Global Humanities Senior Research and Teaching Stay at l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

 
September 2015

Belonging in Text: The Cultural Dynamics of Poetry in Joyce Mansour.

Susanne Zepp's current project investigates varied temporal inscriptions of belonging in lyrical poetry. The aim is to investigate the relation between representation of time and concepts of cultural belonging on the basis of poetical representations of the self in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Hebrew literature. With reference to the Poetologies of Theodor W. Adorno and Peter Szondi, the theoretical potential of lyrical reflections of existential experience shall be discussed and connected to contemporary research debates.

In 1997, Susanne Zepp completed her M.A. in Romance Philology, Comparative Literature and German Studies at the University of Wuppertal, where she served as a Research Associate until 2000. Until 2003, she was teaching as Assistant Professor at the Institute for General and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Romance Philology at Freie Universitaet Berlin where she received her PhD with a book on Jorge Luis Borges and skepticism in 2002. From 2003 until 2011, Susanne Zepp served full-time as the Deputy Director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University. In 2009, she completed her Habilitation at the University of Cologne (Venia Legendi: Romance literatures and cultures). In 2011, she was offered a full professorship with tenure from University of Bamberg and from Freie Universität Berlin.
Susanne Zepp teaches literary and historical texts that range from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. She has written on Borges, Montaigne, Eça de Queiroz, Lispector, Cohen and Early Modern Jewish Literatures, among others. Her books explore the reception of Skeptic thought in Modern Literatures and different aspects of Jewish belonging, theories of authorship and autobiography, both literary and historical, and their relation to issues of language and knowledge. More recently she has written on representation and time and on the writings of Peter Szondi. Her most recent books are an Introduction to Portuguese and Brazilian Literary Studies (UTB Publishing Series), a monograph on Early Modern Jewish literary creativity (Stanford University Press) and an Edited volume on German as a Jewish language (Leipzig University Press).