Berlin is home to one of Europe’s most prodigious and vibrant literary scenes. Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies serves as a conduit in making literature and literary criticism accessible to a wider audience by hosting events, supervising doctoral candidates, and promoting exchange through a variety of offers.

With this year’s conference topic, the organizational team wishes to highlight that anarchism is often linked to binary ideas of dystopia and utopia and is sometimes used in relatively narrow political definitions. The term has been heavily debated in literary studies and depicted in different ways in literature. The researchers also want to discuss how literature not only serves as a reservoir for ideas surrounding concepts such as anti-authoritarianism and egalitarianism, but that it can also reflect its own relations of production and offer new forms of communication. One subject they are interested in is how approaches to academia, poetry, and activism that have anarchist sensibilities can be brought together to make literature an instrument by which we critique power structures.

Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies mentors outstanding dissertation projects in the field of literary studies that examine texts of European and non-European origin. Its objective is to expand perspectives in literary research. As a doctoral program with several participating institutes at Freie Universität Berlin, Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies also cooperates with institutes at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and many non-university partners.