Dr. Kathrin Yacavone

Office hours

My office hours are on Tuesdays 4-5pm or other times by arrangement via email.
Office hours are in person in my office (07A-14A) or remotely via Internet. 

External research profiles

ORCID-ID: 0000-0002-0183-5064
Research Gate: researchgate.net/profile/Kathrin-Yacavone
Academia: uni-marburg.academia.edu/KathrinYacavone

• Inhalt ausklappen Inhalt einklappen Short biography

  I am a scholar of literary, media and cultural studies as well as a photography historian and theorist. I have a particular interest in cross-media phenomena and intermediality from the nineteenth century to the present day, and although one of my main areas of expertise is French literary and cultural history and theory, my work also engages with media topics from English- and German-language contexts more broadly. 

  Prior to coming to the University of Marburg in 2022, I was a Thyssen@KWI Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies/Kulturwissenschaftliche Institut (KWI) in Essen as well as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Universities of Constance and Cologne (2019-2022). I studied in Mainz, Berlin, Paris and Edinburgh and received my PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2008, where I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) and taught in French Studies and Art History. Between 2011 and 2019 I was a tenured Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham, but left the position to return to continental Europe.

  At Marburg I teach courses in Media Studies in both English and German.

• Inhalt ausklappen Inhalt einklappen Research interests

  · Theory and history of photography
  · Histories of photography’s institutionalisaton
  · Digital and AI-generated images
  · Theories of authorship
  · Discourses of intermediality and media relations
  · Media history and media archeology
  · French cultural and literary history (19th – 21st centuries)

• Inhalt ausklappen Inhalt einklappen Current research projects

  Photography, Portraiture, and Intermedial Authorship. Literary Celebrity in Nineteenth-Century France
  
  Habilitation and monograph (forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press, 2025)
  
  This study traces the 19th-century origins and rapid spread of the now ubiquitous photographic author portrait. The book examines the socio-cultural, media- and photo-historical, literary-theoretical as well as trans- and intermedial dynamics that shaped the production, use, dissemination, and reception of author portraits as prototypical cases of modern celebrity phenomena. The media-historical analysis foregrounds the dual role of photography as a medium of both portrait generation and dissemination and shows how it contributed to a specifically modern combination of 'intermedial authorship' and literary celebrity culture. Although the focus is on 19th-century French literary culture, the media dynamics this study describes and the theoretical conclusions it offers may also be found in or applied to other cultural contexts. Bringing together concepts and discourses from English-, French- and German-language research – and on the basis of archival research on photographs and their diverse channels of dissemination (e.g. in print media such as books and magazines) as well as paratextual material (author correspondence, diaries, forewords, drafts, etc.) – the book offers a new perspective on authorship as fundamentally shaped by photography, both as an independent visual medium and as remediated in other forms. Overall it shows that authors' photographs were not merely a visual appendage to their published works but significantly impacted on the (self-) presentation, reception and collective perception of writers through the powerful affordances of the medium.

• Inhalt ausklappen Inhalt einklappen Publications

  Please see my German profile page.

• Inhalt ausklappen Inhalt einklappen Teaching

  For my current teaching, please see my German profile page.