Building Connections with Excellence
Welcome at the
Desk
Come and see what is taking shape on my desk.
This is where new projects begin: novels still finding their stories, studies growing out of questions that refuse to go away. A glimpse of work in progress—before it becomes a book.
Coincidences
A Novel
(working title)
At her father’s funeral, Johanna Seidel learns that her mother was Jewish—and that, by descent, she is too. What begins as shock at a concealed family past soon becomes a search for a part of her own life she never knew existed.
At the same time, Johanna is writing a doctoral dissertation on the history of the police in the Thuringian city of Erfurt under National Socialism. Her research now acquires an unexpectedly personal dimension. In the cathedral she encounters another unresolved history: the bronze lamp and the monumental Guta chandelier. Christian or Jewish? Indigenous to the cathedral—or objects appropriated in the aftermath of the pogrom of 1349?
The novel follows the coincidences through which private memory, scholarly research and the contested ownership of the past begin to converge.
The Age of Propertisation
(working title)
How did nature, human beings, land, air—and almost everything else—come to be treated as property?
This study traces the long history of a profound transformation: from worlds in which nature, land and living beings could be understood as belonging to themselves, to the gods, or to a larger cosmic order—and therefore as fundamentally unavailable for unrestricted appropriation—to societies in which they became increasingly commodified, transferable and ownable.
The project asks what rôle philosophy, religion, law and culture played in this global process of propertisation, and how ways of thinking helped to turn what had once been regarded as inalienable into objects of possession, exchange and exploitation. Its history is still unfolding.
Für die deutsche Website könnte ich dieselben beiden Texte auch noch in einer etwas stärker literarischen bzw. essayistischen Fassung formulieren.
The project is part of the SFB on "Structural Change of Property" (SFB 294) of the Universities of Erfurt and Jena, Germany.
Preliminary work has been published on the "Age of Propertization" in:
