2026. I have also been preparing the first edition with a German translation of Lorenzo Valla's proof that the Constantine
Donation is a forgery, which is set to be published by Hiersemann later this year. My time in Venice will enable me to get my next projects off the ground, particularly a book on literary connectivity.
2. Please state your reasons for choosing Venice and the Department for your research and teaching stay.
As an early modernist, I have worked with books printed in Venice throughout my career. In recent years, I have become interested in how the notion of global literature could gain form a deeper historical perspective. I have looked into the ways in which older genres, institutions, and practices have informed the emergence of the discourse of world literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My current book project on literary connectivity builds on early modern case studies in which Venice is an important node.
3. Have you ever had a research collaboration with the teaching staff of Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies in the past?
I have collaborated with my host, Professor Claus Zittel, for over fifteen years. Shortly before the pandemic, I had the honour of addressing a large group of Venetian colleagues in a lecture at Ca' Foscari, and the subsequent discussion proved highly inspiring. Another workshop that we held as soon as it was safe to meet again also revealed many shared interests with colleagues in Venice. I very much hope to connect or reconnect with many of them during my stay.