Junior Research Group "Kulturtechnik Imagination"

Project: "Imagination processes of the fairytale: Intermedial Entanglements of Image and Text in 19th Century European Publications"

Maxim Braun is a literary and cultural studies scholar with a research focus|main research area on the European History of the Fairytale. In his doctoral project, he is investigating the extent to which a concept of the fairy-tale imagination was consolidated over the course of the 19th century. The project analyses illustrated fairytale publications from German-speaking and European countries - from canonical collections, such as Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen, to popular small forms, such as illustrated magazines and widespread illustrated sheets or "images d'Épinal". The focus is on both production-aesthetic conditions and reception processes in order to gain a deeper understanding of the complex interdependencies between fairytale-like imagination and (collective) social imagining.

Contact: maxim.braun@uni-jena.de

Project: "Literary taxonomies (18th century to the present)"

Jasmin Köhler holds a doctorate in literary studies with links to Sociology, Gender Studies and the history of knowledge. In the current stage of her project on literary taxonomies, she is investigating the interactions between Biological Sciences taxonomy and literary social imagining in 19th century illustrated journal literature, specifically, for example, in metropolitan ethnography and the depiction of the taxonomist in scholarly satire. Fundamental to the project is the assumption that taxonomies make the environment imaginable in its diversity. At the same time, it is the specific resistance to imaginability of taxonomic regulations as such that in turn provokes literary imagination, generates images and texts and thus produces a pleasurable, meticulous, pedantic, satirical, programmatically inconclusive literature of taxonomy.

Contact: jasmin.koehler@uni-jena.de

Project: "Drawing Practices of Social Imagination in the Context of a Visual Epistemology of the Social between Enlightenment and Modernity"

I have a degree in cultural studies, a doctorate in art history and see myself as a humanities scholar with a sphere of activity between university, archive and museum and a research focus|main research area in the subject area of image- and art-sensitive history of knowledge and science/intellectual history. My research project situates the exploration of graphic practices of social imagining in illustrated print media of modernity in the larger context of a visual epistemology of the social, which examines the History of the search for and formation of social thought and knowledge between the Enlightenment and modernity, starting from the French context and with the aim of a transnational intellectual history. My empirical work concentrates on encyclopaedic works, German/English/French-language (illustrated) journal literature and the art form of caricature, which I explore as a form of knowledge. A further focus is an image- and art-sensitive exploration of the "social imaginary" as a transversal epistemic category in an intertwined history of theories in the humanities, cultural studies and social sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Contact: adriana.markantonatos@uni-jena.de

Project: "Kairos, Caricature and Crises: Imaginings of Critical Temporality in Illustrated Press during the European Revolutions of 1848/49"

An historian informed by cultural studies, sociology and gender studies, I'm propelled by a curiosity for visual culture in illustrated mass media during moments of modernity signified by social crisis. My project investigates imaginings of crises in caricature and illustrated press during the revolutions of 1848/49 in Europe. Analysing a trans-european yet socially diverse moment of crisis - spanning across industrializing to pre-industrial societies in the German and Scandinavian speaking world - I investigate how images combine representations of temporal "ephemeral" topicality and "eternal" permanence into constellations of a critical here-and-now (Jetztzeit). I will argue that the print medium of newspaper illustrations in Europe in 1848/49 politicises this temporal contradiction in visual culture. By both revealing and seizing a crisis as a perceived opportunity for social change, it mediates a foundation for the collective imagining of critical time - a kairological crack in chronology - with implications for a theory on the temporality of practices of imagining.

Contact: john.norrman@uni-jena.de