Selected Publications
- Literary Lists. A Short History of Form and Function. London: Palgrave, 2023. (mit Roman Alexander Barton und Anne Rüggemeier)
- Enlistment. Lists in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2022. (hrsg. mit James Simpson)
- Handbuch Historische Narratologie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2019. (hrsg. mit Stefan Tilg)
- Narratologie und mittelalterliches Erzählen. Autor, Erzähler, Perspektive, Zeit und Raum. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018. (hrsg. mit Florian Kragl)
- The Scottish Legendary. Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
FRIAS Projects
Prof. Dr. Eva von Contzen is member of the Project Group “GlassAge – A Transparent View of Ancient Innovation” (2024-2025)
The project group investigates the historic and cultural context of one of humankind’s earliest high performance materials the importance of which has only grown with time: glass. Since the early developments in glass shaping, the history of this material has been closely linked to the cultural context. Interestingly, many of the artefacts of glass that survive from premodern contexts today still surpass the dominating methods of glass processing in the 21st century, and many of the effects found in historic specimens have a surprising actuality. As an example, optical metamaterials have been documented over a span of two millennia with current technology unable to replicate the craftsmanship required to make these object. GlassAge will explore the cultural and historic context of glass and the breakthrough developments which have, for various reasons, been largely ignored by modern developments in the material.
Just as bionics takes nature as a model for material innovations, this project asks how the know-how of past cultures can inspire modern material developments. The project group envisions to provide inspiration for modern material systems which reach beyond the mere technological assessment, building on the rich history of material and material processing in its cultural context thus enabling a holistic retro- as well as a prospective vision for material systems in the 21st century.
ERC Starting Grant:
Lists in Literature and Culture: Towards a Listology (LISTLIT) (2017-2023)
Lists and list-making frequently feature in everyday life. Their uses and functions in literary texts, however, have not received much attention, even though catalogues and enumerations have always been used in literature, ranging from the Greek and Roman epics, medieval wisdom poetry, and Renaissance prose treatises to Dickensian cataloguing and postmodern novels. While previous approaches to lists in literature tended to focus on structural questions and sought to categorise the various types of enumerations and lists on the basis of both their form and content, I start from a different angle in order to do justice to the close interrelationship between the textual form and the cultural and cognitive grounding of lists. I propose a diachronic and interdisciplinary approach that explores the functions, purposes, and effects of lists in literature as the artful expression of experientiality. Drawing on a range of selected examples from Greek and Latin epics, medieval and Renaissance literature to postmodern novels, I am going to combine cognitive linguistic, narratological, cultural and anthropological theories. I suggest that lists can be understood as a narrative strategy the main factor of which is not its system of categorization but the attitude towards this system. This attitude may be reflected by experiential parameters so that lists could be read in terms of the affective responses they seek to stimulate, such as ‘the list as desire’, ‘the list as fear’, and ‘the list as power’.