Call for Applications: Up to 5 Grants (Travel and Accommodation) for Ph.D. students or post-docs for Participation in the Villa Vigoni Symposium: “Citizenship, Law and Literature,” Villa Vigoni, Loveno di Menaggio (CO), Italy, 25-28 March, 2019

Coordinators: Prof. Annalisa Oboe (Padua) and Prof. Klaus Stierstorfer (Muenster)

Vigoni Talks, sponsored in cooperation with the Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaft (DFG), is a unique scholarly format promoting international, and especially Italian-German, collaboration in research, education and culture in a European spirit. Young scholars (doctoral or postdoctoral level) are invited to apply for participation in the upcoming Vigoni Talks on “Citizenship, Law and Literature,” which will explore current formations of European citizenship from an interdisciplinary law-and-literature perspective. The grants cover travel to and accommodation at Villa Vigoni for the duration of the workshop. Successful applicants are invited to present a paper draft (circa 2,000 words) during the Talks, and may be invited to submit a revised paper, based on the draft and the discussions at the workshop, later in summer 2019 for publication in an edited collection.

Situated at the intersection of legal studies and literary studies, the “Citizenship, Law and Literature” Talks postulate that contemporary developments like globalization, mass migration and the rise of new social media have triggered radical reconfigurations of classic notions of citizenship. For a long time, modern citizenship denoted national belonging, legal equality and a set of rights and duties to be bestowed by a state on individual members of a society. Yet in recent decades, new forms of global mobility and transnational political participation have exposed the limits of such a paradigm. In Europe, this shift has become particularly evident in the new millennium under the impact of massive migration and refugee movements into the European South, and more recently into North-western countries like Austria and Germany. In succession of these developments, interdisciplinary scholarly investigations of citizenship are now called upon to explore a variety of interdependent issues ranging from (top-down) juridical prescriptions regarding political citizenship to the (bottom-up) cultural and literary performance of citizenship in local and global contexts.

To apply for participation in the event and a travel and accommodation grant, please send a 300-word proposal in line with this scholarly and thematic outline as well as a short CV to Jesper Reddig (jesper.reddig@wwu.de) by 8 February, 2019.