Main Content
Research focus Syria - Cultural production and social change since the 1980s
Our research group's focus on Syria includes a number of individual and joint research projects, concentrating mostly on Syrian cultural production.
| Database: Syrian authors published since 1980
For this database, we are collecting interviews, articles, books, blogs, videos, and other documents on and by over one hundred Syrian authors of fiction and poetry from the 1980s to the present. This material is intended to form the basis for different research projects on the Syrian cultural production in the past 35 years. The database will be accessible by students and researchers at the CNMS.
Contents:
Biographical information
Published works (fiction and non-fiction)
Published interviews
Secondary literature
Social media output
Videos
| Figures of Thought in novels by Syrian writers since 1990
Felix Lang and Friederike Pannewick
This project, situated in the field of digital humanities, aims to trace the changes in “figures of thought” in large corpora of fiction and non-fiction written by Syrian writers over the past fifteen years with the help of information retrieval software. The concept of “figures of thought” as used in this project is based on the notion of cultural conceptual systems of cognitive anthropology (cf. Bennardo/Kronenfeld 2011). The project proceeds in two steps: firstly, texts are searched for word clusters which relate to specific conceptual systems; secondly, changes in the composition of the individual word clusters over time will be mapped.
The primary aims are:
to elaborate a productive working definition of “figures of thought”;
to map changes in these “figures” in relation to historical time;
and finally, to establish what kind of relationships (if any) exist between social changes and changes in these “figures”.
| Cultural intervention and the war in Syria - Transformations of the field of cultural production and the role of european public diplomacy
This project explores the role of European PDOs for Syrian cultural producers in exile between 2011 to 2018. The main hypothesis is that public diplomacy institutions to a certain extent have come to replace institutions of the national field which have become dysfunctional for an important segment of cultural producers and consequently play a significant role in the transformations of the field of cultural production which is currently in progress. In particular, the PDO’s intervention would seem to lead to (1) the opening up of a new space of possibles; (2) the reversion of the hierarchies between producers; (3) the reversion of the hierarchy of genres; (4) a partial re-definition of the values of the field; (4) a split between national and exilic cultural production.
This project is part of a larger postdoc project on the role of European public diplomacy organisations (PDOs) in contemporary MENA cultural production. It is conducted in cooperation with the ERC Project Social Dynamics of Civil Wars (Giles Dorronsoro, Pantheon-Sorbonne).
| Syrian cultural production in the light of radical political change
Sonja Mejcher-Atassi and Friederike Pannewick
Interested in the intersection of culture and politics, this project takes the radical political change of the ‘Arab Spring’ as the starting point to reconsider Syrian cultural production prior to 2011 and to explore newly emerging cultural practices and the ways they have responded to and participated in the very political change out of which they were produced. It focuses on new ways of writing between testimony, autobiography/memoir, journalism, and fiction, as forged by a younger generation of authors and highlights two shifts: a transition from subversive, indirect criticism expressed ‘between the lines’ to direct confrontation in the public sphere, which almost inevitably leads to questioning the role of the writer; and a documentary turn in writing and cultural production at large, which has brought to the fore the visual image, in particular the genre of the short film.
| Translating the language of the Syrian Revolution
PhD Project
| Literary subversions in the work of Zakaria Tamer
PhD Project