Narratives of the ‚Wende’ show a particular affinity for narrating and forming time. Based on an aesthetically reflected understanding of ‚Zeitgestaltung‘, I would like to pursue an analytical approach that takes into account both the formal design and the semantic thematisation of time in narrative texts.
My PhD project is focused on the memory of German Königsberg in today’s Kaliningrad – the Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea. The main aim of this research is to explore how the memory of Königsberg is represented and interpreted by Kaliningraders, who are mostly ethnic Russians.
Using Germany as a case study, I examine public attitudes towards competing narratives about democracy within the German political discourse, alongside externally promoted counter-narratives from the Russian state.
In the Finnish special language of music, specifically ‘Finnish’ linguistic characteristics and elements are mixed and/or interfere with ‘translated’ features and terminology (prominently of German origin). The resulting special language with its subdivisions (minilects) is not merely a technical language or LSP, but it reflects the cultural narratives related to the meaning of (classical) music as a core element of the Finnish national self-image.
In light of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Soviet memory culture in Lithuania appears to be in motion. This momentum of re-consideration and change is manifested for instance by interventions in public space, such as the renewed wave of dismantling of statues, removing of plaques or changing names of public institutions.
The PhD project explores the fate of Baroque heritage in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the long 19th century, when these lands were part of the Russian Empire. During this period, the Baroque style fell out of fashion across Europe, displaced by Classicism and subsequent styles, and was considered in bad taste for decades until it was revisited and even experienced some revival in the late 19th century.
The project examines the museal representations of the 1944-1955 expulsions of Poles from the former eastern Polish borderlands in the city of Wrocław (formerly Breslau). The objective of the thesis is not to discuss the forced removal and resettlement itself, but rather to investigate how collective memories of the event are being expressed in the present, cultivating ideas of identity representative operating at both regional and national levels.
Emigration from Belarus, which has intensified since 2020-21, has its history dating back to the 19th and 20th centuries. Interested in multimediality of today’s writing, and reading it against the backdrop of the re-sovietization of official Minsk and the state’s use of internet technologies to suppress civil society, I’m taking a closer look at Belarusian authors living and working in exile and the ways they narrate their experiences of home and (non-)belonging online.
